^ERSiry Of CALIFORNIA
RiyERSlDE

Ex Libris
ISAAC FOOT i

■

THE NEW FICTION

AND OTHER ESSAYS

THE NEW FICTION

AND OTHER

ESSAYS ON LITERARY SUBJECTS

A\,

H. D. TRAILL

AUTHOR OF
THE NEW LUCIAN,' ' THE LIFE OF SIR JOHN FRANKLIN,'
ETC., ETC.

LONDON :

HURST AND BLACK ETT, LIMITED

13, GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET

1897
A II rights reserved

PA/5//
T73

CONTEITTS

The New Fiction .
The Political Novel
The Politics of Literature
Matthew Arnold .
Samuel Richardson
The Novel of Manners
Newspapers and English

LUCIAN

The Revolution in Grub Street
The Provincial Letters
The Future of Hu^iour

PAGE

7G
104
137
170
190
220
249
283

THE NEW FICTION

Not to be ' new ' is, in these clays, to be nothiDg,
and in seeking as impartial and as imcommittiug a
title as possible for the work of the latest recruits
to the army of successful novelists, I have not
thought myself justified in withholding the indis-
pensable certificate of novelty. They object, or at
least the ablest and most popular of them has objected,
it appears, to being described as a ' realist ;' so I am
no longer permitted to label his art as the ' New
Kealism.' But I am not at all sure that I shall be
anymore fortunate in my emendation. For it would
not surprise me if the vniter to whom I have referred
were to protest against my describing his books even
as ' fiction ;' so insistent is he, I understand, on their
literal and historical accuracy, so earnest is he in as-
suring us that every character whom he pourtrays
lias had a real existence, and every incident he
relates, an actual occurrence, so artless, in short, is his
confidence in a justification which has no sort of
relevancy to the defence of a work of art. Still, in

THE NEW FICTION

the hope that ho will pass the word ' fiction ' as ia-
dicating the product of an inventor, and not insist
upon some other description of it which shall denote
the historian, I will let it stand at the head of this
paper in order to avoid giving a controversial, or at
any rate a controverted, title to the whole volume.
But for convenience sake I shall still crave leave to
discuss the narrative and descriptive method with
which these pages deal under the name bestowed
upon it b}' its more ardent admirers : that namely
of the New Realism.

If that description is disclaimed by both, as it has
been by one. of the two novelists whose novels I am
about to consider, we can yet understand what it
means in the mouths of those who use it. It would
naturally come pat to their lips. Nothing, indeed,
should surprise us less than that in a day when the
spurious is everywhere supposed to be successfully
disguised and sufficiently recommended to the public
by merely being described as new, we should find
our attention solicited by a New Realism, of which
the two most obvious things to be said are that it is
unreal with the falsity of the half truth, and as old as
the habit of exaggeration. One of the latest pro-
fessors of this doubtful form of art is the very young
American writer, Mr. Stephen Crane, who first at-
tracted notice in this country by a novel entitled The
Red Badge of Courage. Whether this work was or

THE NEW FICTION

was not described by its admirers as an achievement
in realism, I am not aware. As a matter of fact, and
as the antecedents, and indeed the age, of the writer
showed, it was not a record of actual observation.
Mr. Crane had evidently been an industrious investi-
gator and collator of the emotional experiences of
soldiers, and had evolved from them a picture of the
mental state of a recruit going into action. It was
artistically done and obtained a not undeserved suc-
cess; but no method, of course, could be less realistic
in the sense on which the professors of the New
Reahsm insist, than the process which resulted in this
elaborate study of the emotious of the battlefield from
the pen of a young man who has never himself smelt
powder.

Since then, however, Mr. Crane has given us two
small volumes, which are presumably realistic or
nothing. If circumstances have prevented the
author from writing about soldiers in action ' with his
eye on the object,' there are no such obstacles to his
studying the Bowery and ' Bowery boys ' from the
life. We may take it, therefore, that Maggie and
George's Mother are the products of such study. Ac-
cording to Mr. Howells's effusive 'Appreciation,'
which prefaces it, Maggie is a remarkable story, having
'that quality of fatal necessity Avhich dominates
Greek tragedy.' Let us see then what this Sopho-
clean work is like.

B 2

THE NEW FICTION

The story of Maggie opens with a fight between

the boys of Rum Alley and those of Devil's Row.

Jimmie, the heroine's brother, is a boy of Rum Alley,

aged nine, and when the curtain draws up he is tho

centre of a circle of urchins who are pelting him with

stones.

' Howls of wrath went up from them. On their small con-
vulsed faces shone the grins of true assassins. As they charged,
they threw stones and cursed in shrill chorus . . . Jimmie's
coat had been torn to shreds in a scuffle, and his hat was gone.
He had bruises on twenty parts of his body, and blood was drip-
ping from a cut in his head. His wan features looked like those
of a tiny insane demon . . . The little boys ran to and fro hurl-
ing stones and swearing in barbaric trebles ... A stone had
smashed in Jimmie's mouth. Blood was bubbling over his chin
and down upon his ragged shirt. Tears made furrows on his
dirt-stained checks. His thin legs had begun to tremble and
tarn vv^eak, causing his small body to reel. His roaring curses of
the first part of the fight had changed to a blasphemous chatter.
In the yells of the whirling mob of Devil's Row children there
were notes of joy like songs of triumphant savagery. The little
boys seemed to leer gloatingly at the blood on the other child's
face.'

A lad of sixteen, afterwards destined to play an
important part in the story, then approaches. He
smites one of the Devil's Row children on the back of
the head, and the little boy falls to the ground and
gives a tremendous howl. A reinforcement of the
Rum Alley children then arrives, and there is a
momentary pause in the fight, during which Jimmie
becomes involved in a quarrel with Blue Billie, one
of his own side.

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' They struck at each other, clinched, and rolled over on the
cobble-stones.

'" Smash 'im, Jimmie, kick d' face off 'im," yelled Pete, iu
tones of delight.

'The small combatants pounded and kicked, scratched and
tore. They began to weep, and their curses struggled iu their
throats with sobs. The other little boys clasped their hands and
wriggled their legs in excitement. They formed a bobbing circle
round the pair.'

At this juncture Jimmie's father arrives on the
scene, and endeavours to separate the combatants
with a view of 'belting' his son. To this end he
begins to kick into the chaotic mass on the ground.
* The boy Billie felt a heavy boot strike his head.
He made a furious effort and disentangled himself
from Jimmie. He tottered away. Jimmie arose pain-
fully from the ground and confronting his father be-
gan to curse him.' His parent kicked him. ' Come
home, now,' he cried, ' an' stop yer jawin', or I'll lam
the everlasting head off yer.' Upon this they go
home, the boy swearing ' luridly,' for ' he felt that it
was a degradation for one who aimed to be some
vague kind of a soldier or a man of blood, with a
sort of sublime licence, to be taken home by a father.'

This is the first chapter much condensed. In the
original there are eight pages of it. Is it art ? If so,
is the making of mud-pies an artistic occupation, and
are the neglected brats who are to be found rolling
in the gutters of every great city unconscious artists ?
In the next chapter Jimmie pummels his little sister

THE NEW FICTION

and bis mother quarrels with and rates her husband
till she drives him to the public-house, remaining
at home to get drunk herself. In the third chapter,
.limmie, who has stopped out to avoid an outbreak
of her intoxicated fury, steals home again late at
night, listens outside the door to a fight going on
Avithin between his father and mother, and at last
creeps in with his little sister to find both parents
prostrate on the floor in a drunken stupor, and to
huddle in a corner until daybreak, cowering with
terror lest they should awaken. For when you are
a ' realist's ' little boy, you have to be very handy
and adaptable, and do exactly what that realist re-
quires of you : so that, though you may have been
defying and cursing your father at one moment, like
the daring little imp you have been described as be-
ing, you may at the next moment, and for the purpose
of another sort of painful picture, have to behave
like a cowed and broken-spirited child of a totally
different type.

These opening scenes take up about one-fifth of
the short book, and those that follow are like unto
them. There is a little less fighting, but a good deal
more drinking. Jimmie becomes a truck driver, and
fights constantly with other drivers, but the fights
are not described at length. His father dies, pro-
bably of drink, and his mother takes to drinking
harder than ever. Maggie is seduced and deserted

THE NEW FICTION

by Pete, the youth who appeared on the scene during
the opening fight and hit one of the infant fighters
on the back of the head. Jimmie resents the pro-
ceedings of the Bowery Lovelace as a breach of
good manners, and, going with a friend to the tavern
where Pete acts as ' bar-tender,' the two set upon
him, and there ensues a fight, in the course of
which the lips of the combatants ' curl back and
stretch tightly over the gums in ghoul-like grins.'
It lasts for four pages, and is brought to a close
by the intervention of the police, and the escape
of Jimmie ' with his face drenched in blood.' How
this story continues, how Maggie falls lower and
lower and finally dies, and how after hex death her
giu-sodden mother is passionately entreated to forgive
her, and at last graciously consents to do so — all
this may be read in Mr. Crane's pages, and shall not
here be summarised from them. Is it necessary to
do so ? Or to give a precis of the companion volume,
Georges Mother, the story of a ' little^old woman '
actually of sober and industrious habits, and of her
actually not vicious though weak son, of whose back-
slidiugs she dies ? Need I give specimen extracts
from \i% I hope not — I think not. The extracts
which have been already given are perfectly ftiir sam-
ples of Mr. Crane's work. I can honestly affirm that
anyone who is willing to accept my assurance that
to road these two books through would be to wade

THE NEW FICTION

throiigli some three hundred and thirty pages of sub-
stantially the same stuff as the above extracts, will
do Mr. Crane no injustice. So I will pass from him
to a novelist of considerably larger calibre.

For Jilr. Arthur Morrison, author of Tales of Mean
Streets and A Child of the Jago, undoubtedly carries
heavier guns that Mr. Crane. To begin with, he can
tell a story, while Mr. Crane can only string together
a series of loosely cohering incidents. Many of his
characters are vividly and vigorously drawn, while
the American writer puts us off for the most part with
sketches and shadowy outlines. Mr. ^Morrison's ruffians
and their ruffianism are better discriminated, and
though there is plenty of fighting and drinking and
general brutality in his last and strongest work — one
of the faction fights in which, indeed, is related at
quite inordinate length — he understands that the
description of these things alone will not suffice to
make a satisfactory story even about blackguards.
He has outgrown that touching naivetS displayed
in the younger writer's obvious belief in the per-
petual freshness and charm of mere squalor. He
perceives that merely to follow his characters, as Mr.
Crane does his, from the drinking-bar to the low
music-hall and thence home again, day after day,
with interludes of brawling and ' bashing,' and other
like recreations, becomes, after a hundred pages or
so, a little monotonous, and that the fife of the

TEE NEW FICTION

criminal in his constant struggle with the law, and in
perpetual danger from its officers, possesses at least
the element of ' sport,' and presents features of
variety and interest which that of the mere sot and
tavern-brawler cannot possibly offer. Above all, J\Ir.
Morrison wields a certain command of pathos, a pov/er
in which Mr. Crane is not only deficient, but of which
he does not even appear to know the meaning ; and
were it not for a certain strange and, in truth, para-
doxical defect, of which more hereafter, in his method
of employing it, he would at times be capable of
moving his readers very powerfully indeed. In a
word, the English writer differs from the American by
all the difference v/hich divides the trained craftsman
from the crude amateur, and he deserves to that ex-
tent more serious and detailed criticism.

What, however, has most astonished one of Mr.
Morrison's critics fresh from a perusal of A Child of
the Jago, is the impression of extraordinary unreality
which, taken as a whole, it leaves behind it. To a
critic opposed to the theories and methods of so-called
reahsm, this is naturally rather disconcerting. He
has probably been girding up his critical loins for the
task of showing that the realist has lost sight of art
in the perusal and capture of naked Truth, when lo !
he finds that even Truth herself appears to have al-
together escaped her pursuer. He was preparing
himself to detect and expose the aesthetic and artistic

THE NEW FICTION

defects of a supposed product of literary photography,
Avhen to his amazement he discovers that the photo-
graph, though it seems distinct enough to the gaze
which concentrates itself successively on the various
parts of the picture, yet fades, when the attempt is
made to view it in its entirety, into a mere blur. He
comes ont from the Jago with the feelings, not, as he
had expected, of a man who has just paid a visit to
the actual district under the protection of the pohce,
but of one who has just awakened from the dream of
a prolonged sojourn in some fairyland of horror. This,
to be sure, may be the effect which Mr. Morrison de-
sired to produce : it is certainly not difficult, I think,
to show that his methods are distinctly calculated to
produce it ; but then those methods cannot be exact-
ly the methods which the realist professes to employ,
nor that effect the effect at which he is commonly
supposed to aim.

What is the Jago ? The Jago is a name of Mr.
Morrison's own invention, and applied by him to a
district which he carefully localises by giving it two
real East-End thoroughfares, High Street, Shoreditch,
and Bethnal Green Road, as boundaries on two of
its sides. He estimates its area as that of ' a square
of two hundred and fifty yards or less,' and describes
its population as ' swarming in thousands.' Yet with
the exception of the hero's mother, and a single family
besides, it appears to contain no one adult person

THE NEW FICTION

among all these thousands who is not actually or
potentially either a thief, or a prostitute, or a 'fence,'
or a professional .mendicant, or the female decoy of
drunken libertines for the purpose of robbery with
murderous violence. In the opening chapter of the
book, the wife of Billy Leary brings in a victim to
the ' cosh,' — an iron rod with a knob at the end.
which the craftsman carried in his coat-sleeve, 'wait-
ing about dark staircase corners till his wife (married
or not) brought in a well-drunken stranger, when
with a sudden blow behind the head the stranger
was happily coshed, and whatever was found on him
as he lay insensible was the profit of the transaction.'
And we are told that ' there were legends of surpris-
ing ingatherings achieved by wives of especial dih-
gence : one of a woman who had brought to the cosh
some six-and-twenty on a night of public rejoicing.'
Mrs. Leary 's stranger was 'happily coshed,' and
afterwards thrown out into the street. As thus : —

' lu a little wbile soraetLing large and dark was puslied forth
from the door opening near Jago Row, which Billy Leary's spouse
had entered. The thing rolled over and lay tumbled on the pave-
ment for a time unmoved. It might have been yet another would-
be sleeper, but for its stillness. Just such a thing it seemed be-
like to two that lifted their heads and peered from a few yards off
till they rose on hands and knees and crept to where it lay : Jago
rats both. A man it was, with a thick smear across his face and
about his head, the source of the dark trickle that sought the
gutter dreamily over the broken flags. The drab stuff of his
pockets peeped out here and there in a crumpled bunch, and his

THE NEW FICTION

•waistcoat gaped whore the v.-atch-guarcl had been. Clearly here
was an uncommonly remunerative cosh — a cosh so good that the
boots had been neglected and remained on the man's feet. These
the kneeling _two unlaced deftly, and rising, prize in hand, van-
ished in the deeper shadow of Jago How.'

This, be it observed, is not a crime of rare occur-
rence, and the work of a limited class of criminals.
You are invited to believe that it is a regular industry
of the Jago practised semper, uhiqiie, et ah omnibus,
throughout the whole district, at all times, and by
every one who has the means of practising it with
success. Lack of such means is the only limit to it.
' S'elp me !' says one of the characters, referring to
Mrs. Leary, ' I'd carry the cosh meself if I'd a woman
like 'er.'

After this one ought not, perhaps, to be surprised
at the fight between the Ranns and the Learys, re-
lated with £dl the circumstantiality of the scrimmage
between Molly Seagrim and her enemies in the
churchyard, though in a grim, smileless fashion, con-
trasting comically enough with Fielding's most
humorous burlesque of a Homeric battlepiece. But
it lasts for twenty mortal pages, until indeed we get
a little tired of the prowess of Sally Green in biting
her female adversaries, and tearing out their hair,
and are almost glad when Nora Walsh brings the
fight to a close by breaking a bottle on the kerb,
and stabbing Sally about the face with the jagged
points. The two clans subsequently fraternize, and,

THE NEW FICTION

at a later stage of this agreeable romauce, one fac-
tion invites the other to a ' sing-song ' at Mother
Gapps's, when the floor unfortunately falls in, and the
guests, suspecting a piege, attack their hosts with ex-
ceeding savagery in the cellar. When the burglar-
father of little Dicky Perrott, the hero of the book, is
not ' burgling,' an occupation which, by affording him
facilities for the murder of a treacherous fence, con-
duets him ultimately to the gallows, the reader is
entertained principally with fights ; but the story of
Dicky himself is interesting, though with odd touches
of old-fashioned melodrama about it, and would be
much more so if not buried as it is beneath the mass
of squalid irrelevances which encumbers the book.

No wonder that many who know the East-End of
London well have protested against this picture/
The houses in that area of ' two hundred and fifty
yards square ' have been cleared of its former oc-
cupants and their dens, and the original of the Jago
has, it is admitted, ceased to exist. But I will make
bold to say that as described by Mr. Morrison —
described, that is to say as a place of which, with the
half-dozen exceptions above mentioned, every single
inhabitant out of 'swarming thousands' is either a
thief, or a harlot, or a ' cosher ' or a decoy, or a ' fence,'
or a professional mendicant — it never did and never
could exist. Mr. Morrison has simply taken all the vari-
» See note at end of this essay.

THE NEW FICTION

oiis types of London misery, foulness, and rascality and
'dumped them down' on the area aforesaid. He has
taken the brutal pugnacity of one of the courts of an
Irish quarter, mixed it with the knavery of a thieves'
kitchen in some other district, made ' the gruel thick
and slab ' in his infernal cauldron with a highly con-
centrated dose of the foul scum which is found float-
ing, though in a much diluted form, on the surface of
the vast sea of poverty in all great cities ; and, pour-
ing the precious compost into a comparatively small
vessel, he invites the world to inspect it as a sort of
essence or extract of metropolitan degradation. If
it is not what you would have actually found in ex-
ploring the Jago, it is no doubt what you might
have found if all London had happened to pour its
manifold streams of corruption into that particular
sentina. I have nothing to say for the moment
against art of this kind, except that it is certainly not
realism. It is the idealising method, and its result is
as essentially ideal as the Venus of Milo. That it is the
idealisation of ughness, instead of beauty, is a mere
detail.

80 much for the book as a whole. As an imagin-
ative picture of life at the East-End — that is to say
as a picture formed out of a multitude of sordid and
shocking actualities, many or most of them dis-
sociated from each other in real life, but here
imaginatively combined for the purpose of a work of

THE NEW FICTION

fiction — it Diay pass ; but, unless words are to part
with all their distinctions of meaning, it can no more
be a realistic history of any community of human
beings that ever existed on the earth, than is the
Voyage to the Houyhilinms.

Nevertheless, though the total effect of the story is
unreal and phantasmagoric, yet, considered as a
series of distinct scenes, or as a gallery of repulsive
portraits, may it not, it may be asked, be a triumph
of accurate description and life-like portraiture'?
Grant that the collocation of so many hideous figures
and the concatenation of such an uninterrupted suc-
cession of revolting incidents, is misdescribed as
'realism,' yet the drawing of those figures and the
narratives of those incidents may be masterpieces of
realistic art. Well, is that so ? As for the incidents,
no doubt you are made to ' see them ' plainly enough ;
but, speaking for myself personally, I see them not a
whit more plainly for the crudities of the description.
There is a fight, half prize-fight, half quarrel-fight, in
A Child of the Jago, a sort of incident which interests
if not delights all of us, and probably will continue
to do so until the human race is ready for elevation
to some loftier, but less lively, plane of being. It is
most conscientiously described — with all the con-
scientiousness indeed of the gentleman mentioned
by Sheridan, who described the Pha:nix 'like a
poulterer,' not 'letting us off a single feather.' Every

THE NEW FICTION

pimch •with its effect on the punched part is faith-
tuWy dehneated in black and bhie, picked out with
crimson ; but the blood and bruises with which Mr.
Morrison so lavishly adorns his pages do not make tis
realise the battle one whit more vividly than, for ia-
etance, we realise the prize-fight in Rodney Stone, an
incident nevertheless in which Mr. Conan Doyle can-
not be accused of shirking any necessary detail.
And so with the faction fight, and the scrimmage after
the 'sing-song,' and the murder which brings the plot
to its climax. They are vigorous pieces of descrip-
tion, but any intelligent reader who compares them
with other examples, by writers of other schools, will
find that their vigour is not really enhanced by the
violences of colouring, and that their reality does
not in the least depend upon their so-called realism.

As to the character-drawing, I willingly admit its
occasionally high merit. Josh Perrott, the burglar
father of Dicky, is a convincing portrait, and strikes
one as consistent and unexaggerated. The man has
the virtues, or rather, the one virtue, which goes with
the vices of the lowest type of Englishman — that
dogged stoicism in the face of death, which is the
nobler, as the brute ferocity is the baser, side of his
bulldog nature. But what is one to say of Aaron
Weech, of Father Sturt — nay, of Dicky Perrott him-
self? Have the transactions of Weech with Dicky,
and the relations of Dicky to Weech, been actually

THE NEW FICTION

studied from East-Eud criminal life, or are they uot
rather exercises in the more stagy and artificial man-
ner of the despised sentimentalist Dickens 1 And, if
so, what a falling off is here for the New Realism !
To observe that Aaron Weech is simply a revival of
our old friend Mr. Fagin is a too obvious criticism,
and is a not sufficiently serious objection — for 'comic
relief ' is needed sorely enough in Mr. Morrison's pages,
Heaven knows, and to borrow it from Dickens is at
least, in a phrase of that humourist's own, to ' go to the
right shop ' for it. But it is a little too much to make
an amalgam of Artful Dodger and Oliver Twist, which
really is what Mr. Morrison has done with Dicky
Perrott. For what else can be said of a boy v/ho is
precocious enough to steal a nickel clock from a
neighbour's mantelpiece, yet green enough to allow
a fence to have it in liquidation of a debt of two-
pence ? The child-thief is not quite so common,
I hope, even in a thieves' quarter, as we should
gather from Mr. Morrison's writings ; but there can
be very few East-End children, honest or dishonest,
who do not know more about the price of articles than
that. They acquire that knowledge in only too hard
a school, and begin at only too tender an age. The
theft, again, of the cheap toy musical-box by way of
remorseful compensation of the robbed Ropers with
' a thing worth any fifty clocks,' in Dicky's estima-
tion — surely that is not realistically imagined ;

THE NEW FICTION

surely that is not a natural touch of childish char-
acter in a child of the Jago. It is only the well-
nurtured and well-cared-for child who sees no reason
why ' grown-ups ' should not value toys, as he does
himself, more highly than articles of domestic use.
A child of the Jago would have known very well
that if his mother were bound for the pawnbroker's
she would be more likely to take a flat-iron with her
than a tin soldier. But that Dicky's character should
abouud with these incongruous sentimental touches
is not surprising ; for Sentimentalism is in truth the
Nemesis that dogs the New Realism and its profes-
sors. In their pose of cynical self-repression, in
their determination to make their realism ' unflinch-
ing,' ' relentless,' ' terrible,' and all the rest of it,
they so sternly shut their eyes to the real pathos of
the scenes and lives which they describe, that at
last they seem to lose the power of discriminating
between the real article and its counterfeits, and,
when they need the pathetic for the purposes of a
foil, they are compelled to fall back upon shams of
their own invention.

Even when they quit the hideous and revolting for
the merely dreary and depressing, the same note of
exaggeration almost everywhere asserts itself. In
Tales of Mean Streets, Jlr. Morrison has strung to-
gether fifteen short stories, some of them repulsive,
after the fashion of his long story above discussed,

THE NEW FICTION

others simply gloomy and miserable. Dealing, as he
does, only with two or three characters, in most of
these stories his realism produces a less unreal im-
pression — for, of course, the obvious reason that it is
easier to believe in the existence of one or two brutes
and savages than of a whole London district, peopled
by such inhabitants ' in swarming thousands/ and by
no one else. I need not, however, discuss either the
hideous or the merely dreary stories in this volume.
Not the former, because it would be going over the
ground already traversed; and not the latter, be-
cause Mr. Morrison has so admirably defined his own
standpoint with regard to them in the Introduction
that it will simply suffice me to examine that.

In this Introduction Mr. Morrison describes, and
powerfully describes, a mean East-End street, and
the lives of its inhabitants. It is not a thieves' street
like any of the courts and alleys of the Jago ; it is
the abode of fairly respectable working-men, with
habits of regular industry. Indeed, it is this regu-
larity, with the deadly tedium created by it, which
Mr. Morrison mainly relies on for his effect. He tells
us how the inhabitants of this street are knocked up
every morning at half-past five by the policeman or
the night watchman, and rise and go to their day's
labour at the docks, the gas-works, and the ship-
yards ; how a little later comes the ' trotting of
sorrow-laden little feet along the grim street to the

c 2

THE KEW FICTION

grim Board School, three grim streets off ; then
' silence, save for a subdued sound of scrubbing here
and there, and the puny squall of croupy infants ' :
then, still later ou, ' a new trotting of little feet to
docks, gas-works, and ship-yards with father's dinner
in a bason and a red handkerchief,' and so to the
board-school again ; then ' more muffled scrubbing
and more squalling'; the return of the children from
school, the return of sooty artisans from work; a
' smell of bloater up and down' ; nightfall; the fight-
ing of boys in the street, perhaps of men at the
corner near the beershop ; sleep.

And this is the record of a day in this street ; and
every day is hopelessly the same except Sunday,
when, however, ' one monotony ' is only ' broken by
another.' And the day is only symbolical of the life,
which has its dawn of birth, its school-time, 'its mid-
day play-hour, when love peeps even into this
street'; then more trotting of little feet, this time
new and strange little feet; the scrubbing and squall-
ing, the end of the sooty day's work, the last home-
coming, nightfall, sleep. Where in the East-End,
asks Mr. Morrison in conclusion, lies this street 1 And
he answers, ' Everywhere.'

' The hundred and fifty yards is only a link in a long and a
mightily tangled chain— is only a turn in a tortuous maze. This
street of the square holes is hundreds of miles long. That it is
planned in short lengths is true, but there is no other way in the

THE NEW FICTION

world that can more properly be called a single street because of
its dismal lack of accent, its sordid uniformity, its utter remote-
ness from delight.'

Ye.?, it is a picture of infinite melanclioly, but
•whence does its melanclioly arise? From the mean-
ness of the mean street and the exceptionally dull
and narrow lives of its inhabitants ? That the
author intends to convey that impression is obvi-
ous; but the impression is nine-tenths of it false.
Why, if I had Mr. Morrison's fine descriptive gift, I
would select a street quite other than mean, a street
consisting, not of poverty-stricken little houses, but
of ' eligible ' suburban villas, a street inhabited, not
by hard-pressed artisans, but by comfortable, even
by * warm ' City men ; and I would undertake to de-
scribe it and the daily lives of its inhabitants — the
daily journey of the men to their business ; the daily
resumption by the women of their burden of house-
hold duties and household worries ; their Sundays;
tlie growth and departures of their children ; their
old age; their death — I say that had I the pen of
Mr. Morrison I would undertake so to describe these
things, that the heart of the reader should sink and
shrink within him at the thought of man^s lot upon
earth, and, perhaps, burn with anger at the spiritless
patience in which man endures it, with the ' quietus '
of the ' bare bodkin ' always within his reach. The
power of suggesting these emotions is not a property

THE NEW FICTION

\ of mean streets ; it is a property of all streets, a pro-
j perty of life itself, with its unresting but aimless
j flow. If Mr. Morrison has not yet felt that himself,
he will feel it before he passes middle life, and he
will know then, if he does not already know, the
true composition of the bitter draught that he has
here brewed and presented to us. He will admit
that he has been trying to pass off upon us a mixture
of Weltschmerz and tedium vifce as genuine ' Essence
of Mean Street.'

Measured out in minim glasses and copiously diluted,
it is not an unpleasant potion, though it is enervating
if too often indulged in, and positively deadly in large
doses ; but always, and in any case, it is a subjective
product, a way of looking at things, not a quality of
things seen. The people who thus depress you with
the intense monotony of their lives, do not, except
by moments, feel it themselves any more than, except
by moments, you feel the monotony of your own.
Writers who bear this in mind are safeguarded from
exaggeration ; but Mr. Morrison is not of them. For
see how he proceeds with the account of the mean
street. 'Nobody laughs here,' says he, 'life is too
serious a thing I Nobody sings.' Is that true of any
street in London or elsewhere? nay, is it true of any
assemblage of human beings, numbering children
among them *? Again, ' Nobody from this street goes
to the theatre. That would mean too long a journey,

THE NEW FICTION

and would cost money, which might buy bread and
cheese and boots'?' Indeed? It is from the daughters
of these families that domestic service (when they
will condescend to it) is largely recruited further
west. If Mr. Morrison will ask the next housemaid
he meets if she ever went to the theatre, I can promise
him that elle lid dlra des nouvelles. True, they ought
not to be nouvelles to one who professes to have made
a special study of the working class : though when he
adds that for those workmen 'who wear black Sun-
day suits ' theatre-going * would be sinful,' it is diffi-
cult not to suspect him of a confusion between this
class and the j;eiife hourgeoisle. And what in the
name of all the maid-servants in London are we to
make of this % ' Now and again a penny novel
has been found among the private treasures of a
growing daughter, and been wrathfully confiscated.'
Do the grown-up daughters then only begin to acquire
their taste for this class of literature, and to collect their
ample libraries of it, after accepting their situations?
If so, the growth, both of the taste and the library, is
astonishingly rapid.

But if this is how the New Realism deals with the
merely pathetic side of humble life ; if these are its
caricatures of the truth, where the truth is matter of
pretty general knowledge, how are we to trust its
dealings with those hideous and revolting aspects of
the truth, which are matters of special inquiry and

THE NEW FICTION

expert information'^ We hardly need the counter
testimony of experts to feel assured that, in the latter
case also, the picture, as a whole, is overdrawn. It
is not only that the note of exaggeration runs through
its details, but that when they are substantially true
they have been so selected as to render the total
impression false. For the impulse to that selection
has not been artistically sincere. A public avid of
sensation and critics wanting in the sense of measure
have corrupted it, until the desire of each writer to
strike and shock more violently than his competitors,
to be more ' relentless ' and ' unflinching,' to write a
'stronger,' even if only in the sense of a more pun-
gently malodorous, book than they, has first driven
them to load their literary palettes with only ' lurid '
colours, and is now rapidly demoralising, if, with
some of them, it has not already demoralised their
artistic sense to the extent of blinding it to all other
hues. That this fate should befall its appropriate
victims is hardly, perhaps, a matter worth any sensible
man's regret ; but Mr. Morrison does not belong by
nature to this class of writers. He has given proof of
the power of better things.

NOTE.

I am unwilling to encumber these pages with controver-
sial matter, but Mr. Morrison has so strenuously challenged
this statement on page 13, and so confidently defied me to
produce any evidence of the protest to which I referred, that

THE NEW FICTION

I tliink I owe it to tlie dissentients themselves to place on
record their rebuttals of Mr. Morrison's main propositions.

Mr. Woodland Erlebach, formerly a manager of the
Nichol Street Board School, who speaks from a thirty years'
acquaintance with the district, (Mr. Morrison's Jago,) and
who throughout that period has visited it for at least foi'ty
Sunday and thirty Wednesday nights as well as on ma.ny
other occasions in each year, addressed a letter on the
subject of this novel to the editor of a literary journal
from which I take the following extract :

'Mr. Morrison, according to his own statement, (pub-
lished in the Daily Keivs, December 12th, 189G,) only
became acquainted with the Nichol Street district at the time
when the London County Council were about to clear it of
houses — say 1890 or '91 — and Rev. 0. Jaj', who introduced
him to it, only began work there in 1886. Therefore those
— and they arc many — who, like myself, have known and
worked m this ncighbou.rhood for over thirty years may
claim to know at least as much about its inhabitants and
condition as these more recent explorers. And I boldly say
that the district, though bad enough, was not even thirty
years ago so hopelessly bad and vile as this book paints it.
The characters pourtrayed may have had then* originals, but
they were the exception, and not the rule. Many poor, but
honest and hard-working people have lived in these mean
streets, and I can introduce you to several respectable men
holding responsible positions whose early days were passed
there, and who found their way out of the Jago that is
represented as impossible to the hero (or rather victim) of
this book.'

I have also seen letters of protest from the following
v/orkers in the district :

Mr. Henry Spiccr, 14, Aberdeen Park, Highbury, at one

THE KEW FICTION

time fellow mnnagcr with Mr. Eiiebach of the Nichol Street
Boartl School, member of the third London School Board,
and formerly M.P. for South Islington.

Mr. J. T. Henderson, 22, Aberdeen Park, Highbury,
Secretary of the N ichol Street Ragged Schools, avIio has been
constantly visiting tlic neighbourhood for over thirty years.

Mr. J. F. Barnard, 3G, Hamilton Koad, Highbury, who
has been manager of the Nichol Street Penny Bank from
1874 to the present day, and has regularly during that time
carried his bag of money to and fro through the very heart
of this desperate district.

Mr. William Anderson, 22, Amherst Road, Hackney,
Poor Law guardian of St. Leonard's, Shoreditch, who was
born in Old Nichol Street, and lived there twenty years.

Mr. W. Weekes, 17, Fidler Street, Bethnal Green, ca
resident in New Nichol Street for over fifty years — indeed,
until its destruction.

Mr. R. Allinson, of 96, Albert Road, Dalston, who has
been for fourteen years specially detailed to the district by
the London City Mission.

Miss Matthewman and Miss Newman, 99, Grosvenor
Road, Canonbury, who for over thirty years have conducted
a mothers' meeting among women, mostly from the Nichol
Street district.

I am further informed that the Jago actually contained
■within its borders a large silk manufactory, the valuable
wares of which, to say nothing of its honest working people,
must have run grave risk in passing periodically through
this colony of brigands. But I am not concerned to carry
the dispute any further on my own account. The above,
I think, is a sufficient response to Mr. Morrison's appeal
to me to ' trot out my experts.'

THE POLITICAL KOVEL

Critics of authority assure us, and we all repeat after
them, that the nineteenth century has found its most
distinctive and characteristic medium of expression
in the novel. Politicians tell us — therein perhaps a
little magnifying their office, but still with substantial
truth — that, next to Sport, the subject which enlists
the greatest interest of the greatest number of
Englishmen is that of Politics. Yet of all forms of
nineteenth century fiction, the political novel is the
most rarely attempted, and very much the most rarely
attempted with success. It would almost seem as if
this peculiar literary genre — popular and attractive
to the literary artist as, for the reasons above set
forth, we should have supposed it to be — bad perish-
ed with its inventor. More than fifty years have
passed since the young Benjamin Disraeli startled,
half scandalized, and wholly delighted his then con-
temporary world of letters and politics with the first

THE POLITICAL NOVEL

of three novels, which a qiifirtev of century later he
described as 'forming a real trilogy,' having for their
motive the exhibition of (1), 'the origin and
character of our political parties;' (2), 'their in-
fluence on the moral and pliysical condition of the
people ;' and (3), ' the means by which that condition
could be elevated and improved.' The first member of
this trilogy was Coningshy ; the second, Sylil ; the
third, Tancred. All three, but the first two in par-
ticular, were brilliantly successful with at any rate
the educated and informed public of their time ; they
were recognised, consciously or unconsciously, as
new and happy experiments; they are admired,
quoted, and even read to this da}^ Yet, though
half a century has elapsed since their appearance,
they still occupy a place by themselves in literature.
They are not only the first in their class, but they are
almost alone in it. Ncc viget quicquam simile aut
secundum. Even the claimants for a place in that
class during the fifty years' interval may be counted
on the fingers of one hand.

Of course, no formidable rival of Disraeli was to be
reasonably expected. The peculiar combination of
gifts and advantages to which his extraordinary suc-
cess was due will possibly never repeat itself; as-
suredl}'- it is not likely to recur except at coraetary
intervals. We may get again — perhaps unknown to
ourselves we have already had again among us — that

THE POLITICAL NOVEL

happy compound of youth, wit, audacity, and im-
pertinence which gives to his poHtical novels their
complex charm. But we can no more restore the
political and social conditions under wliich he wrote
than we could re-create his personality, and surround
it with the peculiar environment amid which it
developed. One of the v.diolly irreproducible con-
ditions of the Thirties and Forties Avas that political,
like fashionable, ' society,' — and indeed the two terms
were to a large extent convertible, — was a numerically
small body, with characteristics, like those of all ex-
clusive coteries, proportionately well marked : and
that Disraeli had, for him, the great good fortune of
not having been born into that society, and yet ob-
taining such early opportunities of observing it from
within — if from only just within — its portals, as to
enable his quick satiric observation to master its
typeSj its language, and its ideas by the time, or more
probably much before the time, when his brilhantl^^
efiective literary faculty had fully matured. His own
account of those experiences, given with that mixture
of pomp and ncdveU which has so delightful a relish
when you have once acquired the taste for it, is to be
found in a well known paper in the Introduction to
the ' Hughenden ' edition of his novels, published in
1870. ' Born in a hbrary,' he wrote, ' and trained
from early childhood by learned men who did not
share the passions and prejudices of our political and

THE POLITICAL NOVEL

social life, I had imbibed on some subjects cou-
clusions different from those which generally prevail,
and especially with reference to the history of our
own country.' This, if 1 may be allowed to quote
certain previously published remarks of my own on
the same subject, ' was no common advantage in a
day when strait was the gate and narrow the way
that led through public school and university to
political distinction, but when those who took that
route found that the walls which on either hand pro-
tected them from competitors proportionately obstruct-
ed their view of the world in which they lived. It was
from the heart of this outer world that the young
Disraeli made a way for himself into the sacred
avenue by dint of an inborn power which would not
be denied recognition, and a native audacity which
did not know the meaning of rebuff. Once there, he
was able to survey the scene of petty strife and ig-
noble ambition around him with a critical detachment
which was impossible to his rivals, and with " larger,
other eyes " than theirs.'

These advantages, however, of origin and training
and exceptional mode of eutraoce into public life,
were not the only valuable superadditious to the
' dasmonic ' element in Disraeli's nature. There was
another of hardly less importance and of his own
acquisition. For if, from 1837, the date of his first
i-eturn to ParHament, to 1814, when he published

THE POLITICx\L NOVEL

Coningshy^ be bad studied politics ' from tbe inside,*
he bad also during tbe same period taken every op-
portunity of mixing witb tbat world of fasbiou wbich
plays at politics and fancies itself serious : be bad
indulged bis satirical appetite to tbe full upon tbe
fussy and impotent intrigues of great ladies, tbe agita-
tions of bungry office-seekers, tbe manoeuvres of cyni-
cal wirepullers, tbe disappointments of pompous
grandees. After a few years of tbis experience be
must bave been fully equipped, even on tbe Hgbter
and more trivial side of bis art, for immediate suc-
cess. Had be been witbout a political idea in bis
bead, be would bave been tborougbly qualified to
produce wbat is now-a-daj^s our almost only substi-
tute for tbe political novel — tbat is to say, a roman a
clef^ in wbicb prominent public men are episodically
sketcbed under more or less easily penetrable dis-
guises. But baving, in fact, a bead as full of political
ideas as it could bold, it only needed tbat be sbould
interweave satirical sketcb witb political speculation,
and ' mount ' the composite fabric on a background
of ortbodox love romance, in order to produce tbe
inimitable Disraelian political novel tbat bas become
a permanent addition to tbe literature of Englisb
fiction.

So remarkable a concourse of rare conditions was,
of course, most unlikely to repeat itself. Fortune
migbt be prodigal in her production of brilliant

THE POLITICAL NOVEL

yonng men, of potential Disraelis, yet never agaia
place any one of them in the peculiar position of tho
author of Coningshy and Syhil. Let us admit, too,
in justice to our brilliant young men and women,
that history, for all its alleged trick of repeating
itself, shows no disposition to ' reconstitute the facts.'
Let us admit that the material with which the coil-
temporary political novelist would have to deal is
less attractive, less readily lends itself to the novel-
ist's use, than the material of the early Victorian
days. Not that it is less fertile in occasions for the
satirist ; that, Heaven knows, is far from being the
case. There is still a world of fashion which plan's
with politics and fancies itself serious ; fussy and im-
potent intrigue is not unknown among ladies ' great,'
or so fancying themselves ; and if the wire-puller
conducts his manoeuvres a little more decently than
of old, and the disappointed grandee conceals his
wounds with more Spartan fortitude, it must be ad-
mitted that the minor office-seeker has never dis-
played his hopes and fears with a more artless
indecency at every change of Government than he
does to-day. All these types still exist, and the part
v/hich they play in the inner history of politics is
still, no doubt, considerably greater than the inno-
cent provincial delegate to ' Federations here,' and
'Federations there,' for a moment suspects. But it
is from the very lack of that suspicion that a follower

THE POLITICAL NOVEL

of Disraeli iu these days avouIcI suflfer. If the cou-
temporaiy pubhc beheve, as the vast majority of
them do, that the pohtioal types and individuals of
the Disraelian era have been swept into the back-
ground by the stately advancing march of Demo-
cracy, that the Lady Firebraces and St. Julians, the
Tadpoles and Tapers of our own time, have ceased
to count, it would be idle for a political novelist of
to-day to give them prominent places in his work.
He must treat them, if he introduces them at all, as
secondary figures, almost perhaps as eccentric sur-
vivals from a past age, and must seek models for his
principal characters among the new types of poli-
tician to whom the democratic period has given
birth. And it must be obvious — even to themselves,
I should think — that these worthy persons yield in-
finitely less artistic material than the unworthy
persons whom they have, in the popular eye, at any
rate, displaced. The New Politician may be respect-
able, but he is not picturesque. He may have — he
has — an ample supply of foibles ready to the stu-
dent's hand, but they are of the kind that depress
rather than amuse.

Not that the essayers of the political novel who
have appeared iu the course of the intervening half-
century have been much more fortunate in their era.
The most notable among them was undoubtedly Mr.
Anthony Trollope ; but Fhincas Finn is a truly disas-

THE POLITICAL NOVEL

trons attempt. As one looks back upon the period
of that novel, and recalls the class of politicians who
at that time filled the stage, and among whom the
'jaunty Viscount' was a mere picturesque survival,
one feels it only just to admit that Mr. Trollope M^as
not fortunate in the particular political life which he
had undertaken to depict, or in the models from
which he drew. Still the time of the second Reform
movement was distinctly a stirring time. Its dra-
matic quality was keenly felt by those who were of
sufficiently mature age to be interested in politics
without having yet become acutely critical of poli-
ticians ; and one might have thought that a practised
story-teller would have succeeded in getting some of
the stir and passion of the time into his pages. But
Mr. Trollope, though a practised and indeed a highly
popular story-teller, was not one of that kind. He
was so little of a politician that he seems not even to
have felt the excitement of a struggle which agitated
many in those days who paid scant attention to the
ordinary political controversies of the period. PMneas
Finn, though pubHshed in 1869, but two years after
the ' shooting of Niagara,' shows no traces of any-
thing of the kind. There is not even Wordsworth's
doubtful basis of the poetic, ' Emotion recollected in
Tranquillity ' ; while, on the other hand, the author's
perfect frigidity of temper has not added to the
penetration of his glance. The hero, otherwise a

THE POLITICAL NOVEL

poor creature enough, is interesting as a ' document '
— a specimen of the Irish member of the pre-Par-
ueUite day ; but the pohtical magnates of the novel,
from Mr. Mildmay downwards, are painfully wooden,
and its whole pohtical ' business ' is quite pathetically
dull.

By far the most serious attempt at a political novel
which has been adventured since Disraeli's time, is
that which has just been made by the accomplished
author of Robert Elsmere. Perhaps the word ' seri-
ous ' may not seem a very apt adjective to apply to
the spirited enterprise which has borne fruit in Sir
George 2\essachj ; but the truth is that it is only too
appropriate. Sir George Tressachj is a serious — a
very serious — effort in a department of fiction in
which to be too serious — or, at any rate, to be no-
thing besides serious — is inevitably to miss complete
success ; and the first and most potent cause of Mrs.
Ward's comparative failure as a political novelist is
to be found in her lack of humour. She takes all
her characters — her hero and heroine, (above all, her
heroine,) her Ministers, her Opposition leaders, her
Parliamentary orators, her ' labour members,' — as
seriously as she has always (quite justifiably) taken
herself and her art ; and the result, to those of her
readers who have had a near vision of the politics,
and seen most of the leading political actors off the
stage, is to give an ideahzed air to scenes and por-

THE POLITICAL NOVEL

traits -which are nothing if not reahstic, and which
were obviously meant for examples of the most con-
scientious realism. The disappointment is all the
greater because Mrs. Ward undoubtedly describes and
recounts as one who knows. She has herself, doubt-
less, had some such near view of politics, and sight
of the leading political actor with his ' paint and
spangles off,' as might have enabled many a writer of
less ability to add those satiric touches to their por-
traits which would have made them human. Quite
possibly she may know as well as her critics where
these touches should have come in ; she is quite ob-
server enough to know ; but if so, it is to be supposed
that she could not find it in her heart to put them in.
Such is the deadly earnestness of her 'views,' that
she must find mouthpieces for them — and, of course,
for the opposite views too — who will do them justice ;
and if appropriate spokesmen and spokeswomen are
not to be found in characters realistically sketched
from life, so much the worse for life and realism. The
characters must be idealized, that is all : and ideahzed
they have been with a vengeance in Sh' George
Tressachj.

It may be pleaded, perhaps, that the date of the
novel is avowedly fixed some indefinite number of
years ahead of us. ' Temp. Victoria ' it may be — we
all hope it will be ; but it is unmistakably Twentieth
Century. This is how the period is described : —

THE POLITICAL NOVEL

' The general situation v.-as a curious one. Some two years be-
fore this time a strong and long-lived Tory Governmeut had come
to an end. Since then all had been confusion in English politics.
A weak Liberal Government, undermined by Socialist rebellion,
had lasted a short time, to be followed by an equally precarious
Tory Ministry, in which Lord Maxwell — after an absence of four
years or so — returned to his party only to break it up. For he
succeeded in imposing upon them a measure in which his own
deepest convictions and feelings were concerned, and which had
behind it the support of all the most important trade unions.
Upon that measure the Ministry fell ; but during their short ad-
ministration Maxwell had made so great an impression upon his
owTi side that when they returned, as they did return with an en-
larged majority, the Maxwell Bill retained one of the foremost
places in their programme, and might be said, indeed, at the pres-
ent moment to hold the centre of the political field.'

This, of course, is a description of a political
era which has not yet dawued. Still, it need uot
be imagined by the reader, and, perhaps, was not
in fact imagined by the writer, as very far ahead of
us. We are living now under a Tory, or quasi-Tory
Government, which is undoubtedly 'strong,' and
which is expected to be ' long-lived.' Suppose it to
have lived out the natural life of Parliament, or that
term as limited by usage ; and allow for the lapse of
two more years to cover the careers of the ' weak
Liberal Government,' the ' precarious Tory Ministry '
which succeeded it, and the Dissolution and General
Election which were followed by the return of the last
Administration with an 'enlarged majority,' and we
get 1903 or 1904 as the date at which the novel opens.
And since, though one might not care to prophesy as

THE POLITICAL NOVEL

much, it is, at least, au only too plausible forecast of
the then state of political groups, that the old Liberal
party should by that time have been ' almost swept
away' (is there much of it left even in 1897?) and
that ' a large Independent Labour and Socialist party '
should fill ' the empty benches of the Liberals,' we are
entitled to expect complete ' actuality ' in treatment.
Sir George Tressadi/ is not one of those fantasies of
the future in which the author may give as much
scope to imagination as he pleases. It is nothing if
not a realistic account of the sayings and doings of
men and women — of Ministers and Ministers' wives,
of philanthropists, male and female, of politicians great
and small, of lady-wirepullers and lady-slummers, of
Sociahstio agitators, and Trade Union ' bosses,' and
private secretaries, and Parliamentary hangers-on —
exactly or substantially as these types exist among
us at the present day. They are all, or nearly all of
them to be found in the novel ; and of course, there-
fore, we expect, in spite of the slight difference of
period, to find them all in their ' habit as they lived,'
and playing such parts as they might be expected to
play at the present day. And the ' habit is all right
enough, but — the parts they play ! Mrs. Ward sketches
them so spiritedly, and costumes them so accurately,
that it irritates one to find them set to perform in a
— what are we to call it? — piece of political /t'ej'iV, the

THE POLITICAL NOVEL

extravaganza of ' The Marvellous Marcella,' or ' lYie
Lovely Lady and the Prostrate Politician.''

The incongruity is made the more glaring by the
faithfulness with which present-day actuality is, up
to a certain point, adhered to. Mrs. Ward evidently
does not contemplate any revolutionary change of
social conditions, as the result or accompaniment of
the political developments to which she introduces
us. The volcanic upheaval of Socialism is to bring
no nouvelle couches sociales to the surface. The poli-
tical machine is still to be 'run,' as now, by the aris-
tocracy: an 'earnest/ passionate aristocracy, it is
true, but more aristocratic than ever, and certainly,
in the Disraelian phrase, no less remarkable than of
old for the 'sustained and stately splendour of their
lives.' As the hero enters Marcella's house in St.
James's Square — Marcella, who had the night before
driven home in a hansom to save her only pair of
horses — ' one mute and splendid person relieved him
of his coat, and another, equally mute and equally
unsurpassable, waited for him on the stairs, while
across a passage beyond the hall he saw two red-
liveried footmen carrying tea.' Whereat he remarks
to himself, not unnaturally, as he mounts the stair-
case, ' When one is a friend of the people, is one
limited in horses but not in flunkies ? These things
are obscure.' The butler lifted a A'elvet curtain and

THE rOLITICAL NOVEL

pronounced tbe visitor's name with a tone and em-
phasis as perfectly trained as the rest of him. It is
a ' pretty, disorderly place,' the room into which he
is ushered ; a room which ' made a friend of you as
you entered.' The house generally is charming. So
is Maxwell Court, their countr}^ house. Sir George's
is ugly, but it commands a line prospect, and he is
himself, as we know, a baronet. Few of the char-
acters, and none of the leading or influential ones,
are anything so low as commoners. Marcella's hus-
band is Lord Maxwell ; the leader of the Opposition
has a com-tesy title as the eldest son of a peer. The
bold bad man with whom the heroine flirts to make
the hero jealous is a peer. The lively lady who sup-
plies, though with no very exhilarating results, that
doubtful ingredient of levity known to serious
dramatists as ' comic relief,' is a baronet's wife ; while
the only important female character in the story who
is plain Mrs., is the mother of a young man who had
succeeded to an earldom since his father's unfortunate
death as a commoner, and, if the youngest, is, on the
other hand, as one gathers, the richest and most
largely rent-rolled noble of them all.

All this is enough to show that that continuity of the
aristocratic tradition in English politics which was so
steadily maintained from the Thirties to the Sixties,
from the era of Lord Marney and Lord Milford, and
Lady Deloraiue and Lady St. Julians and Lady Fire-

THE POLITICAL NOVEL

brace, to the era of the Duke of St. Bungay and
Lord Brentford, and Lady Laura Kennedy, and Lady
Glencora Palliser, will, according to Mrs. Ward's fore-
cast, be still flourishing vigorously in the Twentieth
century. To those who have studied the ethos of
the modern Radical, it seems eminently probable
that it will ; and we may assume that at the sup-
posed date of Sir George Tressadi/, which, as has been
pointed out, is evidently not very far advanced in the
coming century, the actual representatives of that
tradition will be very much like what they are to-day.
Hence its imaginary representatives in Mrs. Ward's
novel may fairly enough be treated as though the}''
were sketches from contemporary life, and both in
externals and internals, as regards speech, idea, and
action, be judged accordingly.

Externally speaking, then, it may be admitted that
not a few of these portraits are successful. Lord
Fontenoy, who is a sort of mixture of Lord Randolph
Churchill and Lord George Bentinck, is distinctly
good ; and Lord Maxwell, though a little shadowy, is
not amiss. Mr. Bennett, the labour member, is also
well observed, and touched in, slight sketch as he is,
with a truthful and not unkindly hand. Many, too,
of the minor political personages — the private secre-
tary ; the 'society' youth wlio collaborates with
Fontenoy in the literary defence of the ' fourth party '
views, and the attack on the Maxwell pohcyj the

•il

THE POLITICAL NOVEL

imwilling yoimg couutiy squire, Sir Frank Levan,
spirited up to politics by his restless wife, are vital if
not very vivacious figures ; and the scenes of private
life in which they figure are certainly far superior to
those mechanical dialogues among lifeless puppets
which cover so many pages of Phineas Finn. If the
reader is not always passionately interested in the
subject of their conversation, they do, at least, talk
as though they were interested in it themselves,
which is more than can be said of ]\Ir. Trollope's
languid interlocutors; though it is no doubt only fair
to remember that current political talk in England
was never more bookish, priggish, and deadly dull
than during the smug Whig ascendancy of the Sixties,
and that a description of a Liberal 'symposium' in
those days would have been romantically and, indeed,
sensationally over-coloured, if it had represented the
symposiasts as having blood instead of ink in their
veins.

