r LIBRARY \ THE SAME A UTHOR Second Edition, revised. Crown 8vo. 75. 6d. ESSAYS IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 1780 to 1860 CONTENTS The kinds of Criticism Crabbe Hogg (Ettrick Shepherd) Sydney Smith Jeffrey Hazlitt Moore Leigh Hunt Peacock Wilson (Christopher North) De Quincey Lockhart Praed Borrow. Second Edition, revised. Crown 8vo. 75. 6d. ESSAYS ON FRENCH NOVELISTS CONTENTS The Present State of the French Novel Anthony Hamilton Alain Rene" Lesage A Study of Sensibility Charles de Bernard Alexandre Dumas Th6ophile Gautier Jules Sandeau Octave Feuillet Gustave Flaubert Henry Murger Victor Cherbuliez. Demy i6mo. 35. 6d. each, bound in paper boards, with parchment back. THE POCKET LIBRARY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE Edited by GEORGE SAINTSBURY. Vol. I .Tales of Mystery. Vol. II. Political Verse. Vol. III. Defoe's Minor Novels. Vol. IV. Political Pamphlets. Vol. V. Seventeenth Century Lyrics. Vol. VI. Elizabethan and Jacobean Pamphlets. ' Seventeenth Century Lyrics' may also be had bound in Cloth, gilt lettered, 35. 6d. LONDON : RIVINGTON, PERCIVAL & CO. MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS 577 < MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS BY GEORGE SAINTSBURY SECOND EDITION RIVINGTON, PERCIVAL & CO. KING STREET, CO VENT GARDEN LONDON 1895 PREFACE THE reception of two preceding volumes of essays the one published about eighteen, the other about twelve months ago has encouraged me to collect and issue a third. I had been somewhat doubtful what audience there might be for papers written in a perhaps unfashionable manner, and putting forward no claims except the modest ones of a good deal of reading, and an attempt to consider that reading from a uniform and definite point of view. It would, however, have shown gross in- gratitude to those readers who have been good enough to read me, if I had been en- couraged by their benevolence to trouble them with what a reviewer would very properly designate "study-sweepings." The contents vi Preface of this volume have been selected from a much larger mass of material, the composition of which covers, in point of time, the best part of twenty years ; and instead of the endeavour to secure a factitious unity by dint of some ingenious title, the contents have designedly been made as various in appearance as might be, in the hope that a sufficient real unity of critical standpoint may be found in them, whether their subjects be old or new, English or French, literary or political. For it is possible to disagree with M. Brunetiere in his confession and apology, as the author of books made of articles, that "articles will never make a book." A book, as it seems to me, consists not so much in ostensibly homogeneous subject, or in the fact that the author has excogitated its plan at a single stroke, as in the unity of method, of treat- ment, of attitude, and of view. I hope that there is such unity here, and if there is, it may perhaps be due to the observation of three rules which I have always tried to keep before my eyes, whether in writing the history of a literature or in criticising a platform Preface vii speech for next day's paper. These rules are : Never to like anything old merely be- cause it is old, or anything new merely because it is new ; never to judge anything in litera- ture or politics except from the historical and comparative standpoint ; and always to put the exposition of the subject before the dis- play of personal cleverness. The last essay here, that on " The Present State of the English Novel," will be found to be almost entirely new. A little of its sub- stance has previously appeared in different forms, first in a Florentine periodical some seven or eight years ago, and then in the Fortnightly Review for February 1888. But this old matter is the smallest part of it, and I have endeavoured to adjust the whole in a different fashion from that followed in either of these papers, so as to make it less of a review of particular works and par- ticular writers, more of a discussion and presentment of the moment in literature. Of the other pieces, which have all under- gone more or less revision, that which has been included with most misgiving is the viii Preface third essay, that on "Modern English Prose," which was written at Mr. John Morley's re- quest for the Fortnightly Review nearly seven- teen years ago. I have been more often asked to reprint it than in any other case save that of the essay on Baudelaire, which also reappears. But " request of friends " is a notoriously inadequate plea, and cannot easily be allowed too little influence. I was, though not a very young man, a very young writer at the date of the appearance of the " Prose " essay, and it seems to me rather amateurish in parts, besides being subject to the drawbacks inseparable from all reviews of literature which is no longer contemporary, and has not acquired the interest of history. But its inclusion seemed desirable, because, though it is written in regard of a different side of the matter, it to a certain extent supplements and completes the more elaborate paper on much the same subject with which the book opens, and for another reason which may be thought to possess still greater force. It will strike every one who reflects for a moment Preface ix that a great many other people, some of them scriptores hand paullo meliores quam ego, must have been thinking very much as I did at the time when this essay was written, and that their thought has impressed itself remarkably on later English literature. The attempts at more or less deliberate and elaborate style, which were rare before 1876, have been very numerous and very note- worthy since. And this I say, not only without the faintest intention of giving any fatuous hint of prophecy or precursorship, but also as one who does not feel unmitigated delight at the result of the efforts which at this time he desiderated. To conclude these explanations (which may possibly annoy some readers, but which are made simply because they please me when other authors take the trouble to make them in reference to their own work), I have made the experiment of arranging together in one heading ("A Frame of Miniatures") six short articles on the lighter poets of the French eighteenth century, which originally appeared at intervals during the autumn of x Preface 1879 in the Saturday Review. They were planned and written on one scale and method, and, if they have no other merit, they still, probably, give a fuller account of a curious and interesting, if not very great, set of literary personalities than is to be found together, or in anything like the same space, either in English or in French. In the case of the first essay, which appeared originally as preface to a volume of Specimens of English Prose Style : London, 1885, I owe my best thanks for permission to reprint to Messrs. Kegan Paul, Trench and Co. Similar thanks are due to Messrs. Chapman and Hall, and the successive editors of the Fortnightly Review, in respect of the essays on "Ernest Renan" (May 1880), "Modern English Prose" (February 1876), " Saint- Evremond" (July 1879), "Charles Baudelaire" (October 1875), and a small part of " The Present State of the English Novel" (February 1888); in respect of "Thoughts on Republics," to the editor and proprietors of the New Review (February 1890); of "The Young England Movement," Preface xi to the editor and proprietors of Merry England (May 1883); of "A Paradox on Quinet," to the editor and proprietors of the National Review (June 1883); of "The Contrasts of English and French Literature," to the editor of Macmillaris Magazine (March 1891), and Messrs. Macmillan ; and of the papers included in "A Frame of Miniatures," which appeared at various dates in the autumn and winter of 1879, to the editor and pro- prietors of the Saturday Review. 1892. NOTE TO SECOND EDITION THE date and origin of one of the following Essays were by accident omitted in the above Preface. "Chamfort and Rivarol" appeared first in the Fortnightly Review for January 1879. I have no alteration to make in the text ; but as so much of the book deals with masters of Prose style, it may not be im- pertinent to note that while M. Renan died shortly after its first appearance, and without adding anything to the work to be discussed, we in England have since, and within a very few months, lost Mr. Pater, Mr. Froude, and Mr. Stevenson, of all of whom by name or allusion there is question here. It is not un- pleasant to me to think that nearly twenty years ago Mr. Pater thanked me for recog- nising, in the Essay which here stands third, his success in attaining an object "at which," said he, "most other critics have not even seen that I aimed " ; and that not long after the first appearance of this collection Mr. Stevenson wrote to me about it with a warmth of interest and approval not often shown to the " gelid critic " by the creative artist. CONTENTS PACE I. ENGLISH PROSE STYLE i II. CHAMFORT AND RIVAROL . . .42 III. MODERN ENGLISH PROSE [1876] . . 81 IV. ERNEST RENAN . . . .114 V. THOUGHTS ON REPUBLICS . . .161 VI. SAINT- EVREMOND . . . .180 VII. CHARLES BAUDELAIRE . . .216 VIII. THE YOUNG ENGLAND MOVEMENT . -253 IX. A PARADOX ON QUINET . . .274 X. THE CONTRASTS OF ENGLISH AND FRENCH LITERATURE . . . .300 XL A FRAME OF MINIATURES : PARNY DORAT DESAUGIERS VAD PIRON PANARD . . . . .336 XII. THE PRESENT STATE OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL, 1892 .... 388 INDEX . .... 427 ENGLISH PROSE STYLE " The other harmony of prose." Dryden. IT was once reported that Victor Hugo, whose command of his own tongue was only . ec l ua ll ed b 7 nis ignorance of the English language and literature, gave not long before his death his opinion of the difference between French and English prose and verse. A perfect language, he opined, should show a noteworthy difference between its style in prose and its style in verse : this difference existed in French and did not exist in English. I shall give no opinion as to the truth of this axiom in general, nor any as to its application to French. But it is not inappropriate to begin an essay on the subject of English prose style by observing that, whatever may be its merits and defects, it is entirely different different by the extent of the whole heaven of language from English verse style. We have had writers, includ- ing some of genius, who have striven to make B 2 Miscellaneous Essays prose like verse ; and we have had other writers, including some of genius, who have striven to make verse like prose. Both PR Q^E ST?LE. in so doing have shown themselves to be radically mistaken. The actual vocabulary of the best English style of different periods is indeed almost entirely common to verse and to prose, and it is perhaps this fact which induced the distinguished person above referred to, and others not much less distinguished, to make a mistake of confusion. The times when the mere dictionary of poetic style has been distinct from the mere dictionary of prosaic style (for there have been such) have not been those in which English literature was at its highest point. But between the syntax, taking that word in its proper sense of the order of words, of prose and the syntax of verse ; between the rhythm of prose and the rhythm of verse ; between the sentence- and clause -architecture of prose and the sentence- and clause-architecture of verse, there has been since English literature took a durable form in the sixteenth century at least as strongly marked a difference in English as in other languages. Good poets have usually been good writers of prose ; but in English more than in any other tongue the prose style of these writers has differed from their verse style. The French prose and the French verse of Hugo himself are remarkably similar in all but the most arbitrary differences, Miscellaneous Essays 3 and the same may be said, to a less extent, of the prose and the verse style of Goethe. PROSTYLE. But Shelley's prose and Shelley's verse (to confine myself to examples taken from the present century) are radically different in all points of their style and verbal power ; and so are Coleridge's prose and Coleridge's verse. The same is eminently true of Shakespeare, and true to a very great extent of Milton. If it is less true of Dryden and of Pope (it is often true of Dryden to a great degree), that is exactly in virtue of the somewhat un-English influence which, though it benefited English prose not a little, worked upon both. In our own days prose style has become somewhat disarranged, but in the hands of those who have any pretence to style at all, its merits and its defects are in great part clearly traceable to a keeping apart on the one hand, to a confusion on the other, of the separate and distinct aims and methods of the prose-writer and the poet It should scarcely be necessary to say that no attempt is made in this essay to compile a manual of English prose writing, or to lay down didactic- ally the principles of the art. The most that can be done, or that is aimed at, is the discovery, by a running critical and historical commentary on the course of English prose generally, what have been the successive characteristics of its style, what the aims of its writers, and what the amounts of success that they have attained. There is nothing presumptuous in the attitude of the 4 Miscellaneous Essays student, whatever there may be in the attitude of the teacher. In the year 1876, at the suggestion of Mr. John Morley, I PR E s STYLE. attempted in the Fortnightly Review a study of the chief characteristics of contemporary prose. 