What may be called, then, the mise-en-scene of this
latest of poKtical novels is always well and often
excellently managed. The ' earnestness ' of the con-
versation is apt to be a little oppressive ; but this is
true enough to that life of to-day which concerns
itself actively with politics, and for aught we know
may be truer still to the life of 1903. If the photo-
graphic portrait of a ' group,' were quite the same
thing as a complete work of art, Sir George Tressady

THE POLITICAL NOVEL

would stand very high indeed ; and, as photographic
portraits of this kind should be of much service to
the historian, its historic value may prove consider-
able. It is especially interesting and amusing to
compare the light-minded drawing-room politics of
Disraeli's time, its ' mainly-about-people ' tone, and
its rare and slightly contemptuous references to tlie
people, with the solemn salon-chatter of this novel,
where everyone, down to the most irresponsible
young party 'item,' e\ddently talks with his con-
stituents and his caucus always in his eye, and the
first duty of ' keeping in touch with the Democracy '
for ever in his mind. No doubt this profound and
important contrast has been quite correctly displayed
by Mrs. Ward, and solemn as is the chatter with
which the political ladies and their disciples amuse or
rather edify themselves and each other in her pages,
its solemnity has not been materially overdrawn.
But the greater art, which would have shown these
well-meaning but fussy and pretentious personages
(as most of them at bottom really are) in their true
relation to the great eternal forces of human nature
which they play at directing — this greater art is to
seek in Mrs. Ward's novel. And the reason why it
is absent is not to seek at all. It is due to the lack
of that power of self-detachment which is never
found apart from — which perhaps is — the sense of
humour. Mrs. Ward can survey her minor charac-

THE POLITICAL NOVEL

ters from the outside. In some of their aspects or
attitudes she can contemplate even the central figures
of her story in the same way. But where they are
giving utterance to her own long-pondered thoughts,
"where they are personifying her own passionately
cherished ideals, where, in other words, they are
speaking, feeling, or acting as she would have men
ppeak, feel, and act, she is wholly unable to detach
herself from them, and view them as the painter
viev.'s his unfinished picture, or the sculptor his half-
modelled clay. They are herself, and the ability to
detach herself from them would imply just that power
of self-detachment which her writings so abundantly
show that she does not possess. And thus it is that
31rs. Ward, while comparatively faihng where Dis-
raeli so memorably succeeded, succeeds no better
than Disraeli where Disraeli failed. Her presentment
of the lighter side of English political life is accu-
rate, and in its way interesting and historically valu-
able, but it is wholly wanting in that brilliant satiric
touch which has made Disraeli's novels live as liter-
ature when their political significance has utterly
passed away. On the other hand, her attempt to
interweave serious romance-interest with the realities
of serious contemporary politics, has as completely
missed the mark as his. The loves of Egremont and
Sybil do not more thoroughly deserve to be described
as ' a fairy-tale of the Young England Movement,'

THE POLITICAL NOVEL

than does the capture of Sir George Tressadj by
Marcella Maxwell deserve to be described as a
' fairy-tale of the New Socialism.'

And from the exigencies of this conte fantastique
the realistic, or what are meant to be the realistic,
scenes and incidents of the story are continually
suffering. Its v^ery climacteric situation is disas-
trously affected by them. The varying fortunes of
the Maxwell Bill, and their culmination in the great
debate in which the hero deserts his party, are
handled throughout by Mrs. Ward in a manner which
has been justly praised. Critics, who perhaps know
more about novels than about the proceedings of the
House of Commons, or the agitations of its lobby,
have been much moved by the pages in which these
things are described. Some of them, apparently,
have been made to realise, with a wholly unfamiliar
intensity, the excitement of a great political struggle
as it is felt by the combatants themselves ; and I do
not for a moment deny that the history of these
events is related by this vigorous writer with no
little dramatic power. Nor to the description of the
critical night's debate itself — a class of descriptive
effort in which Trollop e so signally and spiritlessly
failed — is there any exception to be taken, save one.
But that one is almost as important as the exception
to the general excellence of the lady whose ' only
fault,' according to Talleyrand, was that she was

THE POLITICAL NOVEL

'intolerable.' Its central incident is^ incredible —
materially and formally incredible. It is possible to
conceive a politician changing his opinion as to a
Bill in the com-se of its passage through the House,
and both speaking and voting against his party on a
vital clause in its provisions. But it is not possible
to imagine him keeping this change in his opinions a
dead secret from his leader and his colleagues till he
announced it in his place in the House ; and it is a
thousand times impossible — unless he deliberately
intended to play the game of a traitorous wrecker of
his party, and Sir George Tressady is represented as
a man of scrupulous honour — that he should delay
the announcement until the very eve of the division,
and then spring it upon his party in the manner best
calculated, not merely to insure their defeat, but to
hurry them into utter rout and collapse. It is pass-
ing strange that Mrs. Ward, who shows so intimate
an acquaintance with the English political code of
conduct, should have made her hero commit an act
so fatal, not only to his credit as a politician, but to
his honour as a gentleman.

So much for the material incredibility of Sir
George's gmu rifiuto ; its formal incredibility — the
monstrosity of the means by Avhich the incredible act
is brought to pass — is more flagrant still. Tressady
is not described as the victim of one of those sudden
and violent attacks of love-madness which shatter

THE POLITICAL NOVEL

men's characters and paralyze their wills. It is true
be has a certain artistic appreciation of Marcella's
physical beauty; but his feeling for her consists far
more largely of respect for her intellectual powers,
admiration of her nobility of character, and sym-
pathy with her social ideals. These motives, least
of all the last, which seems ultimately to have de-
termined his action, are none of them potent enough
to make an honourable man break loose from all the
restraints of honour. Nor is he even represented as
having been intellectually converted to the lady's
opinions. At best, she has only made him uneasily
distrustful of his own ; and indeed at the very last he
avows to himself that his real reason for throwing over
his party and bringing about the defeat of their policy
is that he may make Marcella a present of 'her
heart's desire !' In other words, because a beautiful,
accomplished, and nobly altruistic lady ardently de-
sires the success of certain legislation which he had
always regarded as injuriously affecting the rights
and liberties of his countrymen, he feels himself
compelled to give her what she wants ! The motive
is so glaringly inadequate to account for Sir George
Tressady's action, that there is only one way of ex-
plaining the appearance of adequacy which it must
have presented to Mrs. Ward. She is a good deal
more in love with Marcella than is her hero himself.
It is, in fact, the idealisation of Marcella which has

THE POLITICAL NOVEL

converted what might have been a powerful novel
into a ' fahy tale of the New Socialism.' Lady Max-
well, with her surpassing beauty and sweetness, her
passionate sympathy with suffering, her passionate
de'S'otion to her husband, her irresistible power over
all sorts and conditions of men and, what is much
more wonderful, women, including even the woman
in whom she has unwittingly, though not unnaturally,
aroused the passion of jealousy to a furious pitch —
and let it here be parenthetically said, that the im-
possible scene in which Marcella subdues Letty re-
dounds immensely to the credit of Mrs, Ward's
artistic dexterity in being made as plausible as it is
— is undeniably a fascinating figure ; but its fascina-
tion is elaborated to a point at which it ceases to be
of this world. Her charms, both of aspect and
nature, are insisted on till she impresses one merely
as a radiant angel with a house in St. James's
Square ; nor do those foibles of generous imprudence,
which Mrs. Ward imputes to her with the praise-
worthy intention of giving a touch of the human to
her angelic perfections, avail to humanize her. For,
after all, they are precisely the sort of foibles which
a radiant angel, 'dumped down' in the midst of Lon-
don society, might be expected to display.

The same deflection of the artistic needle by the
disturbance of vehement political or politico-social
aspirations, is visible indeed throughout the whole

THE POLITICAL NOVEL

etory. The legislative crisis which Mrs. Ward has
imagined, and npou Avhich she has built the plot of
her novel, is no doubt a serious one ; but even this,
in a certain sense, she takes a little too seriously.
She writes as though the country may expect to find
itself, within another decade, in the throes of a semi-
Socialistic revolution. That forecast may possibly,
of course, prove accurate ; but if Mrs. Ward had
read her Syhil as carefully and with as much re-
flection as it deserves, she would have seen how easy
it is for speculations of this sort to take a prematurely
alarmist shape. A comparison between the social
conditions described in the second story of the
Disraelian trilogy, and those which are presented to
us in Sir George Tressadi/, displays the futility alike
of human hopes and human fears with the bitterest
and saddest irony in which the Fates have ever in-
dulged. Tliere is hardly a moan of suffering from
the victims of our industrial system, hardly a sigh of
sympathy with the sufferers, hardly a cry of passion-
ate indignation against the iron law whereby they
suffer, which is not equally audible in the utterances
of these two writers divided from each other by an
interval of more than fifty years. Nor, to all appear-
ance, is the earlier writer less profoundly convinced
than the later that English society is treading the
edge of a volcano. To him, as to her, it seems as if
the State must solve the problem of poverty, must

THE POLITICAL NOVEL

compose the everlasting quarrel between the Haves
aucl the Have-nots finally and forthwith, or perish.
Before the eyes of both of them these great and painful
issues loom so large as to occupy the whole field of
politics, and to exclude all other political objects and
questions from the view. To both it seems that now
is the appointed time, now is the day of salvation, or
of perdition, as the case may be. The same note is
heard all through the Past and Present of Carlyle. To
the thinkers of half a century ago it seemed no less
certain than it seems to the thinker of to-day, that
the mighty riddle was being propounded for the last
time of asking, and that the propounder would brook
no delay. Yet the half-century has run its course,
and the Sphinx and Oedipus still stand confronting
each other in the same expectant attitude. Qi]dipus
has neither answered the riddle nor given it up ; the
Sphinx has neither dashed herself against the rock
nor claimed her prey.

I admit that the irony of this protracted situation
is much too grim for laughter ; but it must be per-
ceived and felt, if that situation is to be handled in
the spirit and with the detachment of the artist.
And it is because, among other reasons noted above,
Mrs. Ward is wanting, unlike Disraeli, in the power
of detachment ; it is because she feels the ' pity of it '
too much and the irony of it too little ; because, with
all the passion of the social reformer, she flings her-

THE POLITICAL NOVEL

self, and her characters with herself, into the thick of
a struggle which she should survey from with-
out — that Sir George Tressady has failed, with all its
brilliancy and power, to attain that rank as a political
novel to which the genius of its author might other-
wise have raised it.

E 2

THE POLITICS OF LITERATURE

A DIALOGUE

Broohs. Middleway, I am afraid we are boring you.

Middlcway. Not in the least, my dear fellow. Dis-
putes like yours are most refreshing to me : thejseem
to provide such a complete answer to all complaints
of the excessive preoccupation of the age. Every-
thing is to be hoped for a community in which men
find time and taste for such serious frivolities as this
discussion of yours,

Carlton. Frivolity or not, you must allow that it
is an interesting subject of speculation.

M. Interesting? It possesses every quality
which lends charm to controversy. You start upon
it without either data or definitions, thereby saving a
tedious preliminary wrangle about the meaning of
terms ; and the dispute itself can leave no bad blood
behind it, because it is impossible, in the nature of
things, for either of you to obtain the slightest
advantage over the other.

THE POLITICS OF LITERATURE

B. There I don't at all agree with yon.

C. Nor I.

M. I dare say not. But yon wonld have a better
chance of persuading me that one of yon is getting
the better of the other if yon could satisfy me that
you have ever come to blows at all.

C. How do yon mean ?

M. Well, I may be mistaken ; but your con-
troversy certainly reminds me of the proverbial battle
between the dog and the fish. Yon, Carlton, keep
barking out statistics, while Brooks is lashing his tail
nobly in a stream of generalities.

C. I don't see it. Brooks maintains that Liberal-
ism is the natural politics of a man of letters ; and as
the best way of overthrowing the assertion, I enu-
merate a long list

B. A long list, you call it ?

C. Yes ; I say a long list of distinguished literary
men whose way of thinking is profoundly Con-
servative.

M. Yes ; and then Brooks sets up the overthrown
assertion on its legs again, and da capo. For, of
course, some half-dozen distinguished literary men
can no more prove the natural tendency of literature
towards Conservatism than Brooks's intuitive con-
clusions prove its affinity with his own pohtical
creed.

B. What is your own opinion on the point '?

THE POLITICS OF LITERATURE

M. On which point ? I have already told you
that you seem to me to be debating two. You,
Carlton, would like me to agree with you, that the
most eminent men of letters of the day — a body num-
bering, let us say, about a dozen all told — happen at
the moment to lean to Conservative opinions. Brooks,
on the other hand, wants me to say that the literary
occupation, and the habit of mind which it presup-
poses, or begets and strengthens, tend to make
Liberals of those who follow the one and share the
other. I see nothing to prevent my agreeing with
both of you ; but to do so, though gratifying to my
feelings, would be of no great assistance to the settle-
ment of your dispute.

C. Very well then. I will waive my own con-
tention, and join issue with Brooks on his own terms.
I deny that the natural tendency of literature is to-
wards Liberalism, and I affirm that the contrary is
the truth. Now what do you say ?

M. I say, first, that I should hke to know what
you mean by literature. How do you define a
literary man ?

C. Well, it will be sufficient for my purpose to
define him as a man whose sole, or at any rate chief,
occupation is that of writing.

M. Observe the inexactitude of the Conservative
mind. Why, that would serve for the definition of a
secretary, of a clerk, of a shorthand reporter, of a

THE POLITICS OF LITERATURE

transcriber in a Government office. A little more
precision, please. Writing what ?

C. What ? Oh, anything which involves inde-
pendent thought and original composition. Novels,
poems, essays, biographies.

M. Political 'leaders'? Do you inclnde journalists'?

C. Oh, no.

B. Certainly not.

M. Wonderful unanimity I But not very compli-
mentary, perhaps, to the rejected of both parties.
You don't thinkj then, that the journalist has any
• natural ' politics "?

B. Why, of course not, ray dear Middleway. Or,
if he has, he cures himself of them, as he does of other
unprofessional habits. You might as well talk of the
' natural ' view of a barrister on a question of law.
The business of the journalist is advocacy.

M. I like your frankness. His political teuden
cies, you mean, are those of his clients, and his clients
are the proprietors of newspapers ?

B. I don't quite say that.

M. No ; you are too polite to say it. But you are
too intelligent not to mean it. Let us pass the jour-
nalists. Is a historian a man of letters ?

B. In one sense, of course, he is — in the highest
sense, perhaps : but for the purposes of this discussion
I think he ought to be excluded.

Al. In the name of wonder, why ?

THE POLITICS OF LITERATURE

B. Because he is a student of political phenomena
first, and a literary man afterwards. The view which
he takes of contemporary politics will be determined
by the political philosophy which he has constructed
from his researches into, and his reflections upon, the
politics of the past.

J/. But what of that ?

B. Well, in that case, his political prepossessions,
whatever they are, will have a political, and not a
literary origin. If he is a Liberal or a Conservative
in contemporary politics, it wall be simply because he
is a Liberal or a Conservative historian.

C. Always supposing, you mean, that the process
has not been reversed, and that he is not merely a
politician who has taken to styling his political
pamphlets

M. The ' history of his own times ' ? Yes ;
Brooks, I am sure, will be magnanimous enough to
exclude that variety of Liberal historian also.

B. I am willing to exclude all varieties. If the
historian Le<jan as a party politician, the case, of
course, is simple. But even if ho only ends as a party
politician, his opinions, 1 say, will have had a poli-
tical, and not a literary on'gin. He wall be a Liberal
or a Conservative simply because inquiry and thought,
as appHed to bygone events, have convinced him
that Liberahsm or Conservatism furnishes, on the
whole, the safer standpoint from which to judge the

THE POLITICS OF LITEEATURE

events and movements of the time. And a political
creed of that sort has no connection whatever with
the literary ' ethos ' as such.

M. Oh, then ^^oiir conception of literature excludes
the ideas of thought and inquiry 1

B. That is good enough as ' chaff,' but, of course,
you know very well what 1 mean. I will put it this
way. The politics of a historian have no more to do
with his being a man of letters than have the politics
of a professional politician who may happen to be a
man of letters also. You would not say, for instance,
that Burke's Whiggery, or his Old AVhiggery either,
was a result of the literary habit.

M. Indeed I should. Your illustration is most
unfortunate. Burke I consider a typical example of
the politician whose politics are formed in the study.
But never mind. Let us pass the historian too. We
have now dismissed one set of literary men as having
no natural bias in politics, and another set as having
uo bias derived from the literary profession. Let us
go a little further. Scientific men, I suppose, you
would certainly exclude ?

B. H'm, yes ; though it would be to my interest
to include them.

C. Eh?

B. What? You dispute that?

C. Dispute it ! You surely haven't the effrontery
to maintain that Science is Liberal ?

THE POLITICS OF LITERATURE

B. AYhy, how could she possibly ally herself with
the party of theological bigotry ?

C. That is not confined to either party.

B. Perhaps not ; but I think I remember a certain
famous discussion in which your side had the best of
it, both in votes and prejudices.

C. You are hugely mistaken, if you imagine that
Science ever troubled her head about that dispute.
Science, in these times, is eminently respectable, and
Mr. Bradlaugh's cause was eminently the reverse.
Scientific men don't want to run a-muck against
religion, Tom Paine fashion, nowadays. They are
quite content to keep to their laboratories and lecture-
rooms, and leave you alone, if you will only let them
alone. But that is exactly what you Liberals won't
consent to do. You arc perpetually worrying them,
and they detest you in consequence.

B. What ! merely because we object to give them
the absolute rights which they claim over the lower
animals, and indeed — if we may couple mental anguish
with physical torture — over the whole sentient world ?
If they detest those who would simply

M. Forgive me, my dear Brooks, for recalling you
to the point. The question is not whether men of
science ought to be disgusted with contemporary
Liberalism, but whether they are. And on that point
I confess I think Carlton is in the right. The estrange-
ment between you appears to me complete.

THE POLITICS OF LITERATURE

B. Ob, impossible ! You have been both of yon
misled by a few sallies of petulant savauts, or a few
ineptitudes of the scientific prig. As the common
friends of progress, Science and Liheralism must be in
accord.

M. Oh, of course. Two friends of a word are
bound to love each other — especially when it is a word
•which each interprets differently. It reminds me of
those sudden and mistaken salutations of social life :
' I think you know Mr. So-aud-So.' ' To be sure.
Delighted to have met you.' You shake hands
warmly, and half an hour afterwards you find that
the friend of your new-made acquaintance is not
your own friend, but a highly objectionable namesake
of his.

B. Nonsense! That is not at all the case here. Our
Conservative critics may make their miads perfectly
easyion that score. Liberalism and Science thoroughly
understand each other, and, whatever transitory and
superficial difference may divide them, you may take
my word for it that they are the best of friends.

M. Theoretically, perhaps ; but practically ? Lib-
eralism in the abstract is devoted to the cause of
science ; but unfortunately there seems to be always
something which the concrete Liberal prefers to her
interests. Now it is a rabbit ; now a baby sickening
for the small-pox in a crowded district ; now the Doll
Tearsheet of a garrison town. What value do you

THE POLITICS OF LITERATURE

suppose a man of science can attach to the friendship
of men who are continually sacrificing the fruits of his
labours and the blessings of his discoveries to
crotchets of their own?

B. The divergence of paths is only temporary.
The man of science has gone astray, as the mere
student will. Absorbed in his own ideals, he has lost
touch of considerations to which the man of action
and affairs is naturally alive. We shall recall him in
time to a juster appreciation of those rights of
others which he is now disposed to ignore.

C. And you think that that is the only note of
discord between Liberalism and Science ? You think
that if what Middleway calls the ' rabbit ' difficulty
could be settled, together with the other two which
he mentioned, there would be nothing to hinder
Science and Liberalism from falling into each other's
arms ?

B. I don't thiuk it — I am sure of it.

C. Sacred simplicity ! What do you say, Middle-
way?

M. Nothing. I am waiting to hear what Brooks
says.

B. And 1 need not wait to hear what Carlton says,
because 1 already guess what he means. He has
picked up from some pseudo-philosophic anti-Radical
the argument that modern science, being simply the
evangelist of evolution, must necessarily take the

THE POLITICS OF LITERATUEE

colour of her politics from a biological theory which
is ' not democratic, but aristocratic through and
through.' I think that is the way our instructors are
accustomed to put it; and confess now, Carlton,
wasn't that the thunder you were going to pass off
as your own ?

C. I was not conscious of the intention of ' pass-
ing off' anything as my own ; but I had always sup-
posed that good arguments were common property,
and I certainly did propose to make use of the one
you have cited. What have you to say to it ?

B. Simply that it is an ingenuity of the study ;
that it is, on the face of it, an excogitation of the
man of books, and not a reflection which has sug-
gested itself to the man of action from his observation
of practical affairs.

C That is merely your way of putting it ; but,
supposing you are right, I can't see the force of your
reply.

B. Can't you? I should have thought it was
obvious ; but 1 will put it in the concrete form. Some
ingenious Conservative essayist or other, casting
about for new arguments against the principles of
Liberalism, suddenly bethinks himself of the fact
which I suppose has been a commonplace for years
to anybody who has ever thought about the matter
— that, according to accepted scientific doctrine, the
development of life on the globe has not been man-

THE POLITICS OF LITERATURE

aged by Nature on democratic principles, but on
principles very much their reverse. Elated with
this brilliant apergii, he immediately proceeds to argue
that what is true of life in general must be true of
the human race in particular ; and that scientific men
must thereby be vehemently opposed to the Liberal
theory of the progress and prospects of humanity.
Isn't that the history of the argument ?

C. No doubt it is.

B. Well, what is it worth, then '? Why, in the
first place, nothing can be more absurd than to call
it au argument against any one political creed. It
is an argument against civilisation itself. There was
a time when the human species did develop itself by
the same law of evolution as governs the lower forms
of life to-day; but the then state of our race is de-
scribed — by Conservatives I had imagined no less
than by Liberals ; but correct me if I am wrong — as
barbarism. The ' aristocratic ' doctrines of Nature
no doubt prevailed then among us to their full ex-
tent ; but the first effective protest against them was
not Liberalism, but society. The social union of
man was, in fact, the birth of the principle of demo-
cratic co-operation, and the death of the aristocracy
of individual strength. Man parted company with
the politics of Nature from that hour, and your in-
genious Conservative essayist should raise his voice,
not against us poor Liberals, but against the human

THE POLITICS or LITERATURE

race itself. He should look a little further back than
the first Reform Bill, and attempt to conjure up the
golden age of the flint. He should idealise a more
genuine pre-Adamite than even Sir Charles Wethe-
rell, and while his mind lingers fondly upon Tory
' Dragons of the prime. That tear each other in the
slime,' he should deplore the fatal error which was
committed when man first took to walled cities and
invented morality and laws.

M. Bravo, Brooks! That's really a colourable
imitation of eloquence. At least 1 have heard after-
dinner speakers cheered for a less coherent and even
for a less grammatical string of sentences.

B. You're very good.

M. Not at all. I feel that it is only fair to do
justice to the form of your remarks, as 1 shall again
have to comment on the irrelevance of their matter.
Nothing I know is so disagreeable as sticking to the
point when you are conscious of having some excel-
lent thing to say which has nothing to do with it.
But, disagreeable as it is, there is no other way of
advancing the progress of a controvers}'', and I must
really point out to you that you have not answered
Carlton's argument at all.

B. Indeed ? I thought I had proved that

31. You have quite sufficiently proved that no
man, whether savant or Conservative essayist, or
what not, can reasonably make Liberalism responsi-

TUE rOLITICS OF LITERATUEE

"ble for principles of which the very existeuce of
society is itself the expression. But Carlton is not
concerned to dispute that. His argument, as I
understand it, may be stated thus: The principles
upon which Nature works, when exempt from the
artificial interference of man, are essentially aristo-
cratic principles. The doctrine of the survival of
the fittest is an essentially aristocratic doctrine. The
law of evolution is a law of privilege. ' The weakest
goes to tlie wall,' supplies a good rhyme to, but an
ill paraphrase of, ' equahty for all.' The one, in fact,
is the exact antipodes of the other; and since Science
is engaged in the continual contemplation of the
aristocratic doctrine, while Liberalism is specially
devoted to the illustration and development of the
democratic theory, the question is whether this does
not tend to encourage — rationally or irrationally,
matters not — an antagonism of tendencies between
the two in their way of regarding political phenomena.

C. That's exactly the form in which I wish my
argument to be stated. Thank you, Middleway.

M. Withhold your thanks a little while. I am
afraid you will find I don't deserve them. But first,
Avhat do you say, Brooks, to the argument as I have
just stated it ?

B. Well, as I gather from your last hint that you
are about to fall foul of my adversary, I withdraw
my opposition. I will admit provisionally that there

THE POLITICS OF LITERATUKE

is, in the way you put it, a natural antagonism of
political tendency between Liberalism and Science.
And now let us see you ' go for' Carlton.

C. I don't quite see how you can count upon
that pleasure. Your surrender is my victory.

B. Is it? AYe shall see. I can guess the very
manner of your discomfiture. If Liberal theories
offend the prepossessions of science, what sort of
response does Conservatism make to them ? That
is the question you are going to ask, I suppose,
Middleway ?

M. Yes; unless Carlton anticipates it with the
answer, which he doesn't seem disposed to do. He
has very rightly insisted that the man of science is
likely to be prejudiced against democratic ideas by
continual study of a principle so aristocratic as that
on which Nature is accustomed to work. But now
I want to hear from him why he thinks, or assumes,
that the man of science is likely to be drawn towards
his own party on that account ?

C. Well, he would be drawn towards us, I think,
in virtue of the very opposition of our principles to
democratic ideas.

M. He would be attracted to you as to the repre-
sentatives of the aristocratic principle, you mean ?

C. Yes ; if you like to put it so.

M. And you consider, then, that Nature and the
Conservative party interpret and apply this principle

THE POLITICS OF LITERATURE

iu the same way ? That we have called it in each
case by the common name ' aristocratic ' seems enough
for you. How much has language to answer for when
it can betray a man of intelligence into such an ab-
surdity as that !

C. Do you mean to say, theu, that there is no
analogy between the ' supremacy of the best ' as it
appears in Nature and as it has been illustrated in
political institutions ?

M. Do you mean to say that what a Conservative
would call ' the best ' is what Nature would call ' the
fittest'?

C. Why not?

B. Why not ? You had better ask the House of
Lords. You had better consider the patronage sys-
tem in the matter of appointments. Why, the mon-
archical principle itself — but, however, I need not
shock your courtliness by going into that. I will
merely ask you whether you think an hereditary-
peerage represents the principle of the ' supremacy
of the fittest ' ?

M. I have seen it argued that it does — the in-
genious disputant appealing iu support of his argu-
ment to the titles conferred occasionally upon the
successful soldier or civil administrator, and periodi-
cally upon a certain number of able lawyers.

B. To which you replied ?

M. To which I replied that the analogy was most

THE POLITICS OF LITERATURE

exact and happy — for a single generation ; but that,
unfortunately for its further application, Nature was
in the habit of conferring life peerages alone.
B. Good. What did he say to that ?
M. I did not give him time to say anything. I
went on to add that I would admit the force of his
argument when he could show me a short-necked
giraffe supported in ease and comfort by Nature in
consideration of the distinguished cervical develop-
ment of its ancestors. Nature, I said, appears to me
to have a thorough appreciation of personal fitness,
but of the hereditary variety, so familiar to politicians,
she seems to have no comprehension at all. Obvious-
ly she cannot grasp the idea of an inherited aptitude
for browsing the leaves of trees which your neck is
too short to reach.

C. This seems to me very poor jesting.
M. I don't wonder you find it so ; but you have
always the resource of treating it as serious argument
and attempting to answer it. Come, my dear Carlton,
you cannot possibly claim the sympathy of science
for Conservatism on the ground that your party
represents the principle of the supremacy of the fittest.
The paradox is too audacious. Conservatism and
accidental privilege have been too long associated in
popular language to allow you any hope of severing
them.
B. Quite so ; and that just brings us to the point

THE POLITICS OF LITEEATURE

at which, as I contend, the sympathy of Liberahsm
and science begins. It is Liberahsm after all, and
Liberalism alone, which has unshackled and given
scope to the energies of the human race — thereby
rendering possible the vast material progress which
the race has made, and even contributing in a gTcat
measure to the splendid victories which science her-
self has won. She would be guilty of the worst in-
gratitude if she were really capable of looking coldly
on her benefactor.

C. Ah ! that's all very well ; but, understanding
gratitude as a sense of favours to come, 1 should like
to know from which of the two parties science is most
likely to receive them.

B. From ours ! Not a doubt of it. There cannot
be any permanent antagonism between the man who
labours for the human race, and the man who be-
lieves in the human race ; nor can there ever be more
than a transitory alliance between him whose life is
devoted to the interests of the many, and him who
has to uphold the privileges of the few. Liberalism
and science have, at any rate, a common ideal — the
advancement of mankind — an ideal which Conserv-
atism either does not believe in, or does not care for.
The Liberal politician may thwart the man of science
in such matters as vivisection and the repression of
disease, and the two may quarrel angrily enough
about it ; but each knows at the bottom of his heart

THE POLITICS OF LITERATURE

that his temporary opponent is equally with himself
a labourer in the cause of man. They differ as to
the relative importance of moral and physical factors
in the sum of man's well-being, that is all. But in
any difference between science and Conservatism this
can never be so.

C. What a magnificent specimen of Liberal arro-
gance ! Your party has^ of course, a monopoly of
interest in human welfare.

B. I have never said so ; and it would be as ab-
surd as to say that Haroun Al-Raschid took no interest
in the welfare of his people. AVhat I meant was that
the Conservative — I mean the really thoughtful and
logical Conservative as distinguished from the po-
litical speculators on, or perhaps I ought to say ' in,'
the adventure of ' Tory Democracy ' — does not
believe in the self -directing, self-suflSciug quality of
the mass of mankind, or believes in it only as a pos-
sibility of some so remote future as to warrant him
in treating it for immediate practical purposes as
non-existent. And I say that, while the Conservative
rejects this belief, both the Liberal and the man of
science are fundamentally agreed in holding it.

M. What a charm there is in the discursiveness
of an argument! Now, Avho Avould imagine that all
this animated dispute about the tendencies of science
is really episodical to the main issue ? But it is,
though.

THE POLITICS OF LITERATURE

C. Surely not.

M. Indeed it is. You undertook to discuss the
politics of literature, or, in other words, the political
tendencies of the literary habit, and you have branch-
ed off into a debate upon the politics of scientific
men, whom Brooks at the outset declined, for the
purposes of the discussion, to include in the literary
class at all.

C. Well, we have disposed of most varieties of
the men who employ pen, ink, and paper for the ex-
pression of their thoughts. Journalists, historians,
savants have been successively brought up for
examination as to their politics.

31. Yes ; and since the studies of mental and
moral philosophy are now treated as branches of
physical science, there remains only the novelists,
poets, essayists, &c., whom you first enumerated.
We are reduced, in fact — if the word ' reduced ' is
not impertinent — to the belles lettres, which I suspect
are, in popular language, pretty nearly equivalent to
the word ' literature.'

B. No doubt they are ; and people are probably
thinking exclusively of the poet, the novelist, the
essayist, the critic, and so forth, when they talk of
the politics of literary men.

C. Well, and what do you think theh- natural
politics are ?

B. Ah, there, at least, I can confidently meet
70

THE POLITICS OF LITERATURE

you. For what are the qualities which in the de-
partment of Hterature are supreme ? Are they not
imagination, sympathy, sensibiUty ?

J/. You leave out sense, I see. But surely the
critic should have that, even if tlie poet and the
novelist can dispense with it.

C. Yes, and how about taste and culture, which
you have also omitted "?

B. Thank you for multiplying my allies. Add
taste and culture by all means. I am not afraid of
them. They are on the side of our greater ideals, if
they look coldly on some of our minor political
claims.

M, Which, being interpreted, means that Mr.
Matthew Arnold was an enthusiast for social equality,
if he had no sympathy with the deceased wife's
sister.

B. Exactly so.

M. Recollect, however, what an eclectic Mr.
Arnold was.

C. Ay, and remember how much larger a share in
the life of a political party is filled by these ' minor
claims,' as you call them, compared with the ' greater
ideals/ or, in other words, the vague abstractions
which men may accept like the theological dogma
which has no influence on their lives. In what as-
pect, after all, must the modern Liberal politician
present himself to the man of taste and culture ?

THE POLITICS or LITERATURE

Surely not in the radiant if delusive semblance worn
by the pioneers of the French Revolution to the
English poets of the eighteenth century? Surely
not as a builder of a new heaven and new earth, but
rather as the mechanically-chosen exponent of the
narrowest ideals of the English bourgeoisie.

B. But suppose that these ideals

C. One moment ; I am not saying that this view
of English Liberalism is reasonable, but I do say that
that is the aspect which it must naturally present to
the eye of taste and culture.

B. I see you admire that variety of refinement
which, if you will pardon the criticism, the most close-
ly borders on vulgarity. You are the devotee of a
form of ' taste ' which is to the real article what the
' genteel person ' is to the gentleman. Well, let us
drop taste and culture. Imagination and sympathy
surely do not tend to encourage that gross and
swinish temperament which contentedly acquiesces
in a world of remediable misery for a bribe of meat
and drink. Imagination and sympathy in their
higher developments must surely tend to make
men

C. Revolutionaries? yes; Liberals, no. I can
quite understand your poetic Nihilist. What I can-
not see is the romance of the Caucus.

M. I am entirely with you there, Carlton. A
poet who likes to join hands with the Marxes and

THE POLITICS OF LITERATURE

Krapotkins of the era may indulge bis imagination
to any extent. A socialist democracy contains
possibilities; its coming might be catastrophic or
beneficent ; but it would, at any rate, give promise of
something less prosaic than the present. Now the
promise of orthodox Liberalism is precisely the re-
verse, and, however unsatisfying the present may
seem to imaginative and poetic minds, I cannot con-
ceive it save as turning with disgust from, a future in
which democracy, with its vices sedulously fostered
and its virtues repressed as inconvenient, is to be
' worked,' ' managed,' ' caucused,' by pushing mem-
bers of the commercial capitalist class.

C. Quite so ; and since imagination and feeling,
since taste and culture, can find nothing to satisfy
them, but rather everything to disgust them in the
future foreshadowed to them by the so-called man of
progress, they are naturally drawn towards that body
who represent for them the beauty, the sanctity, the
poetry of the past.

M. You mean, no doubt, the Society of
Antiquaries.

B. Ila ! ha !

C. Nonsense ; I mean the Conservative party.
M. Oh, impossible ! What on earth have the

Conservative party to do with the past ? It is true
they have a sort of bowing acquaintance with it
through the House of Peers, most of whom, however,

THE rOLITICS OF LITERATURE

are ignorant of their own pedigrees, and some of the
greatest of whom are tnruiug their historic heirlooms,
as fast as may be, into current coin of the realm ; but
the party, as a party, is avowedly, even ostentatious-
ly, parvenu. Lord Beaconsfield, they are always
telKng us, was their pohtical father ; they have, con-
sequently, no pohtical grandfather, and they are
proud of it. That may bo a capital way of com-
mending themselves to the democracy; I don't say it
is not; but you must take it with its consequences,
and one of these is that modern Consers'atism has no
more appeal to romance, is not one whit less prosaic to
the tips of its fingers, than modern Liberalism.

B. I thoroughly agree with you. That is, of
course, I mean I agree with you that nothiug can be
more prosaic than modern Conservatism.

C. Well, what / should like to know is, what you
really do think on the point under discussion ? For
hitherto you seem to me to have done nothiug but
amuse yourself by knocking onr heads together,
which is not difBcult when two men are wrestling.

M. I should think, then, that an attitude of such
strict, if scarcely benevolent, neutrality might ex-
plain itself. Your dispute, my good friends, is, to the
best of my judgment, idle. The literary man, as
such, can have no tendency either to Liberalism or
Conservatism as represented by the two political
parties. Neither party has anything to attract him,

THE POLITICS OF LITERATURE

or rather, each has so much to repel him, that he
must become an eclectic whether he will or no.

B. But never mind the parties. Surely his bias
must be — every man's is — towards the creed of one
party or towards that of the other ?

M. Well, of course it must be ; but that has no
more to do with the practice of his calling than with
the colour of his hair. It goes down to that great
fundamental distinction of temperament which makes
every man among us an optimist or a pessiaiist.

C. And which are you ?

M. My dear Carlton, what an indiscreet question !
To avow oneself an optimist is practically to imder-
take to fight all comers at all times of the day or
night ; to declare for pessimism is to get oneself
turned out of the arena altogether and disqualified as
* unpractical.' The one creed threatens me with too
much work, and the other would allow me too little.
So please to understand that I am so far an optimist
as to entitle no one to order me home to my study ;
while, if I ever talk the language of the pessimist, it
is, as I have done to-day, in the strictest confidence
of privacy.

MATTHEW ARNOLD

It is just upon a hundred years since Wordsworth,
in an unlucky moment for himself, excogitated and
published an entirely new, original, and unsound
theory of the poetic art. He was, however, fortunate
in a power of performance far excelling the value of
his precepts, and perhaps still more so in a public who
remained absolutely indifferent to both until the lat-
ter had had time to be forgotten. With Mr. Matthew
Arnold the case is very different. His poetic theories
attracted as much attention as his poetry, if not more,
and made warm partisans and vehement opponents
throughout the world of English letters. Hence a
certain difficulty in fixing Mr. Arnold's own place in
literature. It is impossible in considering the poet to
forget the critic with whom we more or less
enthusiastically agree or disagree ; and the influence
of one's own ' personal equation ' is proportionally
hard to exclude. His work, both in prose and
poetry, but in the former especially, was distinguish-
ed by characteristics of the strongest individuality ;

MATTHEW ARNOLD

it displayed qualities which are as much over-rated
by some minds as they are depreciated by others ; it
enforced doctrines — the prose by precept, the poetry
by example — on the soundness of which men have
differed since the dawn of literature, and will pro-
bably continue to differ until literature is extinguish-
ed by Volapuk. To have reasoned opinions on
literature at all is to hold strong convictions, or at
any rate to feel strongly, on the questions which
Matthew Arnold's genius and teaching raised as with
a standing challenge, and the critic who undertakes
to review his literary work can hardly but be con-
scious of doing so from the standpoint, either of a
convinced believer in his doctrines and method, or of
a heretic hardened in their rejection. Such a one
ought, perhaps, to be aware, therefore, that, in
endeavouring to appraise the work of the departed
poet and essayist, he runs a risk of supplying his
readers with little else than an edifying disclosure of
his own orthodoxy from the Arnoldian point of view
on the theories in question. It says much for the
artless simplicity of the critical guild that this appre-
hension seems to weigh so little on their minds.
Those who have adopted, equally with those who
dissent from, Mr. Arnold's canons of art have in
many instances assigned him his place in English
literature with a noble unconsciousness of the fact
that they have been merely sitting in judgment

}iIATTHKW ARNOLD

upon, and with judicial gravity deciding in favour of,
their own prepossessions.

Mutely submitting to the obvious retort that I am
about to afford an example of the precise foible in my
own person, I propose at the outset to examine the
comparative estimate of Mr. Arnold's poetic and
prose work which has been formed and enunciated
by the majority of his posthumous critics.

Now, the first reflection which suggests itself on
this point might well be one of a somewhat painful
character. It is only my intimate personal conviction
that no such thing as a literary counterpart of Mrs.
Candour is, or ever was, to be found among us — it is
only this, I say, which assures me of the good faith
and good nature of many of the familiar eulogies
of Mr. Arnold. ' It is as a poet rather than as a
prose-essayist,' runs the 'common form' of most
of them, ' that Mr. Arnold will be remembered;' and
then the eulogist goes on to say — not ' in the same
breath ;' he usually respires for two or three sentences
before adding it — that ' to the great body of his
countrymen Mr. Arnold as a poet is almost unknown.'
He will be remembered, it seems, for those achieve-
ments which have failed to attract the attention of
the public which is to remember him. Sometimes, it
is true, the formula has been varied a little, to the
advantage of logic ; and we have been told that the
works which failed to make ISlr. Arnold known to the

MATTHEW ARNOLD

mass of his contemporaries will constitute his
principal ' claim ' to the ' remembrance of posterity/
The critics who prefer this phrase are careful not to
commit themselves to the assertion that posterity
•will honour a draft which an earlier generation had
returned on the hands of the drawer marked with the
fatal superscription ' no effects.'

I am not so rash as to dispute the proposition that
the poet was unknown to all but a very small fraction
of those who were familiar enough with the name of
the literary critic, the essayist on politics and man-
ners, and, above all, perhaps, the amateur theologian.
Indeed, the facts and dates of the matter speak for
themselves. It is now upwards of forty years since
Mr. Arnold gave to the world his first two volumes of
poems — volumes which contain some of his best work.
Some ten or twelve more years had to pass before his
Essays in Criticism made their appearance, and it is
safe to say that at that time very few, even of those
who were sufficiently struck with the contents of his
book to take the trouble to get its title correctly, (the
varia lectio ' on ' has not yet disappeared even from
library catalogues,) had made as much as a bowing
acquaintance with Mr. Arnold's earlier muse, or had
ever read a line of the New Poems which had seen
the light a year or so before. It was undoubtedly
the ' Essays ' that established his fame with that
gi'eat world which can be persuaded by the 'persistent

MATTHEW ARNOLD

bammenng,' which Mr. Graut Alien has recommended,
to read and to admh-e the excellent in prose, but not,
or very, very rarely, the exquisite in verse. This
great world was brought to perceive, or to take for
granted, in default of perceptive power, that here was
a critic, not only of rare technical ability, but one
possessed of original and fertilizing conceptions on
the subject of the critic's art, and the master, above
all, of a style which, whatever fault might be found
with it on other grounds, had become in his hands
an instrument of marvellous delicacy and power.
Then the great world condescended to see what this
remarkable essayist and critic had written in rhyme
and metre. And in the course of time they had got
by heart the last eighteen lines of Sohrah and Bus-
tiun, and the handsome comphment to Sophocles at
the end of the sonnet To a Friend, and the de-
scription of our Titan of empire, laden with ' the too
A'ast orb of his fate,' and a few otlier elegant extracts
of an equally convenient and portable kind.

But the great world never got further than that.
They still continued, and they still continue, to pre-
fer their 'favourites' — the two or three poets who
have won their way to or beyond the place occupied
for so many years in lonely majesty, like the broken
column of Ozymandias, by the author of Proverhial
Fhilosophi/. They still prized, and prize above all
others, the three bards whom they have respectively

MATTHEW ARNOLD

learned to love, been persuaded to adaiire, and taken
af once and spontaneously to their hearts — Lord
Tennyson, Mr. Browning, and Sir Lewis Morris. And
since Mr. Arnold as a poet and Mr. Arnold's poems
were and are in this position in the mind of the gen-
eral public at the time of and since his lamented
death, it follows that, to declare, as has been declared
in so much recent criticism, that his future fame will
depend upon his poetry, must mean one of two
things : either it is a polite way of saying that Mr.
Arnold is not destined to any future life at all in the
popular recollection, or it amounts to a prediction
that, sooner or later, the appreciation, now confined
to a few, of his high excellence as a poet, will, as in
the case of his master, Wordsworth, dawn gradually
iipon the perceptions of the great body of his
countrymen. It is possible that Mr. Arnold himself
entertained some expectation of the kind, and that
his avowed belief in the continuing growth of
Wordsworth's fame and influence was associated with
a personal hope which would certainly not be un-
justifiable on the part of one so deeply imbued with
the Wordsworthian spirit as himself.

It is ill dogmatizing on a question so obviously
incapable of more than a conjectural answer as this.
No man's opinion as to what the public taste of ten,
twenty, fifty, a hundred years hence will be in the
matter of poetry can be worth much more than that

JklATTHEW ARNOLD

of his ueighboiirs ; and, for all we knoAv, the world
may be reading Matthew Arnold with eager delight
a century hence, while Sir Lewis Morris may have
long sunk into neglect. The utmost one can say is
that it is difficult to detect at present any forerunning
sign whatever of either development of the public
taste. I see no reason to doubt that poets who dis-
play Sir Lewis Morris's triumphant address in
adapting themselves to the poetical likings of so vast
a multitude of their fellow-countrymen will always
find innumerable admirers worthy of them. I do not
believe that the singer will either get ahead of the
listener or tlie listener of the singer, but that the two
will be kept abreast of each other by the link of a
quality which Horace, though with a slight difference
of application, has described as 'golden.'

On the other hand, I do not find any very convinc-
ing ground for the belief that the taste of any great
multitudes of men in this or any other country
will ever be powerfully attracted by poetry like
that of Mr. Arnold. Even if the influence of Words-
worth should increase, instead of, as is at least as
probable, diminishing, it does not follow that Mr.
Arnold's would obtain additional acceptance on that
account: for Wordsworth's appeal to the common
mind is largely dependent upon a quality in his
poetry which Mr. Arnold's is altogether without.
Wordsworth lays firm hold of the religious instinct

fi2

MATTHEW ARNOLD

in man. His poetry, for all the mystical nature-
worship that pervades it, was allied to a strongly
and even almost narrowly personal Theistic creed.
There is nothing in the poetry of his disciple to
supply the place of this element, except that highly
attenuated conception of the ' Something not our-
selves which makes for righteousness,' so familiar to
every student of the amateur theologian into which
the poet and critic imfortunately declined. It will
be a long time before the mass of mankind are
willing to accept the ' stream of tendency ' as a sub-
stitute for their no doubt crude and self-contradic-
tory conceptions of a personal Creator ; and when,
if ever, they do, they will probably have ceased to
care for poetry of the Wordsworthian and Arnoldian
type at all. Science relieved by sensuousness ap-
pears to be the ideal to which not only poetry, but
art of all kinds, is tending at the present day, and if
the movement is a real and persistent, and not a
merely apparent or merely temporary one, the ulti-
mate effect of that movement must be to crowd out
all poetry set mainly in the contemplative key, to
whatever tenderness of feeling and truth of sesthetic
vision it may be allied. For, so long as this key is
maintained by a poet, he will probably never be
able to compete for the favour of the average man
with those rivals who proceed upon the sound as-
sumption that the average man wants, as Goethe

MATTHEW ARNOLD

said, not to be made to think, but merely to be made
to feel.

In other words, it seems to me ahnost self-evident
that poetry in order to be popular — and I do not
intend the word in any disparaging sense; I merely
mean that poetry, in order to be the poetry of the
many and not of the few — must have something
more than the power of delighting the imaginative
part of man : it must deeply move his emotional part.
The emotions stirred by it may be at any moral level
you please, however high, or however low ; but the
stir, the exaltation, must be there. Moreover, it
must be a genuine troubling of the waters of the
spirit, and not merely an excitement of the assrhetic
sensibilities discharging itself along the channels of
emotion. What makes Byron's popularity so in-
structive is that we are so often in a position to say
with absolute certainty that the exaltation produced
by his poetry is wholly due to the former of these
causes, and not in the least to the latter. For the
form of the poetic utterance is sometimes so intoler-
ably bad that we may be quite sure that the power
of the passage lies exclusively in the thing uttered,
and in our sympathy with the mood of the utterer.
Lines which lash Mr. Swinburne into fury will
powerfully impress a reader of a less exacting ear and
a less fastidious taste. Mr. Arnold, so far as the
faculty of expression goes, may be said to stand in

MATTHEW ARNOLD

polar opposition to the author of Chilcle Harold^ and,
just as a critical admirer of the latter can almost
always be sure that the pleasure given him by a
passage of Byron is of its essence and not of its
form, so he can nearly as often and with as complete
confidence say that the pleasure given by a poem of
Mr. Arnold is ultimately traceable to form rather
than to essence. It is true that the pleasure is so
intense and exquisite as to pass readily with those
who are keenly susceptible to such pleasure into
emotional exaltation. No critic, no one with any
strong feehng for style, could find it in his heart to
speak of Mr. Arnold's poetry as ' cold.-* To such a
reader it is not and never can be that; but it must
be admitted, 1 think, that the glow which it takes in
the mind of such a reader is largely, if not wholly,
self-generated. The flawless perfection of Mr.
Arnold's poetic work in its best specimens, the ab-
solute sureness of his art when the artist is at liis
best, do much more than charm and satisfy. They
kindle enthusiasm ; they elate and excite all who are
capable of being elated by mere beauty of form and
mastery of workmanship ; and it is easy for those
upon whom this effect is produced to fancy for the
moment that their elation and excitement are in some
way associated with the matter rather than with the
form of his poetry, and, in fact, that their emotions
have taken fire from his imagination.

LIATTHEW ARNOLD

My own impression — and I may perhaps trust it
the more for feeliuj^ the incomparable literary charm
of Mr. Arnold's best work as intensely as I do — ni}'
own impression is that the idea in question is a pure
illusion ; and that it is because it is an illusion that
Matthew Arnold will never be more than ' the poet
of a few.' It may sound paradoxical to say of one
who was a genuine poet, and, on any intelligent
estimate of him, a poet of no mean order, that he
wrote without the genuine poetic impulse ; but there
is a sense, I believe, in which every competent critic
will understand what 1 mean. It would be difficult,
1 think, to point to any poem of Mr. Arnold's in
which he is thoroughly possessed by, instead of
merely possessing, his subject — any poem in which
feeling and expression are so interfused that the
critical and uncritical readers are brought abreast of
each other in an equality, though not in an identity,
of delighted emotion. Mr. Arnold's poetic imagina-
tion was vigorous, subtle, elevated — what you please ;
but I question whether it ever reached a temperature
at which this fusion of form and matter can take
place.

It is true, no doubt, that an exceptionally large
proportion of Mr. Arnold's work was of such a char-
acter as to render the correctness of this judgment
difficult to test. His lyrical poems were usually the
expression of subdued emotional moods, and in his

MATTHEW ARNOLD

dramatic, or semi-dramatic, pieces, such as Merope,
and, in a less degree, Empedocles in Etna, he
aimed dehberately at that reserve and repression
which is the secret of the Greek tragedians, and
■which he was too much and too dogmatically in-
clined to impose upon all poetry whatsoever. Some
small portion of his work, however, was of a differ-
ent character, and my point, perhaps, will appear
with sufficient clearness in those poems in which the
nature of the subject demands a more sustained
ardour of imagination on the part of the poet than
Mr. Arnold's subjects usually exacted from him.
The Forsahu Merman is a piece which I know to be
admired by at least one critic for whose judgment I
entertain a high respect; and, like everything else
that camo from the hand of its author, it contains
beautiful passages. But surely, considered as an
attempt to give poetic expression to the feelings of
the deserted ' King of the Sea,' and to move the reader's
sympathies therewith, it is not only a failure, but a
failure which trembles throughout upon the verge of
the comic. Mr. Arnold had far too keen a sense of
the ridiculous to be insensible to the peculiar dangers
of his subject, and must have been perfectly well
aware of the essential conditions of success in dealing
with it. He must have known that the idea of the
merman hovering, with his fishy offspring, about the
little watering-place wliere the faithless wife and

MATTHEW ARNOLD

mother had taken up her abode, was one which,
while it might be kept clear of the positively ludi-
crous by consummate tact and propriety of poetic
treatment, would require much more than this to
make it interesting and sympathetic. Art might
avail to avoid the provocation of the smile of levity,
but art alone would hardly avail in such a matter to
convince incredulity. It was essential that the poet
should believe most profoundly in, and should feel
most intensely with, his own merman, to have any
chance of producing a corresponding state of belief
and feeling in the minds of his readers. But Mr.
Arnold does not really believe in his forsaken mer-
man a bit. He merely uses his subject as a canvas
on which to paint a few such exquisite little marine
pictures as that of the —

' Sand-strewn caverns, cool and deep,
Vv here the winds are all asleep,
Where the spent lights quiver and gleam.
Where tlie salt weed sways in the stream,
Where the sea-beasts ranged all round
Feed on the ooze of their pasture ground.
Where the sea-snakes coil and twine,
Dry their mail and bask in the brine :
Where great v/hales come sailing by,
Sail and sail, with unshut eye,
Round the world for ever and aye.'