1 Since then I have reviewed many hundreds of new books, and have read again, or for the first time, many hundreds of old ones. I do not know that the two processes have altered my views much : they certainly have not lessened my estimate of the difficulty of writing good prose, or of the merit of good prose when written. During these years considerable attention has undoubtedly been given by English writers to style : I wish I could think that the result has been a distinct improve- ment in the quality of the product. If the present object were a study of contemporary prose, much would have to be said on the growth of what I may call the Aniline style and the style of Marivaudage, the first dealing in a gorgeous and glaring vocabulary, the second in unexpected turns and twists of thought or phrase, in long- winded description of incident, and in finical analysis of motive. Unexpectedness, indeed, seems to be the chief aim of the practitioners of both, and it lays them perhaps open to the damaging question of Mr. Milestone in Headlong Hall. When we hear that a bar of music has "veracity," that there is a finely-executed "passage" in a marble chimney-piece, that some one is "part 1 See this essay, infra. Miscellaneous Essays 5 of the conscience of a nation," that the "andante" of a sonnet is specially noteworthy, the PROSE'STYLE. q uest after tne unexpected has become sufficiently evident. But these things are not directly our subject, though we shall find other things remarkably like them in the history of the past. For there is nothing new in art except its beauties, and all the faults of French naturalism and English aestheticism were doubt- less perfectly well known to critics and admired by the uncritical in the days of Hilpa and Shalum. Although there are delightful writers in English prose before the reign of Elizabeth, it was not till that reign x was some way advanced that a definite effort on the part of writers to make an English prose style can be perceived. This effort took for the most part one of two directions. The first was vernacular in the main, but very strongly tinged with a peculiar form of precious- ness, the origin of which has been traced to various sources, but which appears clearly enough in the French rhttoriqueurs of the fifteenth century, whence it spread to Italy, Spain, and England. This style, in part almost vulgar, in part an estilo culto of the most quintessenced kind, was represented chiefly by Lyly. But it is in fact common to all the Elizabethan 1 Since I wrote this it has been contended by a learned and competent authority that the golden age of English prose was the tenth century, and that we are with great difficulty recovering that Saturnian reign. It may be so : I speak but of that I do know. 6 Miscellaneous Essays pamphleteers Greene, Nash, Harvey, Dekker, Breton, and the rest. The vernacular in many of them descends even to vul- PR O^E" T S " LE . garity, and the cultivated in Lyly fre- quently ascends to the incomprehensible. Few things are more curious than this mixture of homespun and tinsel, of slang and learning, of street repartees and elaborate coterie preciousnesses. On the other hand, the more sober writers were not less classical than their forerunners, though in the endeavour to write something else than Latin sentences rendered into English, or English sen- tences that would translate with little alteration into Latin, they fell into new difficulties. In all the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline authors, there occur inelegancies and obscurities which may be traced directly to the attempt to imitate the forms of a language possessed of regular inflec- tions and strict syntax in a language almost destitute of grammar. Especially fatal is the attempt to imitate the Latin relative and de- monstrative pronouns, with their strict agreement of gender, number, and case, to render them in usage and meaning by the English words of all work who, which, he, they, and to copy the oratio obliqua in a tongue where the verbs for the most are indistinguishable whether used in obliqua or in recta. These attempts lie at the root of the faults which are found even in the succinct style of Hooker and Jonson, which turn almost to attractions in the quaint paragraph- Miscellaneous Essays 7 heaps of the Anatomy of Melancholy ', which mar many of the finest passages of Milton PROSE STYLE. *^ Taylor, and which in Clarendon perhaps reach their climax. The abuse of conjunctions which is also noticeable in most of the writers of this period, and which leads them, apparently out of mere wantonness, to prefer a single sentence jointed and rejointed, parenthesised and postscripted, till it does the duty of a para- graph, to a succession of orderly sentences each containing the expression of a simple or moderately complex thought is not chargeable quite so fairly on imitation of the classics. But it has something to do with this, or rather it has much to do with the absence of any model except the classics. Most of these writers had a great deal to say, and they were as much in want of models as of deterrent examples in regard to the manner of saying it. The feeling seems still to have pre- vailed that if a man aimed at literary elegance and precision he should write in Latin, that English might be a convenient vehicle of matter, but was scarcely susceptible of form, that the audience was ex hypothesi incult, uncritical, exo- teric, and neither required nor could understand refinements of phrase. I have more than once seen this view of the matter treated with scorn or horror, or both, as if those who take it thought little of the beauty of seventeenth century prose before the Restoration. This treatment does not appear very intelligent 8 MiscellaneoTis Essays The business of the critic is to deal with and to explain the facts, and all the facts. PROSE STYLE. It is the fact, no doubt, that detached phrases, sentences, even long passages of Milton, of Taylor, of Browne, equal if they do not excel in beauty anything that English prose has since produced. It is the fact that Clarendon is unmatched for moral portrait painting to this day ; that phrase after phrase of Hobbes has the ring and the solidity and the sharp outline of a bronze coin ; that Bacon is often as glorious without as within. But it is, at the same time, and not less often, the fact that Clarendon gets himself into involutions through which no breath will last, and which cannot be solved by any kind effort of repunctuation ; that Milton's sentences, begin- ning magnificently, often end in mere tameness, sometimes in mere discord ; that all the authors of the period abound in what look like wilful and gratuitous obscurities, cacophonies, breaches of sense and grammar and rhythm. To any one who considers the matter in any way critically, and not in the attitude of mind which shouts " Great is Diana of the Ephesians " by the space of as many hours as may be, it is perfectly evident that these great men, these great masters, were not thoroughly masters of their instrument ; that their touch, for all its magic in its happier moments, was not certain ; that they groped, and sometimes stumbled in their walk. When Browne begins the famous descant, " Now these Miscellaneous Essays 9 dead bones " ; when Hobbes gathers up human vice and labels it unconcernedly as " either an e ff ect f power or a cause of pleasure " ; when Milton pours forth any one of the scores of masterpieces to be found here and there in his prose work, let us hold our tongues and simply admire. But it is a merely irrational admiration which refuses to recognise that Browne's antithesis is occasionally an anti- climax and his turn of words occasionally puerile ; that Milton's sentences constantly descend from the mulier formosa to ftut piscis ; and that Hobbes, after the very phrase above quoted, spoils its effect as style by a clumsy repetition of nearly but not quite the same form of words, after a fashion which few writers possessing a tithe of Hobbes's genius would have imitated in the eighteenth century. It is still more irrational to deny that most of this great group of writers occasionally make what are neither more nor less than " faults of English," or grammatical blunders which actually vitiate their sense. Let us admire Alex- ander by all means, but let us not try to make out that Alexander's wry neck is worthy of an Apollo or an Antinous. Among the chief reasons for this slowness on the part even of great writers in recognising the more obvious requirements of English prose style, not the least perhaps may be found in the fact that English writers had no opportunity of com- parison in modern tongues. German literature io Miscellaneous Essays was not, and Spanish and Italian, which had been cultivated in England with some zeal, were too alien from English in all PR |[ STW.E. linguistic points to be of much service. The Restoration introduced the study and com- parison of a language which, though still alien from English, was far less removed from it than the other Romance tongues, and which had already gone through its own reforming process with signal success. On the other hand, the period of original and copious thought ceased in England for a time, and men, having less to say, became more careful in saying it. The age of English prose which opens with Dryden and Tillotson (the former being really entitled to almost the sole credit of opening it, while Tillotson has enjoyed his reputation as a "stylist," and still more as an originator of style at a very easy rate) produced, with the exception of Swift and Dryden himself, no writer equal in genius to those of the age before it. But the talent of the writers that it did produce was infinitely better furnished with command of its weapons, and before the period had ceased English prose as an instrument may be said to have been perfected. Even in Dryden, though not very often, and in his followers Temple and Halifax occasionally, there appear examples of the old slovenlinesses ; but in the writers of the Queen Anne school these entirely disappear. To the present day, though their vocabulary may have in places become slightly antiquated, Miscellaneous Essays 1 1 and their phrase, especially in conversational passages, may include forms which have pRoaf STYLE. g ne out of fashion, there is hardly any- thing in the structure of their clauses, their sentences, or their paragraphs, which is in any way obsolete. The blemishes, indeed, which had to some ex- tent disfigured earlier English prose, were merely of the kind that exists because no one has taken the trouble to clear it away. Given on the one side a certain conversational way of talking English, inaccurate or rather licentious as all conversational ways of speaking are, and on the other side a habit of writing exact and formal Latin, what had happened was what naturally would happen. Dryden, who during the whole of his life was a constant critical student of language and style, may be said, if not to have accomplished the change single-handed, at any rate to have given examples of it at all its stages. He in criticism chiefly, Temple in mis- cellaneous essay writing, and Halifax in the political pamphlet, left very little to be done, and the Queen Anne men found their tools ready for them when they began to write. It is moreover very observable that this literary change, unlike many if not most other literary changes, had hardly anything that was pedantic about it So far was it from endeavouring to classicise English style, that most of its alterations were distinctly directed towards freeing English from 1 2 Miscellaneous Essays the too great admixture of Latin grammar and style. The vernacular influence, of which, almost in its purity, the early part of t period affords such an admirable example in Bunyan, while the later part offers one not much less admirable in Defoe, is scarcely less perceptible in all the three writers just mentioned, Dryden, Temple, and Halifax, and in their three great suc- cessors, Swift, Addison, and Steele. Addison classi- cises the most of the six, but Addison's style cannot be called exotic. The ordinary English of the streets and the houses helped these men to re- form the long sentence, with its relatives and its conjunctions, clumsily borrowed from Latin, to reject inversions and involutions of phrase that had become bewildering in the absence of the clue of inflexional sounds, to avoid attempts at oratio obliqua for which the syntax of the language is ill fitted, to be plain, straightforward, unadorned. It is true that in rejecting what they thought, in many instances rightly, to be barbarisms, they