Or he interprets the plaints of the forsaken merman
in language which would be appropriate and touch-
ing enough in the mouth of Enoch Arden, but which

MATTHEW ARNOLD

leave us quite cold as the utterances of an amphibi-
ous being in whom we find that the author has no
more genuine behef than we have ourselves. I can
understand people admiring the poem, as the critical
friend to whom I have referred appears to admire it —
for its ' purple patches ;' but I cannot understand any-
one admiring it as a whole, or failing to recognize it
as a work of which the initial poetic impulse was
not energetic enough to secure the adequate accom-
plishment.

And I venture to maintain that, with the few and
partial exceptions above referred to, Mr. Arnold's
poetry will be found full of positive or negative in-
stances to the same effect throughout. It is not cold to
the cultivated taste any more than the marbles of
Phidias are cold, but to the natural man, to the man
who has to be reached, if at all, through the emotions,
rather than the aesthetic sensibilities, it is cold. The
Horatian Si vis me flere^ &c., may or may not be a
true maxim for the dramatic art, but it is assuredly
true to this extent of the art poetic, that in all poetry
which moves the common kind of humanity a certain
thrill of agitation, a certain pulse of passion, is always
to be felt. It would be absurd, of course, to deny
that there are some short poems, and not a few pas-
sages perhaps here and there in longer poems, of Mr.
Arnold's in which this throb and pulsation may be
felt. But they are composed in his rarer — nay, in

MATTHEW ARNOLD

Lis very rare — moods. He does not feel and write
at this temperature for long. Such pieces as Philomela
and The Strayed Reveller are specimens of a very
limited class. In much the larger majority of his
poems, and in all the longer ones, the key is distinct-
ly lower, and yet it is in these that his mere technique
is far and away at its best. Take, for instance, that
most perfect of all his poems — more perfect, it seems
to me, (though I suppose the opposite preference is
more common,) than the Thyrsis itself — The Scholar
Gipsy ; and from this take the exquisite picture given
in the following stanzas : —

' For most I know thoii lov'st retired ground !
Thee at the ferry Oxford riders blithe,

Returning home on summer nights, have met
Crossing the strij^ling Tliames at Bablock-hithe,
Trailing in the cool stream thy fingers wet,
As the punfs rope chops round ;
And leaning backward in a pensive dream,
And fostering on thy lap a heap of flowers.
Plucked in shy fields and distant "Wychwood bowers,
And thine eye resting on the moonlit stream.

' And then they land, and thou art seen no more ! —
INIaidens, who from the distant hamlets come,

To dance around the Fyfield elm in May,
Oft through the darkening fields liave seen thee roam,
Or cross a stile into the public way.
Oft thou hast given them store
Of flowers— the frail-leafed white anemone,
Dark bluebells drenched with dews of summer eves,
And purple orchises with s^jotted leaves —
But none hath words she can report of thee.

MATTHEW ARNOLD

* And, above Godstow Bridge, ■when haytime's here
In June, and many a scythe in sunshine flames,

]\Ien -who through those ^vide fields of breezy grass,
Where black-winged swallows haunt the glittering Thames
To bathe in the abandoned lasher pass,
Have often passed thee near,
Sitting upon the river bank o'ergrown ;
Marked thy outlandish garb, thy figure spare,
Thy dark vague eyes and soft abstracted air —

But when they came from bathing thou wert gone !

' At some lone homestead on the Cumnor hills,
Where at her open door the housewife darns,
Thou hast been seen, or hanging on a gate
To watch the threshers in the mossy barns.

Children who early range these slopes and late,
For cresses from the rills.
Have known thee eying, all an April daj'.
The springing pastures and the feeding kiue ;
And marked thee, when the stars come out and shine,
Through the long dewy grass move slow away.'

That is pure essence of Arnold — a thorougbly
typical example at once of his most characteristic
manner and his most characteristic mood. No music
could be sweeter; but how low, how plaintively
minor is the key ! Nothing could be more true
and tender, nothing more deeply and sincerely felt
than the mood which inspires it; but how alien,
how incomprehensible to the mass of men ? The
very 'scholar-gipsy' himself, the aimless wanderer
whom the poet meets in imagination at so many
of the spots most familiar in the rural rambles of
generations of Oxford students — what sort of a

MATTHEW ARNOLD

figure does lie present to this age of ours? What
chance is there of his seizing on the imagination of
our * strenuous time ' (Heaven help it !) and of the
multitude %vho have made it Avhat it is? To that
multitude this exquisite poem can be nothing more
than a fantastic, and indeed reprehensible, glorifica-
tion of ' mooning.' If it shows, as no one surely
will dispute that it does show, Mr. Arnold, not only at
his best but at his most characteristic best, 1 might
venture, I think, to risk the case for my contention
on this one poem alone. No other example of his
work is needed, as no better could be found, to show
that we have here a poet who has as little chance of
finding his way to the hearts of the restless and
emotion-seeking Many as he is assured of a perpetual
place in those of the quiet and contemplative Few.

If the foregoing view of Mr. Matthew Arnold's
genius and place as a poet be correct, we shall be
justified, it seems to me, in regarding the early re-
lapse of his muse into silence without either surprise
or regret. We shall not wonder that an impulse
which was never strictly poetic in its character to the
writing of poetry should have been soon exhausted,
and we shall not deplore the reserve which he im-
posed upon himself from the moment when he be-
came conscious that that impulse was spent. It is,
in my opinion, an error of classification to include
Mr. Arnold in the list of those poets with whom the

MATTHEW ARNOLD

critical faculty, strengthening with advancing years,
has overgrown and killed the creative faculty. I am
inclined to believe that the instinct of the critic — or,
at any rate, of the thinker, the philosopher, the
theorist and moralist on life — was of earlier develop-
ment in him than that of the poet. I do not say they
begot the poet, for 1 cannot believe them capable in
themselves of begetting anything higher than a
verse-maker. But I strongly suspect that, before his
poetic instinct began to respond to the impressions
made upon it by the world without, the bent of re-
flective habit had so far fixed itself as seriously to
limit his freedom of selection for poetic purposes from
the impressions thus presenting themselves. It is
not good for a poet that he should start with a ready-
made philosophy of life. It is better that he should
evolve it for himself — if indeed it is necessary for
him to have one — at a later stage of his career. The
ascent of Parnassus can be much more hopefully at-
tempted without any such impedimentum in the knap-
sack of the mountaineer, and the article, moreover,
can always be procured on the summit.

It was in this sense that I spoke of Mr. Arnold's
impulse to poetry as not being in strictness of lan-
guage a poetic impulse. I w^as far from intending to
imply that he belonged to that unhappy class of self-
deceivers who cut up their philosophy of life into
lines of equal or ostensibly equal syllabic length, and

MATTHEW ARNOLD

occasiouaily, though not always, jingle the ends of
them against each other. He was didactic only in
the sense that his already formed philosophy of life
too rigidly prescribed the channels in which his
poetic sensibilities were to flow, and forbade their
replenishment from any new freshets of inspiration
when at last they ran dry. It was to this that I at
least am disposed to attribute that theory of his with
respect to the functions of the poet which has pro-
voked so much just opposition. His pronouncement
upon poetry, that it should be ' a criticism of life,' is
the eminently natural deliverance of a man who,
though he was born both poet and critic, seems to
have almost reached maturity in the latter char-
acter before he even began to essay his powers in the
former. His own poetry from first to last had been
far too much of a criticism of life^ — too much so at
least for its popularity and for the vigour and per-
manence of its inspiration ; and the dictum 1 have
cited partook largely of the character of one of those
after-thoughts by which the ' human nature in man '
is apt to persuade him that any shortcomings of
which he is conscious have followed inevitably from
the nature of things. There is, of course, a sense in
which it is true that poetry is and must be a criticism
of life, but interpreted in that sense it becomes so
absolutely uuinforming and unfruitful that it would
be unjust to suspect JMr. Arnold of having dwelt with

9-1

MATTHEW ARNOLD

such insistence on a proposition of such futility.
Poetry is only a criticism of Hfe in the indirect
fashion in which every human art, or for that matter
every human science, is and must be so ; and it would
be just about as instructive and important to say that
the execution of a song by Madame Patti is an illus-
tration of the physical and physiological laws of
vocalization. The poet must describe life — either
the life within him or the life without — in order to
poetize, just as the singer must breathe to sing ; but a
poem is no more a critical deliverance on life than a
song is a lecture on the respiratory functions. To
attempt to impress any such character expressly and
designedly on the poem is likely to be ahnost as fatal
as it would be to intersperse the song with spoken
observations on the structure and action of the ' vocal
chords.'

This * criticism of life ' crotchet was, however, only
one of a few critical perversities with which Mr.
Arnold alternately amused and irritated his readers ;
and on these it is not necessary to hnger. It is more
pleasant to dwell, as one can do, with admiration al-
most unqualified, on his general work as a critic of
literature. Much has been said since his death of the
Essays in Criticisin as an ' epoch-making book,' and,
with a little care in defining the precise nature of the
epoch which it did make, the phrase may be defend-
ed. It would be too much to say that the principles

MATTHEW ARNOLD

of criticism for ■svliicli Mr. Arnold contended were
new and original — or rather it would be the reverse
of a compliment to say so, since it is literally certain
that any fundamentally novel discovery on this
ancient subject would turn out another Invention of
of the Mare's-nest. There is no critical canon in the
Essays which has not been observed in, and might
not be illustrated from, the practice of some critic for
long before the Essays appeared. But it is quite
true that these principles were at that time under-
going what from time to time in our literary history
they have frequently undergone, a phase of neglect .
and it is equally true that Mr. Arnold's lucid exposi-
tion of these principles, and the singularly fascinating
style of the series of papers in which he illustrated
them, gave a healthy stimulus and a true direction to
English literary criticism, which during the thirty
years now completed since the publication of the
Essays it has on the whole preserved. And to credit
any writer with such an achievement as this is un-
doubtedly to concede his claim to a permanent place
in the history of English letters.

It may be that Mr. Arnold would not have made
that place higher or more assured by steadily pursu-
ing his studies as a literary critic ; but the virtual
abandonment of these studies, so far at least as
publication is concerned, during his later years, must
always remain a matter of keen regret to all lovers of

MATTHEW ARNOLD

literature. There were so many subjects which he
had touched so admirably and yet had only touched ;
so many on which he had said his word, but not his
last word. To take only one instance of our loss :
it is now more than forty years since, in the preface to
the first collected edition of his poems, he instituted
his subtle and penetrating comparison between the
dramatic methods of Shakespeare and of the Greek
tragedians. Nothing could be more striking and
suggestive, nothing more excellently put than that
criticism. Yet so far from exhausting the subject,
which indeed is probably inexhaustible, it seemed
merely to open the way into a wide and fruitful field
of critical inquiry, which no one could have explored
with so sure a foot as he. Yet from this exploration ,
as from so much other work for which he was unique-
ly fitted, Mr. Arnold, for the last ten years of his life,
turned almost wholly away. And he turned away
from it to devote himself, save for occasional and for
the most part singularly inefi*ectual excursions into
the domain of contemporary politics, to a hopelessly
unpractical and almost visionary attempt to put the
old wine of dogmatic Christianity into the new
bottles of modern scientific thought!

Some years ago, on the occasion of the issue of a
cheap reprint of Literature and Dogma, I endeavoured
to investigate the validity of Mr. ArnokVs theories of
Scriptural interpretation, and to estimate the amount

IMATTIIEW ARNOLD

of acceptance ^vbich they were likely to obtain from
those whom it was his avowed desire, and whom he so
straut^ely conceived it to be his special mission, to in-
struct. On the former of these too questions I find
nothing' now to add to the observations which 1 then
made. I thought then, and I still think, and, wliat is
more, I believe it to be the well-nigh universal
opinion, that the critical canons by which Mr. Arnold
sought to refine away what he regarded as the
materialistic accretions on the creed of Christianity,
(but what are reall^^ of its essence as a definite system
of doctrines deriving from a supernatural origin and
possessing a supernatural sanction,) were valueless
for any practical purpose. I thought, and still think,
that the whole of his teachings on this subject were
in part futile and in part superfluous : superfluous,
because unueeded by those who have accepted with
him the conclusions of modern science, and who, if
they retain their belief in Christianity at all, are quite
competent to devise their own ' accommodations ' for
themselves ; and futile, because assured of rejection
by those who, through ignorance of or repugnance to
the scientific conclusions which are tending to destroy
its supernatural element, still cling to their religion,
' superstitions ' and all. The assumption that there
anywhere exists any considerable class of Christians
in so curiously ' mixed ' a mental condition as to be
at once anxious to reconcile the dogmas of their

jMATTHEW ARNOLD

faith with the informations of their reason, unable to
do it for themselves, and willing to allow others to
attempt it for them, was in itself an assumption of a
highly doubtful kind ; but the idea that if there were
such persons they would find anything speciall}''
persuasive in Mr. Arnold's method of reasoning with
them, or even in his manner of approaching them,
appears to me to have been a positively monumental
instance of self-deception.

Our spiritual physician reversed the Scriptural pre-
cept, and addressed himself not to the sick, but to
the whole. The style, the argument, and, above all,
the illustrations of a treatise avowedly addressed to
persons still in the bonds of servitude to a narrow and
superstitious literalism, appeared, nevertheless, to
presuppose the completest ' emancipation ' on the
part of its readers. The babes and sucldings who
were to be weaned from their superstition were fed
with the strongest of strong meats by their instructor,
and that too, apparently, in perfect good faith and
with no sign of any suspicion of the weakness of
their stomachs. An amusing illustration of this un-
consciousness is to be found in the preface to the
new edition of Literature and Dogma, in connection
with its author's astounding figure of ' the three
Lord Shaftesburys.' 'Many of those,' observes Mr.
Arnold, ' who have most ardently protested against
the illustration, resent it, no doubt, because it directs

MATTHEW AENOLD

attention to that extreme licence of affirmation about
God which prevails in our popular reh'gion, and one
is not the easier forgiven for directing attention
to error because one marks it as an object for
indulgence. To protesters of this sort 1 owe no
deference, and make no concessions. But the
illustration has given pain, I am told, in a quarter
where only deference, and the deference of all who
can appreciate one of the purest careers and noblest
characters of our time, is indeed due ; and, finding
that in that quarter pain has been given by the
illustration, I do not hesitate to expunge it.' In
other Avords, Mr. Arnold^ finding that he has given
offence by comparing the Trinity to ' three Lord
Shaftesburys,' apologizes — to Lord Shaftesbury. To
the ' protesters,' who were certainly not thinking of
Lord Shaftesbury when they resented the com-
parison, he thinks he ' owes no deference,' and will
therefore ' make no concessions.' One is left wonder-
ing whether Mr. Arnold was really unaware of the
susceptibilities and the persons he had wounded, or
whether he purposely treated them with contempt.
And in either case one wonders still more vehement-
ly whether he was aware that the persons to whom
he owed no deference and would make no concessions
were, in fact, the very persons whom, if his teachings
were to bear any fruit at all, he was bound, before all
others, to conciliate. But either of the two ex-

100

MATTHEW AENOLD

planations will equally entitle lis to say that Mr.
Arnold could have formed no adequate estimate of
the fundamental conditions of success in the task
which he proposed to himself.

As a critic of our social life and institutions, J\lr.
Arnold was doubtless more successful. No one can
say that his delightful raillery was altogether thrown
away upon its objects. Our ' Barbarians ' are pro-
bably a little less barbarous, our * Philistines ' a little
more enlightened, for his pleasant satire. And those
who could appreciate the temper of his literary
weapon, and his matchless skill in using it, were able
to watch the periodical performances for many years
with almost undiminished pleasure. But it must be
admitted, I think, that even as a social instructor he
flomewhat outstayed his welcome, and that even his
most ardent admirers occasionally found their patience
a little tried by him. His incessant iteration of his
favourite phrases was, no doubt, a tactical expedient
deliberately adopted for controversial purposes at the
perceived expense of artistic effect. Mr. Arnold was
well aware that to provoke, to irritate, is better for a
disputant than to fail to impress, and he had no
doubt persuaded himself that to get our social
defects "acknowledged and the proper remedies ap-
plied, it was necessary to be as importunate as the
widow suitor of the unjust judge. It is true he does
not tell us, in the admirable linos on Goethe which

101

MATTHEW ARNOLD

adoru the memorial verses to Wordsworth, that that
♦physician of the iron age' was always 'striking his
finger on the place,' and saying, ' Thon ailest here and
here ;' but Mr. Arnokl had abandoned the methods
aud the vehicle of the poet — who speaks once for all
with a voice whose echoes are undying — before he
started in business as a reformer of his countrymen's
manners and modes of thought. As a prose physician,
so to speak, he may have thought that his pre-
scriptions needed to be dinned into the ears of the
patient until he actually consented to try them. But
a recognition of that fact only sets us inquiring what
the value of the prescription is ; and when we find
ourselves assured that all the defects of the various
classes of our society are to be corrected, and that all
the unsatisfied 'claims' upon them — the 'claim of
beauty,' the ' claim of manners,' and all the rest of it
— are to obtain their due satisfaction through a re-
form of our system of secondary education, Ave recall
the writer's official position and duties, and are irre-
sistibly reminded of a certain homely apologue the
point of which is contained in its concluding words,
' There's nothing like leather.' In this as in other
matters we see how Mr. Arnold's persistent deter-
mination to play the constructive reformer — a part
for which he had no natural aptitude — enticed him
beyond the limits of that critical function in which
his true strength lay.

102

MA.TTHEW ARNOLD

But much as v:e ma}^ regret the perversity, if that
be not too harsh a word, which diverted so large a
portion of Mr. Arnold's intellectual energies in later
years away from the natural bent of his genius, it
would be ungracious not to acknowledge the indirect
benefit which arose from this very dispersion of the
rays of that penetrating intelligence. He could not
touch any subject without throwing some light upon
it. Everything that he wrote was suggestive, if too
little of it was satisfying ; and though his determina-
tion to avoid the commonplace view of every subject
was undoubtedly a snare — since the commonplace,
and even what he would have called the Philistine
view, is more often the true view than he was at all
prepared to admit — it was also, and as undoubtedly,
in many instances a source of strength. A deliver-
ance of ]\lr. Arnold's on any question — social, moral,
or political, as Avell as literary — was always the most
admirable touchstone of received opinions. None of
us could be quite sure of our reason for the faith that
is in us on any matter till it had stood the test of his
refined and searching criticism. More of us have
been compelled by him than by any other writer of
our age and country to review and revise our judg-
ments upon most subjects of human interest ; and not
only the world of literature, but the infinitely larger
world of unexpressed thought and feeling and unem-
bodied imagination, is sensibly the poorer for his loss.

103

SAMUEL RICHARDSON

Among all the emblems of change and reminders of
mortality with which the world is full, there are few
perhaps more pathetic than the faded flowers of
romance literature. The picture which has ceased
to please seems still to preserve a certain life of its
own ; and the death of an ' acting ' play is, after all,
only like the disappearance of the companion of a
few amusing or exciting hours. But the popular
novel — and more especially the popular novel of
emotion and sentiment — has been the close, the con-
stant, the confidential friend of so many readers ; it
has awakened so many imaginations, engrossed so
many minds, and perhaps, if a work of real genius,
entered into and affected so many intellectual lives,
that there is something pecuharly strange and sad
about its literary death. I suppose that there are
few real lovers of literature who cannot, after
Jaques's fashion, ' suck melancholy ' of this sort out
of a survey of the shelves of any well-found library ;
and assuredly there is no shelf more likely to yield

104

SAMUEL KICHARDSON

it than that which bears — very likely along its whole
length — the serried line of Samuel Richardson's
works. Nineteen volumes — nineteen ' mortal ' vol-
umes, as the observer of to-day is but too likely to
put it— contain, in one of the best of the older edi-
tions, the three romances which complete the sum
of this author's literary performances; and not a
volume, he Avill notice, is out of its place. Not a
soldier in that regiment is missing, or for years past
has been missing from morning parade, though a
century or more ago there would have been deserters
to be found in half the rooms in the house — above
stairs, and even surreptitiously perhaps below. No
one in the lifetime of the oldest inmate has imitated
Pamela's wicked master by disturbing her repose.
Sir Charles Grandison is no more called upon to dis-
play his courtly graces in any new ceremonies of
introduction. There is dust on the edges of Clarissa
Harlowe^ instead of tears upon her page.

To not a few careless critics the neglect of Rich-
ardson seems sufficiently accounted for by a gibe at
his inordinate length. Yet we must learn to dis-
tinguish between des longueurs in one sense and des
longueurs in another. There is a prolixity which is
compatible with art, and is even an essential condi-
tion of a pure artistic form ; and there is a prolixity
which is of itself a fault in art, and as such always
and everywhere to bo condemned. To say that tho

105

SAMUEL EICHARDSON

geni^e enniiyeux is of its own nature anathema is, from
the historic point of view, to beg the question. If a
man's contemporaries find him tiresome, there is an
end of the matter, so far as contemporary criticism
goes ; but, if lie is only found tiresome by posterity,
the question of course arises Avhether it be he or
posterity that is to blame. We all know that the
genre enmiyeux of one age is often very far from
having been the genre ennui/eiuv of another; and, it
being once ascertained that an author was read with
untiring interest by the public of his clay, the fact
that he is a weariness to the flesh of a later genera-
tion becomes almost irrelevant to the question of his
real merit. The word ' almost ' is, no doubt, a
necessary quahficatiou, because the fact last men-
tioned is to this extent relevant that it does unques-
tionably exclude such a Avriter from that small band
of the immortals who have delighted all ages and
bored none. But no romancist's manes — at least, no
reasonable manes of any such departed writer — need
chafe at his exclusion from so very select a circle.
The question as to the number of ' classics ' who
neither bore nor ought to bore the reader of to-day,
is one upon which I share many of Mr. James Payn's
suspicions without sharing his intrepidity in specify-
ing them. But as to the mere number of great ones
of the earth who, whether rightly or not, are as a
matter of fact found tedious when taken in large

106

SAJIUEL KICHARDSON

doses, one can speak with more freedom perhaps ;
and nothing, therefore, need hinder me from saying
that Richardson in the Shades must have improved
upon the quite sufficient complacency of Richardson
among the Hving if he regards himself as too good
for his company. After all, he only adds another to
a group which, if at one end it is typified by the
authors of The Grave and The Course of Time, in-
cludes at the other end the poets of The Excursion
and Paradise Lost.

The yawns of posterity prove no more than this.
They remit Richardson to the class who by reason of
their matter or their manner, or both, have failed to
sustain their appeal to the unflagging attention of
mankind. But, from the point of view of retrospec-
tive criticism, this of course is immaterial.' Except
for the ambitious purpose of fixing a departed writer's
place in the literature of all time, his unbounded
and unabated vogue in his own day is the only fact
needed in order ' to found,' as the lawyers put it, ' the
jurisdiction ' of the critic. This alone is enough to
make any author a phenomenon to be explained and
if possible analyzed by the literary student of a later
day. Fleeting and capricious successes in the past
may no doubt be passed by : there have been Master
Bettys in literature as well as on the stage. But if
an author's contemporaries, critical and uncritical,
consent in admiration of his writings, if the public of
107

SA:\IUEL RICHARDSON

his day continue to admire these writings after their
novelty has entirely disappeared, and indeed through-
out his lifetime and after his death, the maxim
securus judicat orbis terrarum may be taken to apply.
We may confidently expect to find in such a writer's
works an imperishable something, some breath of an
immortal spirit, surviving the death and decay of its
embodying forms. Whether and in what way this
element reveals itself to us in Richardson is a question
which for the moment I propose to defer.

A matter of more immediate interest is the exam-
ination of the dead and decayed form in which this
imperishable something was contained. And here a
question of much cuiiosity, though not very easy
perhaps to determine, confronts us at the outset.
How much of the form was essential to the life of
these books, in the days when they possessed what
may be called a corporeal, instead of, as at present,
only a spiritual existence — in the days when Clarissa
Harlowo was to thousands of Englishmen what
Waverley was to the novel-reader of the early nine-
teenth century, or Adam Bede to the novel-reader of
thirty years ago ? How much of the form, on the
other hand, was mere dead weight and surplusage —
]iot helping but hindering — a thing in spite, and not
in right, of which these books were impatiently
awaited and eagerly read ? For the hasty opinion
which treats everything distasteful to the modern

108

SAMUEL EICHARDSON

reader ia their form as something which the cou-
temporaiy reader prized, is of course a more or less
gratuitous assumption. AYe ourselves tolerate many-
things in our favourite authors which we wish away.
Many of us would like Dickens better Avithout his
often forced and artificial sentiment. Still more of
us would be well content — in her later books, at any
rate — with less of the waterlogging ballast of George
Eliot's physiologico-psychology. Our posterity, there-
fore, will have no right to argue from Dickens's fame
that his sentiment was as generally valued as his
humour, or from George Eliot's fame that her con-
temporaries thought as highly of her scientific ac-
quirements as they did of her satiric insight into
character, and her original gift of creative imagina-
tion. And we ourselves have equally no right to as-
sume that what may have been deductions from the
sum of Richardson's claim upon his readers were
actually additions thereto. All we know for certain
on the matter is, that our great-grandfathers read
and dehghted in certain desperately prolix novels ;
it is too much to assume that they delighted in the
prolixity for its own sake. We are often reminded,
it is true, that our great-grandfathers lived in a
leisurely age ; but this is an explanation tvhich ac-
counts rather for their capacities as readers than for
their tastes. It may well be that inordinately long-
winded books could only be tolerable in a leisurely

109

SAMUEL RICHARDSON

age. This, however, is equally true of long dinnerR,
long whist, and other forms of indulgence or recrea-
tion ; and it explains merely the possibility, and not
the popularit}^, of one particular form of slow-moving
amusement. Again, the more leisurely the age the
greater, we should imagine, the tendency to sleep.
Yet, if there is a well-authenticated fact connected
with Clarissa IJarlowe, it is that the novel put to
flight, instead of provoking, slumber. ' Right reason,'
in short, and ' the instinct of self-preservation in
mankind,' as Mr. Matthew Arnold would say, revolt
from the hypothesis that any race of men can have
preferred to have a story in which they were deeply
interested related to them at excessive length. For
it is to be specially remembered that the most popular
of Richardson's romances was popular in respect of
its story. It was not, or not mainly, by its moral
lessons, by its pictures of manners, or by its analysis
of character that Clarissa Ilarlowe held the public
spell-bound : it was by its plot. The ' town ' was in a
fever — a slow fever, of course^ but still a fever — of
excitement to know whether the infamous Lovelace
would succeed in his plot, and what would be the
end of the unfortunate Clarissa ; and it is not to be
believed that mere difFuseness of narrative, mere ex-
penditure of many words in relating events which
might have been told in a few words, would have
been found endurable, or would, in fact, have been

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SAMUEL RICHARDSON

endured. The delay innst have been in some sense
or other artistic ; the prolixity must have been felt
to contribute something to the artistic result, in order
not to have wholly destroyed the popularity of the
story. The sense in which it Vv-as artistic may, to our
present conceptions of art, be well-nigh unintelligible ;
the something which it contributed to the result may
to us be nothing, or worse than nothing. But it is
surely irrational to suppose that the exterior form of
Richardson's novel — iu which I include not only the
mere length of the book from cover to cover, but its
epistolar}'' structure and whatever other drawbacks
that structure to our present ways of thinking in-
volves — could have seemed to its own pubhc what it
seems to us : viz., simply so much handicapping of
the tale. There must have been some reason other
than the mere amount of his spare time which com-
pelled the eighteenth-century reader to listen so
patiently to a story of which he M'as so devouringly
anxious to hear the end ; there must have been some
reason why he did not resent the author's unusual,
fidgetting, and in many, though not in all, respects
undramatic method of telling his story in the form
of correspondence. Such is the conclusion which
ought to suggest itself, on a j^^iori grounds of
probability, to all who have ever considered the mat-
ter with any degree of care ; and it is, I may add, a
conclusion which subsequent inquiry abuudantl}'' con-

111

SARIUEL RICHARDSON:

firms. There is a reason and a good one for Ricliard-
son's prolixity; it was in many respects the very
secret of bis power. But, unfortunately, it is a secret
to the discovery of which there is no royal road ; for
it would be uncandid to give so attractive a title to
the only method of ascertaining it with which I am
acquainted — that, namely, of reading the romances
straight through from beginning to end.

Richardson was not the first, as he will not be the
last, man to discover his literary powers in the use of
them. When Sterne began Tristram Shandy he had
assuredly but little idea of the artistic lengths to
which his work was destined to carry him ; and
though the germ of Clarissa mvij have been, and of
course in a certain sense must have been, latent in
Pamela, it was, for all that appears, as completely
hidden from the author of the two works as from
any of his readers. No one, it may safely be said,
could have seen in the earlier book the promise of
the later. When Rivington and Osborne, the book-
sellers, asked him ' to write a volume of letters to
suit the taste of country readers ;' it was in the spirit
of the moralist, and not at all in that of the artist, that
he responded to the invitation. Halfway through the
second volume of Pamela, he takes advantage of the
disappearance of the heroine's father and mother from
the scene — at least as the sole correspondents of
their daughter — to reviewhis work and its objects; and
112

SAMUEL EICHAEDSON

we then see what are the quahtiesia it upon which he
congratulates himself. It contains, he proudly assures
US, morality, and excellent morality, for all. The fash-
ionable libertine ' may learn from it to prefer vice to
virtue ;' the proud and high-born may see ' the deformity
of unreasonable passion ;' ' good clergymen ' will per-
ceive from it that if they do their duty in despite of
their ' proud patrons,' Providence will at last reward
their piety ; the poor will learn that ' Providence
never fails to reward their honesty and integrity ;'
while the virtues inculcated by the example of the
heroine herself require for their examination a com-
plete inventory divided into separate paragraphs.
There is an encouraging moral for the ' poor deluded
female ' who has the strength of mind to ' stop at
her first fault,' and a warning moral for her who pur-
sues ' the wicked courses into which she was at first
inadvertently drawn.' There are even lessons for
' the upper servants of great families ' in the be-
haviour of three of the characters, and for the ' lower
servants' of the same families in that of a fourth. In
short, we are as good as told that the merit of the
book is to be measured by the closeness of its re-
semblance to the didactics of the nursery. Nobody
who reads it, says Richardson in effect, can after-
wards plead ignorance of what happened to 'Don't
Care.' If he remains incorrigible in his naughtiness,
and comes to a bad end in consequence, he will have

SAMUEL RICHARDSON

himself alone to blame for it ; the author of Pamela
has at least done his best to reclaim him. He has
said to him in many volumes, ' Be good, for the good
are always rewarded in this life ; do not be wicked,
for the wicked are always punished here as Avell as
hereafter.' What more could he do ?

That the facts of life decline to confirm this com-
fortable gospel was apparently no more an objection
from Richardson's point of view than it is from that
of the nurse ; but to say this is, of course, enough to
dispose of the artistic claims of the book. The
good so:-etimes prosper of course in this life ; but
you cannot write a story in which they are always,
and all of them, to prosper, without constantly ofiend-
ing against truth and probability. Add to this, that
the continual effort to find illustrations of morality
everywhere, and to make the fortunes of all the
characters in a novel subserve a didactic end is pretty
sure to end in throwing some of those characters
into violent contradiction with themselves. This is
notably exemplified in the case of Pamela's master,
whose sudden conversion from a most uncompromis-
ing profligate into a consistent paragon of propriety —
for we need not attach serious importance to the
Platonic flirtation Avith the countess in his later mar-
ried Hfe — is hardly attempted to be made credible.
These, however, though the most obvious, are far
from being the only artistic faults of Pamela. It is

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SAMUEL RICHAKDSON

hardly too much to say that it scarcely rises, in the
working out of its plot any more than iu its main
conception, above the level of the nursery story. A
romance of greater posthumous popularity has in-
directly preserved the name of Pamela Andrews from
oblivion, and few perhaps, even of those who have
never opened a volume of Richardson, will need to
be told that Pamela is a virtuous maid-servant (as
her brother Joseph was a virtuous footman), who
successfully resists a series of the most determined,
and at last even violent, attempts upon her virtue on
the part of her master, and who, at last, so impresses
him by her courage and constancy that he marries
her, and, with the exception of one passing cloud of
jealousy, 'they live happily ever afterwards.' In
such a story, with such a conclusion, there is nothing
essentially ludicrous ; it was reserved for Fielding to
perceive by the instantaneous light of humour that
it might be made exquisitely ludicrous by merely
transposing the sexes of the tempter and the tempted.
Why this should be so is a point in the psychology of
ethics which does not immediately yield up its ex-
planation; but the fact is unquestionable, as the
reader may satisfy himself by comparing the famous
scene between Joseph Andrews and Lady Booby
with any of the scenes between Pamela and Mr. B.
To speak the honest truth, however, it would have
been difficult for Fielding to outdo Richardson in

I 2

SAMUEL RICHAEDSON

absurdity; and Joseph Andrews, as we all know,
though commenced as a caricature of Pamela, de-
parted very soon, and very widely, from the lines of
its model.

But, while the story of Pamela suffers as a story
from the slowness of movement which, in a less de-
gree (though the slowness is even greater), injures
that of Clarissa, the former heroine, unlike the latter,
is herself as severe a sufferer as a heroine from the
delay. Her figure, to begin with, is one which will
not stand much de-romanticizing. Mrs. Pamela's
virtue, though no doubt quite sincere and genuine,
is (as of course it should be) of a very soubrettish
type, exceedingly, not to say pharisaically, self-con-
scious, not refined or elevated by the slightest
admixture of delicacy, and obviously associated with
a very shrewd eye to the main chance. All this, of
course, is true enough to Nature ; but truth to Nature
becomes useless unless it falls into the impartial
hands of Art.

These human touches in Pamela's character would
have been invaluable to Richardson if he had cared
to treat his heroine like an artist ; but he wanted to
treat her exclusively as a moralist. Her affinities
with the waiting-maid of real life make her a more
real and, therefore, a more interesting, if less heroic,
figure ; but Richardson, in order to make his moral
lesson as impressive as possible, was in pursuit not

116

SAMUEL PJCHARDSON

of the interesting so much as the heroic. He wanted
an ideal waiting-maid, and not a real one, for his
purpose ; and these marks of very commonplace, and
even rather vulgar, realism only serve tlierefore to
make the ideal figure, on its lofty moral pedestal, a
little ridiculous. Above all, they combine with the
inartistic slowness of movement in the story, and its
weak invention of incident, to destroy a great part
of the reader's sympathy with the heroine, and even
to suggest the suspicion, which Kichardsou undoubt-
edly never intended to arouse, that she is a person of
rather a designing disposition.

' How is this T the reader feels tempted to ask.
' Here is a young woman who is evidently perfectly
well able to take care of herself, and who remains,
under circumstances of the most dangerous character
for her chastity, exposed to the constant soHcitations
and even assaults of her master. Of course we are
given to understand that she is under physical
duress; but as a matter of fact the restraint is very
often of the feeblest and most inefficient kind. On
one occasion Pamela, by her own admission, might
have walked straight out of the house and away, and
was only restrained from doing so by the fact that
there was a bull (who had injured the cook-maid
under circumstances unstated) in a paddock which
she would have to cross to make her escape. On
another occasion there is absolutely no impediment

117

SAMUEL RICHARDSON

to her flight, and though she is indeed followed and
seized in the act of getting over a stile which alone
divides her from liberty, the unexplained deliberation
of her movements is solely accountable for her cap-
ture.' In short, upon a careful review of the whole
circumstances, the reader finds it hard to avoid the
suspicion that it is calculation, and not timidity,
which keeps Pamela a prisoner ; that she sees a
chance of inducing the infatuated Mr. B. to marry
her, and that gambling for a stake so high she is
prepared to make some very dangerous ventures
indeed.

This idea was of course very far from Richardson's
intention to suggest, and it is a fault in his charac-
terization and story-telling that the reader feels
persuaded that it is just the idea which would pos-
sess all but the exceptionally charitable spectators of
Pamela's trials in actual life. But there is also little
merit in the delineation of the other characters in
the story. LadyDanvers, with whom most care has
apparently been taken, is a coarsely and crudely exe-
cuted portrait ; and there is a want of reality about
both the good Mrs. Jervis and the infamous Mrs.
Jewkes. Mr. B.'s return to virtue, again, is cele-
brated with an exaggeration Avhich was due in part
to Richardson's hourgeois reverence for ' the quality,'
a characteristic which sometimes amusingly, and
sometimes irritatingly, deranges both the balance of

118

SAMUEL RICHARDSON

his ethical judgment and his sense of artistic pro-
priety. In the case of Mr. B. it is most comically
displayed. It is quite obviously felt by all the char-
acters in the story, and by the author himself, that
repentance is very condescending on the part of a
' gentleman of good estate ' ; and that with a ' place '
in two counties, the ambition to secure a third in
heaven is highly creditable to an English squire. ]\Ir.
B. is greatly praised for having abandoned a course
of profligacy which most other men of equal rank
and fortune, we are given to understand, would have
pursued consistently throughout life ; and those who
surround him are unwearied in their laudations of his
new-found virtue. No doubt the accumulation of all
these honours on the repentant libertine's head is due
not wholly to social servility, but in part to moral
purpose ; but for the merits of the romance from this
point of view there is not much to be said. Coleridge,
who speaks on such a point with even more than his
wonted critical authority, has expressed his opinion
on a comparison between Joseph Andreics Rud Pa7nela
that the former is the more moral work of the two.
It would be diflicult, I think, for any candid modern
reader of the two romances to contest this judgment.
Excellent as Hichardson's intentions were both to-
wards servant-maids and country squires in composing
the story, it seems to me c^uite certain that a care-
ful and sympathetic study of it would, in the vast

119

SAMUEL RiCHAEDSON

majority of cases, prove most unedifying to either.
Clarissa Harlowe has more pretensions to plot, in.
the sense of invented incident and situation, than
Pamela ; but its central motive is of a no less simple
kind. It is, in fact, the story of Pamela reversed.
Pamelas alternative title is Virtue Rewarded, and vir-
tue in Clarissa Harlowe is not, except in the spiritual
sense, rewarded, but defeated, outAvitted, betrayed.
The virtuous heroine is not permitted, as in the
earlier romance, to escape the wiles of the seducer,
and reap the moral reward of her firmness in his con-
version to the paths of virtue, and its material re-
compense in a splendid establishment and a coach-
and-six. On the contrary, she is condemned to fall
a victim to his vile machinations, and, proudly reject-
ing all his offers of atonement, to sink broken-hearted
into an early grave. The superior dramatic possi-
bilities of this story compared with that of Pamela
are evident, and Richardson owed much to their
stimulus. They brought out his powers as an artist
by compelling him in a great measure to drop the
role of the moralist. He w^as as anxious to preach as
ever ; but the exigencies of his narrative do not per-
mit him to ascend the pulpit so often, or to remain
there so long. ' Be virtuous and you will be happy,'
is in a certain sense the preacher's text in both cases ;
but in Clarissa the virtuous have to wear their hap-
piness ' with a difference ' which it is difficult to

120

SAMUEL RICHARDSON

explain Vv'ithoiit frequently descending the pulpit-
stairs. Happiness in Clarissa has to do v/ithout its
coach-and-six and its splendid establishment ; nay,
it has to part company, one by one, with all the
external conditions of human well-being — home,
parents, family, friends, material comforts, reputation,
and, finally, life itself; and yet, in the strength of a
pure heart and a quiet conscience, to maintain itself
uncouquered to the end. This demands a far more
difficult and subtle exposition of the be-virtuous-aud-
you-will-be-happy text than it receives ,or ueeds in
Pamela; and it is one which the moralist requires the
artist's assistance to enforce. Anybody can see 'why
Pamela should be happy ; her contentment is as
comprehensible to the simplest reader as v/as virtue
upon five thousand pounds a-year to Becky Sharp.
But Clarissa's happiness under her misfortunes is not
to be taken on trust from the pulpit, or to be made
credible to the congregation by even the most earnest
thumping of the velvet cushion. It Hes deeper than
the superficial blessedness of Pamela, and the preacher
must go deeper to find it for us and to show it to us.
It is an inward peace of the heart, and to exhibit it
the heart must be laid bare. In other words, the
romancist must here cease to preach, and begin to
dissect. He must desist from mere reiteration in
various forms of pulpit rhetoric that virtue alone is
true happiness, and attempt to convince us of tho

121

SAMUEL EICHARDSON

fact by furuisbiug us with the explanation. He must
endeavour, by minute analysis of his hapless-happy
heroine's emotions, to show us that they are the
natural outcome of causes whose presence and po-
tency iu the minds of human beings our own moral
consciousness will attest.

It would, of course, be far too much to say that
Richardson is uniformly successful in the endeavour.
Neither his genius nor his method were fitted for the
achievement of such uniform success. Being before
all things a preacher of morals, he cannot refrain from
making his characters preach to us in their own per-
sons, when they should be simply revealing to us
their own thoughts and feeliugs, and leaving us to
draw the moral for ourselves. And while the bent
of Richardson's genius thus militates against his com-
plete artistic success, the peculiar vices of his method
exercise an even more injurious effect upon his work.
His letter-writers are so terribly long-winded, so
mercilessly prolix, that they cannot be expected to
confine themselves solely to their proper work of self-
disclosure and self-portraiture. Like garrulous wit-
nesses, they favour their jury of readers with a vast
amount of matter which is in no sense evidence.
^Yheu Clarissa, for example, should be telling us
minutely what she feels, and speclficaUy why she feels
it, she is continually lapsing into mere general alle-
gations that her mind is at peace, with the addition

122

SAMUEL RICHARDSON

of the pulpit platitude that the minds of the virtiions
always are. The thing is so, she tells us, because it
must be so. But in any well-conducted trial of the
issue, Does virtue insure happiness, ay or no ? Miss
Harlowe would have found herself being perpetually
' stopped by the Court.' She may say, ' I feel happy,'
and that is evidence as far as it goes, though it does
not go far. She may add : ' I feel proud of my forti-
tude and of my superiority to my betrayer, — conscious
that the outrage inflicted upon my body has left my
soul unsullied — awed and impressed by perceiving
that the victor is more abashed and perturbed by his
triumph than I, the vanquished, by my defeat ; and it
is in the sum of these emotions (which obviously only
the virtuous could feel) that my happiness consists.'
All that is evidence, too, and of a very important
kind. But when the witness persists in repeating the
formula, ' I am happy because I am virtuous,' the pre-
siding judge would be bound to check her with the
polite but firm correction, ' That, madam, is for the
jury. It is for them to decide whether your happi-
ness is the result of virtue, or of conceit, callousness,
insanity, I know not what.' But, though Clarissa is
undoubtedly too apt to encroach in this manner on the
jurisdiction of the reader, it must be admitted that
she makes out her case at last to his complete satis-
faction. We end by believing as thoroughly in her
happiness as in her virtue, and by feeling that it fully

123

SAMUEL KICHAEDSON

responds to our own conceptions of the natural and
the true.

She starts, however, with considerable personal
advantages over Pamela. She is altogether a more
sympathetic and attractive figure, to begin with,
simpler and more refined, of a higher dignity and
delicacy, of a far more unconscious purity — a ' lady '
by nature, in fact, which ' Mrs. Pamela ' neither is
nor of course was intended to be, nor could, without
injury to the story, have been made. And Clarissa
also is morally of a far more sincere and genuine
stuff than her predecessor in fiction. Both, to be
sure, are prigs : they have to be made so, in order
that they may deliver Richardson's moral reflections
in Richardson's language. But Clarissa, far more
often than Pamela, takes the pen from Richardson's
hand, and writes, not what the preacher would have
her utter, but what it is given her to utter out of the
deepest depths of a human heart. We get to recog-
nize in her case, as we never do in that of the self-
conscious waiting-maid, that she is seldom, if ever, a
prig on her own account. We learn to regard her in
a double aspect, and mentally to dissociate the living,
breathing, suffering woman from the mere mouth-
piece of moral commonplaces. But, as the story
draws towards its tragic close, the need of any such
mental act of dissociation less frequently occurs.
We have more and more of the natural woman and

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SAMUEL EICHAEDSO^'

less aud less of the sermonizing automaton, more and
more of Clarissa Hariowe and less and less of Clarissa
Kichardsou. The presence of her creator's hand is
still, indeed, too plainly perceived ; the faults of his
method still too intrusively assert themselves. The
' linked sweetness ' of the tale of woe is decidedly too
' long drawn out ;' the sorrows of the death-stricken
heroine are dwelt upon and elaborated beyond all
measure, and their portrayal is marred in one in-
stance — that of her preparation of her coffin — by an
artistic blunder of a truly lamentable kind. But by
many a touch of authentic human pathos, of true
■womanly gentleness and heroism, the figure of the
slowdy dying maiden — 7rap6ivo<; aivupOevo^ — wins its
way to our hearts ; and though time and change may
have decreed that it shall never again so deeply stir
the emotions of mankind as it once was wont to stir
them, yet we shall, I think, even the coldest of us,
find sufficient excuse for the freelj^ flowing tears of a
past generation in the moistened eyes of our own.

Still it would be scarcely true to say that the
power of the romance over our sympathies is wholly
or perhaps even mainly due to the isolated reahsation
of the heroine. It is largely by force of contrast that
the individuality and the career of Clarissa are made
impressive. She owes much, very much, to her foil
in the person of Lovelace. He is her making in the
novel, as in life he was her undoing ; and even if the

125

SAMUEL RICHARDSON

■victim were a far less winning and sympathetic
figure than she is, she would derive a sufficiency
of reflected interest from her association with a
character which has been set before us with such
masterly vigour of portraiture as Richardson has
bestowed upon the lineaments of her betrayer. But
before entering upon the analysis of this, so immeasur-
ably the highest, achievement of the author's genius,
it is necessary to give a brief outline of the plot of
this once famous story.

Clarissa Harlowe is the daughter of an English
country gentleman of good fortune and repute, but
of a cold, hard, despotic temperament, a man not al-
together destitute, perhaps, of paternal affection, but
possessed with the most extravagant notions — ex-
travagant, surely, even for those clays — of the rights
of paternal authority. His wife is a kind-hearted and
affectionate, but contemptibly weak and submissive,
woman, too fond of her daughter to join without re-
morse in oppressing her, and too much afraid of her
husband to make any effective protest against it.
The couple, in short, form a pretty exact ' replica ' of
the father and mother of the heroine of xXylmers
Field. Add to these a surly, ill-conditioned brother,
and an envious and spiteful sister, the willing ac-
complices of the parental design against Clarissa's
peace, together with two uncles, the indifferent
spectators of its execution, and the domestic circle

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SAMUEL RICHARDSON

is complete. Circumstances combine with the
characters of Clarissa's family to prepare her nuhappy
fate. Her grandfather has earned for her the ill-will
of her kindred by passing over them in his will, and
constituting her the heiress of a small property which
would have made her independent of them, but of
which, from exaggerated notions of filial respect, she
declines to take possession except with the willing
assent of her parents. Her sister, Arabella, bears a
special grudge against her as the involuntarily suc-
cessful rival, to whom Lovelace, for a time the pre-
tended suitor of Arabella, had always meant to
transfer, and at the beginning of the story does in
fact transfer, his addresses. These conditions given,
we manifestly need nothing more than the appear-
ance on the scene of a suitor whom Clarissa detests,
and whom her father is resolved to force upon her, in
order to establish the groundwork of the domestic
tragedy which is to follow. Profound as is Clarissa's
filial piety, it is unequal to the sacrifice which her
parents demand of her. She persists in her rejection
of the odious De Solraes, although the harshest mea-
sures are resorted to by her father to compel her
submission. She is degraded from her position as
housekeeper to the family ; her keys are taken away
from her ; she is confined to her room a close pri-
soner ; and a tender-hearted maid-servant, who had
assisted her mistress to maintain a clandestine corre-

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SAMUEL RICHARDSON

ppoiideuce u-itli the only female friend she possesses,
having been detected and dismissed, she is for a time
cut off from all communication with the outer world,
Lovelace, however, finds means of reopening a cor-
respondence vv'ith her; and, as her persecutions verge
upon the intolerable, his solicitations naturally ap-
proach the irresistible. Driven at last to desperation
by the near approach of the day fixed for the de-
tested marriage, Clarissa agrees to accept Lovelace's
pretended offer of escort to the house of one of his
female relatives, who he had declared would give
her refuge. ^Yith this one false step begins that
series of misfortunes and indignities to which the
unhappy girl at last succumbs. Lovelace's promise
■was, of course, a mere trick to get Clarissa into his
power. Instead of taking her to her supposed desti-
nation, he conveys her to the house of a certain in-
famous Mrs. Sinclair, Avhere she remains at first
willingly and in ignorance of the character of the
place, afterwards under duress. She once makes
her escape, but only to be followed and recaptured ;
and at last the crime which her villainous lover has
striven with such merciless determination to commit
is, by force, accomplished. His triumph, however, is
fatal alike to his victim and to himself. Smitten
■with remorse, or with as near an approach to that
emotion as his nature is capable of feeling, Clarissa's
betrayer entreats her to forgive him and become his

128

SAMUEL RICHARDSON

wife ; but it is then too late. She too deeply ' des-
pises the wretch who could rob himself of his wife's
virtue,' and as soon as she is freed from her captivity
she secludes herself altogether from the world. But
her sufferings have broken her heart, and she pines
slowly away and dies, unreconciled to her family,
and attended in her last moments only by a repent-
ant friend of Lovelace's, John Belford, and her
cousin. Colonel Mordeo, by whose hand her be-
trayer ultimately faljs.

The imperfections of this story are plain enough
upon its face, and they are made yet more conspicu-
ous by the manner of its telling. To begin with,
the plot is exposed to the capital objection that,
while it professes to be thoroughly realistic, it is
from the point of view of real life preposterous. It
is not so much an improbable as an impossible one ;
the sufferings of Clarissa are as those of an imprisoned
princess in a fairy-tale ; the cruelty and power of
Lovelace is as that of the giant or ogre of the same
order of fable. Young 'bloods' may have been
very masterful and daring in mid-eighteenth cen-
tury ; wrongful acts may have been less easily and
quickly brought to light in those days than in these
of the penny press ; wealth and wickedness may have
been less hopelessly overmatched in a contest with
the law than they are now. But, after all, the
liberty of the subject could not have been quite so

SAMUEL RICHAEDSON

iiiuch at the mercy even of an equally determined
and far more ingenious plotter than Lovelace, as was
Clarissa's. Even for women of humbler rank, the
law was not of a presence so inaccessible as it seems
to be in this romance : even fcr them there were
courts and attorneys, and a Habeas Corpus Act ; but
that Miss Harlowe, a ' person of condition,' a young
lady well known in the county society among which
she lived, with at least one fast friend in Miss Howe,
and through her a male ally in Mr. Hickman, should
have remained so long a helpless captive, is simply
incredible. Her gaoler, it is to be observed, takes
no pains to conceal himself from the world. He
moves freely enough in society during the progress
of his vile conspiracy ; and Richardson even invents
the monstrous incident of his meeting and convers-
ing (in no very amiable spirit, it is true,) with the
very family of his victim at the house of a common
friend. The notion of his going about for weeks
and months in this way unmolested, is surely too
gross an excess of a realistic romancer's privi-
leges of invention. It is perfectly certain that in
real life a piece of paper would have been very
promptly handed to this all-subduing gentleman,
on which he would have found ' Robert Love-
lace' commanded by George 11. to 'have in our
Court before us at Westminster immediately on
receipt of this our writ, the body of Clarissa Harlowe

130

SAMUEL RICHARDSON

being detained under your custody, with the day
and cause of her being taken and detained/ This,
however, is of course the least of the consequences
with which Clarissa's persecutor would have been
threatened. Lovelace, as Mr. Leslie Stephen has
pointed out, 'has every conceivable motive, including
the desire to avoid hanging,' for wishing to obtain his
victim's forgiveness. He had, in fact, been guilty of
a capital crime, and, what is more, against no ob-
scure and powerless person. Indeed, it is more than
probable that in actual life both ' Captain ' Lovelace
and his lieutenants, Mowbray, De Tourville, and the
other scoundrels would have swung together on
Tyburn tree.