to a great extent lost the secret of a splendour which had been by no means exclusively or often barbaric. They were un- rivalled in vigour, not easily to be beaten in sober grace, abundantly capable of wit : but as a rule they lacked magnificence, and prose was with them emphatically a sermo pedestris. Ex- cept in survivors of the older school, it is difficult to find in post-Restoration prose an impassioned passage. When the men of the time wished to Miscellaneous Essays 13 be impassioned they thought it proper to drop into poetry. South's satire on the PROSTYLE. " frin es of the North-star" and other Taylorisms expresses their attitude very happily. It is hardly an accident that Dryden's subjects, capable though the writer was of giving literary expression to every form of thought and feeling, never in prose lead him to the inditing of anything exalted ; that Temple gives a half- sarcastic turn to the brief but exquisite passage on life which closes his essay on poetry ; that Addison's renowned homilies on death and tombs and a future life have rather an unrivalled decency, a propriety that is quintessential, than solemnity in the higher sense of the term. The lack of ornament in the prose of this period is perhaps nowhere more clearly shown than in the style of Locke, which, though not often absolutely incorrect, is to me, I frankly own, a disgusting style, bald, dull, plebeian, giving indeed the author's meaning, but giving it ungraced with any due apparatus or ministry. The defects, however, were for the most part negative. The writers of this time, at least the greater of them, spoilt nothing that they touched, and for the most part omitted to touch subjects for which their style was not suited. The order, lucidity, and proportion of Dryden's criticism, the ease and well-bred loqua- city of Temple and the essayists, the mild or rough polemic of Halifax and Bentley, the in- comparable ironic handling of Swift, the narrative 14 Miscellaneous Essays and pictorial faculty, so sober and yet so vivid, of Bunyan and Defoe, are never likely to be surpassed in English literature. The generation which equals the least of them may be proud of its feat This period, moreover, it must never be forgotten, was not merely a great period in itself as regarded pro- duction, but the schoolmaster of all periods to follow. It settled what the form, the technical form, of English prose was to be, and settled it once for all. It is not usual to think or speak of the eighteenth century as reactionary, and yet, in regard to its prose style, it to some extent deserves this title. The peculiarities of this prose, the most famous names among whose practitioners are Johnson and Gibbon, exhibit a decided reaction against the plainness and vernacular energy which, as has been said, characterised writers from Dryden to Swift. Lord Chesterfield's well-known denunciation of proverbial phrases in speaking and writing, and the Latinisms of the extreme Johnsonian style, may seem to have but little to do with each other, but they express in different ways the revolt of the fine gentleman and the revolt of the scholar against the simplicity and homeliness of the style which had gone before. The men of 1660-1720 had not been afraid of Latinisms, but they had not sought them : the ampullae et sesquipedalia verba of Johnson at his worst were Miscellaneous Essays 1 5 by no means peculiar to himself, but may be found alike in the prose and the verse f wr i ters over whom he exercised little or no influence. The altered style, how- ever, in the hands of capable men became some- what more suitable for the dignified branches of sustained prose-writing. We shall never have a greater historian in style as well as in matter than Gibbon ; in style at least we have not beaten Hume, though there has been more than a century to do it in. Berkeley belongs mainly to the latest school of seventeenth century writers, to the Queen Anne men, but partly also to the eighteenth century proper ; and he, again with Hume as a second, is as unlikely to be surpassed in mastery of philosophical style as Gibbon and Hume are unlikely to be surpassed in the style of history. Nor were there wanting tendencies and influences which counteracted to a great extent the striving for elaboration and dignity. The chief of these was the growth of the novel. This is not only in itself a kind unfriendly to a pompous style, but happened to attract to its practice the great genius of Fielding, which was from nothing so averse as from everything that had the semblance or the reality of pretension, pedantry, or conceit. Among the noteworthy writers of the time, not a few stand apart from its general tendencies, and others exhibit only part of those tendencies. The homely and yet graceful narrative of the author of Peter Wilkins derives evidently from 16 Miscellaneous Essays Defoe ; the gossiping of the letters of Walpole, Gray, and others, is an attempt partly to imitate French models, partly to re- produce the actual talk of society ; Sterne's deliberate eccentricity is an adaptation, as genius of course adapts, of Rabelais and Burton, while the curious and inimitable bad- ness of the great Bishop Butler's form is evidently due, not like Locke's to carelessness and con- tempt of good literary manners, but to some strange idiosyncrasy of defect. On the whole, however, the century not merely added immortal examples to English prose, but contributed not a little to the further perfecting of the general instrument. A novelist like Fielding, a historian like Gibbon, a philosopher like Hume, an orator and publicist like Burke, could not write with- out adding to the capacities of prose in the hands of others as well as to its performances in their own. They gave a further extension to the system of modulating sentences and clauses with a definite regard to harmony. Although there may be too much monotony in his method, it seems unlikely that Gibbon will ever be surpassed in the art of arranging the rhythm of a sentence of not inconsiderable length without ever neglecting co-ordination, and at the same time, without ever committing the mistake of exchanging the rhythm proper to prose for the metre which is proper to poetry. Much the same may be said of Burke when he is at Miscellaneous Essays 1 7 his best, while two earlier ornaments of the period, Bolingbroke and Conyers Middle- PROS^STYLE. ton > thou gh their P rose is less rhythmical, are scarcely less remarkable for a deliber- ate and systematic arrangement of the sentence within itself and of the sentences in the paragraph. To enumerate separate particulars in which the eighteenth and late seventeenth centuries subjected English prose to laws would be appropriate rather to a manual of composition than to an essay like the present. For instance, such details as the reform of punctuation, and especially the more frequent use of the full stop, as the avoidance of the homoeoteleuton, and if possible of the same word, unless used emphatically, in the same sen- tence, can be only very summarily referred to. But undoubtedly the matter of principal importance was the practice, which as a regular practice began with Dryden and was perfected in Gibbon, of balancing and proportioning the sentence. Of course there are numerous or innumerable examples of ex- quisitely proportioned sentences in Milton and his contemporaries, but that is not to the point. What is to the point is such a sentence as the following from the Areopagitica : " But if his rear and flanks be not impaled, if his back-door be not secured by the rigid licenser but that a bold book may now and then issue forth and give the assault to some of his old collections in their trenches, it will concern him then to keep waking, to stand in watch, to set good C 1 8 Miscellaneous Essays guards and sentinels about his received opinions, to walk the round and counter -round with his fellow -inspectors, fearing lest pR ^ ST?LE. any of his flock be seduced, wlio then also would be better instructed, better exercised and disciplined." Here the sentence begins excellently, winds up the height to " trenches," and descends again in an orderly and regular fashion to "seduced." There in sense, in sound, by all the laws of verbal architecture, it should stop : but the author has an afterthought, and he tacks on the words italicised, thereby ruining the balance of his phrase, and adding an unnecessary and disturbing epexegesis to his thought. Had Milton lived a hundred years later he would no more have committed this merely careless and inerudite fault than Gibbon would. Like all rules of general character, the balan- cing of the sentence has of course its difficulties and its dangers. Carried out on principles too uniform, or by means too obvious, it becomes monotonous and disgusting. It is a considerable encouragement to sonorous platitude, and (as satirists have sometimes amused themselves by showing) it can sometimes be used to disguise and carry off the simply unmeaning. When Mrs. St. Clair in The Inheritance uttered that famous sentence, " Happy the country whose nobles are thus gifted with the power of reflecting kindred excellence, and of perpetuating national virtue on the broad basis of private friendship," Miscellaneous Essays 19 she owed everything to the fact that she was born after Dr. Johnson. Very large . num bers of public speakers in and out of pulpits were, during the time when prose rhythm by means of balance was enforced or expected, in a similar case of indebtedness. But the amount of foolish speech and writing in the world has not appreciably lessened since every man became a law unto himself in the matter of composition. And for my part I own, though it may be immoral, that I prefer a platitude which seems as if it might have some meaning, and at any rate sounds well as sound, to a platitude which is nakedly and cacophonously platitudinous or senseless, still more to one which bedizens itself with adjectives and crepitates, as Dr. Johnson might have said, with attempts at epigram. The Latinising of the language was a greater evil by far, but one of no lasting continuance. No permanent harm came to English literature from Johnson's noted second thought about vitality and putrefaction, or from Armstrong's singular fancy (it is true this was in verse) for calling a cold bath a gelid cistern. The fashion rose, lived, died, as fashions do. But beauty looks only a little less beautiful in the ugliest fashion, and so the genius and talent of the eighteenth century showed themselves only to a little less advantage because of their predilection for an exotic vocabulary. No harm was done, but much good, to the theory and practice of verbal 2O Miscellaneous Essays architecture, and if inferior material was some- times used, Time has long since dealt with each builder's work in his usual ju and equal fashion. With the eighteenth century, speaking gener- ally, with Burke and Gibbon, speaking particu- larly, what may be called the consciously or unconsciously formative period of English prose came to an end. In the hundred years that have since passed we have had not a few prose writers of great genius, many of extreme talent. But they have all either deliberately innovated upon, or obediently followed, or carefully neglected, the two great principles which were established between 1660 and 1760, the principle, that is to say, which limited the meaning of a sentence to a moderately complex thought in point of matter, and that which admitted the necessity of balance and coherent structure in point of form. One attempt at the addition of a special kind of prose, an attempt frequently made but foredoomed to failure, I shall have to notice, but only one. The great period of poetical production which began with the French Revolution and lasted till about 1830, saw also much prose of merit. Coleridge, Southey, Shelley, are eminent examples in both prose and verse, while Wordsworth, Byron, Moore, and others, come but little behind. Scott, the most voluminous of all except perhaps Southey in prose composition, occupies a rather Miscellaneous Essays 2 1 peculiar position. The astonishing rapidity of his production, and his defective educa- tion ( for ood prose-writing is far more a matter of scholarship than good verse- writing), may have had a somewhat injurious influence on his style ; but this style has on the whole been rated much too low, and at its best is admirable English. The splendour, however, of the poetical production of the later Georgian period in poetry no doubt eclipsed its production in prose, and as a general rule that prose was rather even and excellent in general characteristics than eminent or peculiar in special quality. The same good sense which banished the artificial vocabulary of poetry achieved the banishing of it from prose. But except that it is always a little less stiff, and sometimes a little more negligent, the best prose written by men of middle or advanced age when George the Third was dying does not differ very greatly from the best prose written by men of middle or advanced age when he came to the throne. The range of subjects, the tone of thought, might be altered, the style was very much the same ; in fact, there can be very little doubt that while the poets deliberately rebelled against their predecessors, the prose writers, who were often the same persons in another function, deliberately fol- lowed, if they did not exactly imitate them. It was not until the end of this period of brilliant poetry that certain persons more or less deliberately set themselves to revolutionise English 22 Miscellaneous Essays prose, as the poets for a full generation had been revolutionising English verse. I say more or less deliberately, for the revived fashion of " numerous " prose which one man of genius and one man of the greatest talent, Thomas de Quincey and John Wilson, proclaimed, which others seem to have adopted without much of set purpose, and which, owing especially to the great example of Mr. Ruskin, has enlisted so large a following, was in its origin partial and casual. The introducers of this style have hardly had due honour or due dishonour, for what they have done is not small, whatever may be thought of its character. Indeed, at the present day, among a very large propor- tion of general readers, and among a certain number of critics, " style " appears to be under- stood in the sense of ornate and semi -metrical style. A work which is "not remarkable for style " is a work which does not pile on the adjectives, which abstains from rhythm so pronounced and regular that it ceases to be rhythm merely and becomes metre, which avoids rather than seeks the drawing of attention to originality of thought by singularity of expression, and which worships no gods but proportion, clearness, closeness of expression to idea, and (within the limits incident to prose) rhythmical arrangement. To confess the truth, the public has so little prose of this latter quality put before it, and is so much ac- customed to find that every writer whose style Miscellaneous Essays 23 is a little above the school exercise, and his thought a little above platitude, aims at PROS^ST?LE. tlie distinction of prose-poet, that it has some excuse for its blunder. That it is a blunder I shall endeavour to show a little later. For the present, it is sufficient to indicate the period of George the Fourth's reign as the beginning of the flamboyant style in modern English prose. Be- sides the two persons just mentioned, whose writings were widely distributed in periodicals, three other great masters of prose, though not inclined to the same form of prose -poetry, did not a little to break down the tradition of English prose in which sobriety was the chief thing aimed at. These were Carlyle, with his Germanisms of phrase and his sacrifice (not at all German) of order to emphasis in arrangement ; Macaulay, with his sententious clause and his endless fire of snapping antitheses ; and lastly, with not much influence on the general reader, but with much on the special writer, Landor, who, together with much prose that is nearly perfect, gave the innovators the countenance of an occasional leaning to the florid, and of a neo- classicism which was sometimes un-English. Side by side with these great innovators there were no doubt many and very excellent practi- tioners of the older and simpler style. Southey survived and Lockhart flourished as accomplished examples of it in one great literary organ ; the influence of Jeffrey was exerted vigorously, if 24 Miscellaneous Essays not always wisely, to maintain it in another. Generally speaking, it was not admitted before 1850 that the best models for a young man in prose could be any other than the chief ornaments of English literature from Swift and Addison to Gibbon and Burke. The examples of the great writers above mentioned, however, could not fail to have a gradual effect ; and, as time passed, more and more books came to be written in which one of two things was evident. The one was that the author had tried to write a prose-poem as far as style was concerned, the other that he was absolutely without principles of style. I can still find no better instance of this literary antinomianism than I found of old * in Grote's history, where there is simply no style at all. The chief political speeches and the most popular philosophical works of the day supply examples of this antinomian eminence in other departments. Take almost any chief speaker of either House and compare him with Burke or Canning or Lord Lyndhurst ; take almost any living philosopher and compare him with Berkeley, with Hume, or even with Mill, and the difference is obvious at once. As history, as politics, as philosophy, the later examples may be excellent But as literature they are not comparable with the earlier. In the department of luxuriant ornament, the example of Mr. Ruskin may be said to have 1 See the essay before referred to. Miscellaneous Essays 25 rendered all other examples comparatively super- fluous, though many of our later prac- titioners, as usual, scorn their model. From the date of the first appearance of Modern Painters, the prose-poetry style has more and more engrossed attention and imitation. It has eaten up history, permeated novel -writing, affected criticism so largely that those who resist it in that department are but a scattered remnant It is unnecessary to quote instances, for the fact is very little likely to be gainsaid, and if it is gainsaid at all, will certainly not be gainsaid by any person who has frequent and copious examples of English style coming before him for criticism. 1 At the same time the period of individualism has given rise, as a former period of something like individualism did in the seventeenth century, to some great and to many remarkable writers. Of these, so far as they have not been distinguished by an adherence to the ornate style, and so far as they have not, with the disciples of literary incuria, let style go to the winds altogether, Mr. Carlyle was during all his later days the chief, and in not a few cases the model. But he had seconds in the work, in many of whom literary genius to a great extent supplied the want of academic correctness. 1 It should perhaps be added that in the seven years since the text was first written the popularity in each case late, in each well deserved, but in each also too often a matter of mere fashion, as was the previous neglect of them of Mr. Browning in verse and of Mr. Meredith in prose has set fresh models before those whose one idea is to escape, at any cost, the appearance of commonplace. [1892.] 26 Miscellaneous Essays Thackeray, with some remarkable slovenlinesses (he is probably the last writer of the first eminence of whom the enemy " and which " has made a conquest), elaborated, rather it would seem by practice and natural genius, than in the carrying out of any theory, a style which for the lighter purposes of literature has no rival in urbanity, flexibility, and width of range since Addison, and which has found the widest acceptance among men of letters. Dickens again, despite very great faults of bad taste and mannerism, did not lack the qualities of a great writer. He seldom had occasion for a sustained effort in prose writing, and the "tricks and manners" to which he was so unfortunately given lent themselves but too easily to imitation. Of the many writers of merit who stand beside and below these two space here forbids detailed mention. There are also many earlier authors who, either because they have been merely excep- tional, or because they have been examples of tendencies which others have exhibited in a more characteristic manner, have not been noticed speci- ally in the foregoing sketch. To take the last century only, Cobbett ranks with Bunyan and Defoe as the third of a trio of deliberately ver- nacular writers. The exquisite grace and charm of Lamb, springing in part no doubt from an imita- tion of the " giant race before the flood," especially Fuller, Browne, and Burton, had yet in it so much of idiosyncrasy that it has never been and is never Miscellaneous Essays 27 likely to be successfully imitated. Peacock, an accomplished scholar and a master of PROS^STYLE. ironv > nas a peculiarity which is rather one of thought than of style, of view- point towards the world at large than of expres- sion of the views taken. The late Lord Beacons- field, unrivalled at epigram and detached phrase, very frequently wrote and sometimes spoke below himself, and in particular committed the fault of substituting for a kind of English Voltairian style, which no one could have brought to greater perfection if he had given his mind to it, corrupt followings of the sensibility and philosophism of Diderot and the mere grandilo- quence of Buffon. Thus then the course of English prose style presents, in little, the following picture. Begin- ning for the most part with translations from Latin or French, with prose versions of verse writings, and with theological treatises aiming more at edification, and at the edification of the vulgar, than at style, it was not till after the invention of printing that it attempted perfection of form. But in its early strivings it was much hindered, first by the persistent attempt to make an uninflected do the duty of an inflected language, and secondly, by the curious flood of conceits which accompanied, or helped, or were caused by the Spanish and Italian influences of the six- teenth and early seventeenth centuries. In the latter period we find men of the greatest genius 28 Miscellaneous Essays producing singularly uneven and blemished work, owing to the want of an accepted theory and practice of style; each man writing PR QSE STYLE. as seemed good in his own eyes, and selecting not merely his vocabulary (as to that a great freedom has always, and rightly, prevailed in England), but his arrangement of clauses and sentences, and even to some extent his syntax. To this period of individualism an end was put by Dryden, whose example in codifying and reforming was followed for nearly a century. During this period the syntactical part of English grammar was settled very nearly as it has hitherto remained ; the limitation of the sentence to a single moderately simple proposition, or at most to two or three propositions closely connected in thought, was effected ; the arrangement of the single clause was prescribed as nearly as possible in the natural order of vocal speech, inversions being reserved as an exception and a license for the production of some special effect ; the use of the parenthesis was (perhaps unduly) discouraged ; and a general principle was established that the cadence as well as the sense of a sentence should rise gradually toward the middle, should if necessary continue there on a level for a brief period, and should then descend in a gradation corresponding to its ascent. These principles were observed during the whole of the eighteenth century, and with little variation during the first quarter of the nine- teenth, a certain range of liberty being given by Miscellaneous Essays 29 the increasing subdivision of the subjects of litera- ture, and especially by the growth of ENGLISH /> . i r i- , PROSE STYLE. " ctlon anc * * periodical writing on more or less ephemeral matters. The con- tinuance of this latter process, the increased study of foreign (especially German) literature, the disuse of Greek and Latin as the main instruments of education, and the example of eminent or popular writers, first in small and then in great numbers, have during the last fifty years induced a return of individualism. This has in most cases taken the form either of a neglect of regular and orderly style altogether, or of the preference of a highly ornamented diction, and a poetical rather than prosaic rhythm. The great mass of writers belong to the first division, the smaller number who take some pains about the ordering of their sentences almost entirely to the second. That this laboured and ornate manner will not last very long is highly probable, that it should last long would be out of keeping with experience. But it is not so certain that its disappearance will be followed by anything like a return to the simplicity of theory and practice in style which, while it left eighteenth century and late seventeenth century authors full room to display individual talents and peculiarities, still caused between them the same resemblance which exists in examples of an order of architecture or of a natural species. So much has been said about the balancing 30 Miscellaneous Essays of the sentence, and the rhythm appropriate to prose and distinct from metre, that the reader may fairly claim to be informed PR OSE STYLE. somewhat more minutely of the writer's views on the subject. They will have to be put to a certain extent scholastically, but the thing is really a scholastic question, and the impatience with " iambs and pentameters," which Mr. Lowell (a spokesman far too good for such a breed) con- descended to express some forty years ago on be- half of the vulgar, is in reality the secret of much of the degradation of recent prose. In dealing with this subject I shall have to affront an old pre- judice which has apparently become young again the prejudice which deems terms of quantity in- applicable to the English and other modern languages. The truth is, that the metrical symbols and system of scansion which the genius of the Greeks invented, are applicable to all European languages, though (and this is where the thoroughgoing defenders of accent against quantity make their blunder) the quantity of particular syllables is much more variable. In other words, there are far more common syllables in English and other modern languages than in Latin, or even in the language of those Quibus est nihil negatum Et queis " are's ares " licet sonare. A Greek would have laughed heartily enough at the notion that the alternative quantity of Miscellaneous Essays 31 Ares made it impossible to scan Homer regu- larly. And an Englishman may borrow pRosif STYLE. the l au gh : despite the large number of syllables (not by any means all) in his language which are capable of being made long or short according to the pleasure of the writer and the exigencies of the verse. All good English verse, from the rudest ballad of past centuries to the most elabor- ate harmonies of Mr. Swinburne and Lord Tenny- son, is capable of being exhibited in metrical form as strict in its final, if not in its initial laws, as that which governs the prosody of Horace or of Euripides. Most bad English verse is capable of having its badness shown by the application of the same tests. In using therefore longs and shorts, and the divi- sions of classical metre from Pyrrhic to dochmiac, in order to exhibit the characteristics of English prose rhythm and the differences which it exhibits from the metre which is verse rhythm, I am using disputed means deliberately and with the fullest intention and readiness to defend them if required. 