There is another improbability, however, in the
story, besides that of plot ; there is in the reahstic
sense of the word an improbability of character also
in the person of Lovelace. Considered as a serious
picture of the fashionable libertine, the thoroughly
abandoned ' fine gentleman ' of his day, the character
is, of course, a monstrosity. The truth is that
Richardson had as little actual knowledge of the
class whom he thus caricatured, as the modern lady
novchst has of the dear, dehghtful, wicked Guards-
man, whose prowess in the fields of love and war
she similarly exaggerates. Men are of course aware
that no flesh-and-blood officer of the Household
Brigade is at once so profligate, so strong, so hand-

SAMUEL EICHAEDSON

some, so daring a rider to hounds, so masterly a
■whist-player, and the wearer of such costly dressing-
gowns, as are the irresistible heroes of the lady's
novel; and many of Richardson's contemporaries
must doubtless have felt the same about Lovelace.
The quiet little bookseller evidently took a sort of
trembling, delicious pleasure in the elaboration and
contemplation of the superhuman wickedness of his
fine gentleman. His heartlessuess, his cynicism, his
brutality and audacity, are individually worked up to
an almost incredible pitch, and are quite incredible
in combination. We may be perfectly assured, and
may congratulate human nature on the assurance,
that no such man as Lovelace ever existed. But this
is no objection to the story from the imaginative
point of view. It is not less certain, I should think,
that no sQch man as lago ever existed ; considered
from the point of view of actuality, we cannot ac-
cept him as a faithful picture of an ' ancient ' in the
Venetian army. But lago, though beyond the range
of the actual, is a masterpiece of imaginative truth,
and so, and in a scarcely less degree, is Lovelace. The
reason why the ' monster,' ' faultless ' or the reverse,
of the inferior artist offends us is, not because his
vices and virtues are idealized to excess, but because
they do not seem to be the vices and virtues of
humanity at all. It is not that they shock us in
degree, but that we do not recognize them in hind. It

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SAMUEL RICHARDSON

is far otherwise, however, with Richardson's Lovelace.
Villain as he is, we see how he has become so, and
we perceive that it has been through the morbid
hypertrophy of very common, and in most men very
venial, foibles. Hardly an act of treachery, however
black, or of cruelty, however brutal, is wrought by
him ; hardly a sally of diabolical cynicism, or a cry
of heartless triumph escapes him, which cannot be
traced to the simple passion of egotism, in one or
other of its two forms of selfishness and vanity. His
attractive and repulsive quahties are all of a piece,
and are all woven of the stuff of his self-love. His
good-humour, his gaiety, his savoir /aire, his fascina-
tion even for the people who dislike him, are all
born of his desire to gratify himself; while, on the
other hand, we see that his egotism is doubly the
parent of his crimes, in prompting him to their com-
mission, and in partially blinding him, cynic though
he is, to their full enormity. There is an admirable
subtlety in the way in which Richardson shows the
secret v/orkings of Lovelace's ever-active selfishness
and his unsleeping vanity^even in his momentary out-
bursts of remorse. His letters are full of touches of
perfectly natural, yet perfectly unconscious, self-dis-
closure ; and from end to end, in fact, his imaginative
reality, to use a phrase which is only apparently
self-contradictory, is consistently and most skilfully
sustained.

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SAMUEL EICHAKDSON

It would be allowing too much, however, to the
third of Richardson's romances, Sir Charles Grandison,
to say that it reaches the same level of ideal por-
traiture as Clarissa Harlowe. In delineating, at the
request of his friends, as he tells us, ' the man of
true honour,' in the person of this irreproachable
baronet, Richardson had no such dramatic contrast
to inspire him as in his second and greatest romance.
Sir Hargrave Pollexfen is but a commonplace and
vulgar foil to the virtues of the hero, and there is no
thread of pathos or of tragedy running through the
story, or indeed appearing in it, except episodically,
to give play to the author's strongest powers. Sir
Charles Grandison shows himself a man of true
honour, in eight volumes ; and that is about all that
can be Aaid of the romance. Unlike Clarissa, its nar-
rative cannot be said to hang fire through the
dififuseness of the narrator's method ; for in strictness
of language it contains no narrative at all. ' Why,
sir,' once exclaimed Dr. Johnson, ' if you were to read
Richardson for the story, you would hang yourself ;'
and Sir Charles Grandison, far more avowedly than
its predecessors, dispenses with plot and relies upon
the analysis and exhibition of character alone. But
it illustrates, though in a less degree than Clarissa
Harlowe, the points insisted upon at the outset of
these remarks. The dihgent reader of either, and
especially of Clarissa, can hardly fail to be enhght-

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SAMUEL EICHARDSON

ened as to the true import and value of Richardson's
relentless prolixity. He will no longer suppose it to
be a mere accident of the author's literary manner
or mental constitution. His public may have only
tolerated it out of regard for certain other qualities
of Richardson's which were not to be enjoyed ex-
cept in its company ; but unconsciously they profited
by it. The faithful but exhausted reader, as he closes
one of these long-drawn romances, and reflects upon
it, will undoubtedly be forced to acknowledge that
their length is of their essence ; that, extraordinarily
diflfuse as they are, they contain comparatively little
matter which could be fairly rejected as surplusage,
and that Richardson and his art being what they
were, his romances would not have been the better,
but the worse, for any abridgment of their length.
This is not to say, of course, that the art is of the
highest kind. Undoubtedly there would be higher
creative genius and greater delineative skill in
achieving, .by half a dozen masterly touches, what
Richardson only contrives to accomplish by the
patient multiplications of thousands of minute strokes.
But to only a few of the great creators and great
literary craftsmen of the world has it been given to
produce great work by the former method; and it
would be irrational to complain of any lesser artist
that he possesses it not. It is only when a Diderot's
extravagance forces us to the comparison that we

135

SAMUEL EICHARDSON

need remind ourselves or others that Richardson is
not Shakespeare. At other times it should be enough
for us that he uses his own literary instruments to
the best advantage, and gets the utmost out of his
method that it will yield ; and no one, I think, who
steadily and manfully submits himself to a course of
Richardson will question that he does. He has no
' moments,' as the slang of dramatic criticism has it ;
there are no flashes of inspiration in his work ; no
sudden and happy strokes of descriptive genius
■which seem to do the work of a chapter in a line.
There is hardly any sensible exertion of power, and
at any given instant no visible growth of result.
But by dint of sheer iteration, he succeeds in pro-
ducing the effect he desires.

' Gutta cavat lapidem non vi sed sfepe cadendo.'

And though the drip-drip of that interminable cor-
respondence is to some men soporific, to others
maddening and tedious, it must be admitted, to all
the reader will nevertheless find, when the drops
have at last ceased to fall, that they have channelled
sharp and deep impressions on the tablet of the
mind.

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THE NOVEL OF MANNERS

In Olio of the most curious discussions which ever
escaped being brought to an untimely close by a
request for definitions, Dr. Johnson in his usual
oracular fashion observed : ' Sir, there is all the dif-
ference in the world between characters of nature
and characters of manners, and there is the difference
between the characters of Richardson and those of
Fielding. Characters of manners are very entertain-
ing, but they are to be understood by a more super-
ficial observer than characters of nature, where a
man must dive into the recesses of the human heart.'
By way of further illustrating his meaning the doctor
went on to remark that there was us great a differ-
ence between these tv/o writers as between ' a man
who knew how a Avatch was made and a man who
could tell the hour by looking on a dial-plate.' The
analogy, though not at all expressive of the real
distinction between the two great masters, and
though it seems at first sight even unfair to the iu-

137

THE NOVEL OF .AIANNERS

fei'ior of the two forms of art thus compared with
each other, will be seen on a closer view to be
marked by Johnsou's customary felicity of compari-
son. Undoubtedly there is a way of studying men
and women which exactly resembles a reading of the
hour on the- dial-plate of a watch, and another way
of studying them which bears as exact a resemblance
to an examination of its works.

But Boswell, in remarking by way of reply that
' the neat watches of Fielding are as well constructed
as the large clocks of Richardson,' and that ' his
dial-plates are brighter,' was talking more than
usually off the matter. His true answer to his ' ven-
erable friend ' would have been first to have disputed
the soundness of the distinction between Richardson's
and Fielding's characters as 'characters of nature'
and ' characters of manners ' ; secondly, to have de-
nied that the two forms of characterisation need be,
or in the highest art could be, mutually exclusive ;
and, thirdly, to point out that the question for the
critic is not how much a novelist knows about human
nature, but how much of it, and with what accom-
paniments of artistic charm and intellectual interest,
he succeeds in exhibiting to his readers. A charac-
ter of manners which is not also a character of nature
becomes a study of superficial eccentricities ; a char-
acter of nature which is not also, at least to some
extent, a character of manners, becomes a piece of

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THE NOVEL OF MANNERS

bare psychological analysis. The one is not high
art; the other is not art at all, but science, or qnasi-
science.

Of course the aim both of Richardson and Field-
ing — and, whenever they are at their best, their
attained aim — is the exhibition of human nature ;
and the latter no more forgets this aim in his
descriptions of manners than the former attempts
to dispense entirely with descriptions of man-
ners in his constant effort towards that aim. As
to ' diving into the recesses of the human heart,'
both of the two men have done that, as every man
must before he can tell other people what is to be
found there. The difference between them is a mere
question of method. Richardson will not, or cannot,
give you much information as to v^^hat is to be found
in the human heart without compelling you to join
him yourself in the diving process ; Fielding allows
you to remain on the surface while directing your
imagination unerringly to what lies beneath. Which
of the two methods implies tlie more artistic skill,
and gives the more artistic pleasure, is a question
which I should think is hardly open to doubt.

In the matter of truth of portraiture and vividness
of representation, the two methods, no doubt, occupy
more equal ground ; but, even here, the analytic has
certainly no advantage over the dramatic method.
Nothing, surely, but Johnson's invincible prejudice

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THE NOVEL OF MANNERS

against Fielding could have persuaded bim that
Lovelace is a more real and living character to us, a
more thoroughly comprehended and appreciated in-
dividuality, than Tom Jones, or Clarissa Harlo we than
Amelia Booth, or Sir Charles Grandison than Squire
Western. The two last-mentioned characters stand
at the two opposite poles in the matter of manners;
and considering how strongly marked, in their own
way, are the manners of each of them, their creators
might alike have left them to tell their own story to
the reader. True to his method, however, Richard-
son is perpetually ' diving into the recesses ' of Sir
Charles's heart. Hundreds of pages are filled with
minute accounts of v/hat other people think of him,
and a good many score with indications, direct or in-
direct, of what he thinks of himself. But compare
the effect of all these laborious efforts to complete
and define our conception of the baronet with the
enlightenment of a single dramatic stroke of self-dis-
closure on the part of the squire. ' I don't know how
'tis, but, Allworthy, you always make me do just as
you please ; and yet I have as good an estate as you,
and am in the commission of the peace just as your-
self.' What is the illuminating power of all Richard-
son's thousands of carefully arranged candles to that
of this one penetrating electric flash? But it is hard-
ly fair, perhaps, to take such an example. Humour is
the only generator of this sort of electricity ; and

140

THE NOVEL OF MANNERS

Fielding was as consummately skilled in the pro-
duction and storage of that force as Richardson was
utterly incapable not merely of directing its action
but even of comprehending its properties.

The essential unsoundness of Johnson's distinction
is, however, too obvious to us in these days to need
insisting on ; nor, by consequence, is there any
necessity for asserting the essential unity, as regards
aim and criterion, of all fictive art under whatever
forms. What was unperceived by this robust and
well-equipped critic of a hundred years ago has be-
come a commonplace in these days to men who do
not aspire to be called critics at all. The effort of
every novelist, and the demand of all but indiscrimi-
nately voracious novel readers, is for as true and
complete a representation of human nature as the in-
sight and skill of the novelist enable him to compass.
Whether his characters be ' characters of manners ' or
not, he endeavours to make them and his public re-
sent the failure if he fails to make them ' characters
of nature ' also. So thoroughly, indeed, is this taken
for granted, that no novelist for whom his admirers
claim a place in the first rank would for a moment be
admitted by them to be only a portrayer, however
faithful and humorous, of mere 'manners' in John-
son's sense of the word — that is to say, if merely the
more strongly marked, superficial characteristics,
moral and intellectual, of men and women — of their

141

THH NOVEL OF MANNERS

' humours,' as they were called by an earlier Jonsoa
and his contemporaries.

To take an example. Just as there were Pelagians
and semi-Pelagians, so there are Dickensians and semi-
Uickensians, who, while thoroughly united in their
admiration of that master's portraiture of ' manners,'
part company altogether in their estimate of its relation
to natiu-e. But the true Dickensian regards this last
point as ' the root of the matter.' He would think his
own creed not worth holding if he made any con-
cession to the theory that Dickens was only a divine
caricaturist, whose personages, or the more success-
ful among them, are simply insulated oddities or
personified foibles. A belief in their correspondence
to some objective reality in nature is his signwn
stantis aut cadentis ecclesice : and this, indeed, is the
criterion which is iiowadays universally applied — at
any rate to every novel whose writers and readers
claim for it any place of importance as a work of art.
The demand, in fact, for strict fidelity to nature has
become so imperious that it is at last producing some-
thing like a revolt against the dramatic method of
Fielding, so long predominant in English literature,
and a reaction in favour of the analytic method of
Richardson.

We have nowadays an increasing school of
novelists, who are so afraid of being suspected of con-
fining themselves to the delineation of tlie mere ex-

142

TEE NOVEL OF MANNEKS

ternals of cbaracter, that they will hardly give us any
externals of character at all. Their men and women
are almost disembodied emotions, -which the reader is
invited to study, not as they objectify themselves in
incident or action — for of incident and action there is
almost none — but subjectively and from the inside.
The heroes and heroines of Mr. Howells and Mv.
Henry James do not indeed, like those of Richardson,
describe or have described for them, in interminable
letters, their subtlest shades of feeling ; but their
creators do it for them, and with a minute delicacy
■which Richardson himself has not surpassed. Decid-
edly we have, under the guidance of the American
school of novelist, travelled far enough from Field-
ing's conception of the novel, as a stage on which
character might be left to enfold itself in action and
dialogue, with as little assistance as possible from
the soliloquies of the chorus. In our modern novel
of analysis Chorus is more often on the stage, and
for longer periods together than any of the actors.

This reaction, however, is of very modern origin.
For a full century after Johnson delivered the above-
quoted criticism the method of Fielding enjoyed so
complete a triumph over the rival method of Rich-
ardson — the objective and synthetic school succeeded
in beating the subjective and analytic school so
utterly out of the field, that even the distinction so
dogmatically propounded by Johnson to Boswell

143

THE NOVEL OF MANNERS

would, to the ovdiuaiy moderu reader, be unintelli-
gible. To-day it requires reflection and study of its
context to ascertain its meaning. What Johnson
meant by ' manners ' is to the modern reader so in-
dispensable an incident of ' character,' and eo com-
mon an index to nature, that he does not readily
apprehend what is meant by opposing « characters of
nature' to ' characters of manners.' Every portrayal
of human nature in fiction must be, it seems to him,
a portrayal of manners, in Johnson's wide sense of
the word — that is to say, a delineation of those indi-
vidual pecuharities of conduct, speech, and action
whereby the inner nature of a man is revealed to his
fellows. Long familiarity with this method of por-
traiture, and a blessed ignorance of its opposite, has
persuaded the ordinary modern reader that it is the
only one possible in the nature of things. He has
never pored hour by hour over Richardson's labori-
ous engravery, and watched that great but exasper-
ating artist portraying ' nature ' after his relentless
fashion; with almost no assistance from the exhibi-
tion of anything which can in the loosest acceptation
of the word be called ' manners,' but simply working
away with his amazing complacency at 'how he
felt,' ' how she felt,' « what he thought,' ' what she
thought,' until, little stroke by stroke, he has traced
out for us a human soul.

The ordinary modern novel-reader knows nothing,
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THE NOVEL OF MANNERS

I say, of all this ; and though I yield to no one iu
admiration of Richardson — though I would say ditto,
in fact, to almost any praise of him which keeps
short of the extravagance of Diderot's — I could not,
in common humanity, recommend the ordinary
modern novel-reader to exchange an ignorance
which, if not bliss, is contentment, for a wisdom
which, if not folly, is fatigue. Knowing nothing,
however, by painful experience, of Johnson's novel
of 'nature,' he so confidently regards Johnson's novel
of ' manners' as the only possible novel that he has
virtually dropped, and forgotten the ancient meaning
of the qualifying suffix ; and, if anj'one should now
speak to him of the novel of manners, he would
understand the phrase in the later and more limited
sense in which it is employed at the head of this
article. He would take it, no doubt, as equivalent
to the ' novel of society,' at least as that last word
was understood before it underwent that process of
fashionable vulgarisation which has made it a fellow-
sufferer with the word ' gentleman.'

The novel of society, or the novel of manners, he
would say, is the novel which professes to present
only a picture of life as it appears to the student of
a more or less restricted circle of men and women,
and to portray human nature only as it displays itself
under those limiting conditions. Now no such limit-
ations were imposed, it is obvious to remark, either

THE NOVEL OY MANNERS

by Fielding or by Ricbardsou on their respective
exercise of their art. Jones and Andrews move
freely among all sorts of company, and Fielding de-
lineates nature as he conceives it on every level of
the social scale. The unhappy Clarissa is brought
into contact with many other sorts of people than
fine gentlemen and ladies ; the virtuous Pamela has
to do with housekeepers and lackeys as well as with
amorous squires, ^society as such, the ways and
characteristics, the virtues, vices, and humours of a
M'orld of actual or nominal equals, bound together
by certain more or less elastic, but still perfectly
definite and well-understood, conventions, may be
regarded as still untrodden ground to the novelist
after Fielding and Richardson had ceased to write.

By the comic dramatists of the Restoration, indeed,
and by one inimitable poetic satirist of the age of
Anne, ' society ' had been brilliantly depicted, and
between 1775 and 1780 the comedies of the Rivals
and the School for Scandal had signalised the rise of
a kindlier Congreve and a more masterly stage-
limner than Vanbrugh. But no novelist had as yet
held up the mirror to nature as she appeared at the
drum and the rout, amid the fops and coquettes, the
dowagers and debutantes of the polite world. Or
rather, since universal propositions are dangerous,
let us say that down to the last quarter of the
eighteenth century no mirror held up by the hand of

146

THE NOVEL OF MANNERS

any novelist had as yet presented a reflection suffi-
ciently clear and truthful to arrest the public gaze.
The fame of that achievement was reserved for a
London music-master's daughter, who, in the year
1778 and at the age of six-and-twenty, set all Lon-
don in a buzz of curiosity and admiration by the
production of the novel of Evelina.

There are two things which a critic of to-day
would be glad to know about this young lady : the
first, what had been the nature of her early reading ;
and the second, what was the quality of her previous
and unpublished attempts at fiction. Macaulay dwells
mnch upon the advantages which she derived from
the curiously mixed society which surrounded her in
Dr. Buruey's house ; and no doubt these advantages
count for something. But in the presence of so pal-
pable an imitation of Smollett as is the character of
Captain Mervau, one may be slow to believe that all
the other portraits in this singular gallery were
studied from the life. And it is perhaps as permissible
to doubt, upon internal evidences of style and
structure, whether Evelina was not the result of a
good many antecedent efforts at composition. The
novel, as we know, was reported, before its author's
name was known, to be the work of a girl of seven-
teen, and perhaps some part of its extraordinary
vogue may have been due to this flattering mistake.
But the main element in its success must surely, I

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should thiuk, be sought iu the fact that it was the
first 'novel of mauuers/ iu the later seuse of the
word, that had ever been offered to the public. It
was a picture of life in London, life at Bath, life at
the Bristol Hot Wells, in the later eighteenth century
— principally, indeed, of modish life, but with just so
much of a side glance at the gaieties and affectations
of the middle class as would give it additional
piquancy to the taste of the superiors whom they
strove to imitate. The delights of Ranelagh and the
watering-place assembly rooms are varied by those
of the suburban subscription ball. The amusements,
the interests, the conversations are all those of the
pohte, or of the would-be polite, world. The course
of true love is hindered by the machinations of an
unscrupulous baronet ; the heroine marries a virtuous
peer. Society was unused to finding itself made an
object of such direct and minute presentation, un-
used to studying the history of fictitious personages
whose circle of occupations, hopes, fears, desires, am-
bitions was so exactly identical with its own. And
while society read the book eagerly, and as eagerly
sought out and lionized the author, so the literary
coteries, or rather the one literary coterie of the day,
partly following the fashion, partly led by its own
autocratic leader, gathered round her also. Dr. John-
son was the warm friend of her father, and had an
almost fatherly affection for Fanny herself. Macaulay's

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THE NOVEL OF MANNERS

assertion that ' Bnvke, Windham, Gibbon, Reynolds,
Sheridan were amongst her most ardent enlogists,'
requires probably as many grains of salt as the
statement just before it, that the ' timid and obscure
girl found herself on the highest pinnacle of fame.'
But no doubt she was the rage of fashionable London,
and had secured the high though clearly not the un-
prejudiced commendation of the first critical authority
of the day. Others, or others at least who were men
of critical capacity themselves, must simply have
praised the book in that half-conscious, half-uncon-
scious excess into which praise is so likely to pass in
the case of a literary production which is at once new,
popular, and the work of a young woman.

For no tenderness towards this subject of a hun-
dred-years-old nine-days' wonder ought to induce a
candid critic of to-day to conceal his conviction that
Evelina is a ver^'- crude performance. Macaulay,
whose professed admiration for it was perhaps arti-
ficially heightened by his antipathy to Croker — who
thought meanly of it — excludes it, we may observe,
from his detached criticisms of its author's gifts and
manner, and draws all his illustrations from Cecilia.
The only circumstantial reference to the earlier novel
in his well-known essay on Madame D'Arblay's Diarj'-
and Letters is as follows : —

' One favourite story in particular haunted her imagination. It
■was about a certain Caroline Evelyn, a beautiful damsel, v/ho

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THE NOVEL OF MANNERS

made an uufortunate love matcb, and died, leaving an infant
daughter. Frances began to image to herself the various scenes,
tragic and comic, through which the poor motherless girl, highly
connected on one side, meanly connected on the other, might have
to pass. A crowd of unreal beings, good and bad, grave and
hideous, surrounded the pretty, timid young orphan — a coarse sea-
captain ; an ugly, insolent fojt, blaziug in a superb court dress ;
another fop, as ugly and as insolent a one, lodged on Snow Hill,
and tricked out in second-hand finery for the Hampstead ball ; an
old woman, all wrinkles and rouge, flirting her fan with the air
of a miss of seventeen, and screaming in a dialect made up of vul-
gar French and vulgar English ; a poet, lean and ragged, with a
broad Scotch accent. By degrees these shadows acquired stronger
and stronger consistence, the impulse which urged Frances to
write became irresistible, and the result was the History of
Evelina.'

Unfortunately the shadovrs, in ficquiiing consist-
ence, have too often become the crudest caricatures.
The coarse sea-captain is as coarse as any of Smol-
lett's ' salts/ and with less humour to redeem his
brutality ; the fops, less extravagantly treated, have
no flavour of original study and first-hand drawing ;
the rouged and wrinkled old woman is sometimes a
mere tedious infliction, at others a violent impossi-
bility. The scenes of horse-play, in which she figures
with her tormentor the captain, and in one of which
she is actually made to spit in his face, cannot pos-
sibly have corresponded to anything within Miss
Burney's personal experiences. They can only be
the result of a purely imaginative attempt to describe
what seemed to her the probable consequences of
turning a 'sea-dog' loose in a drawing-room. It is

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not necessary to have lived in the h\st quarter of the
eighteenth centurv to feel certain that they desper-
ately ofifend probability ; for they plainly exceed
what the author's own account of the conventions of
the society she is describing shows to be the limits
of the possible. The humours of Captain Mervan
and Madame Duval are no doubt the worst blots on
the book to the taste of a modern reader; hut JSvelina
is a gallery of very coarsely-handled portraits, diver-
sified by a few feebly executed sketches, from end to
end. The hero, Lord Orville, is a lay figure; Sir
Clement Willoughby has but intermitteut life ; the
Branghtons, though they are drawn with more spirit,
and certainly seem to be sketches from nature, are
but moderately successful. It is only in the char-
acters of Lady Louisa and her indiffereut Jiance thett
we seem to come upon traces of anything but the
most superficial observation, and the most rudimen-
tary art. Nothing, in a word, appears to me to ex-
plain the extraordinary popularity attained by Evelina
except its mere novelty of genre, aided, it may be,
by the purely accidental cause which has been sug-
gested above.

At the same time it would be too much to say that
the book shows neither ability nor promise. It
shows something of the one, and more of the other;
and Cecilia is undoubtedly an incomparably better
novel than Evelina. Most of the conversations and

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incidents are at least possible ; the colours of charac-
terisation are less glaring ; the heroine is a more
clearly defined individuality ; the story of the novel
possesses far more variety and interest than that of
its predecessor. It is admittedly Miss Burney's best
work : it was certainly her most popular one (for
Camilla, published fourteen years afterwards, gained
nothing like the reception of her two earlier novels),
and it would be unjust to deny it the merit of a
certain liveliness of dialogue and animation of narra-
tive. But the language in which Macaulay speaks
of it — even when he professes to be recording and
not expressing opinion — cannot be read, I think, by
anyone who compares the book, not only with earlier
but with later models, with other feelings than those
of blank amazement. As a novel of manners we
may concede it a right to a certain artificiality of
style and tone : as a novel of ' humours,' to adopt
Macaulay's classification of it, we might make allow-
ance for a certain considerable latitude in the way
of caricature. But really, that any critic of such
copiously informed, if somewhat unequal judgment
as Macaulay should seriously and without protest
write of it that ' those who saw Cecilia in manuscript
pronounced it the best novel of the age,' that ' Cecilia
was placed by general acclamation among the
classical novels of England,' and that the critic who
wrote thus should be capable of proving in the same

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essay that he was able to appreciate the genius of
Jane Austen — this must surely be attributed rather
to some persistent influence of early traditions than
to any independent and deliberate exertion of the
critical faculty. He says with obvious truth that
' humours,' meaning individual eccentricities, ' ruling-
passions,' hobbies, do exist, and are therefore proper
subjects for the imitations of art; and he adds as
truly, that though ' the imitation of such humours,
however skilful and amusing, is not an achievement
of the highest order,' though ' they are rare in real
life, and ought to be sparingly introduced into works
which profess to be pictures of real life,' a writer
^ may nevertheless show so much genius in the ex-
hibition of these humours as to be fairly entitled to
a permanent and distinguished rank among classics.'
Sterne's is a casein point. He is essentially a por-
irayer of humours, but his genius for that order of
portraiture has justly earned him a permanent and
distinguished place among English classics. But
can a claim to genius even under these limitations
be seriously put forward on behalf of Fanny Bur-
ney '? If it is admitted that we must not look in her
pages for Fielding's vigorous truth to nature, or
Goldsmith's delicacy and subtlety of delineation, can
we look there without disappointment, 1 will not say
for Sterne's mastery of the grotesque, but for any
signs of a cognate power ? To reduce the question

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THE NOVEL OF MANNERS

to the yimplest of all possible tests, are Miss Bnmey's
caricatiu'es funny even as caricatures ? Speaking as
one who may claim to have served a fairly long ap-
prenticeship as a taster of the humorous, in every
variety of age and body, I own that I can detect
very little flavour in any of the Buruey brands, and
I have some difficulty in believing that it ever really
outlived the year of their vintage. Is Mr. Briggs
humorous? Is Mr. Hobson"? Will any reader la}-
his hand on his heart and declare that the ' skipping
ofHcious impertinence ' of Mr. ]\Iorrice diverts instead
of boring him ? Or if he does find some drollery in
these characters, will he contend that the 'genius
shown in the exhibition of these humours' is suffi-
cient to compensate for the monstrous outrages on
probability which are committed whenever Mr.
Albany appears on the scene ? Miss Burne}^ laid
claim to wit as well as humour, but has she suc-
ceeded any better in her endeavours after this much
commoner kind of excellence? Let the sarcasms of
Mrs. Selwyn in Evelina, and those of Mr. Gosport in
Cecilia — sarcasms almost comparable with the rude
and flippant sallies which pass for e23igram in the
second-rate comedietta of the present day — supply
the answer.

The fame of Miss Burney declined pretty rapidlj'
after the publication of her third novel. This did
not ajppear till fourteen years after Cecilia — namely,

154

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iu 1796. But her publishers, from whom she is said
to have received a large sum of money for Camilla,
on the strength, it is to be supposed, of her previous
reputation, must have burnt their fingers by the
venture. It failed to hit the public taste — failed as
completely as Miss Buruey's subsequent memoirs of
her father, and, indeed, as everything else tlmt she
subsequently wrote. She seems, in fact, to have
been the ^ Miss Betty' of the literary world; and it
is as difficult to understand in these days that she
could ever have been the admiration of a lettered
coterie, as it must have been for the friends of the
' Young Roscius's ' later years to realise in the person
of that stout, middle-aged, respectable gentleman the
juvenile prodigy for whom the playgoiug public had
for the time deserted all the great actors of their
day. Yet the tradition of her high merit as a writer,
or rather of the high merit of her two principal
novels, must have survived well into the present cen-
tury, since it has so strongly influenced the mind of
a man like Macaulay, who could hardly have spoken
— consistently at least with his appreciation of far
better art — in the terms in which he does speak of
Fanny Burney, unless some of the purely imitative
predilections of boyhood had been allowed by him
to mingle untested with the judgments of his maturer
years. The comparison which he institutes between
the authors of Evelina and the author of Emma — the

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former highly skilled iu ' the exhibition of humours,'
but unable to set before us, as the latter does, an en-
tire character — is perfectly sound, but at the same
time so comically inadequate as to provoke a smile.
It is as though one should gravely point out that Sir
Joshua Reynolds is a greater master than an ale-house
sign-painter, because the faces of Sir Joshua's portraits
display great potentialities of varied emotion, where-
as the worthy sign-painter is content with having ex-
hibited the single quality of rampancy in a blue
lion. We admit the justice of the remark, but cannot
feel that it is the last word of discrimination between
the tvv'o pictorial styles. And without, of course,
going so far as to say that the great novelist of man-
ners of the early nineteenth century is raised so far
above her immediate predecessor of the eighteenth as
Sir Joshua excels the limner of the blue lion, one can
and must say that the points of distinction between
the two writers (points from Avhich Macaulay has, for
the purpose of his argument, selected one alone) are
at least as numerous and as salient as those which
can be traced between the two painters.

It must be admitted, however, at the outset, that
the common subject-matter of the two writers had
undergone an extraordinary transformation, to the
advantage of the latter, between the dates of their
respective writings. The French Revolution occurred
within ten years of the pubhcation of Cecilia, and be-

156

THE NOVEL OF MANNERS

fore Jaue Austen had reached her twentieth year.
The chief works of the younger novelist are divided
by less than a generation from the most successful pro-
duction of the elder; but as pictures of society, what
a gulf divides them ! In truth, if we wish to gain an
adequate idea of the social, moral, and intellectual
changes wrought in Europe by the portent of 1789-93,
we should look for them not in English poetry but
in English fiction. The spirit, manner, and poetic
canons of the school of Wordsworth do not differ so
widely from those of the school of Pope as do the
social tone and language, the social usages and ideas
which pervade the pages of Miss Austen from those
which WQ meet with in the pages of Miss Buruey.
Allowance made for the purely superficial distinctions
of costume and outward behaviour, a greater cere-
moniousness of demeanour, and a few, a very few,
occasional archaisms of language, the men and
women of Pride and Prejudice or of Northanger Ahhcy
are the men and women of the Victorian age. With
a few similar allowances, the men and women of
Evelina and Cecilia would pass for men and women of
the age of Anne. It would seem as if the broader
and deeper characteristics of English society had re-
mained unchanged for nearly ninety years, and then
had been suddenly transformed into a shape Avhich
they were to retain for eighty or ninety more.

The change, however, was one eminently suited,
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by its tendency to a greater simplicity, to promote
the artistic development of the novel of manners.
And accordingly, the highest point to which it has
ever been, or to which perhaps it ever can be,
brought, it has reached in the hands of Jliss Austen.
No other writer of fiction has ever achieved such
great results by such insignificant means ; none other
has, upon material so severely limited, expended such
beauty, ingenuity, and precision of workmanship. Her
novels, indeed, are novels of manners in a sense in
which certainly not those of Miss Burney — since not
even those of Thackeray — can be said to deserve that
iiame. For }.Ii.ss Burney continually, and Thackeray
in no inconsiderable measure — even in novels of the
Vanity Fair and Pendennis type — seek attractions for
the reader in much else than the simple portrayal of
character. Sentiment, not to say sentimentalism,
plays a large part in the work of the former; plot and
incident, though not abundant, are by no means
wanting to that of the latter. The author of Evelina
and Cecilia is liberal of her moral reflections ; the
author of Tlie Newcomes and Barrij Lyndon is mainly
prized by many of his admirers for a caustic criticism
of life. But all these devices of the art of the story-
teller — partly, no doubt, through limitations of
personal experience, but also, 1 imagine, and in
much greater measure, by her own deliberate choice
as an artist acutely sensible of where her real power

158

THE NOVEL OF MANNERS

lay — Jane Austeu entirely denied herself. The plots
of her stories, though excellently conceived for her
purposes, are usually of the simplest and most
obvious description ; her characters are, so far as their
positions and circumstances go, just such as might fall
in the way of any young woman of the upper middle
class, resident for the most part in the country, but
varying her life by occasional visits to Bath or Lon-
don ; her incidents are just what might find daily
entry in such a young woman's diary. The parson
and the squire, the young military or naval officer,
the Oxford or Cambridge undergraduate, the retired
professional man with his wife and daughters, and
occasionally the titled Lady Bountiful of a rural
parish — these are the commonplace personages who
fill her pages, and in our presence live their common-
place lives.

It has often been observed that Miss Austen never
brings before us, except in the briefest possible
fashion, any man, woman, or child of the poorer
classes ; and when she does, as in Pride and Prejudice,
it is perhaps with something less than her usually un-
erring felicity of touch. She confined herself all but
wholly to the class in which she was born and bred,
and which she had studied ; neither, as has been said,
did she invent interesting situations for her person-
ages of this class, but V\'as content to take them as
merely performing the every-day acts and undergo-

1.59

THE NOVEL OF LIANNERS

ing- the uuroniantic experiences of the society aroimd
her. Never was drama so uusensatioual enacted ou
a stage so sternly denuded of scenic accessories of
any sort ; yet never was drama enacted from first to
last in so resohitely dramatic a spirit. Passion, the
•word and the thing, is absolutely unknown to any
hero or heroine of Miss Austen's ; the mere excitement
and exhilaration of rapid action she deliberately fore-
goes ; but yet, while surrendering all these facihties,
and resisting all these temptations of the dramatic
form, she never deviates from that form, never needs
relief from it herself, nor, with the sublime presump-
tion characteristic of genius, ever allows herself to
suppose that her hearers can need such relief them-
selves. Neither does she turn aside, or imagine that
you will care to turn aside^ from the exquisite life-
studies which she is executing before you, to gaze,
even for the briefest interval, at external nature.
That perpetual diversorium at which the novelist of
to-day is perpetually ' putting up ' is not for her. It
may be supposed that, if she had no high cesthetio
sensibihties in that regard, she possessed at any rate
that appreciation of the simple rural beauty of Eng-
land which no country-bred Englishwoman of refined
life and thoughtful disposition is likely to be without.
Yet it would be difficult to find two consecutive
pages, if even two consecutive paragraphs, of land-
scape painting in the whole of Miss Austen's works.

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Nor does she take refuge from her labours of minute
portraiture in that other common solace of later
novelists — the impersonation of Chorus. No one
soliloquizes so rarely as she. Her characters hold a
score of conversations with each other for one that
she holds v/ith the reader. Nothing can differ more
than her manner in this respect from that of the in-
ferior artist who doth so abound among us at this
day — that keeper of the marionettes whose puppets
explain so little of their characters in the course of
their rare and ineffective dialogues with each other
that the voice of their manipulator can never afford
to be long silent at the wings. Miss Austen compels
character to unfold itself in dialogue and action, un-
aided, or almost unaided, by comment and criticism
of the writer's own. Only those who have attempted
this feat for themselves can be fully sensible of its
difficulty; but others may form some rough estimate
of it by observing the regularity with which it is
shirked by nineteen novelists out of twenty.

It is one of the great merits of Scott's vivid and
faithful draughtsmanship that he makes this so con-
stant an aim of his endeavours ; but no one more
generously admitted that difference of conditions
which made it a so much easier achievement for him
than for her. An often-quoted passage from the
diary in Lockhart's Life contains the fullest recog-
nition of this. * Read again, and for the third time at

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least, Miss Austen's finely written novel of Pride and
Prejudice. That young lady had a talent for de-
scribing the involvements, and feelings, and char-
acters of ordinary life which is to me the most
wonderful I ever met with. The big bow-wow strain
I can do myself like any now going ; but the ex-
quisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace
things and characters interesting from the truth of
the description and the sentiment is denied to me.
What a pity such a gifted creature died so early !'
But much more, of course, than ' truth of sentiment
and description 'goes to the creation of Jane Austen's
power and charm. A profound insight into the
workings of the calmer and commoner human feel-
ings and motives — this and a marvellously subtle
humour were the two gifts which she was the first to
bring in anything like such profusion to the ' novel
of manners.' And the purest novels of manners, in
the sense in which I have endeavoured to define the
phrase, her stories are. They give, and they confine
themselves strictly to giving, a picture of human
life as it presents itself under the most rigid rules of
social convention, v^ith only such actions described,
such characters and feelings depicted, as these rules
permit of being displayed.

The problem which she proposes to herself is, in
fact, this : Given just so many and no more inches of
upturned mould on the surface of human nature, to

1G2

THE NOVEL OF MANNERS

determine the character and constituents of the sub-
soil to as great a depth as possible. That, of course,
is the problem which every novelist of manners must
propose to himself who wishes to rise above the level
of a moral and mental modiste, merely doing for the
manners of society what the fashion-boolis do for its
costumes ; but one may safely say that the marvellous
success with which that problem might be attacked
was never revealed nor could ever have been realised
until the creator of the Bennets and the Dashwoods
first took it in hand. Then for the first time a wo-
man showed the world that human nature trimmed
and parterred by the hand of the gardener, Society,
into accordance with the primmest Dutch taste is
human nature still, and that it was within the power
of the botanical expert to trace the affinities of its
most highly cultivated specimens with the wild
growths, and sometimes even with the noxious weeds
that flourish beyond the garden wall. The saving-
qualities which redeem this operation from both the
dulness and the repulsiveuess of science are, of course,
the qualities of sympathy and humour — qualities the
utter absence and the apparently unsuspected need
of which form together the amply sufficient explan-
ation of much of that dismal writing of the ' ana-
lytical ' order which nowadays imagines itself to be
art. The quickness and the breadth of Miss Austen's
sympathy with moods and temperaments the most

M 2

THE NOVEL OF MANNERS

various may be traced on almost every page of her
writings ; and that subtly humorous aroma which
impregnates nearly every sentence would require a
whole essay to do it justice. But what is still more
striking about her, and, indeed, what probably is
alike the secret of her extraordinary insight into
character, and of her admirable finesse in delineating
it, is the unusually perfect balance which humour
and sympathy seem to have always maintained in her
mind.

It is sympathy which saves the novelist from over-
drawing human foibles, humour which prevents him
from over-estimating human virtues. To be reason-
ably just to his characters the novelist must possess
at least a more than average share of both qualities.
When both, as in Miss Austen's case, are equally
balanced, and when, above all, the more wayward
of the two instincts is held in check by an imperious
artistic conscience, the result is perfect truth. But
the artistic conscience — the power of self-restraint,
the ability to hold the hand and to refrain from that
last touch to which the undisciplined instinct of
comedy so alluringly persuades us — this, after all, is
the great thing to possess, and the difficult thing to
obey. To those who are at all capable of measuring
the humorous possibilities of a situation or of a
character, there is something no less surprising, and
to some, perhaps, no less disappointing, than admir-

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THE NOVEL OF MANNERS

able in Miss Austen's masterly reserve. Among all
her delightful pieces of comic portraiture 1 know of
but one instance in which her sense of humour has
overcome her fidelity to nature, and strict artistic
truth has been sacrificed to the desire of heightening
the absurdity of one of the most exquisitely absurd
of moral grotesques. I refer to the character of
Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice. Here it seems to
me that, for the first and last time, she found the
humours of one of her own creations irresistible, and
allowed herself to be betrayed into a caricature of
which, however, even the sternest of critics would be
loth to part with a single ridiculous trait. It is this
severe reserve of Miss Austen's which makes her seem
to some readers tame and colourless. To such we
can have nothing to offer but a recommendation of
patience, and the assurance that, if ever they acquire
the taste for this simplest and yet most delicate of
literary diets, they will grow to wonder that their
palates could ever have relished any coarser food.

What, the question of course arises — what, in this
day of universal novel- writing, is the present position
of the novel of manners ? During the second quarter
of the century it found, as everyone knows, its most
brilliant representative in the person of Thackeray.
It would bo preposterous to rank Miss Austen with
Thackeray in respect of intellectual grasp, and both
idle and invidious to attempt any comparative esti-

165

THE NOVEL OF MANNERS

mate of their respective styles of workmanship. In
breadth, both of stroke and canvas, they differ vastly
from each other, and Thackeray is yet further dis-
tinguished from Miss Austen in having travelled, and
with signal success, beyond the region of the novel
of manners into that of historic romance and imagin-
ative study. Miss Austen not only never attempted
anything like Esmond or Barry Li/)idon, but she never
finds occasion even for the accidental display of these
peculiar qualities which make an Esmond or a Barry
Lyndon possible. Yet in his other books, and those
perhaps on which his fame most securely rests — in
Pendennis^ in Vanity Fair, in The Newcomes — one may
describe him, subject to the reservation made a few
pages back, as hardly less emphatically a novelist of
manners than Miss Austen herself. His range of
characters is of course larger than hers, but their
caste, their order is the same ; or, rather, it is the
same, with an addition in Thackeray's case which is
practically no addition — that of the class of domestic
servants : the butlers, footmen, valets, lady's-maids,
housekeepers whom he has sketched so admirably,
but who really mix with, belong to, and must be
studied as adjuncts of those upper classes to whom,
in other respects, his study was entirely confined.
Thackeray, in short, lives, and will live, in our history
as essentially the great novelist of manners of the
period during which ho flourished — a period, bo it

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THE NOVEL OF MANNERS

remembered, which, among writers in the same order
of fictioD, included DisraeK (considered from the non-
political side of him) and (when he was not in the
big bow-wow vein) the first Lord Lyttou.

The third quarter of the nineteenth century has
been the flourishing time of perhaps the most popular
novelist of manners who ever lived — the late Mr.
Trollope : to whom no one can deny the merit of
careful observation, and who, if he could have
brought himself to recognise that a man may become
a machine, that machines do not think, and that
thought is as necessary as observation to intelligent
portraiture, might have well deserved all the popu-
larity which he achieved. Since Mr. TroUope's death
it would be hard to name any living representative
of the school. Indeed, there is some reason to sus-
pect that the school, as a school, has perished. In
one sense almost every novelist we have is a novelist
of manners ; in another sense, none of them are. That
is to say, there is not an inventor of sunsets and love-
scenes, not a chronicler of ' runs ' and steeple-chases,
not a delineator of theatrical life and character, not
a feminine diaritr't of the doings of the wicked guards-
man, who would not be seriously offended at the
imputation that he or she fails in the accurate por-
traiture of contemporary manners; but, on the other
hand, all of them — 'spooning' novelists, sporting
novelists, theatrical novelists — arc concerned with

167

THE NOVEL OF MANNERS

scenery, passion, incident first, and Tvith manners
afterwards. They all make grandly nonchalant pre-
tences of knowingness in the Vvays of the world in
general, and of modern society in particular ; but
where the novel of manners has not degenerated in
their hands into that very different article, the
'fashionable novel,' — where it does not recall the
vulgarity without recalling the unquestionable clever-
ness of the once famous Mrs. Gore, it is hardly to be
recognised for what it professes to be. The novel
of modern life and society, in so far as it does not
rely for its attractions on mere sensational incident,
is generally a study of male and female character —
mostly, indeed, of one male and one female character
— with a few elaborate sketches of scenery for a
background, and a clumsy caricature of some two or
three well-known contemporary personages thrown in
to give it an air of actuality. The close objective
study of social types — not of their superficial
peculiarities only, but of their inner being — appears
to be becoming a lost art. Where, indeed, are we to
look for the observation, the humour, to say nothing
of the icisdom, which was brought to bear upon this
branch of the art of fiction by its great masters in the
past? We have but one living novelist with the
adequate intellectual equipment ; but Mr. George
Meredith is poet, philosopher, and politician, as well
as novelist, and we must be satisfied, I suppose, that

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THE NOVEL OF MANNERS

brilliaut studies of manners form an element, and an
element only, in his varied and stimulating work.
For the rest, we have ' pretty ' writers in abundance,
and a few of genuine power in the creation of in-
dividual character. But the generalising eye, the
penetrative humour, and the genial breadth of
sympathy, which is needed to portray the social
pageant as a whole, appear to be gifts which are be-
coming rarer and rarer among us every day.

1G9

NEWSPAPERS AND ENGLISH

A DIALOGUE

Minutius. What, Scriptorius ! corrupting your
style by studying a newspaper f Didn't I under-
stand you to say that you were composing a paper to
be read this evening before the Eclectic Society ?

Scriptorius. How do you know I am not studying
one of my own leaders?

Min. How do you know that that is not exactly
■what I am assuming ?

Scrip. Oh ! then you believe that a man whose
style would not otherwise be vicious, may demoralise
it by reading his own writings?

Min. Many a man could have no worse model.
But you know very well what I mean. What you
are reading in that newspaper is not your own writ-
ing, in the sense of being your own thoughts express-
ed in your own language. It is the thoughts of your
political party expressed in the language of — well, in
the language of your guild. I can't describe it

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NEWSPAPERS AND ENGLISH

otherwise. It is essentially a language of itself:
English, of course, or at any rate for the most part, in
its vocabulary; English, too, in its accidence and
syntax, and differing, therefore, in the first of these
two respects from a ' patter,' and in the second from
a patois — from the cant or argot of a class on the
one hand, and from the dialect of a tribe on the
other. And in both respects — but perhaps I offend
you by my freedom.

Scrip. Not at all. I am admiring the accuracy of
your philological criticism. The peculiar diction of
journalism has never, I think, been better described.
I recognise at once the elements both of its weakness
and its strength, the sources alike of its power and its
limitations. All I fail to perceive is its corrujDtlug in-
fluence. If it is neither ai^got nor patois, where is the
mischief of using it ?

Min. Where ! Why, my dear fellow, in the very
fact on which you seem to rely. No one is the worse
for possessing a knowledge of slang, or acquiring the
mastery of a dialect ; for neither pretends to be more
than an accretion upon, or a corruption of, the
language to which it belongs. It is not the medal or
the token that debases a currenc}*, it is the spurious
coin — and the more mischievously in proportion to
the closeness of the imitation. If the journalistic
'lingo' has cither a little more of the metal, or a
little less of the semblance of genuine English, its

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NEWSPAPERS A:^D ENGLISH

enormously wide circulation in these days would no
doubt do comparatively little harm.

Scrip. Whereas ?

Min. Eh ? what ? Oh, come, Scriptorius, these
dialectical thrustings of a naturally polite man into
the corner of incivility are really in bad taste. Well,
then, if you will have it — whereas its circulation pro-
duces, as it is, an effect which I could not correctly
describe without comparing a most excellent man,
and my very good friend, to a professional manufac-
turer of bad half-crowns.

Scrip. Good. And now let me express my ex-
treme surprise, Minutius, that a man of your in-
dependent judgment and force of character should
have permitted yourself to become the mouth-piece
of so false and silly a cry as that which 1 have now
for the first time heard you echo. Have you ever
really examined the grounds of the charge which
you are making against the newspapers?

Min. Well, of course I have not scrutinised it as
jealously as though it were a tribute to their merits.
You are alwiiys demanding some impossibilities of
self-mortifying rigour.

Scrip. If you have not examined it, let me do so
for you.

Min. Do ; and put the results of your inquiries
into a ' social ' leader, as I understand you and your
fellow-craftsmen describe every disquisition you give

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NEWSPAPERS AND ENGLISH

US on any subject at all broader or of more permanent
interest than last night's Parliamentary debate,
whether it be an excursion into the Philosophy of the
Unconscious, or a thoughtful essay on the true
method of disposing of the metropolitan sewage.

Scnp. Well, I conceive that both are subjects with
which society is more or less concerned.

Mill. Undoubtedly — more or less ; but so, after all,
it is supposed to be with politics. To divide all sub-
jects of human interest into political and social, and
to lump together as ' social ' all that infinite variety
of matters which lie outside the range, as I say, of
last night's Parliamentary debate, does strike one as
a somewhat rough and ready method of classification.
But perhaps you do not go so far as to maintain that
journalism actually tends to promote philosophic ac-
curacy in the use of language.

Scrip. I don't know what I may find myself con-
tending for when we once get fairly in dispute : it is
that, I think, which constitutes one of the most pleas-
ing features of familiar controversy, and

Min. Stop I I beg your pardon I One moment
just to take down the phrase you have last let fall.
All right, go on 1

Scrip. I see what is preparing for me, and I defy
you. But to finish what I was saying, I do not
propose to maintain, at least for the present, that
journalism ' tends ' — 1 had better repeat your exact

173

NEWSPAPERS AND ENGLISH

words — ' to promote philosophic accuracy in the use
of language.' When an unfortunate gentleman is
brought up on a charge of coining, the jBrst thing for
him to do is to rebut the accusation. It will be time
enough for him to attempt to show that he is a pub-
lic benefactor Avhen he has satisfied his judge that he
is not a public malefactor. So here. I shall be quite
content, at any rate for the present, with acquitting
myself and my fellows of the charge of debasing or
defacing the verbal coinage of my country without
claiming to have purified or brightened it. Enough
if we do not clip or alloy the money of the English
tongue ; it is too much to expect of us, or for us to
claim for ourselves, that the coins come out of our
hands with more gold in them to the ounce, and with
a sharper and cleaner cut device and legend upon
their face. The second position I cannot hope to
establish ; the first I can and will.

Mill. ' To't ' then ! as our friend the Danish grave-
digger says. ' To't.'

Scrip. I am quite ready ! What is the charge ?

Mill. Eh ? the charge t Well, upon my word I
ihought I had expressed it with great precision.

Scrip. What, by a metaphor ! A pretty situation
f a man's life is to depend upon his accuser's pos-
sessing a just appreciation of analogy and a nice
discrimination in the employment of rhetorical
£gures.

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NEWSPAPERS AND ENGLISH

Mill. 'Ation ! 'ation ! 'ation ! I shall have some-
thing to say about that presently.

Scrip. With all my heart ; and in the meantime I
will meet your accusation in the form it took at the
very opening of this colloquy. You made, or you
implied, the charge against neAvspaper writers of
corrupting the English prose style. That is a little
different, of course, from the charge of debasing the
EngHsh language, and as, being much the more
vague, it is the easier to sustain and the harder to
refute, I daresay you will prefer that form of the
accusation to the other.

Min. 1 think, if you don't mind, I should like to
avail myself of both, though not, of course, at the
same time.

Scrip. I am obliged to you for that last conces-
sion, at any rate. It is by no means a common form
of forbearance, I assure you.

Min. Well, then, as to debasing the language —
Scrip. Yes, as to debasing the language. I shall
be happy to save you as much trouble as possible in
establishing that part of your case. Allow me to
read you a list of admissions which I have at varioas
times committed to paper with a view to the discus-
sion of this particular subject. I admit that when
facts ' transpire,' in correct English it docs not mean
that they occur, and it does mean that having oc-
curred they get abroad ; whereas, by transpiring in

175

NEWSPAPERS AND ENGLISH

newspaper English, they do not get abroad, but only
happen. I admit that when we call a man ' reliable,'
w^e neither strengthen nor adorn the Englisli lan-
guage, and I may here add that I have tried not to
smile w^hen 1 have heard, as I actually have, a purist
object to the word on the ground that as long as
'trustworthy' was available to express the idea, 're-
liable ' could not be indispensable. In other words, 1
recognise a mysterious guilt in burking the preposi-
tion ' on ' which does not attach to the suppression
of the particles 'of and 'with.' I admit further
that the words

Jlin. There, that will do. You need not give us
the T.-hole string of pearls. I know it is a long one.
But since you admit the solecisms

Scrip. Ah! Unfortunate people of Soli! Do
you believe they really spoke worse Greek than
their neighbours — that they were really sinners
against grammar above all men that dwelt in
Cilicia? Soli! Siloam ! It is the way of the
world, however. Those unlucky colonists, and we
unlucky journalists, are simply the ' eighteen upon
whom the tower fell.'