1 I take it that the characteristic of metre that is to say, poetic rhythm is not only the recurrence of the same feet in the same line, but also the recurrence of corresponding and similar arrangements of feet in different lines. 1 It has been pointed out to me, since the following remarks were written, that I might have sheltered myself under a right reverend precedent in the shape of some criticism of Kurd's on the rhythmical peculiarities of Addison. I do so now all the more willingly, that no one who compares the two passages will suspect me of merely following the bishop. 32 Miscellaneous Essays The Greek chorus, and in a less degree the English pindaric, exhibit the first charac- teristic scantly, but they make up, in t first case by a rigid, and in the second by what ought to be a rigid, adherence to the second. In all other known forms of literary European verse Greek, Latin, English, French, Italian, Spanish, German both requirements are complied with in different measure or degree, from the cast-iron re- gularity of the Latin alcaic to the wide license of a Greek comic senarius or an English anapaestic tetra- meter. In blank verse or in couplets every verse is (certain equivalent values being once recognised) exactly equal to every other verse. In stanzas from the quatrain to the Spenserian the parallelism, if more intricate, is equally exact. Now the requirement of a perfect prose rhythm is that, while it admits of indication by quantity- marks, and even by divisions into feet, the sim- plicity and equivalence of feet within the clause answering to the line are absent, and the exact correspondence of clause for clause, that is to say, of line for line, are absent also, and still more necessarily absent. Let us take an ex- ample. I know no more perfect example of English prose rhythm than the famous verses of the last chapter of the Canticles in the Authorised Version ; I am not certain that I know any so perfect. Here they are, arranged for the purpose of exhibition in clause - lines, quantified and divided into feet. Miscellaneous Essays 33 Set m6 I Ss a seal | upSn thine heart | as a seal | up6n thine arm F, PROSE STYLE. EN GLISH - v i 1 y * I v j .t_ l* iv i/i For love Is strong as death jealousy crugl | as the" grave Thg coals thgreof | are coals | 6f fire" | which hath | m8st ve | hSmgnt flame | Many watSrs | cannot quench love | nelthSr | can the" floods | drown ft | If a man | should give | allth2sub | stance | 8f his house | for love | ft should ut | t8rly bS contemned. | I by no means give the quantification of this, or the distribution into lines and feet as final or impeccable, though I think it is, on the whole as a good elocutionist would read the passage accurate enough. But the disposition will, I think, be sufficient to convince any one who has an ear and a slight acquaintance with res metrica, that here is a system of rhythm irreducible to poetic form. The movement of the whole is perfectly harmonious, exquisitely modulated, finally complete. But it is the har- mony of finely modulated speech, not of song ; harmony, in short, but not melody, divisible into clauses, but not into bars or staves, having parts which continue each other, but do not correspond to each other. A similar example may be found in the almost equally beautiful Charity passage of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, and if the reader likes to see how the sense of rhythm flourishes in these days, he may compare that with the version which has been substituted for it by the persons called Revisers. But let us D 34 Miscellaneous Essays take an example of different kind and of less elaborate but still beautiful form, the already cited close of Sir William Temple's Essay on Poetry : "When all is done, human life is at the greatest and the best but like a froward child, that must be played with and humoured a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over." Here the division is that which has been noted as the usual one in eighteenth century prose, an arsis (to alter the use of the word a little) as far as " child," a level space of progress till "asleep," and then a thesis, here unusually brief, but quite sufficient for the purpose. But here also the movement is quite different from that of poetry. Part of the centre clause, "but like a froward child that must be played with," may indeed be twisted into something like a heroic, but there is nothing corresponding to it earlier or later, and the twisting itself is violent and unnatural. For the clause or prose line does not begin at " but " and does not end at " with." Here is yet another and longer passage, this time from Mr. Ruskin, who, though he has by no means always observed the distinction we are discussing, and has taught many maladroit imitators to neglect it, is, when he is at his best, thoroughly sound. The sentence chosen shall be a long one, such as the writer loves : " He did not teach them how to build for Miscellaneous Essays 35 glory and for beauty, He did not give them the fearless, faithful, inherited energies that __ worked on and down from death to PROSE SXYi-*i death, generation after generation, that we might give the work of their poured-out spirit to the axe and to the hammer : He has not cloven the earth with rivers that their wild white waves might turn wheels and push paddles, nor turned it up under, as it were fire, that it might heat wells and cure diseases : He brings not up His quails by the east wind only to let them fall in flesh about the camp of men : He has not heaped the rocks of the mountain only for the quarry, nor clothed the grass of the field only for the oven." At first sight it may seem as if this admirable passage (the brilliant effect of which is not in the least due to spilth of adjectives, or to selection of exotic words, or to eccentricity of word-order, for the vocabulary is very simple and plain, and the order is quite natural) incurs some of the blame due to the merely conglomerate sentence, in which the substitution of full stops for colons or commas is sufficient to break up the whole into independent wholes. But it does not, and it is saved from this condemnation not merely by the close connection of its matter, but by the arrangement of its form. The separate members have a varying but compensating har- mony, and the ascent and descent of the sentence never finally ends till the last word, which has been led up to by a most cunning and in no 36 Miscellaneous Essays invidious sense prosaic concatenation of rhythm. Mr. Ruskin, it is true, is not always impeccable. In a fine passage of The P ^ LE . Harbours of England (too long for quotation, but which may be conveniently found at p. 378 of the Selections from his works) I find the following complete heroics imbedded in the prose : " Hot in the morning sun, rusty and seamed." " The grass of spring, the soft white cloud of foam." " Fading or flying high into the breeze." " Brave lives dashed Away about the rattling beach like weeds." " Still at the helm of every lonely boat, Through starless night and hopeless dawn, His hand." Now this is wrong, though of course it is im- possible always to avoid a complete heroic cadence. So is it, also, with a very elaborate, and in its somewhat illegitimate way, very beautiful passage of Charles Kingsley the dream of Amyas at the Devil's Limekiln, in Westward Ho ! This sins not by conscious or unconscious insertions of blank verse, but by the too definitely regular and lyrical sweep of the rhythm in the words, " I saw the grand old galleon," etc. This is the great difficulty of very ornate prose, that it is constantly tending to overstep the line between the two rhythms. When this fault is avoided, and the prose abides strictly by its own laws, and draws its ornament, not from aniline dyes of vocabulary, but from Miscellaneous Essays 37 harmony of arrangement, nothing can be more beautiful and more satisfactory. But PROSE^TYLE. in fact such P rose d es not differ at all in kind from satisfactory specimens of the simpler style, and it was De Quincey's great critical fault that he not only overlooked but denied this identity in his scornful criticisms of the style of Swift and other severe writers. The same principles are applied with more or less elaboration as the case may be, the criterion of appropriateness in each case being the nature of the subject and the circumstances of the utterance. It is because the rule of prose writing is in this way so entirely a /LtoXv/SSt^o? icavoav, because between the limits of cacophony on the one hand and definitely metrical effect on the other, the practitioner must always choose and can never merely follow, that prose writing is so difficult, that the examples of great eminence in it are so rare, and that even these examples are for the most part so unequal. It is easy to produce long passages of English poetry which are absolutely flawless, which, each according to its own plan and requirements, could not be better. It is by no means easy to produce long passages of English prose, or of any prose, of which as much can be said. The artist lacks the help of obvious and striking error which he possesses in poetry. In poetry, as in the typewriter on which I write these words, a bell rings loudly to warn of certain simple dangers. The muse of prose is silent, 38 Miscellaneous Essays however awkwardly her suitors make love to her, In the simpler style there is of course less danger of flaws Swift is often quite impeccable but as the style rises the danger increases. I do not think that even in Landor or in Mr. Ruskin, the most accom- plished, as the most opposed, English writers of the elaborate style during this century, it is possible to find an unbroken passage of very con- siderable length which is absolutely faultless. This art of rhythmical arrangement, applicable in sentences so simple as that quoted from Temple, as much as in sentences so complex as that quoted from Mr. Ruskin, applicable indeed in sentences much simpler than the one and even more complicated than the other, is undoubtedly the principal thing in prose. Applied in its simplest forms, it is constantly missed by the vulgar, but is perhaps productive of not least pleasure to the critic. Of its subsidiary arts and arrangements of art, space would fail me to speak at length, but the two most important articles, so import- ant, indeed, that with the architectural process they may be said to form the three great secrets of prose success, are simplicity of language, and directness of expression in the shorter clause and phrase. It is against these two that the pseudo-stylists of our day sin most constantly. A gaudy vocabulary is thought a mark of style : a non-natural, twisted, allusive phrase is thought a mark of it Now no reasonable person, certainly Miscellaneous Essays 39 no competent critic, will advocate kgrisdtre style; all that such a critic will contend for is PROSTYLE. a remembrance of the rule of the Good Clerk, Red ink for ornament and black for use. There are occasions for red ink in prose writing, no doubt ; but they are not every man's occasions, nor are they, for the men whose occasions they are, on every day or on every subject. Not only the test passages taken above, but almost any well- selected Prose Anthology will show what extreme error, what bad art, what blind lack of observa- tion, is implied in the peppering and salting of sentence after sentence with strange words or with familiar words used strangely. It is not wanted to produce the effect aimed at ; it may safely be added that it produces the effect aimed at only in the case of persons who are not com- petent to judge whether the mark has been hit. Obscurity of phrase, on the other hand, is only a more venial crime than gaudiness of language because it takes a little more trouble on the part of the sinner. It is at least as bad in itself. It may safely be laid down that in almost any case where the phrase is not comprehended as soon as read by a person of decent intelligence and education in almost any case where, without quite exceptional need for emphasis or for attracting his attention, a non- natural, involved, laboured diction is used in almost any case 4 but as doxa ; not as laws to guide practitioners whose practice is very likely better than the lawgiver's, but as the result of a good many years' reading of the English literature of all ages with a con- stantly critical intent. And of that critical intent one thing can be said with confidence, that the presence and the observation of it, so far from injuring the delight of reading, add to that delight in an extraordinary degree. It infuses toleration in the study of the worst writers for there is at any rate the result of a discovery or an illustration of some secret of badness ; it heightens the pleasure in the perusal of the best by transforming a confused into a rational appreciation. I do not think that keep- ing an eye on style ever interfered with attention to matter in any competent writer ; I am quite sure that it never interfered with that attention in any competent reader. Less obvious, more con- testable in detail, far more difficult of continuous Miscellaneous Essays 41 observance than the technical excellences of verse, the technical excellences of prose de- PROS^STYLE. mand, if a less rare, a not less alert and vigorous exercise of mental power to produce or to appreciate them. Nor will any time spent in acquiring pleasant and profitable learning be spent to much better advantage than the time necessary to master the principles and taste the expression of what has been called, by a master of both, " the other harmony of prose." II CHAMFORT AND RIVAROL 1 AMONG the many classes into which literature and literary men may be divided, there is one, the contents and members of CHAMFORT AND which are only half literary. When- RIVA ROL. ever a certain stage of society is reached, the art of managing words becomes fashionable, like any other art, and practitioners of it arise whose main object is to recommend themselves to society by their dexterity. Not only is this process a certain one in point of time, but it also has certain constant and un- varying peculiarities. The persons who thus dis- tinguish themselves as " wits " (for that, though not an altogether satisfactory term, is the only 1 Since this essay was written fresh selections from both Cham- fort and Rivarol have been made by M. de Lescure, who has also added much to our biographical knowledge, of the latter especially. As, however, I deal here with the work rather than with the lives, it does not seem necessary to do more than refer the studious reader to this authority, and to observe that in Rivarol's case, as in De Quincey's, scepticism as to his own accounts of himself seems to have rather overshot the mark. [1892.] Miscellaneous Essays 43 one that occurs to me), are usually born members of their society at first. By degrees CHAMFORT they become members in virtue of their RIVAROL. qualifications for the practice. The catalogue begins with Chesterfields and Saint -Evremonds, but it is pretty sure to end with Chamforts and Sydney Smiths. It is also noticeable that the men of this class rarely succeed in the highest degree when they en- deavour to produce serious literary work. Their reputation lives, but the inquirer into that repu- tation very often fails to discern much ground for it in the definite work which they leave behind them. Chesterfield's Letters is, indeed, a performance of great merit, and extraordin- arily undervalued nowadays. Saint -Evremond's Historiette of the Pere Canaye is a triumph of quiet irony. But posterity has altogether de- clined to acknowledge La Jeune Indienne as possessing the least claim to be read ; and pleasant as is Peter Plymley, the political interest, that is to say, the least lasting of all interests for all but a few students in all but a few cases, is the best of it. The fame of the brotherhood rests mainly on the memory of their talk some- times preserved more or less faithfully in recorded witticisms, sometimes demanding to be taken altogether on trust. In the latter case the repu- tation of such men is apt to die away almost as soon as the society which knew them is gone. In the former they are saved by the fact of 44 Miscellaneous Essays their being, in Fusel i's blunt language, " D d good to steal from." There are many reasons why this class CHAMFORT should be better represented in French RIV AROL. than in any other language. The joint revolution which passed nearly three hundred years ago over French society and French literature, helped the natural tendency of the race to produce them. The peculiar saline quality, which owes its name to Latin, but in which Latin writers are so singularly deficient, manifested itself as soon as Frenchmen began to write at all, probably as soon as they began to speak. But, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Malherbe and Balzac and the Academy conspired to make the language more suitable for polished and yet pregnant witticism than it had ever been before ; while Richelieu and Madame de Rambouillet conspired, quite innocently, to provide a public greedy of such utterances, and quick to reward in various ways those who could make them. Among the earliest, and certainly among the most distin- guished of the class, was, as I have said, Saint- Evremond, a man of a curious idiosyncrasy, half French and half English, possessing, among other un-French gifts, the gift of sustained irony, with- out the least snigger of countenance or quaver of voice. For a century and a half emulous followers endeavoured to supply Saint -Evremond's place, and in the five-and-twenty or thirty years before the Revolution the crop of wits was at its thickest Miscellaneous Essays 45 The Philosophe movement had had the effect of opening society to almost any one who CHAMFORT h a( j brains and a decent exterior, and RIVAROL. tne memorable disgust with which M. de Castries talked of a certain famous quarrel was not shared by many of his contem- poraries. Envious rivals might assert with perfect truth that M. de Chamfort had made himself a present both of the Chamfort and of the De. The same persons might remark, truly or not, that M. le Comte de Rivarol, or M. le Chevalier de Parcieux (for Rivarol oscillated between these two pleasing titles), was, in plain French, an inn- keeper's son, of the name of Riverot But the great folks whom they amused cared very little for this even before the Revolution broke out, and when it had once broken out there was no longer any question about names or fathers. The wit of the salons promptly became a pamphleteer on one side or the other, and helped to point and wing the darts which both sides so freely flung. This group Rulhiere, Chamfort, Rivarol, Champcenetz, Laclos, Garat, and the rest not merely figure as links between the chamber -wits of the eighteenth century and the journalists of the nineteenth, but in their persons, for the most part, served first in one class and then in the other. Indeed, in the condition to which they had brought the business of wit, it was only a variety of journalism, save that the sharp things said on current events were said to 46 Miscellaneous Essays a smaller public, and were reproduced by a less trustworthy medium than the press. Of this group the most remarkable CHAMFORT beyond doubt were the two men whose RIVAROL . names stand at the head of this essay. They were both (to use a cant phrase which has been invented since their day) self-made men, they both illustrated in ways slightly different some of the most remarkable aspects of the French literary genius, and they have both left on record some of the sharpest and strongest -winged sayings that human ingenuity has ever framed. Neither Chamfort even less than Rivarol has left any single or definite literary work of great or decided value. One, from the accidents of his history as well as from his temperament and disposition, took the popular side .in the great schism of the last decade of the eighteenth century, and had oc- casion amply to repent it. The other, less im- pulsive and more clear-sighted, took the side of precedent and authority, supported it with all his might, and derived profit from it, though he died long before its temporary triumph. Since their death the so-called works of both have been collected into what Mr. Carlyle has called formless agglomerations, a careless study of which might lead men to wonder how two such men should possibly have set their names to work so frequently spiritless and jejune. The standard edition of Chamfort published some fifty years ago in five volumes is reasonably complete, Miscellaneous Essays 47 but cumbrous and unattractive in form. The author's writings tales more indecent CHAMFORT than those of La Fontaine or even RIVAROL. tne Fabliau writers, but curiously lack- ing in pungency, academic discourses, reviews, dramas, and last, but of almost sole im- portance, maxims and anecdotes are all to be found there. Rivarol has been less fortunate. The so-called (Euvres Completes published at the beginning of the century by Fayolle and Chene- dolle" are anything but complete. They have to be supplemented by a volume of Pense'es Incites which appeared in 1836, and by a collection published in 1877 by M. Poulet-Malassis. In this latter, the editor has rescued from the Journal Politique National a Lettre sur la Capture de I'Abb^ Maury d Peronne, which he not unjustly compares to Saint-Evremond's already mentioned masterpiece, and which will also remind some readers of Gerard de Nerval's adventure with the gendarmes at Crespy. Both Chamfort and Rivarol have been more than once subjected to the process of selec- tion, for which they are peculiarly adapted, but which is in their case no easy task. M. Poulet- Malassis alludes to a satisfactory selection of Rivarol as at last about to appear; but I have never heard of its appearance, and it is much to be feared that it must have been one of the projects which his own death cut short. 1 At present many of Rivarol's best things have to 1 See note above. 48 Miscellaneous Essays be sought for in his most dreary and unequal treatise De FHomme Intellectuel et Moral, or else taken on trust through CHAMFORT the medium of not too judicious select- RIVAROL . ors. Even as it is, however, the brighter and sometimes traditional sayings of both have served thousands of duller labourers with the pen as seasonings to render palatable their own savourless compositions. These sayings and a few of their longer works are naturally the most interesting points about them ; but their personal history is not unimportant towards a due apprehension of them, and to this I may give a few lines in the first place. Chamfort, who was born in 1741, was of illegitimate birth. All that we hear of his mother is that she was somebody's companion, and the only name to which the future wit seems to have had any right was the simple baptismal name of Nicolas. M. Nicolas, however, was not so well contented with that title as his remarkable contemporary Restif de la Bretonne, and he had not, like the latter, a genealogy dating from the Emperor Pertinax to fall back upon. Somehow or other he obtained a good scholarship at an endowed school, and there received a thorough education according to the ideas of the time, an education, the test and mark of which were successful prize poems and essays. The French world of those days, if not of these, offered considerable opportunities to any one who was Miscellaneous Essays 49 fort en theme. The frequent prize competitions of the Academy supplied an easy CHAMFORT introduction, not merely to a literary AND U , 1 U RIVAROL. career, but also to a warm reception in salons and supper parties. It is true that these competitions, as Mademoiselle de Lespinasse's letters and many other documents tell us, did not go entirely by merit, but still there was enough of impartiality in the transaction to give deserving literary aspirants a very fair chance. It was by this means that La Harpe, to whom we must, I suppose, allow a certain amount of hopelessly ill -directed faculty, made his way, and it was by this means that Chamfort also made his way by overcoming La Harpe. He was at once launched in the literary society of the time, and succeeded well. He could make excellent love and tolerable literature, faculties which at that date rarely missed their due reward. Competent and not ill-natured judges Diderot and Mademoiselle de Lespinasse herself accuse him of not taking his triumphs as modestly