Min. Oh, nonsense ! You are evading the gist of
the charge. The accusation against you is not that
you use worse English than other people

Scrip. Members of Parliament, for instance. Why,
they owe the only grammar they can boast of to

176

NEWSPAPERS AND ENGLISH

those who have least of it to spare among ourselves.
Our most indigent class contrives to give of its super-
fluity to the destitute senator ; and out of the scanty
grammatical wardrobe of the reporter is his naked-
ness clothed. Nay, the figure is not strong enough.
The debt of the parliamentary orator to the parha-
mentary reporter is not for clothing alone, but for
surgery — for the splints upon the fractures of his
sentences, and for the sutures of their gaping
wounds.

3Iin. My dear Scriptorius, you give yourself a
vast amount of unnecessary trouble. No one has
ventured upon anything so audacious as to compare
the grammar of debate, or even of completed legis-
lation, with that of the newspaper.

Scrip. The Bar, then ? or the pulpit 'l Even in
the ablest of those forensic speeches which decide
the issue of a lawsuit, how many nominatives remain
'pending!' Hovv' often will the changes of heart
among a congregation compare either in suddenness
or completeness with the changes of construction in
their preacher's sentences 'I

Mill. You seem to forget that grammatical errors
are somewhat more pardonable in spoken than in
written discourse : but 1 repeat that the charge
against you is not that newspapers use worse English
— and please to observe that it is you who are now
mixing up questions of syntax with those of vocabu-

NEWSPAPERS AND ENGLISH

lary — than other people, but that owing to the enor-
mous audiences whom they address daily they infect
the largest possible number of people with, their own
habits of inaccuracy.

Scrip. And I have really lived to hear that parrot
cry from lips so accustomed to utter sense as yours..
What man capable of being so ' infected,' as you call
it, can have any health in him ? Take the score or
so of solecisms — if there be so many — for which the
newspapers have obtained currency. By Avhom,
pray, among their readers are they picked up and
made use of? By those who have otherwise any
purity of speech to be contaminated ? or by those —
the uneducated — who learn more genuine words of
their mother-tongue from the newspaper than from
any other printed matter, and who daily commit ten
times as many sins against the language and its
grammar than the newspaper is guilty of in a year?

Min. The more ignorant the reader, the easier, of
course, to corrupt him ; but I am far from admitting
that newspapers have not taught tricks of incorrect
speech to people whom education might otherwise
have enabled to avoid them.

Scrip. Then enumerate these tricks, I beg of you,
and let us see how many they amount to. Do not
trust to your ' transpire ' and your ' reliable,' and the
one or two other stale examples of inaccuracies which
the journalist was either not the first to commit, or

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NEWSPAPERS AND ENGLISH

has done more than anyone else to expose and ridi-
cule. Let us hear the whole list. 1 shall be much
surprised if the number of such offences which can
fairly be brought home to the nev^spaper-writer are
found to exceed a dozen.

Min. Be it so, my dear Scriptorius, be it so.
Moreover, the charge of corrupting our vocabulary
is not one on which I am personally much disposed
to rely. The number of questionable additions which
the language has received from the newspapers must
necessarily be small : for, if we except the lendiugs of
recognised slang, the total number of such additions
which have been made from any source during the
present age is itself not considerable.

Scrip. Now that last is a proposition which I
should have been inclined to dispute. But proceed :
I daresay I shall have an opportunity of disputing it
later on.

Min. 1 have known you go so far as to create one.
I don't know, however, that I had much more to say
when you interposed, except this : that the much
more plausible charge against you and your fellow-
penmen is that of depraving English style. I should
like to hear you on that point, I confess.

Scrip. Would you ? Then you must give me
something to answer. What is to ' deprave ' a
style ? What is English style 1 Nay, what is style
itself?

NEWSPAPERS AND ENGLISH

Mill. Why stop there, my dear fellow ? Pray go
on. By all meaDS let us thresh the whole matter
thoroughly out. What is the origin of language?
What are the casual relations and what the order of
succession in time between the class -name and the
concept ? By what process

Scrip. You are wasting your satire upon me, my
friend. My question was a simple one enough from
the experimental side, and not requiring any pro-
found researches into the metaphysics of philology iu
order to answer it. One need not know the chem-
istry of either pure or muddy water to be able to say
when one has been contaminated by the other. The
eye will tell you that the liquid has become turbid.
But I think that when you are asserting, not the fact
of contamination, but the process, you are bound to
give some intelligible account of the pure water, and
some rational description of the mud.

Mill. \Vell, there is no great difSculty in that, if
you will allow me to confine myself to it. But, do
you know, I have for some unaccountable reason

Scrip. ISome ' uuaccountable-for ' reason you would
say, if you were a reliable-on grammarian.

Min. Conceived a strong desire to attempt the
task you offer to excuse me from. I should like to
define ' style ' in language.

Scrip. Meaning, I suppose, the correct, the ' best
style ' ?

180

NEWSPAPERS AND ENGLISH

Min. Exactly.

Scrip. Then you believe there is only one to
which that description applies ?

Min. You shall see. Style, then, as 1 should de-
fine it, consists in such a choice and collocation of
words, combined with such individual structure and
collective arrangement of sentences, as may, while
giving the clearest, briefest, and most forcible ex-
pression to the thought, assist at the same time the
most powerfully to maintain in the reader the state
of feeling most appropriate to the subject-matter.

Scrip. Allow me, my dear Minutius, to congratu-
late you.

Min. On my definition?

Scrip. On your wind. If I remember rightly you
won the mile race in our school athletics ; but I had
no idea you still kept yourself in such excellent train-
ing in middle age.

Min. Your ironical compliment, if you onl}' knew
it, is genuinely flattering. Length of wind is most
valuable to those who have a long distance to travel,
and I maintain that my definition is not to be short-
ened by a single stage. Choice of words and order
of words we all admit to be points of first importance
to style ; nor less so, the arrangement of sentences.
Nor will you deny that clearness, brevity, and force
in the expression of thought are three qualities of
equivalent necessity to whosoever lays claim to the

181

NEWSPAPERS AND ENGLISH

mastery of a good style. The first suffices only for
the equipment of a Parliamentary draftsman. Acts
of Parliament convey their meaning clearly.

Scrip. Do they ?

Mill. The ideal Act of Parliament does. All legal
documents express, or are supposed to express, the
meaning embodied in them with clearness, and some
few do so with brevity — that is without superabund-
ance of words, but none of them study to do so with
force. Of two words equally unambiguous, of two
constructions equally apt, of two sentences equally
short, the lawyer and the Parliamentary draftsman
do not of design select that word which is the most
telling, that construction or sentence which drives
most smartly home the nail of meaning with the
hammer of emphasis. And lastly, having neither of
them any particular state oi feeling in their readers —
nothing but a purely intellectual condition — to take
account of, neither of them are, of course, in the least
degree solicitous about the existence of any corre-
sponding quality in their work. It is only where to
clearness, brevity, and force of expression a writer
adds that tact and sensibihty which keeps the tone
of his diction in harmony with the feelings suggested
by his thought that he becomes master, in my judg-
ment at least, of the gift of style.

Scrip. You say nothing of simplicity.

Min. Why should I? How can the clearest
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NEWSPAPERS AND ENGLISH

and briefest expression be other than the simplest ?

Scrip. Nor of grace.

Min. Fulfil the commandment I have given you,
and grace shall be added unto you. Grace is only
symmetry, and symmetry only the perfect balance
and mutual adaptation of component parts. Let
thought but wed itself to expression, as my canon, I
believe, unites them, and grace will be born.

Scrip. H'm : the parentage seems a little common-
place, but highly respectable. Much, however, that
passes for grace in literature is not, I fear, the off-
spring of any lawful uuiou whatever. However, I
am extremely obliged to you for permitting me to
hear your views on the subject. And now shall we
resume our discussion "?

Min. By all means: but I am not without hopes
of exhibiting a certain remote connection between
what I have been saying and the matter in hand.

Scrip. What ! All that highly abstract and to my
inteUigence, if you will excuse its weakness, that
decidedly hazy stuff about adapting the tone of the
writer to the feeling of the reader — stuff which if it
has, as of course it has, meaning

Min. Thank you ! Your faith is touching.

Scrip, Can only mean that there is no such thing
as style in the singular number, but as many different
styles as there are differences of subject-matter.

Min. And suppose that is what I mean to main-
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NEWSPAPERS AND ENGLISH

tain ? What if style should be, in the ultimate an-
alysis, not an objective quality of language, but a
certain subjective relation between the mode of the
writer as affected by his theme and an objective

Scrip. Exactly ! What if it should be '?

Mill. Scoff not, professional scoffer ! Even the
words ' objective ' and ' subjective ' may conceal a
definite meaning. Perhaps I shall put it in words
less open to the jests of the irreverent if I say con-
cretely that the writer who possesses style must
possess in more or less near approach to perfection
the power of fitting all varieties of matter to corre-
sponding varieties of manner, and that the writers
who do not display that power, great as many of them,
immortal as some of them are, are nothing other — I
shrink, in speaking of men so illustrious, from saying
nothing more — than magnificent mannerists. What
else "was Gibbon ? What else was Macaulay ?
What else Carlyle "? If fitness is a condition of ex-
cellence, what can be less excellent in their ridiculous
disparity with their subject-matter than some of
Gibbon's stately periods when the historian of the
Roman Empire is engaged upon a mean or common-
place portion of his subject. Or M^hat, by the same
test, can be less excellent than Macaulay's jerky sen-
tences in a passage of pure narrative ; or than Car-
lyle's violently elliptical manner where he has a ' case
to state ' ? Give Gibbon a great event to describe,

184

NEWSPAPERS AND ENGLISH

or even a ' solemn creed to sap,' and his constant
solemnity is well enough. Give Macanlay an inter-
esting individuality — a Tory statesman's for choice
— to analyse, and his crisp antithetic maimer is the
perfection of style, whatever historic trnth may have
to say to it, in relation to that particular subject-
matter. Give Carlyle a dramatic incident to relate,
or a picturesque figure to sketch, and his triumphs in
the qualities of vividness and beauty will make us
forget everything else in his writings that has ever
repelled us, and pronounce him, here, at any rate, the
greatest stylist that ever lived. But except in those
kinds of writing wherein each excels does style exist
for any one of the three ?

Scrip. Perhaps not. Yon are victoriously achiev-
ing the victory which your definitions have prepared
for you. tStyle, then, is nothing but the natural out-
come of a plastic intelligence quickly responsive to
every change of mood.

3Jin. Well ! Is that so very unworthy an account
of it?

Scrip. No, indeed. But I am forced to admit that
it is beyond the reacli of the humble writer in the
newspapers. Circumstances are not so kind as to
provide him with many of those changes of mood
whereby alone he could test the elasticity and adapt-
ability of his style. He is usually obhgcd to take the
moods the gods provide.

185

NEWSPAPERS AND ENGLISH

Mill. Let us go back, then, by all means to a
simpler matter. Let us begin with the element of
simplicity itself. Will you say that your beloved
newspapers

Scrip. Ml/ beloved newspapers !

Min. Yes, confectioner, I repeat the word. Your
beloved tarts ! Come ! the earlier nausea of surfeit is
not perpetual, and for the materials of his trade the
honest man contracts aa affection above the vulgarity
of relish. Will you say that your newspapers have
not done much to destroy, at any rate, the simplicity
of English written speech '?

Scrip. Will you say that they have ?

Mi7i. 1 will: I do. With the proviso, of course,
that I do not guarantee the soundness of every
separate count in the indictment. I will take the
gravest first. You are accused of neglecting and
despising the Saxon element in our language, and of
displaying an undue and pedantic preference for
Latin forms.

Scrip. What, tliat old friend ! 1 know now why
you said you would not guarantee the soundness of
every separate count in the indictment. It was, in-
deed, a prudent precaution. I don't expect to find
?/or{ pronouncing an educated approval of that vulgar
and ignorant charge.

Min. Since when has the advocate been bound
to back up his professional with his private opinion ?

186

NEWSPAPERS AND ENGLISH

You are called npou to plead, not to cross-examine.

Scrip. I plead, then, to the jurisdiction. I have
never yet met a man of those who assume to sit in
judgment on newspapers upon that charge, who was
philologically qualified for a seat on the bench. 1
have the gravest doubts whether many of those who
pretend to one are able to distinguish between a
Saxon and a Latin word.

Min. Oh ! come now !

Scrip. I have certainly often heard some of them
descanting upon the beauties of 'plain Saxon Eng-
lish,' in what was evidently a most happy uncon-
sciousness that one of the three words they were
using, and that the shortest and simplest, was
Latin.

Min. Yes; that, no doubt, was unfortunate. But
you hardly propose to contend, do you, that none of
those who repeat this charge possess any safer test of
the distinction between Saxon and Latin than these
worthy admirers of plaiuness were content with ?

Scrip. I do not propose to commit myself to any
sweeping contentions ; but I verily believe that if the
number of our censors who go by no other rule than
that monosyllables are Saxon and polysyllables Latin
or French, could be computed, the result would a
little weaken the force of their censures. Did I ever
tell you of au experiment v,''hich I once tried upon
one of these gentlemen with the view of ascertaining

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NEWSPAPERS AND ENGLISH

how far bis zeal for Saxon Englisli was accorcliug to
knowledge ?

Min. No, I think not.

Scrip. Well, it Avas on this wise. In illustration
of the superiority of the Saxon to the Latin element
in our language, I quoted to him the following
imaginary extract from an essay on the subject, and
invited him to note how the very style of the pas-
sage confirmed the truth of its contents : ' Our
English,' said the supposed essayist, 'shall be plain,
clear, pure: we will be brief; we will be simple; wq
will use no long words. Yet in English of this sort
there need be nothing common or vulgar. I have
known it to be noble, to be even grand.' My friend
was delighted with this specimen of homely Saxon,
as he called it — so delighted, indeed, that I had not
the heart to undeceive him : and in a moment of false
humanity I did him the cruel kindness of allowing
him to go away and quote it to more erudite persons
as a justification of his preferences in the matter of
English. ' p]nghsh,' indeed, is one of the few words
after his own heart — which it realhj contains. 'Words'
is another, and 'nothing' is another. But 3'ou, of
course, don't need to be told that, deducting what I
may call the mere bolts and rivets of the sentences
— the prepositions, pronouns, auxiliaries, etc. — my
piece of homely Saxon does not contain another
purely Saxon word. Plaia, clear, pure, simple Eug-

188

NEWSPAPERS AND ENGLISH

lisb, as it is, there is not oue other word in it which
we do not either get straight from the Latin, or
jointly derive, Teutonic and Latin together, from one
common root.

Min. Your trap Avas cunningly set, I grant ; or
would you rather 1 should say it was ingeniously
constructed, I concede 1 Come, Scriptorius, you must
allow, I think, that it is possible to weaken a phrase
by translating it from the Teutonic into the Latin,
and that those who have better means of distinguish-
ing between the two than by mere counting of sylla-
bles — though, mind, I don't altogether admit that
that is so very unsafe a test in the majority of cases
— are right as a rule in preferring the former to the
latter.

Scrip. They are right, of course, in preferring it
when it is the stronger: and provided also that

Min. But is it not generally the stronger ?

Scrii). Wait a moment. And provided also that
it satisfies your own condition of superior clearness
as well as of superior force. But it is in conciliating
these two requirements that the difficulty of choosing
between the Teutonic and the Latin is mainly felt.
Yet of this difficulty our Saxon-loving friends, who
are more often men whose pleasure it is to read
rather than men whose business it is to write, are
sublimely unconscious. Suppose I allow that the
shorter, simpler, homelier words are usually Teutonic

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NEWSPAPERS AND ENGLISH

and not Latin, and that these words, by reason, as I
believe, of certain associations which for the moment
I need not stop to notice, convey the more vivid
impression of the act or the thing described — what
then ? Vividness of presentment to the imagination
is not all that language has to provide for, though
'doubtless it is all that many writers think about ; it
has to provide for accuracy of presentment to the
thought. The instance you just now selected — or
rather created — is one upon which no difficulty could
arise; for the phrase you prefer has as much the
advantage in accuracy as in vigour. None but the
penniest of penny-a-liners would hesitate for an in-
stant between ' cunningly setting ' and ' ingeniously
adjusting' a trap, not only because the former phrase
more impresses the imagination, but because the
latter fails even to put the mind in full possession of
the thought. The artfulness of a trapper is not fully
expressed by the neutral word ingenuity ; it is in-
genuity directed to the capture of his prey ; and,
while the word ingeniously contains no suggestion
of the sinister purpose of his act, so the word in-
sidious, had you chosen that, would have contained
no adequate suggestion of its technical quality. But
the word ' cunningly ' imports both. Parenthetically,
however, please to remember, in abatement of your
pride of Saxonism, that its moral association is not
inherited, but acquired. The instance you have

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NEWSPAPERS AND ENGLISH

choseu is, as 1 have said, an instance in which no
difficulty of selection could possibly arise. And so,
to do only justice to their dexterity in illustration,
are most of the examples cited to prove the superi-
ority of plain Saxon.

Mill. Is that so ?

Scrip. Well, is it not so ? What do these gentle-
men ever try their Saxon hands upon by way of
showing their command of monosyllables, unless it
be the description of some daily scene, the account
of some most commonplace act, the expression of
some most familiar thought of life — scene, act, and
thought, for which the simple vocabulary of a child
suffices, and which no sensible adult would think of
describing in any other than the child's terms '? Pass
beyond the sphere of mere sensuous impression and
of the most elementary processes of thought — enter
that of conception, and still more that of ratiocina-
tion, and see how far your Saxon will carry you.

Min. A very little way, it would indeed seem.
Ratiocination is not a pretty word, is it ? not so neat
and compact as one could wish.

Scrip. It is certainly not a word for the waistcoat
pocket. As a word four syllables shorter, 1 should
much have preferred ' reasoning ' ; but then, 1 used
the longer word to illustrate my own point. Where
absolute exactitude is required, 'reasoning' will not
supply the place of 'ratiocination.' The former is

191

NEWSPAPERS AND ENGLISH

both ci process and a product ; the latter is a process
alone. Depend upon it that most of the men who
protest against the use of Greek words, Latin words,
and generally of every word over two syllables in
places where they contend that shorter synonyms
* will do,' are in fact ignorant of what will ' do,' and
what will not. They may have some taste in lan-
guage as a vehicle of sense, impression, and associa-
tion, but they are mostly quite incapable of consider-
ing it as an instrument for the precise expression of
thought. Long words in great numbers have an
ugly and affected look; no man who cares for ap-
pearances in writing would string together more of
them than he could help. But the high and mighty
censor who strides up and down your sentences with
a pen in his hand scoring out polysyllables wherever
he meets them is as often as not a mere presump-
tuous

Mhi. Stop ! He won't insist on any monosyllable
here, I'll be bound.

Scrip. Then I will end the sentence with ignor-
amus. As a quadrisyllable, and Latin after a fashion,
it may annoy him even more than the triliteral
Saxon. For no doubt he would regard 'ass' as
' plain ' Saxon, though it isn't.

Ilin. Well, go on. A presumptuous ignoramus.

Scrip. Yes ; as much so as the man who thinks
that if he were a parliamentary draftsman or a con-

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NEWSPAPERS AND ENGLISH

veyancer be could get a complex act of Parliament
into a score of clauses, aucl a declaratiou of trust
into as many lines. Our law, fortunately for the
public, does not permit him to try bis band at con-
densation in tbe former case ; in tbe latter case,
fortunately for tbe lawyers, it does.

Min. Your defence of tbe newspapers, Scrip-
torius, appears a curious one. So far as I can see,
it tends to sbow, not tbat tbey are free from tbe
faults alleged against tbem, but tbat tbose faults are
unavoidable. We are to understand, according to
you, it seems, tbat tbe newspaper-writer is neitber
brief nor simple, and, baving to express sucb migbtily
complex ideas, cannot be expected to be eitber. Is
tbat any reason, however, why his sentences should
see-saw for ever, pivoted on an ' and ' or a ' but,'
across tbe trunk of a semicolon till monotony itself
cries out upon them 1 Is that any reason why be
should never make a direct statement or a direct
denial, only 'venturing to believe' this, and 'per-
mitting himself to doubt ' tbe other'? Does it justify
bis perpetual formalities of ' with reference to,' ' with
respect to,' ' with regard to,' ' in connection with ' —
vile phrases, however excusable to men who seldom
write ' about ' a subject, but only ' about and about '
it ? And do the needs of this marvellous logical
accuracy which be endeavours to compass warrant
him in always rejecting the outdoor name of a thing

NEWSPAPERS AND ENGLISH

for that which seems to smell of the very leather of
the library '? in never preferring that word which still
retains the sharpness of its stamp and milling, to the
worn counter of language, as smooth, no doubt, and
as polished, but as lustreless and edgeless as an old
shilhng?

Scrip. Bravo, Miuutius ! You have actually con-
descended upon particulars at last, have you? The
charge, it is true, is getting slightly altered. The
coiner, it seems, is guilty of nothing worse than a
preference for coins which have seen most service.
And as to all your complaints of the monotony, the
circumlocution, the ' common form ' of newspapers,
why, faults of that kind seem hardly worth denounc-
ing as depravations of English style. They are
traceable, one and all, to defects in the journalist's
material. If the public have a fancy for huge doses
of politics daily, whether there is anything fresh to
say about them or not, how can those who gratify
this fancy avoid these faults ? How can he avoid
them who has to repeat what he has said a score of
times before ? and how dispense with circumlocution,
who has to eke out even that stale material ? As to
' common form,' pray consider its labour-saving value,
and don't forbid its use to men who have to write in
a hurry.

Mill. I really cannot see how all this differs from
confession. We both seem to agree that the style of

194

NEWSPAPERS AND ENGLISH

the newspaper-writer is mouotonoiis, cumbersome,
conventional, full of unmeaning stock phrases, a foe
to brevity and simplicity, unvarying in its preference
of the tamer to the more spirited word. We may
account for it in different manners, but we agree as
to the fact ; and how you can dispute, therefore, that
a newspaper is one huge repertory of the vices
which writers should avoid, and so a widely circu-
lating medium of literary demoralisation, I fail to
see.

Scrij). Suppose I were to convince you that the
faults which you complain of in the newspaper are
but the symptoms, exaggerated no doubt, but still
unmistakable, of one of those changes which lan-
guages at certain periods of their history are bound
to undergo, would you withdraw your charges then ?

Min. But do you really contemplate so vast an
undertaking .^

Scrij). 1 do.

Min. Then, my dear Scriptorius, 1 must really
wish you good morning. Some other day — some
21st of June, for choice— I should be only too de-
lighted ; but for the present I must forego the plea-
sure, and with your leave we will regard the present
discussion as a drawn game.

O 2

LUCIAN

Lord Byron, we know, was under the impression
that be hated Horace because that deh'ghtful classic
had been forced so uumercifnlly down his throat by
the instructors of his youth. The treatment of which
he complains and the implied patience of his submis-
sion to it are not strikingly in accord with the earlier
reputation either of the particular schoolboy or of
the particular school ; and one would like to have
interrogated a few of the noble poet's contemporaries
at Harrow on the point. But, assuming the fact to
have been as stated in the well-known stanza of
Chihie Harold, one may venture perhaps to dispute
the inference. The truth is that the belief which
Byron there avows is too suspiciously common to be
accepted with ready credence. The man who be-
lieves that only injudicious training at school has
spoilt a fine scholar in his person doth greatly
abound. A little less insistence on the stock Vir-
gilian criices, and he would never, he thinks, have

196

LUCIAN

contracted his self-defensive passion for that particu-
lar athletic exercise in which he has subsequently
achieved fame. A little more forbearance in the
matter of corrupt choruses, and he might have risen
on a masterly edition of ^schylus to the Bench of
Bishops, instead of becoming merely an ornament of
the Stock Exchange. Such pleasing illusions of
middle age it would be cruel to disturb, and humane
men for the most part treat them with respect. The
truth, however, in at least ninety-nine out of every
hundred such cases, is that the early blighted scholar
was not really any more disgusted with his youthful
experiences of the Greek and Latin tongues than was
the schoolfellow who has actually ripened into a pro-
fessor. It is an error to suppose that ' the rudi-
ments ' of anything can be made agreeable to
anybody, least of all to the young. What is true of
the dead languages is equally true of the immortal
game of cricket. Many excellent men of mature
years no doubt entertain the firm conviction that
they would probably have ' played for the Gentle-
men' if compulsory 'fagging out' had not early
inspired them with a distaste for the noble game.
They fail to explain how it is that the cricketer who
has risen through his public school and university
elevens to the deathless honour of being one of
eleven amateurs selected to do battle with the Aus-
tralians did his ' scouting ' too as a boy, and hated

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LUCIAN

it : hated it at the time perhaps as much as many a
now accompHshed scholar detested his Latin acci-
dence and his Greek irregnlar verbs.

No ; there is not often much in the complaint that
the steady and tiresome drill to which the raw recruit
of scholarship has to submit disgusts him out of all
capacity for appreciating those beautiful and stately
evolutions of thought and language which that
training alone enables him to follow. Those who
do not care for these things in mature years never
would have cared for them, however their boyhood
had been spent ; and those who do care for them
know well how much of their pleasure they owe to
the slow and laborious transit of their boyhood
through the mill of the gerund-grinder. It will at
any rate hardly be contended, I think, that the keenest
sensibihty to the charm of the classical masterpieces
is to be found (except in one such instance out of a
thousand as that of Keats) in the man who has made
his first acquaintance with them as an adult ; though^
according to the theory I have been examining, he
certainly ought to enjoy them the most. Keats, as
we know, has imperishably recorded his emotions
on first hearing ' Chapman speak out loud and bold '
(and one may add with a freedom amounting to
Hcence) in his translation of Homer. The poet felt
hke stout Cortez surveying the Pacific from a peak
in Darien ; but that was because he ivas a poet. And

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LUCIAN

though 1 do not for a moment suggest that the
average schoolboy feels at all like stout Cortez on
first looking into the Iliad or the Odyssey in the
original, I suspect that the like effect of Chapman's
translation upon an average adult would be every bit
as rare. The truth is that not only the vast Pacific
of the Homeric poems, but even such a smaller matter
as the sunny Archipelago of the Horatian Odes, by
no means breaks upon most of us in the form of a
sudden revelation. It is oulj' by a gradual dispersion
of the veiling mists of language, accompanied by as
gradual an education of the imaginative eye, that
most of us ever attain to any clear view of these
great sights at all ; and, other things being equal, he
whose faculty of literarj- vision has had the longest
training is likely to see thein best.

But though 1 do not admit that the strictly critical,
or even the minutely grammatical study of the Latin
and Greek classics which is or was exacted from
schoolboys before they are or were of an age to ap-
preciate the literary excellence of those works is
really responsible for the consequences sometimes
sought to be attached to it, I would not go so far as
to deny that Englisli scholastic traditions may some-
what too rigidly prescribe the selection of text-books.
I would not take upon me to maintain that they con-
cede as much as they might to that natural desire of
the student for what ho can understand and in a

199

LUCIAN

great measure appreciate at the moment ; and that
they do as much as they might in the way of supply-
ing him with that most potent of all incentives to the
study of a language, a lively interest in the subject-
matter of the work in which that language is being
studied. Such a reflection presses with peculiar im-
portunity upon a lover of Lucian. How comes it, he
is apt to ask himself, that so many schoolboys have
been breaking their teeth for generations past over
' craggy ' bits of Thucydides, or plodding along un-
interested through the lonicisms of the Father of
Histor}^ while Lucian's delightful dialogues, abound-
ing, even for those who are too young to relish their
inimitable satire, with the fascination of dramatic life
and movement, have been permitted to slumber on
the pedagogic shelves ? For a slumber to all intents
and purposes it has been, since it was never worth
while to have disturbed the neglected humourist for
the mere sake of the snippets of dialogue which I
recollect as helping to furnish forth the school
Analecta of forty years ago. Why should not our
schoolmasters have put their sixth forms through the
whole three sets of dialogues — the Dialogues of the
Gods, of the ISea Gods, and of the Dead, together
with Zeus the Tragedian, the Tcaro-Menippus, the Vera
Historia, and perhaps one or two other pieces ?
Why, above all, should not the University of Oxford
have long since opened the door of Moderations (let

200

LUCIAN

US hope it has done so by this time) to Lucian, as an
author who may be ' taken in ' to the schools as a
whole? What indeed has excluded him? Not his
unorthodoxy surely, for that can hardly shock anyone
but a Polytheist. Not his Greek, for it is excellent,
a genuine Platonic revival, in the literary instead of
the philosophical sense — a revival effected by that
best of revivalists, the writer who has saturated him-
self with the thought and style of the original. And
its stimulating power for a student of the under-
graduate age would of course be much greater than
it is for the schoolboy who, though he is or should
be able to understand and appreciate a straight-
forward joke, is hardly at home with irony of the
graver kind. Why should not schoolboys be in-
troduced to the True History^ earliest of essays in the
humorous-imaginative, archetype of so many a later
effort of satiric fancy, founder of the family of w^hich
the immortal Captain Lemuel Gulliver is the most il-
lustrious son ? Or why not to the Icaro-Menippus, that
ironical Sindbad whose aerial flight on the borrowed
■wings of an eagle and a vulture would surely be as
full of narrative charm even for the youngest reader
as his sardonic survey of our auts'-uest of an earth
is full of philosophic pungency for the adult ? Many
of us have found it difficult to determine whether the
delights of Gulliver are greater for the young than
for the old — greater for those to whom Lihputiaus

201

LUCIAN

and Brobdingnagians are merely creatures of a new
and wonderful world in no allegorical relations
with our own, or to those who are of an age to
understand its inner meaning, and to wonder at the
triumphant art by which every fresh stroke of the
fancy is made to drive home the barb of the satire.
Lucian as a satirist is not of course to be compared
with Swift, but he possesses Swift's rare power of
combining the fascinating story-teller with the grave
humoiu'ist ; and, minor as is the degree in which he
exhibits this combination, it is sufficient to give him
an absolutely unique place among the writers of the
ancient world.

Let me here remark that in the foregoing sentence
' grave ' is the emphatic word. There is nothing
\7hich so pointedly distinguishes Lucian from all his
predecessors, Greek or Latin, in the field either of
poetic or pedestrian satire — nothing which more
brings him into such close kindred with the greatest
satirists of modern times, than the invincible gravity
of his manner. It is this which makes his elaborate
and pertinacious ridicule of the Polytheistic legends
in his Dialogues of the Gods and of the Dead so
curiously effective. Unlike Voltaire, with whom he
is often, though not always i think judiciously, com-
pared, he never allows himself to interpolate any
irrelevant witticism of his own in his exposure of the
mythical absurdities of the decaying creed at which

^^ 202

LUCIAN

be mocked. Dramatic propriety is always strictly
maintained. His Zeus, his Hera, his Aphrodite, his
Hermes, are the Zeus, Hera, Aphrodite, Hermes of
the ' ages ol' faith.' The admirable comedy of their
presentment is produced and preserved by the simple
but essentially artistic device of exhibiting these sur-
vivals of a childlike and unmoral period of human
thought in all their gross and glaring repugnancy to
the intelligence of a refined and cultivated and
sceptical era. The amours of Jove, the jealousies of
his consort, the miraculous births of Minerva and
Bacchus, are recounted or commented upon in a
demurely matter-of-fact fashion which is infinitel}'
more efFectivo for the purpose than the broadest
burlesque. In so far as we may regard Lucian as
writing with a dehberately rationalistic purpose, he
could not have adopted a better method.

But it is a mistake, I think, of the over-serious in
all ages to suppose that this deliberately ratiouaHstic
purpose was always present to Lucian's mind. He
was a born scoffer — not merely at holy or reputedly
holy things, but at all things profane as well as
sacred. For instance, much superfluous ingenuity
has been expended on the question as to which, if
any, school of philosophy Lucian belonged, the
worthy debaters of this question having been greatly
exercised in their minds by his indiscriminate ridicule
of every philosophy without exception in the Auction

203

LUCIAN

of Lives. Of course the simple explanation of the
puzzle is that he avus a humourist first and a
philosopher afterwards. Such preferences as he
might have for any particular philosophical systems
would not iu the least have prevented him from
sharpening his wit upon them, and might indeed
have very likely induced him to give it a keener
edge. He says of Alexander the Impostor, in his
vivid sketch of that singular charlatan, that of all
philosophers he hated Epicurus the most. ' As well
he might,' adds Lucian, with honest Avarmth. ' For
with whom else should a juggler, a sham miracle-
monger, and a truth-hater more rightly Avage war
than with Epicurus, the philosopher who has pene-
trated into things, and alone among men discovered
their hidden truth?' Yet the Epicurean iu the
Auction of Lives is knocked down for a couple of
mina3 — only a little more than eight pounds English I
If it be asked how Ave knoAV that this is a .poor price
for a philosopher, the answer is that Socrates is
bought by Dio of Syracuse for four hundred and
eighty-seven pounds tea shillings ; that even
Pythagoras, AA'ho is the most unmercifully ridiculed
of all, goes for 0A*er forty pounds; and that if the
Cyrenaic has to be -reserved,' it is not so much
because of the moral defects of his theory as be-
cause of the costliness of reducing it to practice.
' You Avill have,' says a half-intending bidder

204

♦ LUCIAN

candidly, ' to look about for a wealthier purchaser. I
am simply not in a position to buy the " merry life " of
this philosophy.' ' It looks, Zeus,' observes Hermes,
' as if this lot would remain on our hands.' ' Let him
stand on one side,' replies the Father of gods and
men promptly, 'and put up another.' Whereupon
Democritus and Heraclitus take their places on the
stand to be sold ' in one lot ;' and as I find it im-
possible to get away from the Auction of Lives with-
out an attempt at Englishing its excellent drolleries,
I shall take leave to give a brief extract (freely
paraphrased where the jest is untrauslateable) from
Lucian's report of the proceedings.

' Hermes. Come forward, if you please, you two. I have here
two most excellent Lives to offer. We put them up as the wisest
of them all.

' Buyer. Good heavens, what a contrast ! One of them is
continually laughing ; while the other has apparently lost a friend,
for he is as incessantly weeping. What does it all mean ? You,
sir, 1 am addressing. What are you laughing at?

'Democritus. What am I laughing at? What a question!
Why, at the ridiculous human race and their ridiculous affairs.'

' B. What ? You are laughing us and our affairs to scorn ?

' Z>. Most assuredly. There is nothing serious about them.
Vanity are they all : a rush of atoms through the infinite void.

' D. Vanity yourself ! You and the infinite void you have got
in your head. Still laughing, eh ? What impudence ! But you
my good sir, to whom it seems better to address myself , — what are
you weeping for ?

' Heraclitus. My friend, I regard all the affairs of men as
miserable and tear-worthy, and wretched in their subjection to
death. That is why T pity and weep over them. I have but a

205

LUCIAN

small opiniou of the j)rescnt, and the fixture I regard as absolute-
ly dreadful— a future of conflagration and cosmic catastrophe. I
lament, too, that there is no fixity or stability anywhere, but
that things are whirled round as if they were in a barley-
stirabout — pain and pleasure, knowledge and ignorance, the great
and the little, dancing up and down and changing places, — a sort
of a puss-iu-the-coruer of Eternity.

'£. What is Eternity?

' H. Eternity? A schoolboy at play with his draught-board,
or wrangling with his school-mates.

' B. What then are men ?

' H. Men are mortal gods.

' B. And gods ?

' H. Immortal men.

' B. You repeat riddles, sir, or you are yourself an inventor of
conundrums. You are as obscure as Apollo himself.

' H. I care nothing for you.

' B. Indeed. Then no sensible man will buy you.

' H. Weep all of you, from youth upwards. Buyers or not,
I adjure you all to weej).

' B. This gentleman's complaint does not widely differ from
melancholy. I shall not buy either of them.

' Herm. Again, an unsold lot !

' Zeus. Put up another.'

Aucl Socrates is theu brought forward to be valued
by Lucian (who certainly knew his Plato well, and
must have admired him) with an amount of irrever-
ence wliich would of itself suffice to show that there
was no malice or even serious purpose in this par-
ticular jest.

And so, J am persuaded, it often is with Lucian.
It is no doubt true enough that where the specific
Polytheistic faith is a gross or demorahzing one, he

206

LUCIAN

may have been inspired to his ridicule of it by some
contemptuous indignation at the thought that the
vulgar beheved it; but in much the larger majority
of cases there is no trace of any such feeling. This
distinction is plainly to be seen in his dealing vrith
the nether world. No doubt he was as desiroui? as
Lucretius to discredit the belief in Hades as a place of
material torment; as for instance in the curious
dialogue between Menippus and Tantalus, in which
the Cynic, after pointing out with admirable good
sense to the Phrygian king that having no body
he could not possibly thirst, proceeds to dispose
of what were evidently contemporary efforts to
spiritualize the meaning of the pagan legend. But
when the myth was mere harmless poetry, — such for
example as that of the Charon and his ferry-boat, of
whom and which Lucian makes such continual fun,
— it is unnecessary to suppose that the pleasantries
were meant to be particularly hostile. It is indeed
unhkely that a writer who had his Homer literally
at his fingers' end, with a line from the Iliad or
(Mijssey ready for every possible occasion, and who
dearly appreciated the poetic beauty of those immor-
tal ballads, should, as some commentators would ap-
parently have us believe, have deliberately set to work
to bring the poet into contempt. Much more reason-
able is it to suppose that it Avas simply the strong
instinct of burlesque which impelled Lucian to bring

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LUCIAN

out for more mirth's sake the anthropomorpbic side
of the religious legeucl, which he himself does not
scruple to employ, allegorically of course, for the
serious purposes of liis ofteu profound satire on the
vanities of human life. He quite sees, for instance,
as the Charon dialogue shows, how much might be
made in the serious vein out of the old ferryman of
the Styx ; but that does not prevent him from getting
fun out of a matter-of-fact application of the legend
which makes him receive a toll from the dead for
ferrying them over, and represents him as ' in account
with ' Mercury for goods supplied. The quaint com-
mercial gravity of the short dialogue between the
two on that subject could evidently have had no
didactic afterthought of any kind.

' Herm. Let us go through our accouuts, if you please, Mr.
Ferryman, and see at once what you owe me, in order to prevent
disputes hereafter.

' Char. Let us go through them, by all means, Hermes ; it will
be better to ascertain them at once and save future trouble.

' H. Yqvy well, then. To one anchor, procured by me to your
order, five drachm eg.

' Ch. A stiff price !

' H. It's what I had to give, though, by Pluto ; five drachmae,
no less. Then the oar-thoug, two obols.

' Ch. Right. Put down five drachma} and two obol?.

' H. And a darning-needle for the sail. That I had to give five
obols for.

' Ch. Down with the five obols.

' H. And wax for stopping leaks, and nails, and the rope you
made a brace of — two drachmae the lot.

' Ch. Good ; you got those a bai'gaiu.

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LUCIAN

* H. Well, that is all, unless something has escaped my memory.
And now, when are you going to pay up ?

' Ch. At present, Hermes, I regret to say I am not in a position
to do so. Times are too bad. If a good plague now, or a war,
were to send me down a crowd of passengers, I might turn an
honest penny on the whole number of them by cooking the
accounts of the fares.

' H. Then I suppose I must sit down and hope for the worst, —
that I may get my debt paid out of these calamities.

' Ch. I am afraid there is no help for it. You see yourself
what business is like : how few arrivals there are. These are the
piping times of peace.

' H. Well, 'tis better so, even if it does somewhat delay the
payment of my debt. But think of the old times, Charon. You
remember in what sort of plight the men of those days used to
come down to us — sturdy fellows all, bathed in blood most of
them, or riddled with wounds. But nowadays it is some one who
has been dcsed out of the world by a wife or a son, or who has
swollen himself to death, by way of stomach and lips, with glut-
tony — pallid miserable wretches, not to compare with their fore-
fathers. Most of them, to judge by their appearance, find their
way here through plotting to get each other's money.

' Ch. Yes, 'tis an article in considerable request.

' H. To be sure ; but how then could you blame me if I were
sternly to demand payment of my debt ?'

The iconoclastic satirist — the writer who sets him-
self to ' sap a creed,' whether ' solemn ' or not, even
with a sneer which is not solemn but lively — is not
as a rule a very attractive personality. Many worthy
people, quite capable of admiring his extraordinary
and many-sided genius, have never succeeded in tak-
ing Voltaire thoroughly to their hearts. Even the
tolerant Charles Lamb admitted just so much want
of sympathy with the brilliant Frenchman as is im-

LUCIAN

plied in the remark that he would not care to ' read
Candide in a church.' But I cannot understand any-
one reading the works of Lucian — dialogues, rhetorical
exercises, burlesques, romance, or what not — intelli-
gently and appreciatively, and feeling anything of
that kind of half-repugnance which, even while he
dazzles, the scoffer at the religious weaknesses of his
fellows excites in so many minds. To my thinking he
is saved from that by a thorough geniality of humour
which in most of the scoffers, and in the very greatest
of them all, is almost or altogether wanting. No
one, I should think, could read the charming little
autobiographical sketch which he has left us in the
Dream (would that many another by many another
hand of ancient times had been written and had sur-
vived !) without feehug attracted to the man who
wrote it. The touch is so light, the style so frank
and unaffected, that one cannot imagine the author
to have been other than a good fellow.

Lucian adds another to that tolerably numerous
list of great names in literature whose owners had
been destined in the parental counsels for quite a
different walk in life. His account of this matter is
delightful. He was the son of parents in poor cir-
cumstances, and when he had reached his fifteenth
year his father was advised by friends of the family,
officious in all ages, to take him from school and ap-
prentice him to his uncle, a statuary — probably not

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in a very flourishing way of business, but who at any
rate, as did many more distinguished artists then and
since, combined the profession of the sculptor wit!i
something like the handicraft of a working mason —
the scheme was thought the more hopeful because
the youth was supposed to have shown a turn for
art. In his play hours, he says, ' I had been accus-
tomed to model oxen, horses, or even, heaven save
the mark ! men, out of wax, and as my father thought,
cleverly. I was caned for my performances by my
master, but still they obtained me the praise of native
genius, and my plastic dexterity raised good hopes
that I should speedily master my art.' To his maternal
the uncle's studio or workshop accordingly was
little Lucian sent, thinking with what pride he would
bear himself before his school-fellows when he could
model gods, or portraits of himself or of whomsoever
he pleased among them. His uncle began by giving
him a chisel, and bidding him use it gently on a
marble slab before him, sententiously delivering him-
self at the same time of the gnome that the ' begin-
ning is half of the whole.' The beginning in the
youthful apprentice's case was more than half of the
whole: it was the whole itself. Bearing too hard
upon the instrument, Lucian broke the slab which he
had been set to polish, and the indignant statuary
caught up a leathern thong which lay near him, and
administered chastisement in ' no very mildly 'per-

LUCIAN

snasive manner, so that tears were my introduction
to art. I ran home choldng with sobs, and over-
flowing with tears ; and there I recited the pathetic
story of the thong and showed my stripes, and com-
plained of the great cruelty of my uncle,' adding
(this is a delicious touch), 'that it was due to his
envious fear of my excelhug him in his art. My
indignant mother heaped reproaches upon her brother,
and I rethed still in tears to my bed, there to pass a
night of sleepless cogitation.'

Thus far, continues Lucian, who evidently com-
posed and delivered the Dream as a lecture, perhaps
to an audience of his own fellow-citizens of Samosata,
after his return from his travels, ' I have been re-
counting to you merely ridiculous and boyish inci-
dents ; but what follows, gentlemen, [the co avSpe<;
stamps the character of the piece,] is not to be as
lightly accounted.' And what does follow is the
finely-told story of a vision, in which Paideia and
Techu^ (Learning and Handicraft) contend for him
like Virtue and Vice for Hercules in the Fable of
Prodicus. Handicraft was ' dressed in artisan's garb,
a masculine-looking, shock-headed, horny-handed
creature, covered with marble dust, hke my uncle at
the stone-polishing work.' Her rival Avas fair to look
upon, graceful of figure and comely of dress. Handi-
craft, who is the first to address Lucian, warns him
not to condemn her for her squaHd appearance, ' since

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LUCIAN

from such beginnings came Phidias who revealed
Zeus to the world, and Polycletus who wrought the
Hera, and the much-praised Mj^ron and Praxiteles
the wonderful — men who are now honoured next to
the gods/ Learning, however, reminds him that
everybody cannot be a Phidias or a Praxiteles, and
that even those who admire the art of those masters
do not envy them the actual practice of their calling ;
and Learning wins the day. Lucian quitted the
workshop for ever, and rose, as he tells his audience,
to fame and fortune by letters. And he concludes
his lecture with the moral, possibly of doubtful wis-
dom in those days as in these, that youth should
always follow the supposed bent of its genius, and
Avith the moral no more doubtful in those days than
in these, that the mere dread of poverty ought not
alone to be sufficient to deter him from following
it.

From the date of this fortunate accident at his
uncle's— how thankful we ought to be that the mar-
ble slab was not a little more tough, or the leathern
thong a little less so ! — until some thirty years later,
that is to say from about 135 a.d. to about IGo A.D.,
Lucian led the wandering life of the sophistes, or paid
rhetorician, of those days. In his twentieth year, or
four years after quitting his native Syria, he seems to
have visited Greece, and to have made the acquaint-
ance of the Platonic philosopher Nigrinus, who gives

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the title to one of the dialogues. Other passages
from his writings — for it is, of course, from these
alone that our scanty knowledge of his life has been
built up — shov/ that he practised for some time at the
bar in Antioch, but abandoned the profession of the
law in disgust at the dishonesty of its practitioners ;
that he visited Rome in about his thirtieth year ; that
from Italy he passed into Southern Gaul, where he
remained to exercise his calling of rhetorician, or pub-
lic lecturer, for some ten years ; that thence he re-
turned to his native place ; and that j&nally, about
the age of forty-five, he migrated with the surviving
members of his family to Athens, where he passed
nearly the whole of the remainder of his life. All
that is further known of him is the curious and inter-
esting fact that at an advanced age his circumstances
became reduced ; that he was only saved from poverty
by the timely interference of some imperial patron —
which of the Roman emperors it was is not quite cer-
tain — and that the most famous writer of his age and
country died a judicial sinecurist. He was appointed
to the clerkship or registrarship of the law-courts of
Alexandria, the duties of which office he delegated to
a deputy, so that he was enabled to spend the re-
mainder of his life in comfort at Athens.

His defence of himself was characteristic. He had
in one of his earlier satirical pieces somewhat bitterly
criticized those of his order who accepted the posi-

LUCIAN

tiou of salaried dependent in the houses of the rich ;
and after accepting the sinecure ofiSce from the
Emperor he composed an Apology, addressed to his
friend Sabinus, in which he pointed out how vevy
different a case was his from that of those whom he
had assailed with his satire.

' In my present capacity,' he argues, ' I remain an independent
man ; while my public office is one of great honour and authority.
Practically I administer a large share of the Imperial government
in Egypt. I grant judicial decrees. I fix the order of judicial pro-
ceedings, and see to the keeping of their records. I arrange and
regulate the pleadings of litigants, and I look after the registration
and faithful prosecution of the edicts of the Sovereign. Further
you must remember that my emoluments come to me not from a
Ijrivate individual, but from the Emperor, and that they are very
handsome ; and that the post gives good hopes of leading to fur-
ther advancement.'

And he humorously goes on to argue that since the
Emperor himself did not scruple to receive very splen-
did douceurs in the shape of dedicatory shrines and
statues, and other material as well as moral forms of
gratification, over and above the regular revenues,
a humble citizen might certainly be excused for
following his example at a properly respectful
distance.

Luciau, as his latest translator observes — and it is
another point of justification for the well-worn com-
parison between him and Voltaire — displayed an
extraordinary versatiUty of talent. ' He is almost
encyclopedic,' says one of his translators, 'in the

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LUCIAN

extent and rarity of bis productions. He was critic,
moralist, philosopher, politician, poet, romancist,
litterateur.' It is strange that Mr. Williams should
have left out the title by which he is the best known
to posterity — that of satirist ; and indeed to the clas-
sification of ' romancist ' he might have added with
but a slight deviation from technical accuracy that
of dramatist also, for Lucian's dramatic gift is as-
suredly conspicuous in all his dialogues. His personw
are not, as Landor's in most cases almost avowedly
and designedly were, mere mouthpieces for the ex-
position of his own views. They are almost always
distinct and individualized. Examples of this abound
in the Dialogues of the Gods : an excellent instance
of it appearing in the scene between Hermes, Paris,
and the three goddesses who compete for the prize
of beauty. Nothing could be more delicate and skil-
ful than the discrimination with which the varying
characters of the three divine ladies are hit off. The
spiteful jealousy of Hera is particularly well brought
out in her apparently innocent suggestion, on reach-
ing Mount Ida, that Aphrodite should go first and
show the way, having familiarized herself, ' they do
say,' with the locality by her frequent visits to Au-
chises. Much of the same power of dramatic char-
acterization is displayed in the exceedingly droll
colloquy between Zeus and Hera on the subject of
the misconduct of Ixion, a piece in which a con-

216

LUCIAN

temporary critic has well noted ' the admirable dis-
tinction of the reprobate masculine humour of one
speaker from the feminine, though highly creditable,
incapacity to appreciate humour in the latter.'
Lucian's highest effort of comedy, however, is his
Zeus tlie Tragedian — the scene of the meeting
convened by the uneasy father of the gods to con-
sider the grave question of the dechne in mortal
reverence which the Olympian family had recently
undergone, and the best measures to be taken for
stemming the tide of infidelity. The deeper satire of
the piece is excellent, but not less so in its way is the
broad Aristophanic fun of the ceremony of convoca-
tion and of the arrangement of the delicate question
of precedence. Hermes, as master of the ceremonies,
as well as usher (a sort of combination of Gold Stick
and Black Rod) is directed by Zeus to seat the gods
as they arrive, according to rank as fixed either by
material or art : the Golden in the front rank, the
Silver next, then the Ivory, and lastly the Bronze and
Marble ones. Among these last art might be taken
into account, and precedence was to be given to the
gods of Phidias, Alcamenes, Myron and Euphranor ;
but the tag-rag and bob-tail, who have no pretensions
either to beauty of workmanship or intrinsic value,
are to take back seats, and be content to figure as
silent members. Upon this follows an admirable bit
of character. Mercury, as the patron of art, cannot

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LUCIAN

readily bring himself to assign such importance to
mere material costliness. How, he asks, if some of
these many hundred-weighted golden fellows be of
wretched workmanship, out of taste and proportion,
glaringly vulgar and plebeian? Are they to have
the pas of the bronzes of Myron, Polycletus, and
Phidias, and the marbles of Alcamenes ? Or should
Dot art by rights have the precedence ? ' By rights,
yes,' replies Jupiter ; « but still,' he adds, like the
thorough man of the world he is, ' it must be given
to gold.' This double-edged stroke of satire, which
at once hits an ignoble trait in human character and
the common weakness of anthropomorphism in all
human religions, is delivered by a master-hand.

Lucian's intimate and at the same time genially
tolerant knowledge of human nature is indeed con-
spicuous throughout his Avritiugs, and in none more
so, perhaps, than in the Hetasric Dialogues. The
gallery of female portraits through which one passes
in the series of conversations is not exactly an edify-
ing one, but only one or two of its presentments are
properly speaking unpresentable. For the rest it is
au extremely interesting procession, in which one
hardly knows whether to admire more the force and
truth with which Lucian has set forth some of the
eternal generic types of female character, or the skill
with which he has contrived to discriminate, through
a series of no fewer than fifteen dialogues, between

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LUCTAN

their specific illustrations. The lightness of touch
which he displays in these portions of his work he
owed no doubt in some measure to his training and
practice as a rhetorician. His purely rhetorical
exercises (mere fantasias, of course, as they now and
then arej are still worthy of study as something more
than mere old-world literary curiosities. We need not
suppose with Wieland that his Encomium on a Fly
was an impromptu recitation in order to feel plenty
of admiration for the grace and spirit with which the
little trifle is worked out.