as he might have done. But even this was hardly looked on as a demerit. Madame Helve"tius, a nursing mother of the philosophers, gave him free board and lodgings at Sevres ; Chabanon, a sympathising literary man, made over to him a small but comfortable pension ; and for many years, without more serious literary labours than the production of a few floges and plays, he lived in the curious way in which people E 50 Miscellaneous Essays did then live, literally by his wit, if not by his wits. At the Revolution, the violent anti- CHAMFORT royalist part which he took surprised both RIVA ROL. sides. For some years he was, or pre- tended to be, the life and soul of the revolutionary party as far as wit went. He it is who claims the origination of the famous title of Sieyes' famous pamphlet on the Tiers fetat ; he it was who formu- lated the equally famous guerre aux ch&teaux, paix aux chaumieres. At one moment he was inspiring Mirabeau, at another he was being saluted in the clubs as "La Rochefoucauld-Chamfort." There is not, as it seems to me, any great mystery in his having taken this course. It is clear, from all we hear of him, that the stigma of his origin weighed heavily upon him, and that he, like many other sufferers from use and wont, looked on the Revolution as a moment of revenge. He seems also to have had a genuine belief in a good time coming. But he had little fanaticism in the matter, and his caustic tongue was guided chiefly by thefron&ur spirit which has so often animated distinguished Frenchmen. After a time his wit- ticisms began to take a dubiously patriotic turn. " Be my brother or I will kill you," was not a de- finition of revolutionary conduct likely to find favour with revolutionists. He was accused and imprisoned, released, but threatened with imprisonment again. Then he tried to make away with himself, but pistol and knife would not help him. He only Miscellaneous Essays 5 1 succeeded in maiming and gashing himself in a ghastly fashion, and died after many CHAMFORT days. RIVAROL. This horrible death figures in a most striking story, the Prophecy of Cazotte, which has often been told before, but is too remark- able to be omitted here. According to La Harpe testimony, it should be remembered, given many years after the event a brilliant company were collected, some time in the year 1788, at the house of some unnamed academician, who was also a man of high rank. Among them were assembled Chamfort, La Harpe himself, Condorcet, Bailly, Cazotte, the learned Vicq d'Azyr, Roucher, chief poet of the deplorable descriptive school which Saint- Lambert and Delille'had introduced, and many others, with a plentiful admixture of merely fashionable company, and numerous ladies, with Madame de Grammont at their head. The company, if we may trust La Harpe, who had, it must be remembered, become at the time of writing violently orthodox (so that Marie Joseph Che"nier contrasted his feu celeste with Naigeon's feu d'enfer), had been indulging in free feasting and free drinking of the kind recorded in fable of the Holbachians. Chamfort had read " impious and libertine tales," for which the reader of his works will not search in vain. A guest had informed the audience that he did not believe in the existence of God, and that he did believe that Homer was a fool. Another had cited with 52 Miscellaneous Essays gusto the remark of his barber, " I am not a gentleman, sir ; but I assure you I am not a bit more religious than if CHAMFORT I were." Encouraged by these cheer- RIVA ROL. ing instances, the company begin to forecast the good time coming. Suddenly Cazotte, who was known as an oddity and an illuming as well as from his admirable tale, the Diable Amour eux, breaks in. The good time will come, and he can tell them what its fruits will be. Condorcet will die self-poisoned on a prison floor ; Chamfort will give himself a score of gashes in the vain hope of escaping from the Golden Age. As each guest, treating the matter at first as a joke, ironically asks for his own fate, the revela- tions grow more precise. Vicq d'Azyr, Bailly, Roucher have their evil fortunes told. At last the crowning moment of incredulity is reached when the prophet announces the fate of La Harpe. " La Harpe sera chre"tien." The com- pany are almost consoled when they think that their own misfortunes depend necessarily upon such an impossible contingency as this. But there is still an unpleasant impression from the gravity and the mystical reputation of the speaker. To dissipate it Madame de Grammont makes some light remark about the hardship which, by the conventions of society, prevents women from reaping the fruits of the Revolution. Cazotte replies to her promptly. There is no exemption for women in the Golden Age. She herself, her Miscellaneous Essays 53 friends, and even her betters will share the fate of Bailly and Roucher. "At least," she CHAMFORT cr i e s, " you will give me the consola- AND RIVAROL. ti n f a confessor." " No," is the answer. "The last victim who will be so attended will die before you, and he will be the King of France." This is too much even for such an assembly, and the host interferes. But the valiant duchess is irrepressible. She asks Cazotte whether he alone is exempted from all these evils, and receives for answer only a gloomy quotation from Josephus, relating to the fate of the madman who at the siege of Jerusalem ended his forebodings by crying, "Woe to myself!" Then Cazotte makes his bow and leaves the room. Before six years had passed every word of his prophecy was fulfilled. Vicq d'Azyr had suc- ceeded, and Chamfort had failed, in their attempts to copy the high Roman fashion. Roucher and Bailly and Madame de Grammont and the rest had looked through the dismal window, and Cazotte himself had been the hero of perhaps the most famous and most pitiful of the revolu- tionary legends. As for the Christianity of La Harpe, that perhaps is a question of definition. 1 The history of Rivarol is curiously different. Chamfort is a distinctly melancholy figure : he is full of gall and wormwood ; his life is passed half 1 There has been an increasing tendency of late to take it for granted that this striking story was an invention of La Harpe's. If it be so, La Harpe was a much cleverer fellow than he appears in his undoubtedly original work. 54 Miscellaneous Essays in attempts at great passions, and half in regrets at not achieving them, and his end is sinister and ghastly almost beyond CHAMFORT TT- I_ll L iA-> r AND comparison. His rival has nothing of RIVAROL . this Timon-Heraclitus air about him. Even less seems to be known of his youth (with the exception of the innkeeperhood of his father) * than of Chamfort's. But Rivarol was born in lawful wedlock about the middle of the century, and seems to have had some claims to nobility a la mode de Gascogne. He is, indeed, despite an alleged Italian origin, a Gascon all over : in his imperturb- able self-conceit, in his determination to take all things at their best and sunniest, in his keen apprehension of the side on which his bread was buttered, and in a certain lightness and springiness of character which stood him in good stead. He began his literary career with somewhat formid- able works a translation of Dante's Inferno^ with comments, and a Discourse on the Universality of the French Tongue. There is great literary promise in both these works ; indeed Rivarol, merely as a writer, ranks far above Chamfort. The limited range and, at the same time, the inflated style of the period, is admirably shown in both the com- ment and the discourse. The essay which pre- faced his Dante is very curious to read. It gives the idea of a man who is thoroughly aware of the weaknesses of his day, and thoroughly deter- mined to fall in with them, though he himself does 1 See note at beginning of this essay. Miscellaneous Essays 55 not wholly share them. It has the suspicion of insincerity that nearly all his work CHAMFORT h aSj but it gives an undoubted idea of RIVAROL. power. Of the discourse, perhaps no better idea can be given than by the sentence in which the author expresses its essence, " La langue Franchise est la seule qui ait une probit^ attachee a son g^nie." It is impos- sible to imagine a cleverer and more audacious translation into the moral jargon of the time, of the simple statement that French is the clearest of European languages. In the year before the Revolution, however, Rivarol tried a very different style. His Petit Almanack de nos Grands Hommes pour I'annJe 1788, an alphabetical handbook of authors, is one of the most venomous, but at the same time one of the most charming literary skits that have ever appeared. The mania for gorgeous appellations which had seized upon literary men, gave Rivarol plenty of handle, and to this day it is impossible to avoid laughing at the unlucky victims whose titles he discovered, or in some cases invented. There is M. Duhaussy de Robecourt, author of a touching poem with the refrain Et je voudrais pour tout potage Des pommes cuites avec vous which must surely have inspired the author of Doctor Syntax with his equally touching but less famous romance of which each verse ends Give me the table-flap, the mutton bone, and Mary. 56 Miscellaneous Essays There is M. Fenouillot de Falbaire de Quingei, whose name alone ought to be suffi- cient to gain him a high rank in CHAMFORT literature. There is M. de Saint-Ange, RIVARO L. hero of the following exquisite quatrain, which Moliere ought to have lived to hear Rival d'Ovide et saint ! Quel assemblage dtrange ! X 1'heureux traducteur d'un tendre original Le nom de Saint parait convenir assez mal. Mais ses vers ont prouvd qu'il a 1'esprit d'un Ange ! It is needless to say that this publication provoked some rather warm displays of feeling from the brother men of letters, who found themselves classed with these fantastic personages. But before long the Revolution broke out, and Rivarol at once and without hesitation took the Royalist side. It does not appear that his motives were altogether sordid, and he was probably in- fluenced to a great extent by the same hatred which his countryman, Gautier, afterwards bore and expressed to la stupiditt tgalitaire. His articles in the Journal Politique National are vigorous enough, and have the curious tone of laboured conviction which is characteristic of Rivarol's serious work, and of which one is at a loss to gauge the sincerity, though it induces us to believe him insincere. He very soon had occasion to leave the country, and spent the last ten years of his life in Brussels, London, Hamburg, and Berlin, rejoicing a good deal in the society first Miscellaneous Essays 57 of a certain Manette, then of a Russian princess ; writing a little under strong stress of CHAMFORT publishers, and often delighting young RIVAROL. Frenchmen who were introduced to him by the brilliancy of his conversa- tion. It is to one of these neophytes that we owe not merely the best account of his ways, but also the preservation of some of the best of his good things. This was Chenedolle", an amiable man of letters, a poet as poets went between the days of Andre" Che"nier and of Lamartine, and the friend of Joubert, of Chateaubriand, and of a great many other persons more distinguished than himself. Rivarol died at Berlin in the spring of 1 80 1, being then just fifty years old. Before discussing the work from which these two men derived their principal and most per- manent reputation, it may be well to say a very few words on the absolute and relative literary merit of their longer and more regular composi- tions. The fact that they were the two prominent swordsmen on the two opposing sides, has led to a good deal of partial judgment of them in France. Chamfort has sometimes been represented as a mere pander to the vicious tastes of the great ; Rivarol as a scurrilous denizen of Grub Street, who adopted the Royalist side merely because it seemed likely to pay the best. Literary as well as moral value has been adjudged or denied to both in the same way. For my own part, and postponing the question of wit, I think that 58 Miscellaneous Essays Rivarol has certainly the higher claims in matter of literature. Chamfort's serious pro- ductions are hardly readable nowadays. CHAMFORT The plays are not readable at all. RIVA ROL. The Tableaux de la Revolution are feeble and wordy. The loge on Moliere is a mere schoolboy performance, and that on La Fontaine, though very much better, is not up to the level of even good second-rate criticism. It is otherwise with M. le Comte de Rivarol. Sainte- Beuve acknowledges that he is presque un grand farivain, and I venture to think that the presque expresses very close contiguity. But what is more remarkable about him even than his manner is his matter. His essay on the French language, his essay on Dante, are written with very insuf- ficient knowledge, and from a critical standpoint entirely opposed to our present points of view. Yet it is remarkable how Rivarol's divination sup- plies his lack of knowledge ; how just his thoughts are ; how strikingly they differ from the accepted notions of the La Harpes and the Suards. His