It is of course, however, unnecessary to say that on
this side of Lucian's encyclopsedic genius he is
naturally the furthest removed from modern sym-
pathies. Nowadays we have nothing like — or at any
rate nothing avowedly, even if we have anything in-
tentionally, like — the rhetorical exercise of a travel-
ling lecturer of the second century of the Christian
era. It is extinct as a literary form ; and of course
the place of an ancient writer in modern estimation
will be fixed by the work which he has left behind
him in those forms which have proved imperishable.
In such forms, however, lies the bulk of Lucian's
work. It is in satire — the department of his pro-
ductions which Mr. Williams has so siragularly
omitted to specify in the foregoing list — that Lucian
has most clearly established his claim to a
place among the great writers of all time : not

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LUCIAN

of course in theological satire alone, or even
principally, though it is to that branch of his satiric
work that most attention has been given by the
world at large, aad perhaps 'even by the narrower
world of scholars. For though he lives and will live
as a satirist in a,ll acceptations, particular as well as
general, of the term, he will not live so surely, or at
any rate not so justly, for his witty raillery at a dying
superstition, as for the broad philosophic disdain with
which he contemplates human life in the man. His
topics are of course and necessarily those which have
been the commonplaces of satire in all ages — the
vanity of wealth and power, the self-torment of
avarice and ambition, the folly and pretension of
human philosophies, the dream-stuff of life itself.
Every satirist that ever lived has had his say on
these matters ; but it is only a few of the very great-
est who have handled them with such command as
Luciau. His eye and hand are unerring. It matters
not what is the dramatic stand-point which for the
moment he has selected. It matters not whether, as
in the Icaro-Menippus, he gazes down from his airy
height on this swarming ant-hill of humanity ; or
whether, as in the Dialogues of the under-world, he
looks up at us through the purged eyes of the dead ;
there is always the Shakespearean breadth of vision
though not of course the Shakespearean fiuahty of
touch. One of the masterpieces in satire of this widely-

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LUCIAN

reaching order is his Timon the Misanthrope — a piece
■which is doubly interesting from the fact of its deal-
ing with a subject which has been also treated, if
only perhaps as a reconstruction of the work of
others, by Shakespeare himself. Whence Shake-
speare took his Timon is doubtful, and whether the
play which bears that name was founded upon and
contains the inferior matter of some other dramatists,
we know not ; but one thing is certain, that the
Timon of Shakespeare is not that mere vulgar
Thersites, the Timon of Plutarch, and that it is,
at least in many of its more striking and dignified
traits, the Timon of Lucian. There is little or no
probability of Shakespeare's having seen Lucian's
Dialogue, even in a translation ; but the coincidences
of action alone between the dialogue and the drama
are far too remarkable to be fortuitous. The Dia-
logue opens, indeed, with the very second scene of
Act iv., where the ruined Timon is discovered dig-
ging ; and though there is a strong dash of Lucian's
habitual burlesque in his hero's bitterly ironical in-
vocation of Zeus, the note of seriousness is struck al-
most immediately afterwards, and is maintained to
the end. The response of the father to the noisy out-
cry of this beggared dupe of the sycophant and the
sponge has a certain Olympian majesty about it.
' Who is this, Hermes, that shouts to us thus out of
Attica from beside the base of Hymettus? Yort

221

LUCIAN

squalid wretch in the garment of skins. See ! he who
stoops as though to dig. A prating fellow that, and
a daring one ; some philosopher belike ; for no one
else would have vented such a torrent of impious
words !' Hermes replies that it is Timon the sou of
Echecratides, the rich man who once feasted them
with so many hecatombs, but who had been brought
to ruin by the parasites upon whom he had wasted
his wealth.

' Whilst these vultures were preying upou his liver, he thought
them his best frieutls, and that they fed upon him out of pure
love and affection. But they, after having picked his bones ac-
curately clean, and diligently sucked out any marrow they could
find in him, took their departure, leaving him withered and cut
down to the very roots, and, so far from assisting him in their
turn, declined either to recognize or look at him — for why should
they f Thus it is that, spade in hand, and in skin garments, he
digs for hire, ashamed to show himself in the city, and melan-
choly mad with his troubles ; since those who have fattened on
him now pass him haughtily by, as though they knew not his verj'
name, whether it be Timon or no.'

Jupiter then resolves to despatch Hermes and
Plutus to bestow new wealth on Timon — a command
which the god of riches very reluctantly obeys,
urging that if he returns to the spendthrift he will
only become once more the prey of parasites and
courtesans. On their way to earth the two gods
discuss mankind and their employment of wealth in
a vein of the keenest satire; and, reaching Timon at
last, they find him working with his spade, in com-

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LUCIAN

pany with Labour, Wisdom, and Courage— attend-
ants, according to their invariable wont, in the train
of Poverty. Poverty, on learning their errand,
complains bitterly.

' Would you take from me,' she asks, ' the man whom I re-
ceived from Luxury in sucli miserable plight, aud whom I handed
over to Labour aud "Wisdom to turn into the man of dignity and
worth that you behold? Are you, Plutus, to rob me of him, and
to give him back again to Arrogance aud Vanity, in order that
they may reconvert him into the creature of effeminacy and folly
that he was before, aud that yet again he may return to me, this
time a worthless rag ?'

Timon, liowever, rejects the offer which Plutus
makes him, and the gods leave him, desiring him to
continue digging. He does so, and finds gold ; and
the fine outburst of cynicism with which he greets
the discover}'- should be compared with the parallel
passage in Shakespeare (Act iv., sc. 3), in which the
same incident occurs, if we w^ant to appreciate at
once the resemblance between the Timons of Lucian
and Shakespeare, and the difference between his two
delineators in point of imaginative wealth. It is clear
that the incident of the gold-finding, and of the
insults which the finder heaps upon his returning
parasites, must have been derived by Shakespeare
from some writer or other who had seen the Timon
of Lucian ; and no less clear is it to all who can re-
cognize Shakespeare's hand that none other man,
living or dead, could have helped him to the fiercely

223

LUCTAN

passionate rhapsody wliich follows. Luciaii had
nothing, of course, of Shakespeare's torrent-flow of
imagination. The thought of the discovered trea-
sure does not bring all the multitudinous powers of
gold in a rush of imagery before his eyes. Lucian's
Timon turns at once to the thought of the use that
he will make of it in gratifying his eternal enmity
towards his race ; but the passage is one of great
power and even solemnity, and ma}- stand as one of
the finest specimens of Lucian's serious manner.

' I will purchase the whole of this sequestered spot, aucl hereon
I will build me a tower, to keep my gold, to house myself and
none other, and to serve me for a tomb when I am dead. And
from thenceforth let my rule and law of life be this : To shun all
men, to know no man, to despise all ; to treat the name of friend,
of guest, of comrade, of the shrine of Pity herself, as an empty
sound. Let compassion for the unhappy, or succour for the
needy, be as the violation of law, and as the dissolution of morals.
Be my life solitary as the wolf's, and Timou alone be Timon's
friend. Let all other men be to me as foes and betrayers. Let
converse with them be pollution ; and the sight of them make
the day accursed.'

And in this strain he runs on in a sort of grim
parody of the style of his Psepldsma, winding up
with a ' decreed by us, Timon the son of Echecratides,
and confirmed by us the aforesaid Timon of the deme
of Colyttos.' He goes on to declare, almost in the very
words quoted with too painful a suspicion of a false
quantity by Shakespeare, that the name by which
he would most like to be called is that of misan-

224

LUCIAN

thropos. But the whole dialogue should, as 1 have
said, be read together with the play ; and, if the
comparison leaves the eminence of the great Master
of all time as unapproachable as ever, it can never-
theless hardly fail to show (and this is all that
can ever be shown of any man) that more than one,
or even two, of the Master's vast array of gifts was
possessed, and in no insignificant measure, by Lucian
of Samosata.

THE REVOLUTION IN GRUB STREET

A BOSWELLIAN FRAGMENT

Some days ago I accepted
for Dr. Johnson and myself an invitation to a Lon-
don spirit-party, at which a very distinguished author
was to be among the corporeal guests. It was with
some uneasiness that I announced this to my revered
friend, as hitherto I had been always accustomed to
take his pleasure on the matter before making any
engagement of the kind. At first, as I feared, he
took it very much amiss. ' Sir,' he said, ' you have
permitted yourself to use an unwarrantable freedom.
Why did you accept for me?' BoswELL : 'I imag-
ined, sir, that I was sufficiently acquainted with your
tastes to justify me in assuming that this visit to my
friend would be agreeable to you.' Johnson : ' Sir,
the event itself shows that you were mistaken, as
people commonly are who act upon " imaginations " '

226

THE REVOLUTION IN GUUB STREET

(blowing with derision) ' as thongh they were rea-
soned beliefs. Sir, the very word yon employ con-
victs you of levity and oificiousness.' BOSWELL:
« You used to be well pleased to dine with our friend
Mr. Dilly, the bookseller, in the Poultry, where we
met many literary persons.' JOHNSON: *Well, sir,
and what of that ? This gentleman you speak of is
no friend of Mr. Dilly's, nor have I met him before.'
Boswell: 'True, sir; but 1 thought that as you
were formerly not averse from the company of
authors, you might be amused by again meeting one
of them.' Johnson (testily) : ' And so, eir, you
might argue that because I had a liking for roast
veal and stuffing, I should have an equal relish for
apple-pie and custard. Sir, you are talking at ran-
dom. Authors are not like peas in a pod, and, if
some of them are civil and clubbable men, we are
not to suppose that all are so.' I was casting about
for other excuses with which to mollify him, but he
cut me short. ' Nay, sir,' he said, ' let us deal plainly
with each other. You wished to accept the invita-
tion because you had a curiosity to meet the gentle-
man, and you father your own inclinations upon me.'
1 saw from the humour he was in that it would be
better to drop the subject for the time, in the ex-
pectation that when the day of our engagement ar-
rived, he would recur to it of his own accord, and in
a more compliant mood. Of this I was not disap-

THE EEVOLUTION IN GRUB STREET

pointed, for when the day came he said, in a sudden
way : ' Well, sir, are we not going to your friend's V
To this I replied that I was myself ready and willing,
and shonld like nothing better; but that the least I
could do to atone for my unfortunate misapprehension
of his wishes was to make quite sure of them now,
and that I had merely been waiting for some indica-
tion of their direction. JoHXSON (smiKug) : ' I see,
sir, that you are determined to make an accomplice
of me. Well, let us go.' Here I saw my opportunity
for appeahng to his love of controversy. ' I beg, sir,'
I said, 'that you will not consider yourself under any
obligation to fulfil this unauthorised engagement
which I have made for you. Pray look upon yourself
as released from it.' JoHXSON : ' How can I do that,
sir, without permission, and what right have you to
permit me ? The right is your friend's, and he has
given you no more authority to release me than 1
gave you to bind me. Sir, you are seeking to make
amends for one freedom by committing another.'
BOSWELL : ' But surely, sir, it is not possible that an
undertaking given in your name, but without your
sanction, can impose upon you any liability to dis-
charge it.' Johnson : ' Why not, sir ? It happens
every day in the City of London. Yon have forgot
the maxim. Fieri non debet, factum valet. Your friend
may well suppose that I have given you a general
authority to accept invitations for me, and that I

228

THE REVOLUTION IN GRUB STREET

have specially revoked it in his case. 1 should not
like the dog to think that we have no manners here.
Come, sir, let us go.'

His argumentative victory had so pleased him that
he started on his journey in high good humour ;
but before we reached my friend's house I saw that
a change had come over him. I believe he was
vexed by the informahty of the invitation, now that
he had time to reflect upon it, and came prepared to
stand on his dignity. He was certainly in his gruffest
mood when the Eminent Author, whose name I think
it better to conceal, was brought forward to be
introduced to him.

The conversation, to which I listened very atten-
tively, began thus : The AUTHOR : ' Dr. Johnson,
your most obedient servant.' .JoHNSON: 'Who are
you, sir ]' The Author : ' I am a humble soldier in
the army of which you were the illustrious com-
mander. My weapons are those which, in your

powerful hand ' Johnson : ' Nay, sir, 1 asked

for neither flatteries nor figures of speech. A plain
answer to a plain question will serve me well enough.
Are you a writer of books V The Author : ' That is
indeed my calling.' Johnson : ' Then, sir, 1 wish you
joy of it. It was a beggarly trade in my day, and
many a man who plied it had better left it alone. But
you, at any rate, seem to have prospered at it. There
are no holes in your coat, and you do not look as if

229

THE EEVOLUTION IN GKUB STREET

you had ofteu had to go without your dinner.' The
Author (complacently) : ' 'Tis true, sir, I have been
prosperous enough. My last book has just reached
its fiftieth thousand.' Johnson : ' Sir, you surprise
rae. Either the sales of all books must be vastly
larger than ever I remember, or you must be the
most admired writer of your time, or indeed of all
time.' The Author : ' You offer me an emban-as-
sing choice of alternatives, Dr. Johnson ; and, un-
fortunately, honesty rejects the one which modesty
would prefer. 1 cannot truthfully say that the sales
of all books are larger than you remember them.'
Johnson : ' Is it an epic, sir f The Author : ' Some
of my friends are good enough to call it a prose
epic' Johnson : ' A prose epic ! Not like Mr. Mac-
pherson's Ossian, I trust.' The AUTHOR : ' No, in-
deed, it is a work of fiction.' JoHNSON : ' So, in my
opinion, was Mr. Macpherson's Ossian. But doubt-
less 3'ou may mean a romance, sir, like my own
Rasselas.'

The gentleman seemed rather discomposed, I
thought, at the comparison, and 1 judged it time to
come to his assistance. ' Perhaps, sir,' 1 said, ' Mr.

's romance is of a less philosophical cast than

your history of the Prince of Abyssinia.' Johnson :
' Nay, sir, let the gentleman speak for himself. Why
trouble us with your " perhaps this," and " perhaps
t'other " ? You are wasting our time over coujec-

230

THE REVOLUTION IN GRUB STREET

tures, when if yon would only be silent for a moment,
we should learn the facts. Was your romance a love-
story, sir?' The Author : 'It was; a story of love
and of betrayal.' Johnson : ' I surmised as much,
A tale after the manner of Dr. Goldsmith's Vicar of
Wakefield, I suppose?' Here the gentleman again
seemed a little in doubt, but, after a short pause, he
replied that, with allowances for differences of treat-
ment, the tale was one of the same kind. Johnson
(laughing and rolling about) : ' And you tell me, sir,
that the booksellers have sold fifty thousand copies
of this history of Jenny and Jessamy ? Pray, sir, at
what price ?' The Author : ' The published price is
six shillings.' JoHNSON : Six shillings only ! Then I
conclude it must be a little book.' The author, how-
ever, assured him that that was not the case. It was
at least three times the length of the Vicar of Wake-
field. At this Dr. Johnson was greatly surprised, be-
ing unable, as he said, to understand how so large a
book could be sold at such a price and return a profit.
' Why, sir,' he inquired, ' what in the world does it
cost to produce if?' The gentleman replied, a shil-
ling. Johnson: 'What, and sells for six?' The
Author : ' No, sir, six shillings is but the published
price, as it is called. The price to the purchaser is only
some four shillings and sixpence.' Johnson : ' Be it
so, sir; but that leaves still a handsome profit to the
bookseller. Why, sir, if the fellow does all his busi-
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THE REVOLUTION IN GEUB STREET

ness on those terms he must roll iu wealth.' The
Author : ' It is not all clear profit to him, but he
does very well.'

The conversation here shifted for a time to other
topics, but I could see that my illustrious friend was
still revolving in his mind the strange particulars he
had just heard, and that he was, above all, curious
to know what could have been the author's gains
from this marvellous book. I therefore had the tem-
erity to say : ' There is a question, sir, which I see
Dr. Johnson wishes to ask you ; but he is afraid to
do so for fear of appearing uncivil. He would like
to know what was the sum paid you for the book.'
I confess 1 put this question with no little trepidation,
and held myself prepared for a terrible rebuke ; but
to my great relief the Sage took my interference in
excellent part. ' Sir,' said he, smiling, ' when you
become better acquainted with Mr. Boswell, you will
find that it is his common practice to impute his own
weaknesses to me. But 1 own that, in this case, I
keep him in countenance. It would interest me much
to hear what the bookseller paid you for so vastly
successful a work.' The author not at once replying,
Dr. Johnson added : ' I trust the rogue did not get it
too cheap.' BoswELL : ' Dr. Goldsmith, sir, only got
sixty guineas for the Vica)- of Wakefield.' Johnson :
' What of that, sir ? Beggars cannot be choosers, and
poor Goldy was in great straits when I found him a

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purchaser fov bis book.' Bosv^ELL: 'But the pur-
chaser, sir ! Ought any man to take advantage of
another in that situation V JOHXSON : ' Sir, what
matters whether he ought or not ? We know that,
as man is constituted, he usually will, and the spend-
thrift whose necessities place him at the mercy of
others should blame his own improvidence, not tlieir
cupidity. But you, sir,' (turning to the author,) ' can
have had no necessities for cupidity to prey upon. I
trust you did not part with your romance for less
than a hundred pounds?'

Here a gentleman of the company, who had been
listening to the talk with evident signs of amusement,
could contain himself no longer, and burst out a-
laughing. JOEXSON (sternly) : ' Sir, this ill-timed
merriment is mighty offensive. What was it in my
last speech that you are pleased to find ridiculous 1'
The gentleman, much alarmed, made haste to assure
Dr. Johnson that he meant no offence, and was laugh-
ing, not so much at anything that had been said, as
at his own thoughts. JOHNSON (somewhat mollified,
but unwilling to let the gentleman go without an-
other rub): 'For aught I know, sir, your thoughts
may deserve to be laughed at for their absurdity ;
but ' (smiHng) ' if it is their wit that tickles you, I
think you should share them with the company.'
The Gentleman (vastly relieved by the Sage's re-
turn to good hunionr) : ' With all my heart, though

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THE EEVOLUTION IN GRUB STREET

I cannot claim the merit of wit for them. I happen
for my sins, or those of other people, to be a book-
seller, and I was laughing to myself at the thought
of what our successful authors would say if we paid
them as we did in your days.' JOHNSOX : '0 ho !
sir, you are a bookseller, are yoii? Then you will be

able to check Mr. 's accounts for ns : at least,

when he renders them, which he seems somewhat
loth to do.' The Author -. ' Not at all. Dr. Johnson ,
not at all, 1 assure you. I consider the labourer
worthy of his hire. I receive a modest royalty of
five-aud-twenty per cent., thirteen copies as twelve.'
Johnson : ' Sir, I do not catch your meaning.' The
gentleman who had described himself as a bookseller
explained that the royalty spoken of was a percent-
age on the published price of each cop}- sold, with
the exception of one in every thirteen, on which no
royalty is paid. The Author : 'It came to one and
fourpence-halfpenny a copy.^

Dr. Johnson receiving this information in silence,
the author, after a few moments, observed, somewhat
anxiou.sl}-, ' I hope, sir, you do not consider that as
otherwise than a modest sum. But you say nothing.'
Johnson (something impatiently) : ' Sir, I wish you
would follow my example for a moment, if you desire
me to answer your questions. You mistake the
silence of computation for the reticence of dissent.
I was reckoning the profits of this love-story of yours,

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THE REVOLUTION IN GRUB STREET

and I find' (he added, after a few moments,) 'that
they come to near three thousand five hundred
pounds.' The Author : ' Well, sir, is that sum an
exorbitant one?' Johnson: 'Why, no, sir. It is
large, but we are to consider things in their relations.
There was a very large sum to be divided.' The
Author : ' Then you would not accuse me of un-
bridled greed for demanding and obtaining this share
of the sum so divisible?' JoHXSON : 'No, sir. Let
us not wrest language from its natural meaning. He
only is greedy who grasps at a larger share cf any-
thing than he can justly claim. The bookseller, I
suppose, was a free agent; and, if so, in agreeing to
your claim, he admitted its justice.' Boswell : ' But
might he not agree to it, sir, for reasons of his own,
yet -without considering it just V JoHNSON : ' I do
not think so. How can it be unjust for one man to
strike a bargain with another, which each judges to
be to his advantage ? Moreover, the event showed

that each judged rightly. The sale of Mr. 's

romance at four shiUings and sixpence, after it had
cost but a shilling to print and bind, left three shil-
lings and sixpence to be divided between the author
and the bookseller. If the author's share of this was
one shilling and fourpence-halfpenny, there must have
remained for the bookseller a profit of two shillings
and three-halfpence on each volume — surely a very
pretty sum.'

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Seeing that the bookssller was agaia hard put to
it to restrain his laughter, Johnson turned to him
and said good-humouredly, 'I see that either 1 or
this gentleman's thoughts have again been fortunate
enough to amuse him. If it be his thoughts, I hope
he will once more entertain us with them.' The

Bookseller : ' I wish, sir, you would ask Mr.

whether his bookseller —or, as he and I should call
him, his publisher — drew two shillings and three-
halfpence of profit per copy from the sale of his last
novel.' Johnson : ' Nay, sir, ask him yourself, or
tell us without asking him, since it is pretty evident
that you know.' But the author here interposed,
and admitted of his own accord that his publisher's
profit on the book had not amounted to more than
elevenpence a copy. Johnson : ' Then pray, sir,
what becomes of the rest of the money?' The
Author : ' Sir, it is sweated away as it passes
through the hands of middlemen. The London pub-
lisher, or bookseller, as you would have called liim,
passes it on to some great wholesale bookseller or
other, and by the time it reaches the country book-
shop there is nothing left but a beggarly shred of
profit for the last seller.'

As I saw that the bookseller was listening to this
with much impatience, and with many signs of a
desire to speak, I endeavoured to obtain a hearing

for him by interrupting Mr. with the words,

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THE EEVOLUTION IN GRUB STREET

' Sir, the gentleman wishes to be heard. Praj, sir,
give the gentleman leave.' Dr. Johnson, however,
seemed nettled at my interference, and rapped out
smartly: 'Nay, sir, give this gentleman leave.

Mr. , as I judge, is relating facts within his own

experience, and that is a relation which no one else
is quahfied to correct. 1 conclude that he is going
on to tell us why the seller of his book took it at all
from the man through whose hands it last passed if
he could not resell it at a reasonable profit, or why
he did not clap so much on to the last price as would
repay him.' The author assured us that this was
impossible, because of the active competition of
others in the trade who would undersell and ruin
him if he attempted such a thing. JoHXSON : ' Then
why, sir, does he not buy direct of the bookseller
who printed the work ? Why should he let any
wholesale dealer come between them V The Author :
' That, sir, would in fact be competing with the
wholesale dealer, and he has not the capital for such
a venture.' JoHNSOX : ' Sir, if that is so, he had
better quit bookselling and shift his money to some
other concern.' The Author : ' Surely, sir, he has
a right to live and thrive on this business which his
father before him found at least profitable enough to
subsist upon. The publisher should take care that
the book reaches him at a price which will afford him
what we now call " a living wage." I have before

237

THE EEVOLUTION IN GRUB STREET

this stipulated with my pubhsher as part of mj'- own
agreement with him that the country bookseller
should get my book on such terms as will afford him
a decent margin of profit on the sales.' Johnson :
* Vastly well indeed, sir. Of course, if you choose
out of charity to forego a part of your own profits
(perhaps the fourpence-halfpeuuy over the shilHug
on each copy) in order that a v;orthy man may be
supported in a trade that he cannot make a living at,
you can do so, and there's an end on't.'

Here, for some reason or other, the company fell
silent. The bookseller seemed to be again so much
diverted with his own thoughts and with watching
the author (who appeared to me might}' uneasy) as
to have lost all his former inclination to speak. The
conversation, moreover, was becoming rather tedious
to myself, and I wished, if I could, to give it an
impulse in some new direction. I therefore turned
to the bookseller, and inquired the meaning of an
expression which had fallen from one of the company
before our talk about bookselling had begun. Who
and what, I asked, was the New Woman ? Seeing
that the gentleman hesitated a little, Johnson said,
pleasantly enough : ' You see, sir, that Mr. Boswell's
habit of curiosity still survives. But the term which
perplexes him is one I have never heard ; nor should
1 readily beheve that there is anything in nature
corresponding to it.' The Bookseller : ' What, sir,

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you think a New Woman an impossibility ?' John-
son : ' Why, yes, sir, to be sure. Man himself has
changed but infiuitesimally in the course of ages,
and woman, in whom the primitive instincts are
necessarily stronger, changes with still more diffi-
culty.' BoswELL : ' What do you say, sir, to the
Varium et mutabile of Virgil T JOHNSON : ' Nay, sir,
you should finish your quotation before asking me
what I say to it. It is varium et mutabile SEilPER
femina. What do you say to the semper? The poet
is on my side, not yours. What he ascribes to
woman is an immutable mutability. He says in
eifect of her that she is constant to her inconstancy,
an unchanging type of change.'

I was not convinced nor, I think, was the book-
seller by the reply of Johnson's, Avho here, as in other
instances, seemed to mo to be merely talking for an
argumentative victory. But the author, who had re-
mained silent, and who seemed to me to be reflecting
with more and more disquiet on the remark Johnson
had last addressed to him, here broke in, a little
abruptly, with tlie question, ' Why, sir, should the
publisher exist at all ?' Johnson, who never rehshed
such sudden interruptions of a conversation in which
he was interested, answered him something shortly :
' I thought we were done with your business, sir.
We cannot be for ever talking of you and your
wonderful book.' The author, however, seemed in

239

THE EEVOLUTION IN GRUB STREET

uo wise dashed by the Sage's reproof, but continued
to enlarge upon what was evidently the favourite
subject, with increasing vehemence of manner. 'Why
should we not deal directly with the country book-
seller, and squeeze out the publisher altogether?
Only two parties are necessary to the production of
a book : the man who makes it, and the man who
sells it to the public. The publisher is a modern in-
vention, or rather a late and superfluous growth. He
is a mere excrescence, a wart, a wen. He did not
exist in England even as recently as your own day,
Dr. Johnson. Authors then talked of writing for the
booksellers, not for the publishers.' JoHXSON : ' Why,
sir, what stuff is this ? How did Mr. Cave, or Mr.
Cadell, or Mr. Millar, or Mr. Dodsley differ from the
men you now call publishers ? It is true we talked
of writing for the booksellers: but the book had to
be made before it could be sold, and the one book-
seller who made it to be sold by himself and other
booksellers answered to your publisher. Do you say
there is no need for him ?' The Author : ' No, sir.
I repeat that only two parties are necessary to the
production of a book : the man who makes it, and the
man who sells it to the public' JoHNSON : ' Yes, sir,
1 hear you repeat it. Like many other disputants
you are content with merely repeating what it is
your business to elucidate and defend. Let me ob-
serve, however, that you do not state your own case

240

THE EEVOLUTION IN GRUB STEEET

accurately, or as favourably for yourself as you might.
You say that two parties are necessary to the pro-
ductiou of a book, aud you set about to prove it by
adding that it takes one mau to produce the book
and another to sell it, which is a wholly different
operation. Why, sir,' (laughing), ' this is to talk Hke
the urchin who said that currant pie was of two kinds
— currant pie, and currant-and-raspberry pie.'

I saw that Johnson had put himself into good
humour by his jest, so I thought it well to interpose
no remark of my own. But the author, thinking to
trip up my venerable friend in his talk, exclaimed
rather loudly : * Be it so, sir ; I accept your estimate.
Let me say that only one man is required.' Johnson :
' Let us say no such thing, sir. The estimate, as you
call it, is none of mine. I did but correct yours in
order to reduce it ad ahsurdum. For what can be
more absurd than to say that even to the production
of a book but one man is necessary — the man who
makes it. Is it then made by one man, aud that man
the author, or is it to be so made in future ? Is the
writer of the book to make the paper on which it is
printed, and to set up the type, and to bind the
volumes'?' The Author: 'No, sir, I do not mean
that. I should, perhaps, have used the word " dis-
tribution " instead of the word " production." It is
in the distribution of a book that the publisher is, in
my opinion, unnecessary. To that process there are,

THE REVOLUTION IN GRUB STREET

I maiatain, but two necessary parties : the author
and the bookseller. Why should not the author send
his book direct from the printer and bookbinder to
the shop of the bookseller? A business representa-
tive, a clerk, a cashier, is all he would want for such
a purpose V Johnson : ' Does a book then drop
down from heaven ready printed and bound? If
not, how is it to be got into the hands of the printer
and bookbinder? Is the author's clerk, his cashier,
to do this business for him, too ? Is he to make his
contract with the paper-maker for the paper, and
v/ith the printer for the printing, and with the binder
for the binding ? Why, sir, at that rate every author
will have to keep a counting-house of his own, with
all its apparatus, and will have to spend more hours
at his ledger than in his library. Besides, if he can
do this, why stop there ? Why should he not abolish
the bookseller and sell his own books? Why not
plant a clerk or a cashier in a rented shop in fifty
country towns ? They could doubtless make shift to
sell a thousand copies each, and you would then add
the bookseller's profits, such as they are, on the whole
fifty thousand, to your own.'

In spite of the vigour with which Johnson pressed
home these arguments, the author still held his ground
sturdily. 'Publishers,' he complained, 'have been
threatening in a high and mighty fashion to send us
back to Grub Street, but we will show them that in

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these days the dwellers iu Grub Street have learned
the lesson of revolt. They had no such temptation in
your time, Dr, Johnson ; for bookselling was iu a
thriving state in those days, and authors were not so
often starved out of existence.' Johnson (agitated) :
' Hold, sir. You are now talking of matters you
know nothing of. In all ages there have been writers
who lacked bread, and there are some such, I doubt
not, in your own times. But if you think you would
have bettered yourselves by going back to the days
of Richard Savage, or if anyone has led } ou to sup-
pose that there were fewer pens scribbling in vain to
feed an empty belly in my time than in yours, why
then, sir, your credulity has been much abused. We
do not forget what we suffered in Grub Street,
though there is neither sense nor pleasure in recalling
it.'

I have not often seen this firm-minded and almost
stoick philosopher so deeply moved at an^'thing, and
by way of turning his thoughts in the more pleasant
direction of his own poetical treatment of this sad
subject, 1 softly whispered the well-known couplet
from the Vanity of Human Wishes:

' There mark what ills the scholar's life assail,
Toil, envy, v/ant, the patron, and the jail.'

'At least/ I added, 'you have got rid of patrons.'
The Author : * There is but little gain in that. The

R 2

THE REVOLUTION IN GRUB STREET

publisher is but the patrou iu another form. And
you know what the publisher is, Dr. Johnson ; you

who once knocked down a bookseller with a fo '

Johnson (hastily) : ' Sir, it was not so. The story is
a ridiculous fable. The fellow was impertinent to
me, and I beat him ; but it was not with a folio. I
had too much respect for books.' The Author :
'But you have spoken against booksellers.' John-
son : ' Why, yes, sir ; and so may you have spoken
against those you have a value for. But I have said
much more for them than 1 have ever said against
them. Mr. Boswell's book, if indeed it is still to be
procured, will tell you that I spoke of them as
" generous, liberal-minded men." I acknowledged
myself to have been handsomely treated by Mr.
Millar for my Dictionary, though the sum I received
for it will seem email indeed to you, sir — a poor fif-
teen hundred and seventy-five pounds — but little
more than a third of the profits which have come to
you from your love-tale.' The Author : * Posterity,
Dr. Johnson, has admired your own magnanimity
more than the liberality of the booksellers.' JOHN-
SON : ' Sir, I am much beholden to posterity ; but,
wiiat is your own complaint of the booksellers ? You
do not seem to have fared so ill at their hands. Their
faults, whatever they are, have not prevented you
from obtaining a princely sum for your last work.
This seems no sufficient cause for a grudge against

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TPIE REVOLUTION IN GRUB STREET

them.' The Author: 'Pardon me, Dr. Johnson,
but you mistake my motives. I have no grudge
against the publisher. I am merely anxious to pro-
tect the country bookseller.' Johnson : ' Oh, if that
is all you are concerned about, I think you may very
well let it alone. I had supposed that you wished
to increase your profits. You said, did you not, that
by dealing directly with the last handler of your book
before it goes to the reader you would put more into
your own pocket as well as into his ?' The
Author : ' True, I did say so ; and so it would be ;
but that is a consideration which does not weigh
with me. My object is to save the country book-
seller from extinction.' JOHNSON : ' Sir, the country
bookseller would have reason to be grateful to you,
but you would hardly earn the applause of the vir-
tuous by so invidious a benevolence. Nor will you
increase the sum of human happiness if you merely
save one trade from extinction by extinguishing
another.'

The author was about to answer, but Johnson,
who I perceived was becoming impatient of his
tenacity, anticipated his reply with a 'Nay, sir, I
beg you will use no further argument on a question
that, in truth, admits of none. Had you pleaded
your own interest you had silenced me ; for that
must be left to every man to decide for himself.'
BoswELL : ' Yes, sir, every man is the best judge of

245

THE REVOLUTION IN GKUB STREET

that.' Johnson : ' Why, no, sir, a man is not neces-
sarily the best judge of it. But he is the only judge
Avith an authoritative commission to act, or with any
power to execute his decrees. And so, sir, had you
told me that you were consulting your own advan-
tage in this, I had said nothing. But when you
inform me that you are for setting the world to rights
in this matter, I shall hardly be thought intrusive in
attempting to dissuade you from such an adventure.
It is not for fallible mortals to determine what law-
ful trades shall continue to exist for the good of
Society, or to essay the part of an earthly Providence
by attempting to cocker one trade and to crush out
another. No, sir, if you will be guided by me, you
will write another love-story, since such tales seem
most to take the present taste of the town, and see
if you cannot sell a hundred thousand copies of it at
the same, or, if you can obtain it, at a higher per-
centage, leaving the booksellers, in town and coun-
try, to settle their own bargains with, each other by
the higgling of the market.'

It being now cock-crow we took our leave, and on
our way back I ventured to rally Dr. Johnson on his
zeal in the cause of the booksellers. ' After all, sir,'
I said, ' is it any concern of the world how the author
and the bookseller divide their spoils ? And would
it not be more decent of them to keep their disputes
to themselves T Johnson : ' Why, yes, sir, that may

246

THE KEVOLUTION IX GRUB STREET

be ; but we are not to allow ourselves to be put off
with false morality and bad reasoning in a public
controversy because the disputants ought to have
quarrelled in private. If a man and his wife fall to
fisticuffs in Drury Lane instead of within doors, we
may have an opinion on the battle and express it.'
BOSWELL : ' That is true, sir ; but we do not care a
fig which wins ; and why, then, should it matter to

you whether Mr. could extinguish publishers or

not ?' JoHNSOX : ' Sir, it does matter. It matters to
every man, woman, and child in the kingdom. Sup-
pose it were possible for him to do without the pub-
lisher in his own case, and, by that means, to drive
an even better trade in his own works than he seems
to have driven hitherto. Nay, suppose all other
writers of the same kind could do the same thing.
What would that prove as to the publishers' utility
or inutility to the world ? The gentleman talks as if
all literature were contained within the covers of
six-shilling romances that run through fifty editions
in a year. But unless all literature be, in fact, con-
tained therein, how will it fare with the remainder of
it? Could the publisher be dispensed with for that ?
Can the poet, the historian, the moralist, open shop
for themselves and send their own works by " a clerk
or a cashier " direct from the binder to the country
bookseller, to be by him disposed of to an eager
crowd of buyers at the rate of a thousand copies a

THE REVOLUTION IN GRUB STREET

week ? No, sir, we all well know that they cannot ;
and that, since they cannot, they will always need
the services of some trader — call him publisher, book-
seller, or what yon will — with capital enough to
undertake the venture, and to lie out of his money
till its slow returns come back to him.'

Though I was only half convinced, I did not well
see what to reply to this argument ; which, Johnson
noticing, he observed in a playful way ....

{Here, unfortunately^ the fragment ends.)

248

THE PROVINCIAL LETTERS

The royal roads to excellence in literary style are so
numerous, that one cannot but wonder at the small
number of those writers "who complete the journey.
And this wonder is increased when we remember by
whom it is that the plan of the country has been
drawn and the roads set down ; when we reflect that
this has been the work not of the mere theoretical
topographer tracing in his study the hypothetical
windings of a priori paths, but of the successful trav-
ellers in person. It is the men who have made the
journey themselves, that have supplied the materials
for the itineraries in chief repute ; and a most per-
plexing emharras de choix do they present. One great
writer has been reared on the Greek and Latin
classics; another has perfected himself by the as-
siduous study of the masterpieces, in every order of
writing, of his own tongue ; a third has given his
nights and days to the English Bible alone; a fourth
attributes his success to his habit of translating from

249

THE PROVINCIAL LETTERS

his own into other languages ; a fifth to his habit of
transkxtiug from other languages into his own ; until
at last the bewildered student is driven, according to
the measure of his own success, to one of the two
alternative conclusions, that all roads lead to Rome,
or none; that some men may acquire excellence of
style in any way, and that others can do so in no way
— that some are boru to move freely and gracefully
in composition, while others are destined to limp awk-
wardly on paper all their days. The only truth
which would seem to be beyond question in the
whole subject is the negative one that, be the capac-
ity itself innate or acquired, it is by practice only that
it can pass from the potential to the actual; just afe,
though it may be idle to discuss whether a consum-
mate swordsman is born or made, it is equally idle to
deny that no man can become a swordsman at all
without the laborious training of the fencing-school.
Yet even this modest proposition seems to be shaken
to its very foundation by such a case as that of
Pascal, and such a feat of consummate literary sword-
play as the Pvovincial Letters. Where, must many
an astonished Jesuit have asked, did this novice learn
his carte and tierce '? What is the use of long prac-
tice, what avails it to have studied every thrust —
foul as well as fair — that your maitre cCarmes can
teach you, if an invalid mathematician, who has
never taken a polemical rapier in his baud before, is

250

THE PROVINCIAL LETTERS

to beat clown your guard with disdainful ease at the
first assault, and only not run you through the body
because he can show his mastery and his contempt
more effectively by prolonging the bout ? And the
same question must suggest itself, with no diminution
of its interest, to all who turn from such records as we
possess of Pascal's life to that monument of his many-
sided genius which he has left behind him in the
Provincial Letters.

There is probably no case in which the intellectual
personality and intellectual history of an author are
less likely to be correctly deduced from a mere ex-
amination of his works than the case of Blaise Pascal.
His hereditary bent and his early studies, from at
least the age of twelve, were exclusively mathe-
matical. Even if, with Professor de Morgan, we
reject as mythical the story of Pascal's having at
twelve years of age worked out the first thirty-two
propositions of Euclid's first book, from independent
reasoning on the properties of geometrical figures,
and without his having opened an Euclid in his
life, we may safely assume that the myth had some
foundation in fact. It is natural, at any rate, to
assume that nothing but some remarkable evidence
of the boy's precocious talent for mathematics would
have induced the elder Pascal to withdraw his
former inhibition of his son from entering upon this
line of study. Certain it is that from Pascal's twelfth

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year (1635) upwards, be had full liberty to indulge bis
genius for mathematical pursuits, and that he availed
himself of the permission with the greatest ardour and
success. From this date until the year of his final
retirement from the world, Pascal's recorded life is
one continuous history of mathematical and physical
studies, interrupted occasionally by the wretched
health to which he was a victim from bis eighteenth
year, but never, so far as is known, diverted sys-
tematically to any other form of intellectual, and
certainly not to any other form of literary, occupation.
In 1G39, at the age of sixteen, he wrote that
treatise on Conic Sections which excited the as-
tonished admiration of Descartes; at nineteen be
contrived bis remarkable * arithmetical machine ;' some
years later he began that memorable series of
experimental inquiries into the ponderability of air,
which will always preserve an honourable place for
his name in the history of physical science. Before
the close of his twenty-sixth year these experiments
were concluded, and, impelled probably by his fast
declining health (he had had a stroke of paralysis two
years before), he virtually abandoned secular studies
altogether. In IG')!, shortly after the accident which
nearly cost him his life, and which left a permanent
effect upon his mind, he finall}^ retired from the
world, and joined that band of illustres et danger eii.v
solitaires, at Port Royal, who had just commenced

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their struggle with the Papacy, destined to be waged,
with one brief interval of armistice, for upwards of
sixty years. Of his life in the monastery we know
little, save that it was a life of the severest self-morti-
fication, which could have left him little time or inclin-
ation for other than spiritual matters, — none assuredly
for the cultivation, either by study or practice, of
that consummate controversial style of which he was
within two years to appear as a master. His life was
probably that of a thoughtful ascetic, divided be-
tween religious exercises and theological reflection ;
as for secular reading, he was, as he himself tells us,
liomo unius libri, the essays of Montaigae.

And it was from this retirement, from this inaction,
we may say, that Pascal emerged, in 1656, the most
brilliant and deadly controversalist that ever wielded
a pen, and one of the greatest masters of literary
style — a writer who, by the confession of an unsym-
pathetic, and in some respects an unfair critic, rivalled
Bossuet in eloquence and Moliere in wit, and to whose
work, on the testimony of the same witness, Voltaire,
ilfaut rapporter Vipoque de la fixation du language.

One must admit, I thiuk, that the engraftment of a
devot on a mathematician is a process from which we
should hardly have expected such splendid results ;
but it is not so much their mere intellectual splendour
as their artistic perfection— not their genius, great as
it is, so much as their craftsmausliip, which surprises.

2.53

TUB PROVINCIAL LETTERS

Were it otherwise, were the Provincial Letters merely
a collection of eloquent, powerfully-reasoned, subtle,
thoughtful, witty ' things,' instead of forming as they
do one ' thing ' very different from and much rarer
than these or any collection of these, one might get
much nearer to explaining them from a consideration
of the occasion and the man. Intense moral earnest-
ness has a distinct intellectual reaction, and indignatio
of the nobler order makes eloquence and force, and
wit too, as well as verse. No doubt Pascal's deep
religious feeling, his sympathy with the oppressed
Jansenists, his zeal for a pure morality, and his scorn
and detestation of those whose doctrines were adul-
terating it, all conspired to give not only warmth but
brilliancy to his writings. The lambent flash of his
wit leaped up, no doubt, even as the steady flame of
his denunciation glowed forth, from the inner fires
of an intense spiritual conviction. But all this leaves
the real difficulty untouched, which is that Pascal's
peculiar power — the power and enduring vitality of
his great work as a whole — is derived from that most
complex, and, in some sense, artificial of all creations
— style. Intense earnestness, acting on adequate
intellectual gifts, will do much. It will enkindle, or
rather, when raised to a certain power, it will of itself
become eloquence ; it will quicken the play of the
reasoning faculty ; it will stimulate that fine sense of
latent analogy which begets wit, and that fine sense of

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latent incoDgruity which begets humour ; but it cannot
create the power of co-ordinating all these results
so as to give them their maximum effect in combin-
ation. This is, and remains, the alchemic secret of
' style.'

The magnitude of Pascal's obligations to his style
may, I think, be insisted on without any danger of
incurring that charge of dogmatism which justly lies
against so many of the attempts to assign to form
and matter their respective shares in the production
of a writer's total literary effect. Of course the
operation cannot in any case, least of all in the case
of a foreign writer, be performed with more than
approximate accuracy ; but in the instance of Pascal
there are at least two grounds on which we are
justified in assigning an unusually large share of
his total literary effect to sheer excellence of form.
The most salient characteristics of the Provincial
Letters are the perfect finish of their wit, and the
masterly ease with which, especially in the earlier
Letters, an abstruse argument is conducted in the
colloquial and narrative styles, and without any re-
course to that logical, or rather mathematical, form of
arrangement which wearies the reader at least, if it
assists the writer. Both of these characteristics bear
a specially intimate relation to the form of expression.
The value of ' form ' in wit belongs theoretically to
one of the most obscure parts of an obscure subject ;

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but iu practice it ranks almost as a commonplace of
observation. It is proved experimentally nearly every
day in the magical effect produced by the slightest
change in the phrasing of a 7not. In no other case
are words of so high an intrinsic value, and yet so
worthless ' in exchange.' To ascribe great finish of
wit to any work is almost ex vi terminorum to attri-
bute to it great excellence of pure form ; and the wit
of Pascal is of a perfection of finish rarely met with
even in a language renowned for its capacities in
this kind of perfection. It is distinguished by that
masterly restraint and repression which gives to the
wit of two or three, and only two or three, of the
most briUiant of Frenchmen, a subtle power which
the less habile genius of our language denies to
English wit. We may say, I think, ' of our language,'
and not of our intellectual habit, for the ' heaviness of
hand ' of which English wit is sometimes accused
seems more often — if at least we confine ourselves to
the best specimens — a defect in the instrument rather
than in the hands that wield it. It is not, as is
sometimes said, especially by Frenchmen, that we
English do not value innuendo, but that our language
does not lend itself to innuendo : it is not that we do
not feel the artistic force of saying less than is meant,
but that in English it is so much more difficult than
in French to convey more than one says. To at-
tempt to rival in our language the finesse of the

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THE PEOVINCIAL LETTERS

best Freuch wit is to rim the risk of either miss-
ing the desired eflfect altogether, through obscurity,
or of marring it by paraphrases at ouce too elaborate
and too obviously premeditated. It is like attempt-
ing to draw a very fine line with a very blunt pencil,
by studied lightness of touch. A thick hue must be
drawn, or the paper will remain blank. But the
French language has a point like a ' crowquill,' and
in fingers which can ply it deftly it produces efi"ects
which we English can admire but cannot copy. Sel-
dom has the instrument been plied by a lighter baud
than Pascal's ; indeed, when one has named Voltaire,
one can think of no other writer Avhose touch is to
be matched against that of the author of the Provincial
Letters — of none certainly whom this form of excel-
lence has ever stood in better polemical stead. For
the impression of calculated restraint which this light-
ness of touch conveys is to Pascal, as again and
again to Voltaire, a distinct point of controversial
power, in virtue of the air of careless superiority
which it gives to his attack, as well as of the im-
mense reserve of intellectual strength which it seems
to hint at. To recur to the metaphor from the fencing-
school, it is as though the skilful swordsman, having
easily put aside his adversary's guard, should forego
the death lunge which would end the duel at once,
and content himself with inflicting a disdainful scratch.
Even in the mere personalities of controversy, this

THE PROVINCIAL LETTERS

effect may be produced. We have all the feeling of
the Bpectators of some such unequal struggle when
Voltaire, ridiculing Warburton's denial of the vin-
dictiveness of the Jewish character, exclaims, ' Est-il
2J0ssible quun eceur tel que le tien se trompe si gros-
sierement sur la haine'^. C'cst un usurier qui ne sait
pas compter.^ A less contemptuously confident swords-
man would hardly have contented himself with this
lightning-like pass and recovery, but would have
transfixed his adversary again and again. A minor
master of sarcasm who had lighted on this venomous
gibe would have diluted its vitriol over half a page.

Pascal, though his sarcasm is free from the per-
sonality, and has assuredly none of the somewhat
diabolic flavour of the above sally, uses often the
same contem.ptuous brevity and compression. Nor
is it only in single thrusts at his adversaries that he
shows this power. Throughout the whole Story of
Jean d'Alba, and Pascal's application of it to the
Jesuit morality, what an appearance of power is pro-
duced by the humiliating leniency with which he
treats his casuist interlocutor, by the studied modera-
tion and dryness of the irony with which he points
out the weak spot in the secular relations of the
Jesuit system ! Jean d'Alba, servant at a Jesuit
college, has robbed his masters, and has pleaded
the casuisms of Father Bauny before the criminal
court, with no better result than that of being sen-

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THE PROVINCIAL LETTERS

tenced to a flogging, and of seeing the works of his
dangerous preceptor handed over to the torch of the
public executioner by the indignant judge.' But on
Pascal's relating this story to his Jesuit friend, the
latter, not quick at passing from books to facts, finds
it strangely irrelevant. Pascal, he complains, is in-
terrupting their interesting talk on the subject of
casuistic ethics by des Jiistoires Jiors de propos.

' " I did but make a passing reference to the anecdote," I re-
plied, "just to call your attention to an important point which I
find you have overlooked in establishing your ' doctrine of pro-
bability."' " Eh ! what is that?" said the father ; " what flaw can
there be in the doctrine after so many acute persons have
examined it ?" " This," I replied. " You have amply secured, so
far as God and their own consciences are concerned, the position
of those who follow your ' probable opinions ;' for according to
your doctrine, one may make oneself quite easy on those heads
by following the opinion of a doctor of weight. Further, you
have secured your disciples' position on the side of the con-
fessors ; for you compel your confessors, under pain of mortal sin,
to grant absolution for any act committed in reliance on a ' pro-
bable opinion.' But on the side of the judges, you have omitted
to secure the position of your disciples so that they find them-
selves in danger of the scourge or the gibbet in following your
' probabilities.' It is a capital omission, that." " You are right,"
replied the father, " and I am much obliged to you ; but the
reason is that we have not the same authority over magistrates
that we have over confessors, who are obliged to refer to us on all
cases of conscience ; for on those matters we arc the supreme
judges." " I see," replied I. " Still, if on the one hand you arc
the judges^of the confessors, are you not, on the other hand, the
confessors of the judges? Your power is very extensive ; why
not compel the judges, under pain of excommunication, to acquit
these criminals who have a probable opinion on their side, so as

THE PROVINCIAL LETTERS

to prevent its happening to the great contempt and scandal of
the probability doctrine, that those whom you pronounce innocent
in theory be flogged or hanged in practice. Otherwise how will
you obtain disciples?" "I must think this over," replied he, "it
is not a matter to be neglected. I will refer it to our Provincial." '

Nor is the power of pure style less manifest in the
unsought lucidity of Pascal's exposition, the orderly
though unordered procession of his argument. There
is no parade of arrangement, no employment of the
favourite mechanical artifices for keeping the reader's
— and as often as not the writer's — head clear ; but
yet the thread of the argument need never be missed
by a commonly attentive student. This mastery of
what may be called (in the best sense) popular
dialectic, this gift of managing an intricate reasoning-
process in entire independence of scholastic method,
is very rare ; it is perhaps rarest of all in those who
have trained themselves on the mathematics for the
work of controversy. A purely mathematical culture
is perhaps the worst preparation for the acquirement
of that popular dialectic in which Pascal so excelled.
To those who have undergone such a training, and
have become thoroughly imbued ^nth its method, the
digressions, the inversions, the transposition of parts
which are of the essence of popular dialectic, are
repugnant, if not impossible. The steps of their
argument must follow one another in regular series,
or not at all. They themselves are men of ' sections,'

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THE PEOVINCIAL LETTERS

* 8ub-sections,' ' sub-sub-sections,' and the rest of it ;
and they exhaust the accepted symbols of para-
graphic sub-division in their efforts after a precise and
logical arrangement of their matter. Their argument
moves forward like an army in battle array, Avith a
Roman numeral commanding each division, italic
numerals heading the brigades, the regiments under
command of the letters of the English alphabet, and
(a), (/3), (7), &c., each leading his allotted company.
' C'est la ffiierre, mais ce nest pas magnijique,^ ex-
cept perhaps to the professional student of the art of
controversial war.

Nothing but Pascal's complete emancipation from
this repulsive method could have won him readers
for the earlier Letters-, since they, it must be remem-
bered, have none of the claims to interest which were
possessed by the later. As soon as ' M. de Montalte '
began to carry the war into the enemy's country, as
soon as it became known that the policy and morality
of the Jesuits were being exposed and dissected by a
master-hand, it is no wonder that readers should have
multiplied. But Pascal did not begin this retaliatory
warfare ; probably the thought of it did not occur to
him until the great success of his first letters had as-
sured him of a large and sympathetic audience. And
it is the success of these, the popularity, that is to say,
of three disquisitions upon the ponvoir prochain, the
grace sujisante, and the grace actuellc, winch consti-

2G1

THE PROVINCIAL LETTERS

tutes the real triumph of his expository style. No
doubt the Port Royalists and their learned and pious
lerider enjoyed a fair share of popular admiration and
sympathy at the outset ; but it was one thing to
sympathise generally with Arnauld, and quite another
to devour with, delight the history of a theological
intrigue which even Pascal's wonderful art cannot
always make it easy to follow. This could not have
been popularised but by means of the dramatic interest,
the unflagging life and movement with which Pascal
contrives to inform his narrative. The power which
it shows in this respect is of a very high kind. M.
Villemain's declaration indeed — ' that he should have
admired Pascal less if he had lived after Moliere in-
stead of before him ' — is, so far as it institutes a com-
parison between the dramatic achievements of the
two writers, surely a freak of eulogy, which is alone
sufficient to show that the ' literary influence of
academies ' does not always ' make for ' sanity of
criticism ; but without indulging in extravagances of
this sort one may give full recognition to Pascal's
dramatic gift. And in doing this one should protest
as much against the litotes of M. Villemain's com-
parison of Pascal with Plato, as against the
hyperbole of his comparison of Pascal with Moliere.
Of the four elements of dramatic excellence, Plato
has at most but the mastery of two — character and
diak)gue ; while Pascal, besides being a far greater

262

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master of both these, adds to them a command of
plot and situation. Witness the remarkable skill with
which the Jesuit intrigue for the censure of Arnauld
by the Sorbonne is gradually unfolded in the first
letter, and the genuine high comedy of the denoue-
ment, in which the Dominican who has agreed to a
hollow verbal truce with the Jesuit is nearly ruining
all ^by being betrayed into an explanation of his
meaning. It was not only easier but safer to rely on
'monks than reasons' for the condemnation of the
Port Royalist leader.

With the third letter, however, the interest of
plot, so to call it, is at an end, and in the exposure
of the Jesuit policy and morality, the interest of
character and of exquisite ironic dialogue takes un-
disputed place. Here there is more room for the
comparison between Pascal and Plato, but it cannot
be said that the resemblance after all is very close or
very suggestive. Plato's Sophist and Pascal's Casu-
ist are very different figures, and assume wddely
different attitudes. The adulterator of philosophy
is, it must be confessed, ' something of a shadowy
being,' like the ghost described by Dr. Johnson — at
any rate, he has little vitality, and is at best a mere
lay figure to hang fallacies on ; the adulterator of
morals in the pages of Pascal is a creation of unmis-
takable flesh and blood, and a highly finished one lo
boot. The skill with which the Jesuit casuist is

263

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drawD, and especially with wliich the naivete and
simplicity of the character (so amusingly illustrated
in the extract above quoted) are brought out, serves
of course a dialectical end ; but not, one feels, a
dialectical end alone. It has a deeper purpose than
this. For the intention and the efifect of the portrait
is to render casuistry credible as a profession ; to
show how, given the requisite combination of pe-
dantry and esprit de corps, it could be adopted as a
profession by a body of men not universally, or even
perhaps generally, less scrupulous than their neigh-
bours. Pascal's Jesuit interlocutor is, one easily
sees, far better than his principles, which indeed are
sometimes plainly at variance with his healthier in-
stincts. ' Ce nest pas de moi-meme,' he protests on
one occasion, when Pascal exclaims against the
enormity of a certain doctrine. But, good man, he
is a little blunt of perception, and he has turned the
edge of his faculties still further by exclusive devo-
tion to the text-books of casuistry. He has, in short,
paid the penalty which is inseparably attached to
excess of unintelligent study — to reading uninformed
by reflection — which means the cultivation of the
receptive faculty at the expense of the judgment.
He has arrived at that stage in which the learning
of books bulks larger than the realities of things, in
which ' what has been written ' so fills the mind that
it cares not to, and even cannot, inquire, ' What is.'

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Pedantry and the exaggerated faith of the pedant in
the utility of his laboriously acquired knowledge,
these and esprit de corps^ the be-all and end-all of
Jesuit training, combine to effect the astounding
result. Pascal's Jesuit is conscious that he is learn-
ed, that the doctors he has studied are subtle and of
blameless lives, that the great Society of Jesus is an
organization of all-embracing power and activity,
and so, on the whole, he will bring himself to teach
and defend the most marvellous perversions of
morality, and even exclaim at last in genuine sur-
prise, ' Doutez-vons cVime cJio.<^e que nos auteurs
enseignentV

It is by means of this so real and vivid portrait
that Pascal contrives to give practical interest, and,
as it were, ' urgency ' to the attack on Jesuitism.
We feel that it is no question of demolishiug a
speculative error, but of combating a practical and
instant danger to the human commonwealth. We
feel that Pascal is at war not with a theory, but with
an organization ; and we only begin to appreciate
the insidious and far-reaching power of that organi-
zation when we see in the person of Pascal's inter-
locutor what respectable weapons it is able to em-
ploy, what well-meaning blunt-wits it can enlist in
its evil service.

Pascal's own view of the spirit and methods of the
great Society is of course sternly hostile, but it is

265

THE PROVINCIAL LETTERS

distorted by none of that blind hatred which makes
so mucli of our ultra-Protestant invective against
Jesuitism fly wide of the mark. Few more astonish-
ing errors have been made by one great writer about
another than the blunder of which Voltaire has been
guilty in his criticism of Pascal. The attempt of the
Provincial Letters, says the author of the Siecle de
Louis XIV., is to prove that they (the Jesuits) had
conceived ' the deliberate design of corrupting the
morals of mankind, a design which no sect or society
ever had or ever could have.' Voltaire's last quoted
reflection is so obviously just that one can only won-
der at his imputing to Pascal the error which it
condemns. As a matter of fact, Pascal repudiates
it in express terms, and in a sentence which is ac-
quitted of any suspicion of irony, by the sarcastic
remark which follows it. It is less surprising, how-
ever, that Voltaire, and after him M. Villemaiu,
should have overlooked this passage than that, even
having overlooked it, they should not have hesitated
on mere a priori grounds to attribute to Pascal so
vulgar and unintelhgent a theory of Jesuit pohcy.
Pascal, we might have been sure, even without his
word for it, better understood the genesis and pur-
pose of those perversions of morality which he was
about so ruthlessly to expose. But his own language
on the point is clear : — ' Sachez done que leur objet
n'est pas de corrompre les moeurs : ce n'est pas leur

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THE PROVINCIAL LETTERS

dessein. Mais ils n'ont pas aussi pour unique but
celui de les reformer : ce serait une mauvaise poli-
tique. Voici quelle est leur pensee. lis out assez
bonne opinion d'eux-memes pour croire qu'il est utile
et comme necessaire au bien de la religion que leur
credit s'etende partout et qu'ils gouvernent toutes
les consciences.' (Lett. V.)

This is certainly a more intelligent theory of Jesuit-
ism than that denounced by Voltaire, though we must
admit, I think, that even this analysis is not quite
adequate. A religious organization aiming at secular
ascendancy, and prepared to sacrifice rigour of morals
in their efibrts after their object, is undoubtedly a
more credible conception than that of a society aim-
ing at the ' corruption of morals ' for its own sake :
but though it is a sufficient account of ' organic
Jesuitism,' so to say, it fails, I think, to distinguish an
important element in the formation of the individual
Jesuit. There was and is something more than mere
worldly ambition and esprit de corps amongst the rank
and file of the Order. The truth, though it may seem
to resemble a paradox, is, 1 think, that there was a
moral element in the Jesuit system which, and which
alone, has enabled it to enlist the services of con-
scientious men; and made it possible for them to
read the motto of the Society, — Ad Majorem Dei
Gloriam — without that strong temptation to augurial
smiling which plain men in all times have found it so

267

THE PROVINCIAL LETTERS

difficult to prevent crediting them with. The moral
element, such as it is, is one with which Pascal's stern
and semi-Calvinistic theology, as well as his austere
morality, rendered him incapable of sympathizing ;
but which, nevertheless, appeals to one of the deep-
est instincts of a certain order of mind. The Jesuit
casuistry was, in part at least, the expression of a
feeling — profoundly unscriptural, no doubt, but still
profoundly human — that the way of salvation must
not be made too hard for men ; that quantity as well
as quality in the matter of converts deserves to be
considered ; and that as it is given to few to attain
complete virtue, God may be well served by leading
man a little distance at least upon the road. Dan-
gerous as this principle is, and monstrous as we see
its results to have been in practice, there is nothing
absolutely astonishing in the fact that conscientious
men found it possible to accept the principle and
shut their e^-es to the results. The resources of
human self-deception are practically boundless, as we
may see illustrated in our own day. After all, the
attitude of the Jesuits towards morals was not widely
different from the attitude of a modern school of
theology towards faith. The Jesuits were in fact the
' Broad Churchmen ' of morahty, and hardly perform-
ed more astounding feats of legerdemain with their
consciences than we see certain divines among us
performing every day with their intellects.

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With this aspect of the Jesuit system, however, it
was not, as has been said, in Pascal's loftily ascetic
nature to sympathize. When he had admitted that
the Jesuits made terms with the flesh as followers of
the world merely, and not as agents of the devil ;
that they sophisticated virtue not from mere delight
in vice, but to gain certain temporal ends of their own,
he had gone to the utmost limit of his concessions. As
men of the world masquerading in the character of
men of the other world, they deserved, he thought, no
quarter at his hands ; while as the ubiquitous and
all-powerful Society, the very spiders of pohtical in-
trigue, the ever-busy band of schemers with a foot
in every powerful house, and a whisperer at the ear
of every prince, supreme at Versailles, and never
long in abeyance at the Vatican, leniency towards
them w^ould, he felt, be as dangerous as undeserved.
Odious, as the defilers of morality and the contami-
uators of the sincere milk of Augustinian doctrines,
they were formidable as unscrupulous political ad-
versaries ; and the instinct of self-preservation con-
spired with zeal for the truth to urge that the attack
upon them should be as resolute and as deadly as it
could be made.

How Pascal did the work which he thus set him-
self remains on record for all time. He did it in such
a way that since his day it has needed no second
doing. The Jesuits, in giving to the Provincial

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Letters the nickname of the ' immortal liars,' have at
least hit the mark in their adjective ; whether the
letters tell the truth or not, anyone who doubts can
ascertain for himself, for Pascal's charges are pre-
ferred with all the precision of an indictment, and
chapter and verse are given for every one of those
lax dicta of the Jesuit doctors over which the thun-
der of his denunciation and the lightning of his
ridicule have rolled and flashed. But while he thus
traces home every vicious sophism to its individual
author, he never loses sight for a moment of the
mauy-visaged presence of his real enemy, the Society
itself; It is a striking illustration of the forensic
thoroughness of Pascal's work, that he should have so
decisively anticipated the only plea by which an un-
wonted apologist of the Jesuits attempted a century
later to save the collective credit of the Order at the
expense of certain individual members. When Vol-
taire complains of Pascal's having unfairly attributed
to the whole Society the extravagant opinions of a
few Spanish and Flemish doctors, he overlooks two
points which Pascal is at special pains to impress upon
his readers — first, that the perniissiis superiorum, with-
out which no Jesuit work can be published, fixes the
Order as a whole with responsibility for all the doc-
trines which any such work may contain ; and
secondly, that the existence of a rigid, as well as a
lax school of Jesuit casuistry, is in no respect sur-

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THE PEOVINCIAL LETTERS

prising, but on the contrary a result naturally to be
expected from the adroit policy of the Order. God
and Mammon, in fact, could scarce have been jointly
served with success on any other terms. It would
have been a waste of power for the Society to have
encouraged the existence of any large number of lax
casuists. Thanks to the invaluable Jesuit doctrine
of Probability, the sanction of even a single 'doctor
of weight ' was sufficient to justify the vicious in in-
dulging their favourite vices ; while, on the other
hand, it was, as Pascal points out, a most convenient
thing to be able to quiet the scruples of alarmed virtue
by appealing, when occasion arose, to the severer
maxims of other Jesuit doctors of equal learning and
repute.

But, however strongly our moral sympathies may
be enlisted on the side of Pascal, it is scarcely pos-
sible on the whole case to refrain from commiserat-
ing the Jesuits. Their ill-luck in the matter was as
monstrous as would be that of a man who should be
called out and shot in a duel by an adversary chal-
lenging him under a complete misconception of facts.
For the deadly disputant against whom they found
themselves pitted had, after all, taken the field under
a mistake. It was Pascal's sympathy for Aruauld
and his zeal for the true faith, which he believed the
Port Royahst doctor to bo supporting — these motives,
and not, at least originally, any desire to expose the

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THE PROVINCIAL LETTERS

Jesuit teachiug — that first brought him iuto the fray.
And as he entered, so he quitted it. His first letter
is on the poiivoir procliain, and his last on the ques-
tion of the Papal falhbility, sur le fait — the fait of
course being whether the five condemned proposi-
tions were or were not in the Augustinus. He began
and ended as a theologian, and as a theologian he
W'as in error throughout on the practical question at
issue betwe(;n the Jansenists and Jesuits. It must,
then, have been deeply mortifying to these latter, or
to their successors of a somewhat later date, to learn
that Pascal himself afterwards recognized his error,
and that he had, on more mature consideration, to
abandon altogether the position which he assumed
on the Jansenist controversy throughout the Provin-
cial Letters. His convictions reached maturity sadly
too late for the interests of the Jesuit doctors ; for in
the meantime, aud by way of efl:ecting a mere diver-
sion, he had utterly annihilated the elaborate structure
of the Jesuit casuistry.

That the position which Pascal took up in the
Jansenist dispute was unteuable — if we must again
fill our bellies with the east wind of this arid contro-
versy — it will not be difficult to show. Only as
regards the second of the five condemned proposi-
tions can he be pronounced to have made out even
an appearance of a case ; on the others, and on the
question of fact connected with them, he manifestly

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THE PROVINCIAL LETTERS

fails. He was able to show -with some plausibility
that Jansenius had not taught downright Calvinism
regarding the operation of predestination to life, but
he failed to distinguish either Jansenius's doctrine or
his own, or for that matter that of the Church, on
the subject of reprobation, from the doctrine of Calvin
upon the same point. First, as to the former question.
Pascal points out, with his usual felicitous perspicuity
of style, that Jansenius had not committed himself
to the Calvinist necessarian theory that man cannot
resist grace, and the line of argument which he
adopts exposes clearly the origin of what he con-
ceives to be the misconception of those wlio
condemned Jansenius on this point.

Jansenius, according to him, had not taught pure
necessarianism in teaching that man could not resist
Divine grace. Man in Jansenius's system, as ex-
plained by Pascal, still retained his free-will, and
might use it in endeavoiu'ing to resist Divine grace :
only the endeavour would be of necessity unsuccess-
ful. Grace must and would produce its effect in
time ; but it would do so not by overruling, but
by enlisting his will in God's service — by sanctifying
it so that it was infallibly led to God, par iin mouve-
ment toute lihre, tout volontaire, tout amoureux.

We are of course far from saying that the distinc-
tion here sought to be drawn between what are only
two modes of equal necessity- has any real existence.

THE PROVINCIAL LETTERS

It has not ; but it may have a theological existence,
theological distinctions having in all ages been nobly
independent of any objective foundation ; and Pascal
doubtless thought that it was not incumbent upon
him to show that Jansenius held a doctrine of genu-
ine free-will, but that it was sufficient for him to
prove that he did not hold a doctrine identical in
terms with that of Calvinistic necessity. But, though
he may have gained a technical triumph on this
second proposition, not even on this did ho gain a
substantial victory. It was merely the form in which
the condemnation of Jansenius on this point had
happened to be couched which enabled Pascal to
achieve a semblance of success. For the doctrine
intended to be condemned in the second proposition
was the doctrine that ' Divine grace never fails of its
effect.' • This was the heresy of Jansenius, and this
heresy remains after PascaPs vindication, since he
also held, as we have seen, that Divine grace was
invariably efficacious, and it was immaterial, there-
fore, whether this invariable efficacy was the result

1 The second of the condemued propositions does not occur
textually in the Angustinus, but is matter of inference fronia pas-
sage in the second book. ' H?ec est vera ratio cur nulla omnino
mediciualis gi-atia Christi effectu suo careat,' &c., Book ii. c. 55.
On which comments a latter Catholic theologian, ' Si autem nulla
gratia effectu suo careat igitur interiori gratia nimquam resistitur
cum gratije interiori resistere idem sit ac earn effectu suo
dcfraudare,' the Catholic doctrine being, he adds, that grace ' non
semper eum obtinet effectum ad quem a Deo datur.'

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THE PROVINCIAL LETTERS

of pure necessity, or of a human will being invari-
ably directed to God par un mouvement tout lihre, tout
volontaire, tout amoureux.

On all the other propositions Pascal's failure to make
out his case is still more conspicuous. To take first
the question of the fait^ the question, that is, of the
authorship of the condemned propositions as dis-
tinguished from the question of their heterodoxy.
His well-known argument was that Papal infallibility
was confined to the droit, and did not extend to the
fait, and that while the Jansenists could be called on
to repudiate the five condemned propositions (which,
added Pascal, they did ex animo), they could not be
justly required to believe and confess that Janseuius
had afiirmed these propositions, at least in the sense
in which the Holy See had condemned them. And
all this argument is conducted in Pascal's best man-
ner. But it is a line of argument suited only to a
controversy which had itself been conducted from
beginning to end in total defiance of that method so
caustically recommended by Voltaire—-' II eut mieux
valu peut-etre la peine de citer les passages du livre :
c'est ce qu'on ne fit jamais.' Had the passages from
Jansenius been openly cited by the Jesuits, which
— from fear of falling foul of Augustin, under whose
eanctiou they had been put forward — none dared to
do, they would have thoroughly refuted Pascal. The
fact is that all these four propositions are to be found

T 2

THE PROVINCIAL LETTERS

verbatim, or nearly m, in Jansenins's book. The
first proposition, condemned by Innocent X. as
' temerarjam impiara, blasphemam, anathemate
damnatam, et ha3reticam,' was the proposition that
' there are some commands of God which righteous
and good men are absolutely unable to obey, though
disposed to do so, and that God does not give them
so much grace that they are able to observe thera.'
And in A^igustijini^ (Book iii. c. 13), we find, ' Htec
igitur plenissime planissimeque demonstrat nihi
esse in S. Augustiui doctrina certius ac fundatius
quam esse pra^cepta qua3dam qua3 hominibus non
tantum iufidelibus, excascatis, obdnratis, sed fidelibus
quoque et justis, volentibus, conantibus secundum
prassentes quas habeant vires, sunt impossibilia :
deesse quoqua gratiam qua fiant possibilia.' The
second proposition we have already discussed. The
third subject of the Papal anathema is the doctrine
' that in order to a man's being worthy of praise or
blame before God, he need not be exempt from sub-
jective necessity, but merely from objective coercion.'
And Jausenius says {Aug,, B. vi. c. 24), ' Clarissimis
verbis docuit S. Thomas arbitrium honiinis dictum
esse liberum quia non cogitur,' and ' opus esse laude
vel vituperio dignura meritorum ex hoc quod est
voluntarium, spontaneum, non coactum, tametsi deter-
iniuahim ad iinumJ The fourth condemned proposition
was the doctrine that ' the semi-Pelagian error con-

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THE PROVINCIAL LETTERS

sisted in believing that the human will had the power
of either admitting or rejecting the operations of
Divine grace.' The passage in the Aiigitstinus (Book
viii. c. 6) is, ' Hoc proprie semi-Pelagianorum error
solus est quod aliquod prim£BV£e libertatis reliquum
putant . . . quod sicut Adam si voluisset poterat
. . . ita lapsus homo saltern credere potest si vellet,
neuter tamen absque interioris gratia adjutorio, cujus
usus vel abusus esset in unius cujasque arbitrio et
potestati.' Lastly, the Pope had condemned the pro-
position that it was a semi-Pelagian error to hold that
' Christ died for the sins of all mankind/ And
Jansenius has plainly affirmed that doctrine to be
false in the passage B. iii. c. 21 : ' Quse sane cum in
Augustini doctrina perspicua certaque sint, nullo
modo principiis ejus cousentaneum est ut Christus
Dominus vel pro infidelium in infidelitate morieutium
vel pro justorum non perseverantium a^terua salute
mortuus esse, sanguinem fudisse, senaet ipsum
redemptorem dedisse, gratiam obsecrasse sentiatur.
Solvit enim quo quisquejamab a3terno pra^destinatus
erat, solvit hoc decrctum neque ullius pretii oblatione
mutandum esse uec seipsum velle mutare, ex quo
factum est ut juxta Sanctissimum Doctorem non
magis Patrem pro asterna liberatione ipsoruni quam
pro diabolorum deprecatus fucrit.' All these pro-
positions, says Pascal, the Jansenists arc bound to
condemn and do condemn e.c aniino, but tliey are not

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THE PROVINCIAL LETTERS

bound to believe that tbey are in the AugustinuSy
and, in fact, tbey and I deny that they are there.
There, nevertheless, they are.

So much, then, for the question of i\iQ fait. It re-
mains only to point out that Pascal and, so far as he
represented them, the Jansenists were within the
Papal condemnation of the first and most important
proposition as regards the droit also. For he himself
maintains the exact equivalent of the condemned
doctrine on his own account, and asserts it to be, as
probably enough it was, the orthodox teaching of the
Church on the subject. He contends at the close of Let-
ter I, in summing up the results of his exposure of the
Jesuit machinations against Arnauld, that the follow-
ing propositions have never been condemned either on
one side or the other : ' (1) that grace is not given to
all men ; (2) that all the just have always the power
to obey the commandments of God ; (3) that never-
theless, in order to perform them, and even to pray
for grace to perform them, they have need of an
efficient grace which invincibly determines their will ;
(4) that that efficient grace is not always given to all
the just, but depends on the pure mercy of God.'
But surely (2), (3), and (4) if taken together establish
a contradiction (for how can all just men possess a
power which is itself conditional on a gift of grace not
vouchsafed to all the just?) ; while it is evident that
(3) and (4) taken together assert by implication the

278

THE PROVINCIAL LETTERS

first of the condemned propositions, for if the just can-
not perform the divine commandments without a gift
of grace, which some of them do not receive, to those
not so favoured the said commandments are im-
possible.

It is of course equally true that the Jesuits who
condemned Jausenius, themselves held nominally, or
at any rate could not venture to deny openly, the
condemned proposition. The only distinction which
they could have set up between their own and the
Jansenist doctrine (and this distinction had to be
kept in the backgrouud in order to the sham alliance
with the Dominicans to compass the censure of Arnauld
in the Sorbonne) was this : — that whereas the Jansen-
ists, their opponents, and the Dominicans, their sham
allies, alike held that grace was necessary even to
enable a man to pray for such grace as would enable
him to do the will of God, they, the Jesuits, held
that the just required no antecedent gift of grace to
enable them to pray for grace. But even then, as
the Jesuits dared not deny that grace was necessary
as a means of obeying the commandments, and as
they admitted that it was not freely given to all, and
did not venture to affirm that it was even given to
all who prayed for it, they had no right to condemn
as a heresy the proposition that some of the divine
commandments were to some of the just impossible.

The truth i?, as must appear to all who have the
279

THE PROVINCIAL LETTERS

courage to wade through these barren polemics, that
there are ouly two logical positions to beheld on this
question — the position of the Pelagian and that of the
Calvinist — the position of those who believe that man
can secure his salvation of his own free-will, and the
position of those who hold that he is the abject slave
of necessity, to be saved or damned solely according
as a grace, which he is unable to secure or even soli-
cit of his own free-will, is given to or withheld from
him by an omnipotent being. Pascal really belonged
to the latter of these schools and the Jesuits to the
former ; but, from widely differing motives, mental
and moral, neither party could or did admit his true
affinities. Pascal was an unconscious Calvinist, try-
ing in vain to distinguish between his own creed and
that which had been condemned by his Church, and
doing so from an honest desire to submit himself to
that Church. The Jesuits Avere conscious Pelagians,
who skilfully concealed their heresy for fear of losing
their influence. The practical result of this contest
between candour and duplicity was such as might
have been expected. Pascal in his efforts to escape
the condemnation incurred by Calvin, and to avert it
from the teacher whom he followed, contended with
manifest ill success that his teacher never taught, and
that he himself never held, the doctrine which had
been condemned. The Jesuits, on the other hand,
without committing themselves to an open denial of

280

THE PROVINCIAL LETTERS

Augustinian doctriue, succeeded in procuring its con-
demnation in the person of an alleged follower of
Calvin. In the meantime, it is true, as Gibbon says,
hat the difference between Augustin whom the
Church of Rome has canonized and Calvin whom she
has reprobated is invisible.

Yet the Jesuits, with their usual art, contrived to
conceal in a great measure their own embarrassment
while consummating their adversaries' disgrace. The
intellectual self-deception of Pascal is, however, more
surprising than the moral dishonesty of the Jesuits,
and the probability that this self-deception could not
have permanently prevailed over so acute a mind,
lends much credibility to the story cited by Bayle,
from the Histoire des Cinq Propositions, to the effect
that Pascal subsequently recognised the fact that it
was the orthodox doctrine — the true faith as held and
taught by Augustin, and as embraced, for all his
alleged heresy, 1)y Calvin, which had been anathema-
tized by Innocent X. In other words, he came at last
to see, what only theological controversy could have
ever hidden from liim, that his own theory of an im-
potent 'power' to obey the commandments was in
truth no whit less absurd and self-contradictory than
the inadequate 'sufficient grace' of the MoHnists
which he had transfixed with some of the happiest
shafts of his ridicule.

But who now cares for this I Who now troubles
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THE PROVINCIAL LETTERS

himself to inquire whether Pascal was victorious or
vanquished on the theological issue ? What now
would be the whole weary literature of Jansenism to
mankind but for this one work of matchless art and
strength ? A vast field of half-buried ruins, lost be-
neath the luxuriant overgrowth of modern interest
and modern thought — a hidden world into which the
curious antiquarian might find his account in burrow-
ing, but which the traveller intent on worthier objects
would pass by. As it is, however, there are few in-
deed who make the journey of self-culture without
turning aside for a pilgrimage to these else unlovely
ruins, for in their midst stands the great work of Pas-
cal, erect, solitary, flawless ; a single stately column
visible from afar.

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THE FUTURE OF HUMOUR

Among many signs of a growing recognition of
human brotherhood not the least notable are the
praiseworthy attempts of ' the peoples ' to understand
and, if possible, appreciate each other's recorded
jokes. There is an element of the humorous in the
very endeavour. It assumes, to begin with, that a
joke, whether considered as a natural or, as is too
often the case, a manufactured product, is necessarily
a subject of international exchange. This is, from the
economical point of \aew, a curious theory, which ap-
parently implies that though all, or at any rate most,
nations produce their]own jokes some in greater, some
in less quantity, but usually in an amount sufficient
to supply the home market, and to render the native
consumer independent of foreign supplies, it is, never-
theless, at his option to vary the quality of the con-
sumable product to any extent by taking consign-
ments of it from abroad. It is a mere question of tlie

283

THE rUTURE OF HUMOUR

cost and difficulty of tmDsport, which latter word, it
should be noted, is etymologically almost identical
with the word ' translation.' These matters arranged,
and the foreign joke delivered safely to the pur-
chaser, he has nothing to do but to sit down to its
enjoyment ; and this with as absolute an assurance
of relishing it, even though ' made in Germany,' as
the gourmet feels in opening a jar of Russian caviare.
If the taste disappoints him he attributes the defect
to the fault of the intermediary, and reproaches the
translator as a consignee of goods would reproach a
slovenly packer through whose negligent perform-
ance of his duty they had ' gone bad ' in transit.
That the goods may be quite unsuited to his taste,
or outside the range of his appreciation, never seems
to occur to him, still less that before their consign-
ment they^may have already deteriorated, even in the
country of their production.

This conception of the joke as in itself an im-
perishable creation, a permanent addition to the
world's wealth, and fit companion of the serious work
of Thucydides, as a ' possession for ever,' is really
very humorous, when you come to reflect upon
it. It is almost as humorous, indeed, as Mr. Labou-
chere's theory of poetry, which he regards, as he
would coal or iron, solely from the point of view of
the realised product, and not at all from that of the
productive energy, arguing therefrom that since the

284

THE FUTURE OF HOIOUR

world has accumiilated enough of the former the
latter should now cease. ' We have,' he once wrote
in comment upon some remarks of mine, 'already
enough of the article ' — that is poetiy — ' which has
come down to us from former generations, and time
has taken care that only what is good and sound has
reached us. Why, then, should we trouble to read
any more ?' And, therefore, why trouble to write, or,
at any rate, to print, any more ? ' Poetry,' in fact,
means ' poems ' to Mr. Labouchere in precisely the
same way and to the same extent as * coal-mining '
means ' coal.' You examine your stocks of botli
commodities, find you have enough, and cease de-
manding: whereupon down go profits and up come
strikes in one of the two businesses, though not,
cm'iously enough, in the other. In the same way it
is quite clear that to a great many worthy people
' humour ' means the contents of a jest-book. If
there are many jest-books in existence, in your own
and other languages, then you are well supplied with
humour, and, as far as you are concerned, there is no
reason why the ' humourist ' should go on producing
any more. It is true that there is more of a pre-
judice against jocularity ' which has come down to
us from former generations ' than there is against
poetiy of a similarly imposing length of descent, and
that the ' good and sound ' joke does not in all
circles enjoy the respect that 'is paid to seasoned and

285

THE FUTURE OF HUMOUR

well-preserved verse. Still, there is a considerable
class of consumers who are quite satisfied with it
even in its original state, and, unlike the poem, it is
capable of being, and constantly is, ' worked up '
again into new and attractive forms.

We need not, however, trouble ourselves about
those excellent and most fortunate persons to whom
the old, in all kinds, even in the humorous, is prefer-
able to the new. Long may they live and flourish,
and when they die, may the lapidary have the brilliant
inspiration of inscribing ' Affliction sore,' or ' To live
in hearts we leave behind,' on their tombstones, while
Joe Miller acts as their Virgil through the Elysian
Fields. Byron, I think it is, who in a note to one of his
poems describes a certain country gentleman as one
who 'would have the same joint for dinner every Sun-
day in order that he might make the same joke upon
it.' Which of us with a sense of humour would be
able, if he were a weekly guest of the squire, to help
sharing in this amusement, tickled not, perhaps, by
the jest, but at any rate by the laughter ? And who
will deny that the simple souls who have but one
joke, and never tire of it, do themselves contribute
in no small measure to the not unkindly mirth of the
world?

It is with that more sophisticated and fastidious
person who craves for novelty in his funniments that
I am just now concerned. For it is a serious matter,

286

THE FUTURE OF HUMOUR

when you come to think of it, that humour should
' wear out.' Relative as our perceptions may be,
they manage in other provinces of thought and feel-
ing to keep up a respectable appearance of the ab-
solute and the uni^'ersal, of the unchangeable from
age to age, and the indistinguishable as between
nation and nation. The sublime, the terrible, the
tender, the pathetic — there does seem to be some
common international standard of these qualities ; it
is possible (continues our ' self-torturing sophist ') to
say, with a rough approximation to truth, that those
written words which move a reader of one civiHsed
nationality to awe or pity, which stir him to delight
in the imaginative contemplation of Nature, or agi-
tate him by the vivid portrayal of human passion,
will, as a rule, produce the same effect in kind upon
all readers of the same average level of intelligence,
to whatever race' they may belong. Of course (he
admits; the effect may differ widely in degree.
Dutch sublimity may only moderately impress me,
and Norwegian pathos may leave me comparatively
cold. Yet still I recognise the fact that both the
pathos and the sublimity appeal, in their several
degrees, successfully to the same emotions as are
swayed by Shakespeare and Milton. But with what
truth can I say of some of the jests which tickled the
reader of Hierocles, or of thousands of others which
have no doubt shaken millions of midriffs since that

287

THE FUTURE OE HUMOUR

Greek Joe Miller's day, that they appeal even faintly
to those emotions which are swayed by Swift and
Sterne, by Fielding and Dickens ? So far from doing
this, they 'reverse the engine,' so to speak; they set
the emotional machinery working in precisely the
opposite direction.

It is not a mere effect of time, either ; or, at least,
it cannot be that alone. For age does not wither nor
custom stale the beauties of serious literature. People
have not yet begun to think that the prayer of Priam
to Achilles is poor stuff; or that Lucretius' description
of the gods and their abode is fustian ; or that Dante
has spoilt the story of Paolo and Francesca. The
judicious critic does not propose to obelise all the
lines from ' The cloud-capped towers ' down to ' is
rounded with a sleep ' inclusive ; though the manager
about to produce The Tempest might very likely pro-
nounce them ' cackle/ and mark them with the blue
pencil as ' to be omitted in representation.' We still
read Lycidas with pleasure, and would hardly con-
sent to strike out even the ' No Popery ' part about
the ' wolf with privy paw.' Even on lower literary
levels good things of the serious description contrive
to last. We still find Swift's account of the Struld-
brugs passably impressive, and we do not set down
Home Tooke as a mere watery-headed ' cry-baby,'
because the stern pathos of the closing paragraph of
his enemy Johnson's Preface to the Dictionary affected

288

THE FUTURE OF HUMOUR

him to tears. It is humour alone which will not
wear : it happens only to the joke to seem exquisite
to the men of one age, and imbecile to the men of
another ; and this difference (concludes our despair-
ing sceptic) must be due to something essentially
perishable, something fundamentally relative, limited,
occasional, about humour and its products. Who
can know, then, what is its 'true inwardness,' how
and in what form it can be assured of survival, or
whether it is destined to survive in any form at

ain

These, no doubt, are melancholy — even desolating
— thoughts and questions ; but 1 am not sure that the
evocation of them will be without its salutary effects.
The alarmist will get over his apprehensions as to
the disappearance of humour when he has attained
to a more accurate conception of what that peculiar
faculty is ; and in working his way to this he will
find abundant consolation for the gradual decay of
its successive products, and even for the circumstance
that they are not in all cases suitable subjects of
international exchange.

It would be hardly safe, perhaps, to affirm with
absolute confidence that any one human energy is,
as such, indestructible, still less that no such energy
is transformable out of recognition in the course of
the World-Process. It is possible to maintain, as a
pessimistic thesis, that even the poetic instinct and

THE FUTURE OF HUMOUR

faculty will in course of time disappear ; that its
period of greatest strength is coincident with com-
paratively early stages of human development, and
that, like the measles and other maladies which take
such masterful hold of primitive races, its power is
progressively declining with the advance of civil-
isation. At present, however, there are no signs of
this ; indeed, such signs as there are altogether ' con-
tra-indicate ' it, as doctors say ; and on present ap-
pearances one would be disposed to hold that,
whether our supply of the poetic product (warranted
' good and sound ') be sufficient or not, or whether, if
insufficient, the contemporary producer be capable
or incapable of making any real addition to it, the
work of poetic production is likely to continue, and
to continue at an increasing rate.

So with humour. It is possible, as a pessimistic
thesis, to maintain the probability of its efFacement
from the list of human energies; and it must be
sorrowfully admitted, especially when we study cer-
tain results of the energising of the humorous faculty,
that it seems to possess the less effective vitality of
the two ; but the contingency of its future disap-
pearance seems practically as problematical and
; remote. Humour, like poetry, is the habit of con-
I templatmg, and of being affected by, the facts of
I consciousness in a particular way. It sees the mutual
( relations of thoughts, things, and persons — that is to

290

THE FUTURE OF HUMOUR

say, of thoughts to each other, of things and persons
to each other, and of thoughts to things and persons
— under an aspect, just as poetry does, of its own.
Poetry unveils the hidden beauty, humour exposes
the lurking incongruity, of these relations ; and the
charm of the humorous as of the poetic product
varies directly as the sum of three ingredients — first,
the objective truth and force of the revelation ;
secondly, its novelty and unexpectedness as such
revelation ; and thirdly, the subjective skill with
which it is effected. In the greatest humorists, as in
the greatest poets, all these three contributories
touch their maximum. In their case the illuminant,
humorous or poetic, is the most powerful and the
most commandingly directed, and the illuminated
object the most delightfully surprising in its new
aspect. It is their chiefest triumph to transfig-ure
with beauty and renew with humour those common
things on which the careless eye of the world has
rested, unsuspecting of their secret charm, a thousand
times.

But all this is only true of the gi-eatest in either
kind ; and where the poet or the humorist is some-
thing less than supreme he rarely has that magical
gift of handhug the ' eternally common ' which will
assure his work of sharing the perpetuity of its
material. People see this clearly enough in the case
of poetry, and are apparently resigned to it. At any

THE FUTURE OF HUMOUR

rate, thej do not seem to distress themselves— I am
not now speaking of Mr. Labouchere alone — at the
reflection that the heritage of < good and sound
poetry ' which has come down to us from former
generations is small indeed compared to the total
amount of the poetry which was regarded — and
surely some of it justly — as ' good and sound ' at the
time of its production. In other words, they acquiesce
philosophically enough in the fact that poetry — that
is, some poetry — can grow old and perish, while they
seem to be dismayed at the thought that humour —
that is, some humour — is of the fashion that passeth
away.

Of course, the actual discovery that it is of this
fashion — at any rate when that discovery is made in
the work of some dearly-loved humorist of one's
youth — is indefinitely the more painful of the two.
That is for the reason already referred to : namely,
that humour which fails to give its intended pleasure
gives positive pain — a pain which is not in the
smallest degree mitigated by the literary skill with
which the product is presented. Better a thousand
times to be a poet of a mode outworn than a rococo
humorist ; for the former, though banished from the
common household of man, may in virtue of his style
possess an eternal refuge in the temple of letters.
What human heart is moved in these days by the
poetry of Pope, yet what lover of the art of literature

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THE FUTURE OF HUMOUR

has it ceased, or will it ever cease, to delight? The
rhetorical passion which leaves him cold does not
offend him ; the decay of its once prized ' poetic
beauties ' detracts no whit from his enjoyment of its
grace, its elegance, its matchless skill ; nay, perhaps
their charm is heightened by that scent of faded
flowers. But think of the difference for a devoted
Dickensian who suddenly finds himself confronted
with some well-known passage of the master's ' high
jinks,' the delight of his admirer's early youth, but
now all gone flat — its humours changed into mere
mechanical clowning from which all the spirit has
departed ! The writing is as good as ever, the
movement of the scene as brisk, the technical skill
of the whole, in short, as admirable as ever. But do
these qualities console the disenchanted worshipper?
Can he even bear to linger over the page in the hope
that they may yield him consolation ? No, he turns
the leaf, perhaps closes the book, v/ith a curious
emotion of shame ; to examine the vainly-grinning
jest more closely would seem a kind of impiety. He
almost feels like one who has unwittingly ' uncovered
the nakedness of his father.'

Yet he is wrong to close the book, though right
enough to turn the leaf ; for if he has the courage to
face the loss of some of his early illusions, ho will
find much happy and refreshing confirmation of his
early tastes. If the critic in him should be, as it is

THE FUTURE OF HUMOUR

in some of ns, for good or evil, not so very many
years younger than the man, he will never have been
able to accept all the Dickensian humour with abso-
lute unreserve. Nay, even the comparatively un-
critical youth of five-aud-thirty years ago — a far less
precocious period than the present — could not away
with the whole of it ; so that as regards some of its
more exuberant mirth-making there is no illusion to
destroy. Much of the rest, however, and that very
often of the broadest, is still vital; it only needs that
the breadth of the caricature should have some
broadly human vice or foible to sustain it. There
was always genius in its very exaggeration, and
that genius will be found in most cases to have kept
it alive. It is only, after all, the too narrowly local,
the too eccentrically individual element, which has
perished.

No doubt it is a blow to find — if we do find — that
the humours of Pickwick have largely staled, and that
we can no longer laugh as erst we laughed at the
cockneyisms of Sara Weller. Yet, at least, the noble
and impossible Pecksniff is still left to us almost as
fresh as ever, and the fun of Todgers's — that Pension
Vauquer of a more genial Balzac — groweth not old.
Even Mrs. Gamp, now fallen unamusing as to her
more than human perversions of articulate speech, is,
beneath her lifeless bizan^erie of externals, living still.
We feel it when she sits down to tea with Mrs. Prig.

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THE FUTURE OF HUMOUR

Her type has perished and passed away, but there is
that in her — as there seems not to be in Sam Weller,
a more purely stage construction — which holds of
human nature and survives. The ' sick and monthly '
of fifty years ago may have been folded up like a
vesture and changed ; but greed and cunning,
vanity and unscrupulousness and gross animalism, and
the semi-salacious interest of the lower order of
womankind in the reproductive side of life — these are
permanent human characteristics : and fused into one
comic whole with the humour of unconsciousness it
seems that they have power to delight us still.

Generally, therefore, we may venture, for the bene-
fit of the too serious and desponding persons to whom
I have referred, to hazard the proposition that Nature
as exhibited in the human race, is not yet played
out ; nay, that in respect of her inexhaustible power
of supplying art with perennially fresh material, she
should be recognised as no less a ' rum 'un ' by the
present generation than by the age of Mr. Wackford
Squeers. Only she cannot be expected to admit
parentage of every artistic product, humorous or
other, Avhich one seeks to ' mother ' upon her, and to
shelter it as such for ever from the wasting hand of
time. She will not do this even for a Dickens, as she
has not done it even for a Sterne. Slie takes only
from the hand of every romancer and every hum-
orist, great or small, such children of his begetting

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THE FUTURE OF HUMOUR

as are clearly stamped with her own image ; such
contrasts of character, such paradoxes of thought,
such incongruities of association, as are drawn from
her own bosom or ordered by her own hand; and the
residue she relentlessly lets go. The loss of all that,
from age to age, is certain, and may occasionally be
painful ; but it is not more certain than the preserva-
tion of what Nature has ' quoted and signed ' as fit to
be preserved. Hence let no one fear — as, perhaps,
none do fear, save those defectively humorous per-
sons who cling with such pathetic anxiety to the jest-
book — that the written record of Bumour is not as
imperishable a part of man's spiritual possessions as
the deposit of Poetry.

Whether it will be largely added to in the future
is another question. That depends— it is less a truism
thau it seems to say so — on the persistence of the crea-
tive faculty as distinct from the appreciative sense
of humour among civihsed races. And there is not
quite enough reassurance in sayiug that this faculty,
having now become thoroughly ' organised ' in the
mental constitution of man, is not likely to disappear
altogether. Perhaps not ; but one cannot escape a
fear that it may by degrees become dormant, or fall,
so to speak, 'into abeyance ' — like a peerage on fail-
ure of male heirs. One cannot help observing that
the exercise even of the appreciative sense of humour
appears to require a certain elasticity of the emotions,

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THE FUTURE OF HUMOUR

which, to put it mildly, does not seem to be becoming
a more common quality than it was. The young man
whom one pronounces to 1be destitute of a sense of
humour is not always iptellectually incapable of per-
ceiving the incongruous in human hfe ; or even the
incongruous in his own person, position, and conduct.
But the perception is a strictly intellectual one : it
gives him no pleasure, but rather pain ; the last thing
we should expect of it is that it should provoke him
to a laugh.

It is contended, I am aware, in some highly optim-
istic quarters that this proves nothing. We have
become less demonstrative than our fathers, that is
all ; and we do not enjoy our humour any less than
they did because we do not give such noisy expres-
sion to our amusement. I confess to regarding this
as a very dangerous doctrine. True as it undoubtedly
is that some of the most exquisite humour in the
world is the most silently enjoyed, I have never myself
met a thorough appreciator of this form of humour who
was proof against that^ importunate demand which
some sudden flashes of the humorous make upon
one for an audible response. The power of laughter,
and of hearty laughter — so far, at least, as my own
experience goes — almost always accompanies a keen
emotional sense of humour. As to the mere intellec-
tual appreciation of it I say nothing; that power,
which is, no doubt, possessed in a high degree by the

1^97

THE FUTURE OF HUMOUR

Devil, is of little value to mankind. But I should
doubt myself whether this emotional sense of hum-
our — this capacity not only for perceiving the
incongruous, but for tahing pleasure in the sight — is
ever accompanied by an inability to laugh. Among
that very low-typed Oriental race, the Veddahs of
Ceylon, this inability is said to be absolute ; but my
own inference from that, which I give for what it is
worth, is that the Veddahs of Ceylon do not under-
stand a joke.

I am not aware, however, that the point has ever
been definitely settled, and since, in view of the
growing seriousness of our young men, it is beginning
to assume scientific importance, I suggest that steps
should be taken to determine it once for all. A com-
mittee of ethnologists charged with the duty of
investigating the matter might be despatched to
Ceylon, where the Bishop of Colombo, himself a
genuine humorist, and part author, in his pre-episcopal
days, of one of the happiest academic skits ever
written, Avould, I am sure, be glad to render them
any assistance in his power. Translations of a few
of the most approved works of our latest humorists
might be presented to this interesting people for
perusal, and the result observed and recorded. If it
proved that although incapable of laughing at these
pleasantries they had an intellectual appreciation of
them — that is to say, that they could point out, if

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THE FUTURE OF HUMOUR

only geographically, as it were, the exact spot on the
printed page at which the laughter they are them-
selves incapable of supplying is intended to ' come
iu ' — well, in that case their state would not be much
less gracious than that of many old-fashioned people
among ourselves. At any rate, the result of the
experiment would be full of hope for the future of a
country so many of whose most intellectual young
men are in the habit of taking themselves almost as
seriously as the Veddahs of Ceylon.

Meanwhile, and in the painful uncertainty of the
present outlook, it is not surprising that the psycholo-
gist should come to the assistance of his fellow-citizens,
and endeavour by analytic investigation of this
apparently disappearing quality and by discovery of
its true inwardness, to enable us to save it from ex-
tinction. If, argues he, we could only find out
exactly what humour is 'in its quiddity,' we could
keep ourselves humorous, or at any rate bring up
our children to be so. This is very good of the
psychologist : it is like his kindness ; and his attempt
to console and encourage us by these inquiries is the
more praiseworthy because, from the popular point of
view, the task is so essentially a thankless one.

There are indeed few studies which are pursued
by the philosopher under such severe discourage-
ments from simple and subtle ahkc. lie soon finds
that those who take any serious interest in the in-

299

THE FUTURE OF HUMOUR

quiry are far too iutent upon the establishmeut of
their own theories to pay any attention to his; while
as to the general public, they are precluded by an
incurable levity from considering the matter with
any seriousness at all. Indeed, they are apt to find
something unspeakably ridiculous in the mere fact
that, despite its subject, there is no more fun in it
than there is in other psychological inquiries — that,
in fact, the analyst of the Humorous is not, or not at
that moment, and in that capacity, a humorist.
This, of course, is a preposterous injustice. It is
worse than requiring the man wlio drives fat oxen to
be himstlf as fat ; it is to insist that he should be
equally good to eat, Nothing, for instance, could
have been more amusing in their irrevelance than
were many of the newspaper comments on Mr. W. S.
Lilly's recent investigation of this subject. Some of
these dashing commentators showed evident signs of
disappointment at not finding the ' Theory of the
Ludicrous' more amusing; others were excited to
scornful mirth by its logical method and arrangement.
One of them fouud that ' a philosopher analysing
jokes is a bit of a joke himself;' and I have no doubt
at all that many a reader chuckled assent to the
proposition. Mr. Lilly enumerated twenty-one forms
of the Ludicrous, beginning with Humour and ending
with Practical Joking ; and at this also the critic
from whom I have quoted was hugely tickled. The

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THE FUTURE OF HUMOUR

idea of a mau gravely couutiug the number of differ-
ent ways in which one can be made to laugh ! It
was too absurd I The philosopher who could do
such a thing may possibly have attained to a certain
cold intellectual comprehension of a joke ; but he
cannot have the true sympathetic appreciation of
humour, or he would be unable to contemplate the
incongruity of his own position with unmoved
muscles.

All this is very disheartening to analysts of the
ludicrous, and has prevented at least one of them
from taking a hand at the game (though it is one
which he enjoys greatly) for some years past. Another
discouragement which the analyst feels acutely is
that his speculations are in like case with those of
Dr. Primrose : they are addressed to the learned
world, but the learned world takes no notice of them
whatever. Perhaps the individual analyst has no
right to complain, for he never notices the analysis
of anyone else, or not, at least, of anyone later than
Sydney Smith. We all begin with Sydney Smith
and his famous dissertoiion in the Edinburgh Revieic
article on ' Irish Bulls,' though Mr. Lilly only does so
in order to dismiss the Canon's definition of humour
as a ' surprising proposition :' which no doubt it does
seem to be when taken in connection with the in-
felicitous examples which Sydney gives. But for
one who has endeavoured to pursue the analysis

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THE FUTURE OF HUMOUR

further, and who believes himself to have worked
out the much-debated distinction between Wit and
Humour in a formula, to which the only possible
objection is that it seems far too symmetrical to be
sound — for such an one, I say, to find that his labours
have passed absolutely unnoticed by a fellow-inquirer
(and how much more certainly, therefore, by an in-
curious and unpsychological public), there is good
excuse for feeling something of the disappointment
of Mr. Walter Shandy, when, master though he was
of one of the finest chains of reasoning in the world,
he was unable, for the life of him, to get a single link
of it into the head of his wife.

No attempt, however, will here be made to subject
the public to the cranial operation which would
evidently have been necessary in the case of Mrs.
Shandy. The analytic process referred to shall not
be repeated in these pages. It will be enough to
borrow one of them for a concise statement of its
results.

They are embodied in the following proposi-
tions :

1. Wit and Humour, which have sometimes
been treated as difierent results or aspects
of the same mental process, are in reality
the respective products of tw^o diametrically
opposed operations of the mind.
802

THE FUTURE OF HUMOUR

2. Wit consists in the revelation of unsuspected

similarity between two otherwise dissimilar
objects of thought.

3. Humour consists in the display (though not

necessarily the revelation) of incongruity be-
tween two otherwise associable objects of
thought.

4. Revelation being essential to wit, though

not to humour, it follows that the element
of surprise is a uniform constituent of the
effect produced by the former, though not
of that produced by the latter.

5. All incongruity implies dissimilarity ; but not

e converso, dissimilarity being recognised by
a purely intellectual apprehension, while
incongruity exists only between such dis-
similars as cannot be united in thought
without producing an emotional shock.

6. The ' passion of laughter ' is excited by in-

congruity alone. Humour, therefore, in
its various forms, is the sole excitant of
laughter.

7. The response to wit, as such, is not laughter,

but merely that more sedate form of
pleasurable emotion which the sudden dis-
covery of fitness brought about by human

THE FUTURE OF HUMOUR

ingenuity — as in a clever raechariical in-
vention, or the ingenious solution of a pro-
blem — is accustomed to evoke.

8. The fact that laughter is a frequent accom-
paniment of the response to wit is due to
the fact that the objects between which
wit reveals similarity are often not only dis-
similar, but incongruous also, and their union
in thought produces the emotional shock
which is the characteristic effect of humour.

Several more propositions in the nature of corollaries
to the foregoing might easily — perhaps only too
easily — be added ; but 1 refrain. The first and the
last three will quite suffice, I feel sure, to provoke
the vehement opposition of all those rival theorists
who do not prefer to treat them with an even more
vehement neglect. Space does not permit me to
support them with examples, but it will be easy for
anyone who doubts their soundness, especially that of
No. 8, to test it by examples. Everybody who has
any intelligent appreciation of wit will at once admit
that over and above the epigrams, repartees, and
hons mots, which have excited his mirth as well as
admiration, he has heard in conversation, or met
■with in reading, an immense number of brilliant
phrases, felicitous illustrations, apt comparisons, and
other indubitable and indisputable specimens of wit

304

THE FUTURE OF HUMOUR

■which have afforded him keen intellectual pleasure,
"without, however, provoking in him the slightest in-
chnation to laugh. If, then, he will compare these
specimens with those which have the power of ex-
citing laughter, he will find that in every instance of
the latter kind the wit has brought two incongruous
objects into mental association ; and has thus pro-
duced that emotional shock that results from collision
between ideas which, like the sublime and the ig-
noble, the comic and the tragic, the poetic and the
prosaic, are respectively contemplated in two
different jnoods of mind. For it is in the sudden
descent or ascent from one of these moods that the
emotions get their shock, and by a simple physiolo-
gical process, which Mr. Herbert Spencer's ex-
planation will presently be quoted to elucidate,
laughter ensues.

Perhaps, however, I have lingered long enough on
a side of the subject in which only a very small
minority are interested. The British public, with its
resolute practicality, has never taken kindly to
analysis. It is essentially a synthetic public. It
' drives at practice,' as Mr. Matthew Arnold used to
say of somebody else ; and its secret sympathies have
always been with Mr. Squeers^ when, after instruct-
ing his pupils in the orthography — or rather
heterography — of the word ' winder,' he sends him
away to clean one. It is tolerably certain that if

Tx^IE FUTURE OF HUMOUR

one were to •write quite a thick volume on the
Analysis of the Humorous, with specimens of humour
(constructed as per analysis) at the end, the public
would turn to the last page first, just for all the
world as if the treatise were a sensation novel.
Ever driving at practice, our people would hasten to
examine these concrete examples of the humorous
with the view of ascertaining beforehand whether a
study of its abstract principles would be Hkely to re-
pay them by developing the faculty in question.

Nor is there any doubt that, in secret, they suspect
the soundness of any psychological reasoning on this
subject which the psychologist is unable to prove by
practice. The analyst, it is plain to see, is often un-
easily conscious of this ; and sometimes he longs to
work out synthetically the demonstration of his
theories. But it is when synthesis succeeds to ana-
lysis that disappointment ensues. You may work
out your Theory of the Ludicrous with triumphant
thoroughness; but when you pass from theory to
practice, when you attempt to reintegrate your re-
solved ingredients and turn out a properly com-
pounded joke, then it is that you find yourself face
to face with the real difficulty. You get your two
' incongruous objects,' you excogitate your ' con-
cept,' ' subsume ' the former under the latter ; and
you let off your little joke. And lo 1 nobody laughs.
Everything has been done according to rule. If you

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THE FUTURE OF HUMOUR

doubt it^ you look up your Schopenhauer and satisfy
yourself. Perhaps you re-read the famous passage
justly praised by Mr. Lilly from Isaac Barrow, or you
take a turn at your Sydney Smith. According to all
these authorities you have been humorous ; you have
scrupulously followed the instructions of the learned,
and you are rewarded with the quiet conscience of
the painstaking though unsuccessful artist. But the
fact remains that you have failed to evoke that re-
sponse from 3^our audience without which even the
most self-sufBcient and stoical of jesters is rarely
content. You have not made anybody laugh.

It may be that, as the world grows older, sadder,
more fastidious, its humorists may learn to be con-
tent with the reward of their own consciences, and
will cease to expect anybody to laugh. Perhaps,
having themselves grown more philosophical, they
will argue that the intrinsic merit of a joke, or even
its projected power of amusing, can have little or
nothing to do with anything so purely physical as
that meaningless agitation of the abdominal and
other muscles which we describe as laughter. True,
it is a muscular convulsion of very ancient origin,
and interesting to the biologist on that account. But
so also are the primitive and rudimentary forms of
humour : there is, indeed, a stage in human civilisa-
tion at which humour is as simple and as practical as
laughter itself.

X 2

THE FUTURE OF HUMOUR

Let us, for instance, endeavour to conjure up to
our imagination that scene of artless jollity — the old-
fashioned country fair. Behold that circle of chubby
bumpkins, each with his blowsy, apple-cheeked
sweetheart at his side, and note that leathern ellip-
soidal ring raised some five feet from the ground and
fixed in that position, midmost the village green.
As Victor Hugo would ask and answer in similar
circumstances :

' What is it ■? It is a horse-collar.'

All eyes are bent eagerly on the empty frame, and
all await with tense expectancy the 'living picture'
who is about to fill it. Many others have filled it
already with more or less credit, but it is in the
prowess of Giles Joskin that the knowing ones be-
lieve. See I Giles is here. Lightly, confidently, he
steps up to the collar, and in another moment there
appears through its aperture, framed but ill-confined
within it, the ' too vast orb ' of his face. There is a
moment's pause, during which the spectators criti-
cally survey the champion's countenance, red and
round as a foggy sun ; and then, in a moment, the
ruddy disc is suddenly cloven in twain by a horizon-
tal fissure, which lengthening laterally and broaden-
ing vertically, like the chasm which swallowed the
tliree rebels against Moses and Aaron, touches at
last the sides of its environment, and bisects, at its

808

THE FUTURE OF HUMOUR

short axis, the leathern ellipse. It is Giles Joskin's
smile : a smile which all who see it recognise as vic-
torious ; and as the judge approaches with the prize
of victory in his hand, and announces that Giles has
carried off the flitch of bacon, to be awarded to him
who should grin most effectively through the horse-
collar, the welkin rings with rustic guffaws.

What has happened ? Psychologically and physio-
logically, what has happened? There is no real
doubt on either point; both have been well ascer-
tained. Explained in terms of the emotions, the
laughter of the tickled yokels is the expression of
the 'sudden glory' of Hobbes — that glory 'arising
from the sudden conception of some eminency in
ourselves as compared with the infirmities of others.'
Giles Joskin's grin — nay, his mere willingness to grin
for the entertainment of the village — is the 'infir-
mity' which excites their sudden glory. For a flitch
of bacon and the barren honour of exhibiting the
biggest mouth in the country-side he has pubhcly
made an ass of himself, while we (glorious thought !)
we, his neighbours, are sitting here, eminent, supe-
rior, not grinning through horse-collars ourselves,
but laughing at the ugliness and despising the
shamelessness of those who do.

Explained in terms of the uervo-muscular func-
tions, the case is equally clear. ' A large amount of

309

THE FUTURE OF HUMOUE

nervous energy,' says Mr. Herbert Speucer, ' instead
of being allowed to expend itself in producing an
equivalent amount of the new thoughts and emo-
tions which were nascent ' (with reference namely to
Giles Joskin's chances of success) 'is suddenly check-
ed in its flow ' (that is to say, by the apparition of
Giles's grin, and the instantaneous conviction that
such an incomparable rictus must inevitably carry off
the prize). ' The excess must discharge itself in
some other direction, and there results an efflux
through the motor nerves to various classes of the
muscles, producing the half-convulsive actions we
term laughter.'

No doubt this explanation is physiologically com-
plete. Audrey giggling behind her beefy hand ; her
hee-hawing swain with palms pressed upon his Sun-
day waistcoat ; the aged hedger who has broken his
' churchwarden ' between his toothless gums in the
convulsions of his mirth, are all simply working off an
excess of nervous energy through the muscles of the
jaws, thorax, and abdomen. So far all is plain sail-
ing. Where the difficulty arises, that difficulty which
so besets us in the field of practice, is in this : that a
philosopher, looking on at this primitive competition,
would not feel that he had any ' excess of nervous
energy ' to discharge. No resulting efflux pours
along his motor nerves in the direction of his malar,

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THE FUTURE OF HUMOUR

thoracic, and abdomiual muscles; but, on the con-
trary, there is, if anything, a stimulus given to those
portions of the muscular apparatus whereby we
manifest a gentle depression of the spirits. And it
then begins to dawn upon the philosopher that the
analysis of humour can never be of much value as a
basis for synthetical operations, having regard to the
essentially subjective character of the ridiculous, and
to the fact at that moment so importunately thrust
upon him that what at one stage of the human in-
telligence may be found most potently laughter-
moving, will at a higher stage prove absolutely
incapable of exciting to merriment.

To console himself under these reflections, it is
necessary that the philosopher should have in him
what all philosophers have not, a dash of the humorist
also. If he has, he will find that the scene is not
wanting in food for genial mirth. To take but the
most obvious of its suggestions, he may treat himself
to an ample draught of that 'sudden glory' whereof
we have been speaking. The yokels around him are
laughing at Giles Joskin, but he will be laughing at
the laughter of the yokels. While they are revelling
in ' the sudden conception of their own eminency
as compared with the infirmity ' of a man who can
grin in public through a horse-collar, ho will be
moved to mirth by the comparison of his own emiu-

311

THE FUTURE OF HUMOUR

eucy with the infirmity of men whom a man grinning
in pubHo through a horse-collar can amuse. But if
he is a humorist of the truer and deeper sort, the
scene of childish merriment will yield him more, much
more, than this. The narrow, unsympathetic, con-
temptuous feeling of amusement, wliich is all that
Hobbes took account of in his partially correct but
wholly inadequate analysis of the ' passion of laugh-
ter,' will be of the shortest possible duration. A
moment later, and he will think of the infinite intel-
lectual interval, the innumerable gradations of refine-
ment by which these clownish antics are divided from
the satire of Swift or the irony of Voltaire, and the
self-centred glory of superiority will give instant
place to that strange, delightful, all-embracing sense
of expansion and exaltation which suffuses our whole
being when humour suddenly Avidens for us the
horizons of the world.

And yet the broad buffooneries of the bumpkin
and the subtlest strokes of the satirist are in their
nature essentially one. The grin through the horse-
collar is humour in the germ, and it has the pathetic
interest of all rude beginnings. No doubt it is even
further removed from the subtlety and finesse of the
latest literary forms of humour than were the wag-
gon and wine-lees of Thespis from the splendid
equipment of the modern stage. But that is only

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THE FUTURE OF HUMOUR

because its beginnings were immeasurably earlier in
the history of human development than the birth of
the drama. It may be that man began in the Stone
Age to find amusement in any chance eminency over
the infirmities of his fellows ; to see another cut him-
self accidentally with a flint knife may have been
the one great joke of the Palfeolithic period. For,
saddening as it may be to the sentimentalist to
admit, the sense of humour must undoubtedly have
had not a sympathetic but an anti-pathetic origin.
We may take it as certain that the ' passion of laugh-
ter' in a Cave man was wholly and solely due to a
sudden glory of superiority over some other Cave
man ; exultation in the fact that he was crippled or
deformed, or for some reason or other weaker than the
laugher, and therefore, should circumstances require
it, his easy prey. Naturally it M^ould take a good
many feons to transform this attitude by a process of
gradual modification to that (say) which is adopted
by Sterne or an appreciative reader of Sterne to-
wards the weaknesses of My Uncle Toby.

Very little progress had been made at any rate
until after the heroic age of Greek poetry. The
Homeric sense of humour, for instance, when you
come to consider it, is quite in the stage of the
country fair. Vulcan goes halting round the Olym-
pian circle, cup in hand, in the absence of Ganymede,

313

THE FUTURE OF HUMOUR

and the lively gods break forth into peals of merri-
ment. Did ever anyone see the like ? This limping,
ill-favoured blacksmith, grimy from his forge, to
volunteer for the part of ' understudy ' to the beau-
tiful Id^eau youth ! What an exquisite joke ! And
so the ' inextinguishable laughter ' of the immortals
rolls on. How nai/ again is the mirth of the Achasan
chiefs "when Ulysses canes Thersites on the hump
with his baton for scurrility of language, and Ther-
sites blubbers I It is evident, too, that Homer (or
the Homeric Company) found matter of amusement
in the personal aspect of the ill-conditioned railer.
The poet dwells with relish on his squint, his hunched
back, his strangely shaped and decorated skull —

' He had a sugar-loaf head with a thin stubble of hair
sprouting from its apex.' There is quite a modern
gust about this description ; it almost anticipates the
comic brutality with which human ugliness is treated
by Smollett and humorists of his school. As a rule,
too, one may say that physical infirmities and
deformities were a good joke to the Roman of the
classical era. Even Horace, an essentially good-
natured little man, can snigger horribly over the
luridi denies and capitis nives of the superannuated
Lyce, and indeed he congratulates the young men of

314

THE FUTUKE OF HUMOUR

Rome generally on the excellent sport they must find
in the contemplation of her ruined charms. The
gods, he says, have prolonged her life to a raven's
length of days, that our ardent youth might have the
fun of seeing (possent visere multo non sine risu) the
torch by which they once were kindled now smoulder-
ing in ashes. An 'Arry of the worst modern type
would be incapable of jumping figuratively upon
the most unworthy of 'Arriets in such a fashion as
this.

We may say indeed that not to find food for mirth
in the lowering misfortimes or disabling ph^^sical
defects of others was distinctly exceptional with the
ancients. It is with quite a shock of agreeable sur-
prise that we find Persius speaking with contempt of
a man who could taunt another on the loss of an eye
— lusco qui possit dicere, Liisce. We are astonished at
the magnanimity which could afford to neglect such
an opening for pungent epigram, and feel that the
poet must have been vastly iu advance of his age.
But in that idea of course there is a considerable
mixture of egotistical self-deception. If we are to
speak of mankind in the mass, and not of a certain
small and highly-subtilized section of the human
race, it would be perhaps wiser for us not to give our-
selves too many airs over the country bumpkins
gazing hilarious on the voluntary self-humiliation of

315

THE FUTURE OF HUMOUR

their clowning comrade. It is more than doubtful
whether, for the great mass of humanity, the humor-
ous has ever yet purged itself of this element of
Aristotehan eTn^aipeKaKia, or 'joy at one's neighbours'
ills ;' whether, in other words, the multitude are even
jQi capable of being much amused except at the ex-
pense of their fellow-man. I do not see, indeed, how
anyone can fail to appreciate the secular persistence
of this element in the most popular forms of appeal
to the sense of humour who merely considers the part
played in fiction and drama, for many ages, by the
deceived husband. From Boccaccio to Moliere and
Congreve, and from the comedians of the seventeenth
century to the farceurs of the late nineteenth, the
assumption that the unconscious dupe of the wife and
the lover is essentially a ridiculous figure has im-
movably held its ground. That the person and
situation have also been treated tragically is true but
immaterial ; it does not affect the significance of the
fact that they can be, and for centuries have been,
treated as a legitimate subject for comedy often of
the most extravagant kind. Nor is it to the point
•that there has of late years been a much more pre-
valent inclination on the part of dramatists to treat
the subject seriously. That unfortunately may only
be a proof, not so much that our jokes have become
more humane, as that a certain prominent, though not

316

THE FUTURE OF HU.^[OUR

numerous, section of us are getting too solemn to
joke at all.

It is with the view, therefore, of warning the
analytical humorist that the above retrospective
sketch — cursory and imperfect as it is — of the history
of humour has been attempted. The object of it is
to remind him that, however skilled he may be in the
subsumption of objects under concepts, people will
only laugh at what amuses them; and that the
question as to what does amuse them, has received,
in different ages and among different peoples, a great
variety of answers. Shakespeare, who, without being
a professed and systematic analyst, stumbled oc-
casionally upon analytic apergus of no inconsiderable
value, has made an often-quoted remark about the
' fortunes of a jest ' lying in the ear that hears, rather
than on the tongnie that utters it ; and this is a golden
saying for all investigators of the psychology of
humour. Our earnest pursuit of culture in these
latter days has tended somewhat to obscure this
truth. The humorous has been treated in too objec-
tive a spirit. It has been too easily assumed that it
is a subject to be ' got up ' Hke another ; and it has
been tackled with all the conscientious solemnity of
the University Extension student. The result, of
course, has been disappointing. It has been found
that the 'personal equation,' even the ' international

317

THE FUTURE OF HUIMOUR

equation,' if I may say so, coimts for a good deal
more than the conscientiously solemn student had
supposed.

The 'international equation.' Yes, the expression
though strange is correct, and has been advisedly
used. It recalls me to that part of my subject to
which I briefly referred at the outset of these remarks —
I mean the resolute, nay, the desperate attempt which
has been made of late years to ' internationalise 'jokes.
It seems to have occurred to some earnest caterer for
earnest students that for the benefit of those v/ho pro-
pose to 'take up' humour, it would be an excellent
and highly ' educational ' thing to start a Humour of
the Nations Series, if that is its name, and the idea
has been carried out with a grim and smileless
perseverance which has in itself a richly humorous
effect. The editor and contributors of these mournful
hand-books have apparently kept their countenances ;
perhaps they do not see the 'joke within the joke ;'
there could be no more delightful joke than that they
should not. But to the philosopher who is also a
humorist, the reception of the whole series, or at least
of the volumes of it which have appeared so far, has
been vastly diverting. The very first to appear was
a staggerer, at any rate, to those who had not
previously made the acquaintance at school of the
Scholasticus of Hierocles. This, then, was the

318

THE FUTURE OF HUMOUR

hiimonr of i\ncient Greece. How was it to be
received? Was it possible to receive it with any-
warmer or more hilarious emotion than that of the
reverence due to its venerable old age? Earnest
students were discovered in odd corners with this
perplexing Attic salt-cellar in their hands. Aris-
tophanes, they had heard, was a great humorist, and
by studying him in translation they had been able,
if not to provoke themselves to laughter, at least to
find the spot at which at the Dionysia the laughter
was supposed to come in. But where, I where, was
its point of entrance in the pages of this Athenian
Joe Miller?

The Humour of Ancient Greece was followed, I
believe, by that of Ancient Rome, and this again by
the Humour of Holland. We are, or were, promised
some time ago the Humour of Scotland, and the
Humour of Japan; but I have never seen them, and
I do not know whether they are or are not of high
educational value. But the general effect of the
series was very disturbing to the popular mind. It
shook the public faith in the possibility of a Science
of the Humorous ; it spread far and wide a desolating
sense of the relativity of all human jokes. For a
time, too, it paralyzed the energies of the psychol-
ogist, who, in the very act of ' subsuming incongruous
ideas under concepts which only apply to them from

319

THE FUTURE OF HUMOUR

one poiut of view,' was overtaken by a sort of ag-
nostic despair. Why bother one's head with con-
cepts? he asked himself. Why continue to subsume
when the only result will be to produce a formula
which, even if it applies, as is more than doubtful,
to jokes that amuse the people of the Netherlands,
may utterly fail as an analysis of such pleasantries as
are acceptable to the Japanese? Mr. Lilly has been
the first to recover from this temporary depression,
and to philosophise calmly and even hopefully on
this attractive subject once more. Perhaps he has
not come across the Ilinnoii.r of the Nations Series,
if that be its name.

Nothing, however, is to be gained by sliutting our
eyes to the disquieting outlook before us. So far
from its being possible to 'internationalise' humour,
we may think ourselves lucky if we can manage to
preserve even a national type. The Dickensian
humour, it would seem, is ' off;' the American droll,
after a vogue of a good many years, is apparently
ceasing to amuse ; the ' inverted aphorism ' had but
a short popularity, and ultimately perished in calam-
itous and indeed unmentionable circumstances ; and
nothing seems growing up to take its place. The
new generation ' knocking at the door' rat-tats with
quite portentous gravity. This is, no doubt, an
improvement on the older generations, who thought
it a first-rate stroke of wit to wrench off the knocker ;

320

THE FUTURE OF HUMOUR

but their successors are surely carrying a virtue to
excess. It seems a pity that they should be unable
to laugh; but the most respected and 'intellectual'
among them cannot. It was the way of certain
frivolous old fogies a few years ago to twit them with
their supposed taste for what was then called the
New Humour, but there was really no foundation for
the taunt. The New Humour turned out to be
simply the Old Buffoonery ' writ small,' and, whoever
its patrons are or were, they are not to be found
among the thoughtful young men who represent the
generation with its hand on the door-knocker.

Altogether we seem to be within measurable dis-
tance of a time when nobody will be outwardly
amused by the humour of anybody else ; or when no
one, at any rate, will be moved or movable to those
mere muscular demonstrations of merriment which
the ludicrous was wont to provoke. To ' shake the
midriff,' I will not say of despair, but of mere indif-
ference, will be a feat beyond the power of the most
skilled and experienced jester to perform. He will
think himself lucky if, by his most successful pleas-
antry, he shall succeed in illuminating the counte-
nances of his younger hearers with a wintry smile.
So far have we now got from the primitive simplicity
of the horse-collar and its enshrined grin. It is not,
of course, that jokes will be worse than they used to
be. On the contrary, if there is anything in scionce,

THE FUTURE OF HUMOUR

they ought to be, scientifically speaking, better ; for
they will be the results of a synthesis based upon
and starting from an analytic process, which will be
brought ever nearer and nearer to perfection. That
they fail to tickle will not be due to any want of the
qualities necessary to titillatory power, but simply to
loss of sensibilit}' in the patient. The feathers are
right enough ; it is merely a chronic case of anaes-
thesis of the mental footsoles.

Of course, there will be consolations for the hu-
morist ; there are consolations already. The spec-
tacle — (and spectacles) — of the earnest young man
gravely studying comic masterpieces, this and the
Humour of the Nations Series (if that is its right
name) are distinctly in the nature of consolations.
And on the final arrival of the time when, although
jokes still continue to be made as psychological ex-
periments, nobody any longer laughs at the jokes of
anybody else, or even at his own, there is no doubt
that a situation of an intensely humorous character
will be created for all those — by that time it is to be
feared but a dwindling minority — who are capable
of appreciating it. The sense of humour, especially
in the elderly, tends in these days to become con-
tinually more and more self-centred and egoistic ;
they see life — especially youthful life — around them
more and more completely converting itself into a
comedy which they have all to themselves, at least

322

THE FUTURE OP HUMOUR

if they may judge from the countenances of the
actors; and it will be only a fitting termination to
the process if one of them should find himself at last
— like Campbell's Last Man, with a difference — alone
in a world of humour of his own, enjoying the great
Cosmic Joke in strict privacy amid many millions of
earnest young men who do not see it, and deriving
a subtle addition to his enjoyment from that very
fact.

THE END.

Note. — The foregoing essays, which severally appeared for the
first time in the Nineteenth Centuri/, the Fortnightly Review, the Con-
temporary Review, the National Revieiu, the New Review, and 3Iac-
millans Magazine, have been carefully revised and in some cases
virtually re-written for the purpose of inclusion in this volume. To
the Proprietors of the above-mentioned Periodicals my thanks are
dne for permission to reprint. — H. D. T.

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THE AWAKENING OF MARY FENWICK.

By Beatrice Whitby.

"We have no hesitation in declaring that ' The Awakening of Mary Fenwick ' is tha
best novel of its kind that we have seen for some years, it is apparently a first efforL
and, as sneh is really remarkable. The story is extremely simple. Mary Mauser marries
her husband for external, and perhaps rather inadequate, reasons, and then discovers

that he married her because she was an heiress. Sue feels the indignity acutely and
does not scruple to tell him her opicion— her very candid opinion— of bis behaviour That
IS the effect of the first few chapters, and the rest of Miss Whitby's book is devol
relating how this divided couple bated, quarrelled, and finally fell in love with one a-n.
Mary Fenwick and her husband live aud move ami make us believe in them in i
which few but the great masters of fiction have been able to compass."— ithenxum.

TWO ENGLISH GIRLS.

By Mabel Hart.

"This story is distinguished by its pure and elegant English, and the refinement of i.
style and thought. It is a lively account, with many touches of humour of Art study i'u
Florence, and the story weaved into it exhibits a high ideal of life . . . The lively, plea.-
tint, and refined tone of the narrative and dialogue will recommend the story to all
cultivated readers." — Spectator.

'■Beatrice Hamlyn is an emancipated young woman of the most pleasing type and her
friend Evelyn is hardly lef-s amiable. But the cleverness of Miss Hart's story lies in tho
simple yet effective portrait of the Italian character. The elder Vivaldi is presented to us
jn a way that shows both knowledge and sympathy. There are pleasing touches of
humour, too, in the minor personages." — Saturday lieview.

HIS LITTLE MOTHER, AND OTHER TALES.

By the Author of 'John Halifax, Gentlejian.'

" 'His Little Mother" is the story of a sister's self-sacrifice from her childhood until her
early death, worn out in her brother's and his children's service. It is a pathetic story
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ground. The volume is written in a pleasant informal manner, and contains many tender
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"The book is written wiib all Mr.'--. Craik's grace of style, the chief charm of which,
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Ob, passages IN THE LIFE OF A JACOBITE'S DAUGHTER.
By M. E. Le Clekc.

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one of the simplest, most charming, tender, and heroic madonK of fiction. It Ih a jrooJ
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A MARCH IN THE RANKS.

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" The characters are so brightly and vividly conceived, and the complications which go
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NINETTE.

By the Author of ' Vera,' ' Blue Roses,' Etc.

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A CROOKED PATH.

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THE IDES OF MARCH.

By G. M. Robins.

" ' The Ides of March ' is a capital book. The plot does not depend for its interest upon
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being really in love with a girl whom he believes to have treated his friend. Captain Dis-
ney, very badly, and getting engaged to another girl, who transfers her affections to the
same Captain Disney, are skilfully worked out, while the dialogue is, in parts, extremely
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a fund of deeper feeling and higher principle."— GaarrfMn.

PART OF THE PROPERTY.

By Beatrice Whitby.

" The book is a thoroughly good one The theme- is fairly familiar —the rebellion ot a
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that the thing against which her whole nature had risen in revolt has become the one
desire of her heart. The mutual relations each to each of the impetuous Mtdge, her selt-
willed, stubborn grandfather, who has arranged the match, and her lover Jocelyn, with
his loyal, devoted, sweetly-balanced nature, are portrayed with fine truth of insight ; but
perhaps the authors greatest triumph is the portrait of Mrs. Lindsay, who, with the
knowledge of the terrible skeleton in the cupboard of her apparently happy home, wears
so bravely the mask of light gaiety as to deceive everybody but the one man who knows
her secret It is refreshing to read a novel in which there is not a trace of Blipsbod work."
— Spectator.

CASPAR BROOKE'S DAUGHTER.

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self might prove a bore or a prig or something else equally annoying. His daughter, too
— the fair and innocent convent-bred girl — would in some hands have been really tedious.
The difficulties of the leading situation — a daughter obliged to pass from one parent to
another on account of their ' incompatibility ' — are cleverly conveyed. The wife's as well
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end disappear to a certain extent It is a story in eomo ways^not in all— above the
a ve rage. ' ' — A thenseum.

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JANET.

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" 'Janet ' ia one of the ablest of the author's recent novels ; perhaps the ablest book of
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striking because, while the character material is so simple, it is made to yield, without
any forced manipulation, a product of story which is rich in strong dramatic situations."
'-Manchester Examimr.

•• Mrs. Oliphant's hand has lost none of its cunning, despite her extraordinary — and, one
would think, exhausting — industry. 'Janet' may fairly rank among the best of her recent
productions." — St. James's Gazette.

•'■Janet ' is really an exciting story, and contains a great deal more plot and incident
til an has been the case in any of Mrs. Oliphant's recent novels. The character sketches
are worthy of their authorship.'' — Queen.

A RAINBOW AT NIGHT.

By the Author of ' Mistress Beatrice Cope.'

" In common, we should imagine, with a large circle of novel-readers, we have been
rather impatiently looking forward to the time when M. E Le Clerc, the author of ' Mis-
tress Beatrice Cope,' would produce a successor to that singularly interesting and charm-
ing tale. 'A Rainbow at Night,' though it certainly lacks the romantic and dramatic
character, combined with the llavour of a fascinating period, which gave special distinc-
tion to its forerunner, has no trace of falling off in the essential matters of construction,
portraiture, and styXe."— Graphic.

"Thanks to an interesting plot and a graphic as well as reflned manner, 'A Eainbow at
Night,' when once commenced, will not readily be laid aside." — Morning Post.

IN THE SUNTIME OF HER YOUTH.

By Beatrice Whitby.

"A description of a home stripped by the cold wind of poverty of all its comforts, but
which remains home still. The careless optimism of the head of the family would be in-
credible, if we did not know how men exist full of responsibilities yet free from solici-
tudes, and who tread with a jaunty step the very verge of ruin; l)is inconsolable widow
would be equally improbable, if we did not meet every day with women who devote them-
selves to such idols of clay. The characters of their charming children, whose penury we
deplore do not deteriorate, as often happens in that cruel ordeal. A sense of fairness
pervades the book which is rarely found in the work of a lady. There is interest in it
from first to last, and its pathos is relieved by touches of true 'h.\>.-iaQ\xT."— Illustrated
London News.

MISS BOUVERIE.

By Mrs. Molesworth.

"Mrs. Molesworth has long established a reputation as one of the freshest and moat
graceful of contemporaneous writers of light Action ; but in ' Miss Bouverie ' she has sur-
passed her.self, and it is no exuggeration to say that this is one of the prettiest stories which
has appeared for years." — Morning Post.

■' fcveryone knows Mrs. Molesworth by her exquisite Christmas stories for children, and
can guess that any novel she writes is interesting, without sensationalism. The refine-
ment which pervades all Mrs. Molesworth's stories comes evidently from a pure, spiritual
nature, which unconsciously raises the reader's tone of thought, without any approach to
didactic writing." — Spectator.

LOND0x\ : HURST AND BLACKETT, LIMITED.

Each in One Volume, Crown Octavo, 3s. Qd.

FROM HARVEST TO HAYTIME.

By the Author of ' Two English Girls.'

"The accomplished author of 'Two English Girls ' has produced another novel of con-
siderable merit. The story is one of a rural district In England, into which there intro-
duces himself one day a foot-sore, hungry, sick tramp, who turns out to be a young man
of education and consideration, whose career in the past is strange, and whose career in
the future the author has depicted as stranger still. The writer is successful chiefly in the
excellent life-like pictures which she presents of Kose Purley, the young lady who man-
ages the farm, and of the village doctor, Gabriel Armstrong. The book is one which may
be read with pleasure." — Scotsman.

THE WINNING OF MAY.

By the Author of ' Dr. Edith Romney.'

" It is the writing of one who is determined, by dint of conscientious and painstaking
work, to win success from that portion of the pubHc that does not look for the brilliant
achievements of genius, but can recognise meritorious work. The tale is an agreeable
one, and the character of Mr. Beresford is admirably drawn, showing considerable in-
sight and understanding. The author has a steady mastery over the story she wishes
to tell, and she tells it clearly and eloquently, without hesitation and without prolixity.
The book has this merit — the first merit of a novel — that the reader is interested in the
people rather than the plot, and that he watches the development of character rather
than that of event."— Literary World.

SIR ANTHONY.

By Adeline Sergeant.

"Sir Anthony introduces two mysterious children, Henry and Elfrida, into his house, and
compels his wife, whom he dishkes, to protect and virtually adopt them. In due course
he tells these children, in his own vigorous Anglo-Saxon, 'You two are my eldest son
and daughter, lawfully begotten of my wife, once Mary Derrick, and known afterwards
as Mary Paston. You will be Sir Henry Kesterton when I die, and Elfrida is heiress
to her grandmother's money and jewels.' Lady Kesterton overhears this terrible
statement. He repeats it in a still more offensive form. Thereupon she gives him an
overdose of chloral, and fights desperately, and with temporary success, for what she re-
gards as the rights of her children, but especially of her son Gerard. Failure overtakes
her, and Elfrida, though not poor Henry, comes by her own. The plot is good and
thoroughly sustained from first to last." — Academy

THUNDERBOLT.

By the Rev. J. Middleton Macdonald.

" 'Thunderbolt' is an Australian rival of Claude Duval, and Mr. Macdonald records his
daring feats with unflagging verve. Never was police officer more defied nor bewildered
than the Major Devereux, of brilliant Indian reputation, who, in the Australian bush,
finds that to catch a robber of Thunderbolt's temperament and ability requires local
knowledge, as well as other gifts undreamt-of by the Hussar oillcer. Thunderbolt goes
to races under the Major's nose, dances in the houses of his friends, robs Her Majo.'ity's
mails and diverse banks, but conducts himself with (on occasion) the chivalrous cour-
tesy that characterised his prototype His tragical end is told with spirit, while the book
has excellent descriptions of Australian life, both in town and country." — Moruinij Post.

LONDON: HURST AND BLACKETT, LIMITED.

Each in One Volume, Crown Octavo, 2>s. 6c?.

MARY FENWICK'S DAUGHTER.

By Beatrice Whitby.

"This is one of the most delightful novels we have read for a long time. 'Bab' Fen-
wick is an ' out of doorB ' kind of girl, full of spirit, wit, go, and sin, both original and
acquired. Her lover. Jack, is all that a hero should be, and great and magnanimous as
he is, finds some difficulty in forgiving the insoiiciante mistress all her little sins of omis-
sion and commission. When she finally shoots him in the leg — by accident — the real
tragedy of the story begins. The whole is admirable, if a little long." — Black and White.

ROBERT CARROLL.

By the Author of ' Mistress Beatrice Cope.'

" M. E. Le Clerc devotes herself to historic fiction, and her success is sufficient to justify
her in the occasional production of stories like ' Mistress Beatrice Cope ' and ' Robert Car-
roll.' Beatrice Cope was a Jacobite's daughter, so far as memory serves, and Robert Carroll
was the son of a Jacobite baronet, who played and lost his stake at Preston, fighting for the
Old Pretender. Of course the hero loved a maiden whose father was a loyal servant of
King George, and, almost equally of course, one of this maiden's brothers was a Jacobite.
A second brother, by the way, appears as a lad of sixteen in the spring of 1714, and as a
wounded colonel of cavalry on the morrow of the fight at Preston, less than two years
later — rapid promotion evea for those days, though certainly not impossible. The author
has taken pains to be accurate in her references to the events of the time, and her blend
of fact and fiction is romantic enough." — Atfiemeuni.

THE HUSBAND OF ONE WIFE.

By the Author of ' Some Married Fellows.'

"It is a comfort to turn from the slipshod English and the tiresome slang of many
modern novels to the easy and cultured style of ' The Husband of One Wife,' and we have
been thoroughly interested in the story, as well as pleased with the manner in which it is
told. As for Mrs. Goldenour, afterwards Mrs. Garfoyle, afterwards Mrs. Pengelley, she is
certainly one of the most attractive as well as one of the most provoking of heroines, and
Mrs. Venn has succeeded admirably in describing her under both aspects. The scone of
the dinner-party, and the description of the bishop's horror at its magnificence is very
clever. We are very glad to meet several old friends again, especially Mrs. Qruter, who
is severe and amusing as ever. Altogether we feel that Mrs. Venn's novels are books to
which we can confidently look forward with ■plea.suie."— Guardian.

BROTHER GABRIEL.

By IVI. Betham-Edwards.

" The story will be followed with unfaltering interest. Nor is anything short of un-
mixed praise due to several of the episodes and separate incidents of which it is composed.
■The principal characters — Delmar, Zo^'s cousin and lover — stand out in decided and life-
like relief. In the sketches of scenery, especially those of the coast of Brittany and the
aspect of its sea, both in calm and storm, Miss Betham-Edwards need not fear comparison
with the best masters of the art." — Spectator.

"The book is one that maybe read with pleasure ; it is fluently, flowingly, carefully
written; and it contains very pleasant sketches of character." — Academy.

LONDON: HURST AND BLACFETT, LIMITED-

Eack in One Volume, Croion Octavo, 3s. ^d.

A MATTER OF SKILL.

By Beatrice Whitby.

"Miss Whitby essays a lighter vein than usual in her collection of stories, entitled ' A
Hatter of Skill.' But she writes with the same excellence and freedom, and all these
miniature love-stories will be cordially welcomed. Lovely woman appears in these pages
in a variety of moods, liumorous and pathetic, and occasionally she seems not a little
'uncertain, coy, and hard to please.' The title story, showing how a stately girl is captured,
after a good deal of trouble, by a short and common-place young man, is very amuBiog;
and there are other Bketches in which it is interesting to follow the wiles of Mother Eve
ere she has come to years of discretion." — Academy.

JOHN HALIFAX, GENTLEMAN.

By Mrs. Craik.

"The new and cheaper edition of this interesting work will doubtless meet with great
-enccess. John Halifax, the hero of this most beautiful story, is no ordinary hero, and
this his history is no ordinary hook. It is a full-length portrait of a true gentleman, one
of nature's own nobiUty. It is also the history of a home, and a thoroughly English one.
The work abounds in incident, and many of the scenes are full of graphic power and true
pathos. It is a book that few will read without becoming wiser and better." — Scots/nan.

A LIFE FOR A LIFE.

By Mrs. Craik.

"We are always glad to welcome this author. She writes from her own convictions,
and she has the power not only to conceive clearly what it is that she wishes to say, but
to express it in language effective and vigorous. In ' A Life for a Life ' she is fortuuate
in a good subject, and she has produced a work of strong effect. The reader, having read
the buok through for the story, will be apt (if he be of our persuasion) to return and read
again many pages and passages with greater pleasure than on a Urst perusal. The whole
book is replete with a graceful, tender delicacy ; and, in addition to its other merits, it is
written in good careful English."— Atheneeum.

CHRISTIAN'S MISTAKE.

By Mrs. Ci:aik.

"A more charming story, to our taste, has rarely been written. Within the compass
of a pingle volume the writer has hit off a circle of varied characters, all true to nature-
some true to the highest nature— and she has entangled them in a story which keeps us
in suapcDse till the knot is happily and gracefully rosijlved; while, at the same time, a
pathetic; interest is sustained by an art of which it would be difficult to analyse the secret.
It is a choice gift to be able thus to render human nature so truly, to penetrate its depths
with such a searching sagacity, and to illuminate them with a radiance so eminently the
writer s own.'' — Tlie Times.

LONDON : HUKST AND CLACKKTT, LIMITED.

Each in One Volume, Crown Octavo, 3s. 6c?.

A NOBLE LIFE.

By Mrs. Craik.

"Few men and no women will read 'A Noble Lift' without feeling themselves t'aa
better for the effort.'' — Spectator.

" A beautifully written and touching tale. It is a noble book." — Morning Post.

"'A Noble Life' is remarkable for the high typea of character it presents, and- the
skill with which they are made to work out a story of powerful and pathetic intereoi."
—Daily News.

THE WOMAN'S KINGDOM.

By Mrs. Craik.

" 'The Woman's Kingdom' sustains the author's rep;itation as a writer of the purest
and noblest kind of domestic stories." — Alkenceum.

" ' The Woman's Kingdom ' is remarkable for its romantic interest. The characters are
masterpieces. Edna is worthy of the hand that drew John Halifax." — Morning Post.

A BRAVE LADY.

By Mrs. Craik.

" A very good novel, showing a tender sympathy with human nature, and permeated
by a pure and noble spirit.'' — Examiner.

" A most charming story." — Standard.

"We earnestly recommend this novel. It is a special and worthy specimen of the
author's remarkable powers. The reader's attention never for a moment flags." — Post.

MISTRESS AND MAID.

By Mrs. Craik.

"A good, wholesome book, as pleasant to read as it is instructive." — Athenaeum.
"This book is written with the same true-hearted earnestness as 'John Halifax.' Tha
spirit of the whole work is excellent." — Examiner.
" A charming tale charmingly told." — Standard.

LONDON : BURST AND BLACKETT, LIMITED.

10)

Each in One Volume, Crown Octavo, 35. 6c?.

YOUNG MRS. JARDINE.

By Mrs. Craik.

" ' Youag Mrs. Jardine ' is a pretty story, written ia pure Engliali." — The Times.

" There is much good feeling in this book. It is pleasant; and wholesome." — Athenceum.

" A book that all should read. Whilst it is quite the equal of any of its predecessors
in elevation of thought or style, it is perhaps their superior in interest of plot and
dramatic intensity. The cliaracters are admirably delineated, and the dialogue is natural
and clear." — Morning Post.

HANNAH.

By Mrs. Craik.

"A powerful novel of social and domestic life. One of the most successful efforts of a
successful novelist." — Daily Newi.

■' A very pleasant, healthy story, well and artistically told. The book is sure of a wide
circle of readers. The character of Hannah is one of rare beauty. — Standard.

NOTHING NEW.

By Mrs. Craik.

" 'Nothing New " displays all those superior merits which have made 'John Halifax '
one of the most popular novels of the day." — Morning Post.

"The reader will find these narratives calculated to remind him of that truth and
energy of human portraiture, that spell over human affections and emotions, which have
stamped this author as one of the first novelists of our day."' — John Bull.

IN TIME TO COME.

By Eleanor Holmes.

" ' In Time to Come,' by Miss Eleanor Holmes, merits a good place among one-volume
novels. The theme is interesting, the characters who work it out have been observantly
studied and carefully drawn, and the sequel justifies what at the first blush seems rather
a vague title."— Ownrfee Advertiser.

LONDON : HUEST AND BLAOKETT, LIMITED.

(11

Each in One Volume, Crown Octavo, os. <od.

THE UNKIND WORD.

By Mrs. Craik.

■' The author of ' John Halifax ' has written many fascinating stories, but we can call to
mind nothing from her pen that has a more enduring charm than the graceful sketches
in this work. Such a character as Jessie stands out from a crowd of heroines as the type
of all that is truly noble, pure, and womanly.'' — United Service Magazine.

DALEFOLK.

By Alice Rea.
" ' Dalefolk ' tells of the effect produced on a^simple and impressible people by a terrific
curse, pronounced by a half-insane clergyman on a parishioner whom he believes to have
written an anonymous letter of complaint to the Bishop of the diocese. The cloud of
mingled awe and repulsion that rests on the family for two generations is forcibly de-
scribed. But this la only a background for a series of capital sketches of life as it was
among the West Cumberland dalesmen at a period — this is the only note of time — when
the diocese was ruled from Chester instead of, as now, from Carlisle. The author evidenly
writes from full acquaintance with her subject, and brings out in vivid colours the quaint,
old festivities, the dancings, and wrestlings, and card-playings, the great gatherings for
shearings and ' salvings,' all of them excuses for genial and unstinted hospitalities, and
renewals of kind, neighbourly feeling and good-fellowship, which were so needed among
the loneliness and isolation which were of necessity the habitual lot of the occupiers of
the great sheep farms. She is equally happy in entering into the ways of thought and
feeling which must have been characteristic of the primitive and simple folk to whom
the reader is introduced in her pleasant pages." — Guardian.

STUDIES FROM LIFE.

By Mrs. Craik.

" These studies are truthful and vivid pictures of life, often earnest, always full of
right feeling, and occasionally lightened by touches of quiet genial humour. The volume
is remarkable for thought, sound sense, shrewd observation, and kind and sympathetic
feeling for all things good and beautiful." — Morning Post.

A WOMAN'S THOUGHTS ABOUT W^OMEN.

By Mrs. Craik.

"A book of sound counsel. It is one of the most sensible works of its kind, well
written, true-hearted, and altogether practical. Whoever wishes to give advice to a
young lady may thank the author for means of doing so." — Examiner.

'These thoughts are worthy of the earnest and enlightened mind, the all-embracing
charity and well-earned reputation of the author of 'John Halifax.' " — Standard.

' This excellent book is characterised by good sense, good taste, and feeling, and is
written in an earnest, philanthropic, as well as practical spirit."— J/orninj/ Post.

LONDON: HURST AND BLACKETT, LIMITED.

12)

MRS. CRAIK'S NOVELS

Each in One Volume, Crown Octavo, Ss. 6d.
JOHN HALIFAX, GENTLEMAN.

•'The new and cheaper edition of this interesting work will doubtless meet with great
success. John Halifax, the hero of this most beautiful story, is no ordinary hero, and this
his history is no ordinary hook. It is a full-length portrait of a true gentleman, one of
nature's own nobility. It is also the history of a home, and a thoroughly English one.
The work abounds in incident, and is full of graphic power and true pathos. It ia a book
that few will read without becoming wiser and better." — Scotsmayi.

A LIFE FOR A LIFE.

"We are always glad to welcome this author. She writes from her own convictions,
and she has the power not only to conceive clearly what it is that she wishes to say, but
to express it in language effective and vigorous. In ' A Life for a Life ' she is fortunate
in a good subject, and she has produced a work of strong effect. The reader, having read
the book through for the story, will be apt (if he be of our persuasion) to return and read
again many pages and passages with greater pleasure than on a first perusal The whole
book is replete with a graceful, tender delicacy ; and in addition to its other merits, it is
written in good careful English. ' — Athinseum.

CHRISTIAN'S MISTAKE.

"A more charming story, to our taste, has rarely been written. "Within the compaSs
of a single volume the writer has hit off a circle of varied characters, all true to nature —
some true to the highest nature — and she has entangled them in a story which keeps us
in suspense till the knot is happily and gracefully resolved; while, at the same time, a
pathetic interest is sustained by an art of which it would be difficult to analyse the secret,
it is a choice gift to be able thus to render human nature so truly, to penetrate its depths
with such a searching sagacity, and to illuminate them with a radiance so eminently the
writer's own."— r/ie Times.

A NOBLE LIFE.

"This is one of those pleasant tales in whijh the author of 'John Halifax ' speaks out
of a generous heart the purest truths of life. " — Examiner.

"Few men, and no women, will read 'A Noble Life' without finding themselves the
better." — Spectator.

" A atory of powerful and pathetic interest " — Dailt/ Ifews.

THE WOMAN'S KINGDOM.

"'The Woman's Kingdom' sustains the author's reputation as a writer of the purest
and noblest kind of domestic stories. The novelist's lesson is given with admirable force
and sweetness " — Athenseum.

"'The Woman's Kingdom' is remarkable for its romantic interest The characters
are masterpieces. Edna is worthy of the hand that drew John Halifax."— Post.

A BRAVE LADY.

"A very good novel, showing a tender sympathy with human nature, and permeated
by a pure and noble spirit" — Examiner.

"A most charming story." — Standard.

" We earnestly recommend this novel It is a special and worthy specimen of the
author's remarkable powers. The reader's attention never for a moment flags." — Post.

MISTRESS AND MAID.

"A good, wholesome book, as pleasant to read as it is instructive." — Athenaeum.
"This book is written with the same true-hearted earnestness as 'John Halifax.' The
spirit of the whole work is excellent" — Examiner.
"A charming tale charmingly told." — Standard.

LONDON : HURST AND BLACKETT, LIMITED.

MRS. CRAIK'S NOVELS

Each in One Volume Crown Octavo, 3s. Qd.
YOUNG MRS. JARDINE.

"'Young'Mra. Jardine' is a pretty story, written in pure English." — T!ie Times.

"There is much good feeling in this book. It is pleasant and wholesome." — Athensivm.

"A book that all shou'd read. Whilst it is quite the equal of any of its predecessors
in elevation of thought and style, it is perhaps their superior in interest of plot and
dramatic intensity. The characters are admirably delineated, and the dialogue is natural
and clear." — Morning Post.

HANNAH.

" A powerful novel of social and domestic life. One of the most successful efforts of a
successful novelist" — Daily News.

" A very pleasant, healthy story, well and artistically told The book is sure of a wide
circle of readers. The character of Hannah is one of rare beauty." — Standard.

NOTHING NEW.

" ' Nothing New ' displays all those superior merits which have made ' John Halifax '
one of the most popular works of the day." — Post.

" The reader will find these narratives calculated to remind him of that truth and
energy of human portraiture, that spell over human affections and emotions, which have
stamped this author as one of the first novelists of our day." — John Bull.

THE UNKIND WORD.

"The author of 'John Halifax ' has written many fascinating stories, but we can call to
mind nothing from her pea that has a more enduring charm than th« graceful sketches in
this work, buoh a character as Jessie stands out from a crowd of heroines as the type of
all that is truly noble, pure, and womanly." — United Service Magazine.

STUDIES FROM LIFE.

"These studies are truthful and vivid pictures of life, often earnest, always full of right
feeling, and occasionally lightened by touches of quiet genial humour. The volume is re-
markable for thought, sound sense, shrewd observation, and kind and sympathetic feeling
for all things good and beautiful" — Post.

A WOMAN'S THOUGHTS ABOUT WOMEN.

"A book of sound counsel It is one of the most sensible works of its kind, well written
true-hearted, and altogether practical Whoever wishes to give advice to a young lady
may thani tbe author for means of doing so." — E.raminer.

'These thoughts are worthy of the earnest and enlightened mind, the all-embracing
charity, and the well-earned reputation of the author of 'John Halifax.'" — Standard

"This excellent book is characterised by good sense, good taste, and feeling, and ia
written in an earnest, philanthropic, as well as practical spirit." — Post.

HIS LITTLE MOTHER.

" ' His Little Mother' is the story of a sister's self-saoriflce from her childhood until her
early death, wora out in her brother's and his children's service. It is a pathetic story
as the author tells it. The beauty of the girl's devotion is described with many tender
touches, and the question of short-sighted though loving foolishness is kept in the buck-
ground. The volume is written in a pleasant informal manner, and contains many tender
generohs thoughts, and not a few practical ones. It is a book that will be read with in-
terest, and that cannot be lightly forgotten.'' — St. Ja7nes's Gazette

LONDON : HDIiST AND BLACKETT, LIMITED.

BEATRICE WHITBY'S NOVELS.

EACH IN ONE VOLUME CROWN 8vo-3s. 6d.

THE AWAKENING OF MARY FENWICK.

" We have no hesitation in declaring that 'The Awakening of Mary Fenwick ' is the
best novel of its kind that we have seen for some years. It is apparently a first effort,
and, as such, is really remarkable. The story is extremely simple. Mary Mauser marries
her husband for external, and perhaps rather inadequate, reasons, and then discovers
that he married her because she was an heiress. She feels the indignity acutely, and
does not scruple to tell him her opinion — her very candid opinion — of his behaviour. That
is the effect of the first few chapters, and the rest of Miss Whitby's book is devoted to
relating how this divided couple hated, quarrelled, and finally fell in love with one another.
Mary Fenwick and her husband live and move and make us believe in them in a way
which few but the great masters of fiction have been able to compass." — Athenwum

ONE REASON WHY.

"The governess makes a re-entry into fiction under the auspices of Beatrice Whitby in
'One Season Why.' Readers generally, however, will take a great deal more interest, for
once, in the children than in their instructress. ' Bay ' and ' Ellie ' are charmingly natural
additions to the children of novel-land ; so much so, that there is a period when one dreads
a death-bed scene for one of them — a fear which is happily unfulfilled. — Graphic.

PART OF THE PROPERTY.

'The book is a thoroughly good one. The theme is fairly familiar — the rebellion of a
spirited girl against a match which has been arranged for her without her knowledge or
consent; her resentment at being treated, not as a woman with a heart and will, but as
'part of the property ;' and her final discovery, which is led up to with real dramatic sbilL,
that the thing against which her whole nature had risen in revolt has become the one
desire of her heart. The author's greatest triumph is the portrait of Mrs Lindsay, who,
with the knowledge of the terrible skeleton in the cupboard of her apparently happy
home, wears so bravely the mask of light gaiety as to deceive everybody but the one man
who knows her secret." — Spectator.

IN THE SUNTIME OF HER YOUTH.

'A description of a home stripped by the cold wind of poverty of all its comforts, but
which remains home stilL The careless optimism of the head of the family would be in-
credible, if we did not know how men exist lull of responsibilities yet free from solici-
tudes, and who tread with a jaunty stpp the very verge of ruin ; his inconsolable widow
would be equally improbable, if we did not meet every day with women who devote them-
selves to such idols of clay. There is interest in it from first to last, and its pathos is re-
lieved by touches of true humour." — Illustrated London News.

MARY FENWICK'S DAUGHTER.

"This is one of the most delightful novels we have read for a long time. 'Bab' Fen-
wick is an ' out of doors ' kind of girl, full of spirit, wit, go, and sin, both original and
acquired. Her lover. Jack, is all that a hero should be, and great and magnanimous as
he is, finds some difficulty in forgiving the inxmicicuitc niistress all her little sins of omis-
sion and commission. When she finally shoots him in the leg — by accident — the real
tragedy of the story begins. The whole is admirable."— ^/acit an(/ White.

A MATTER OF SKILL.

" Lovely woman appears in these pages in a variety of moods, humorous and pathetic,
and occasionally she seems not a little 'uncertain, coy, and hard to please.' The title
story, showing how a stately girl is captured, after a good deal of trouble, by a short and
commonplace young man, is very amusing; and there are other sketches in whifh it is
interesting to follow the wiles of Mother £vo ere she has come to years of discretion."—
Academij.

LONDON : HUEIST AND BLACKliTT, LIMITED.

EDNA LYALL'S NOVEL

EACH IN ONE VOLUME CROWN 8vo— SIX SHILLINGS.

DONOVAN: A MODERN ENGLISHMAN.

"This is a very admirable work. The reader is from the first carried away by the
gallant unconventionality of its author. ' Donovan ' is a very excellent novel; but it is
something more and better. It should do as much good as the best sermon ever written
or delivered extempore. The story is told with a grand simplicity, an unconscious poetry
of eloquence which stirs the very depths of the heart. One of the main excellencies of
this novel is the delicacy of touch with which the author shows her most delightful char-
acters to be after all human beings, and not angels before their time." — Standard.

WE TWO.

" There is artistic realism both in the conception and the delineation of the personages
ttie action and interest are unflaggingly sustained from first to last, and the book is per-
vaded by an atmosphere of elevated, earnest thought"— -Sco^^man.

IN THE GOLDEN DAYS.

•'Miss Lyall has given us a vigorous study of such life and character as are really worth
reading about The central figure of her story is Algernon Sydney; and this figure she
invests with a singular dignity and power. He always appears with effect, but no liber-
ties are taken with the facts of his life." — Spectator.

KNIGHT-ERRANT.

"The plot, and, indeed, the whole story, is gracefully fresh and very charming; thert
is a wide humanity in the book that cannot fail to accomplish its author's purpose."—
Literary World.

WON BY WAITING.

" The Dean's daughters are perfectly real characters — the learned Cornelia especially -.

the little impulsive French heroine, who endures their cold hospitality and at last winf

their affection, is thoroughly charming; while throughout the book there runs a golden
thread of pure brotherly and sisterly love, which pleasantly reminds us that the making
and marring of marriage is not, after all, the sum total of real life." — Academy.

A HARDY NORSEMAN.

" All the quiet humour we praised in ' Donovan ' is to be found in the new story. And
the humour though never demonstrative, has a charm of it.s own. It is not Edna Lyall's
plan to give' her readers much elaborate description, but when she does describe scenery
her picture is always alive with vividness and grace."— Athenseum.

TO RIGHT THE AYRONG.

•' We are glad to welcome Miss Lyall back after her long abstraction from the fields ot
prosperous, popular authorship which she had tilled so successfully. She again affronts
her public with a very serious work of fiction indeed, and succeeds very well in that
thorny path of the historictti novel in which so many have failed before her. That ' glory
of warrior, glory of orator, glory of song,' John Hampden, lives again, to a certain extent,
in that dim half light of posthumous research and loving and enthusiastic imagination
which is all the novelist can do for these great figures of the past, resurrected to make the
plot of a modern novel." — Black and White.

LONDON : HUEST AND BLACKETT, LIMITED.

DATE DUE

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