translation, or rather paraphrase, of the Inferno, shows him chiefly as a master of language ; but the essays which precede it give him independent rank as a student and critic of thought. We may now pass from the work which did not give our authors their reputation to that which did. This latter is of an exceedingly miscellaneous and in parts of a rather prob- lematical kind. It consists partly of regular Miscellaneous Essays 59 penstes or maxims of the kind produced by Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenar- CHAMFORT g ues an d Joubert But it consists AND , , . ... . . RIVAROL. a ^ so > anc * ln stl U larger measure, of anecdotes and of actual conversation and table-talk collected and handed down by authorities more or less trustworthy. To this may perhaps be added the Petit Almanack des Grands Hommes, which Rivarol and Champcenetz launched at their contemporaries, and the axioms drawn from De VHomme. The total has served hundreds of writers since the time of the originals as a quarry, or perhaps, to use a more appropriate metaphor, as a spice-box. Its contents rarely possess the weight and fulness of the great penste- writers ; the truths expressed are generally alloyed to no small extent, and there is much of mere personality and of the spite of the moment. But at its best the stuff displays an extraordinary quickness of intelligence and facility of wit, while even at its worst it has the merit of illuminating, not merely a dead state of society, but something which is living and not likely to die, the part or aspect of human nature which gave to that society most of its characteristic features. Chamfort himself defines a maxim as a product of the labour of a clever man intended to spare fools trouble. The fools who should take his own efforts of the kind, and adopt them without examination, would certainly justify their title to the designation. There is always abundance 60 Miscellaneous Essays of insight in them, but the insight is rarely directed to the whole of the subject. The two most famous of all his say- CHAMFORT ings are his definition of love and RIVARO L. his remark as to the cleansing of Augean stables. It is noteworthy, however, that the former is usually given imperfectly, and that the latter is often altered so as to be hardly recognisable. When Chamfort asserted that " 1'amour ce n'est que 1'^change de deux fantaisies," and so forth, it was with the important qualifica- tion, " 1'amour tel qu'il existe dans la socittt? When he asserted the necessary connection between revolution and violence, the phrase was not, as is so often said, "you cannot make revolutions with rosewater," but " you cannot cleanse the stable of Augeas with a dusting- brush." Of his more high-flown sayings, "II faut recommencer la socie'te' humaine" is perhaps as fair a specimen as can be found. It is striking, and carefully abstains from committing the speaker to details ; a frequent characteristic of Chamfort's political maxims. Here is one, however, of far sharper point and more definite aim: "La noblesse, disent les nobles, est un interme'diaire entre le Roi et le peuple. . . . Oui, comme le chien de chasse est intermediaire entre le chasseur et les lievres." It is remarkable, again, to find a professed man of letters aiming such a shot as this at a favourite literary paradox on politics. " There are people who pardon all the ill that Miscellaneous Essays 61 priests have done, because had it not been for the priests we should never have had CHAMFORT Tartuffe." On the whole, however, his AND ... . . , . RIVAROL. political sayings seem to me his worst. They are animated, indeed, by a really genuine if not fanatical enthusiasm for the popular cause, and by a clear, and, as I think, on the whole unselfish comprehension of the evils of the old re'gime. But they are decidedly one- sided, and there are traces about them of the personal prejudices of a nameless man who felt himself injured, in rank if not in pocket, by a convention of society. This element of person- ality may probably account to some extent for the speedy revulsion which came over him, and made him so soon "suspect" Chateaubriand, who knew him, has remarked that he could not himself understand how Chamfort could ever have seriously espoused any political cause what- ever. There must have been something in his manner which caused this wonder, for his language is expressive enough of conviction. A remarkable sourness reappears in his speeches on other subjects. He is always complaining very unjustly as it seems in his own case of the scanty encourage- ment given to men of letters. " Men of letters," he says, " are like peacocks, to whom a grain or two of corn is grudgingly thrown, and who are brought out now and then to show off their feathers, while cocks and hens and ducks and turkeys are stuffing their fill." But it is on 62 Miscellaneous Essays another subject that, like most of his contempor- aries, he is chiefly eloquent The famous and already quoted definition CHAMFORT of love might lead us to suppose RIV AROL. him a mere cynic. He has, however, and not unfrequently, his moments of sensibility. " Quelque mal qu'un homme puisse penser des femmes, il n'y a pas de femme qui n'en pense encore plus mal que lui," is one of his most savage sayings of the first kind, and it is abun- dantly supported by others. " Avez - vous jamais connu une femme qui, voyant un de ses amis assidu aupres d'une autre femme, ait suppose" que cette autre femme lui fut cruelle? On voit par la 1'opinion qu'elles ont les unes des autres. Tirez vos conclusions." " On n'est tout-a-fait la dupe d'une femme tant qu'elle n'est point la vdtre." " On serait trop malheureux si aupres des femmes on se souvenait de ce qu'on sait par cceur." On the other hand, the author of that other saying, " La pire des mesalliances est celle du cceur," cannot have been a mere railer, and there are many other signs in his work that he had had to choke down not a little sentiment. In almost all his miscellaneous mots there is a distinct under- current of sadness. " II faut," he says in one place, " agir davantage, penser moins, et ne pas se regarder vivre." But it is clear that he did look at himself as he lived, and that the spectacle Miscellaneous Essays 63 did not satisfy him. "Ce que j'ai appris je ne le sais plus, le peu que je sais je 1'ai CHAMFORT dcvine" " may be a remnant of his RIVAROL. days of what Diderot called " suffi- sance bien conditionne"e." He often speaks too of his " celebrity " as if it were a quite incontestable fact. Yet ten years before his death he could say that " he had lost the passions that rendered society supportable, and saw nothing in it but folly and wretchedness." The most popular, however, and not the least interesting side of Chamfort's talent remains to be noticed. He has left us a collection of anecdotes which surpasses in vivacity, in keen- ness of observation, and in power of invention, anything else of the kind which exists. That in many, if not in most cases, the right of in- vention as well as of careful observation and witty expression is his, seems not doubtful. His anecdotes are, moreover, for the most part anec- dotes with a purpose, and the purpose is to show the folly, the vanity, and the vices of the society which Chamfort knew so well and hated so much. It is impossible to read a single page of them without finding striking examples, but I can only quote a few of the happiest and most characteristic, and at the same time the least known. For there are not a few of Chamfort's sayings and stories which are already known by quotation to all the world. Out of the others might be composed a tableau of the later eighteenth century, its 64 Miscellaneous Essays men of fashion and its men of letters, its actresses and its great ladies, its ceremonies and its philosophy. There is the noble CHAMFORT academician, canvassed by a candidate RIVA ROL. who has insulted him forty years before, receiving him with the utmost politeness, complimenting him on his literary successes, and at last bowing him out with the words, "Adieu, M. le Comte, je vous fe"licite de n'avoir plus de me"moire." There is the man who refuses to marry his friend and beloved hostess because "he should not know where to spend his even- ings." There is Broglie, the war -god, who is willing to allow that ce Voltaire has written one good line : Le premier qui fut roi fut un soldat heureux. Or we find ourselves back in the sacred precincts of the Academy for Chamfort is never tired of girding at his colleagues and a member is pro- posing " that not more than four persons be allowed to speak at once " ; while Fontenelle, when the question is whether a certain stingy Immortal has or has not paid his subscription, and the good-natured collector remarks, "I believe he did, but I did not see it," rejoins, " I did see it, but I don't believe it." Sometimes the sar- casm flies higher. We are told of the programme of a Cour Ple"niere which was drawn up for Louis XV., containing not only the remarks that the King was to make, but also stage directions. Miscellaneous Essays 65 " Here the King will assume an air of severity " : " At this point his majesty's counte- CHAMFORT na nce will unbend itself," and so forth. RIVAROL. Elsewhere it is the courtier who de- fies his enemies to supplant him, " II n'y a personne ici plus valet que moi." Or, once more, Louis the Wellbeloved lies on his death-bed, indignantly protesting with his last breath against the uncourtly doctor who says to him, "You must" do so and so. Of one story Madame Denis, Voltaire's unlucky niece, is the heroine. She is modestly deprecating praises for her acting in Zaire. " One ought to be young and beautiful for that," she says. "Ah! madame," replies her well-meaning flatterer, "you have proved the contrary." Then we have the following miracle of the ridiculous-pathetic which deserves quotation at length : " Madame de H me racontait la mort de M. le Due d'Aumont. ' Cela a tourne bien court,' disait-elle. ' Deux jours auparavant M. Bonvard lui avait permis de manger, et le jour meme de sa mort, deux heures avant la re"cidive de sa paralysie, il e"tait comme a trente ans, comme il avait e"t toute sa vie. II avait demande son perroquet, avait dit 'Brossez ce fauteuil,' 'Voyons mes deux broderies nouvelles,' enfin toute sa tete, toutes ses ide"es comme a 1'ordinaire.' " Does not this conquer a place among stories of the light- ning before death ? Nor even after this does the gallery lose its charms. There is the courtier F 66 Miscellaneous Essays who in unconscious contrast to Massillon's famous opening, remarked at the death of Louis XIV., " Apres la mort d'un roi CHAMFORT AND on peut tout croire." Yet a little RIVA ROL. and we are grieved to hear that Voltaire actually spoke of the divine Emily as " Un cochon qui n'a pas d'organes, qui ne sait pas ce que c'est que 1'harmonie." That the majority of the anecdotes are, as this clearly is, ill-natured, is almost to be expected. But what is remarkable about Chamfort is that there is little malice, in the French sense of the word, about him. It is difficult to believe that his unrivalled collection of pathological illustrations gave him the very slightest delight. There is no laugh in them, though they have made so many hundreds of people laugh since they were written and told. The saeva indignatio has come upon the satirist, and scorn has apparently ceased to provide him with any pleasure. One is always expecting Chamfort to change his tone and become a preacher in earnest, bewailing and lamenting instead of merely girding at the follies and vices of his time. The shadow of his death seems to reach backwards. With this melancholy temperament and sombre habit of thought, the light and mercurial careless- ness of Rivarol is in striking contrast. I have said that he seems to me to possess greater literary powers than Chamfort, and a greater faculty of thinking justly on most subjects, if not on any Miscellaneous Essays 67 given subject. But whereas Chamfort is frequently sincere, Rivarol hardly knows what CHAMFORT sincerity is. He is not consciously RIVAROL. or intentionally false, but it becomes very soon evident to his readers that, with immense power of appreciation, he is almost incapable of being really convinced. I have said that his adoption of the Royalist cause does not seem to have been the act of a mere hireling. His acuteness foresaw that the popular party was likely to have some very disagreeable experiences, and that there would be for some time little room there for persons who took merely sarcastic and apolaustic views of life. Whatever may have been his real claim to a place among the nobility, his tastes and his convictions (such as they were) threw him on their side. This had its incon- veniences. There is an admirable story which is told, for a wonder, at his expense. Rivarol in the early days of the Revolution had been ex- patiating on the loss of " nos titres, nos droits," and so forth. Hereat his hearer was heard to mutter Nos ! with a slight accent of wonder. "Qu'est-ce que vous trouvez la de singulier?" said the Gascon sharply. " C'est le pluriel, mon cher, que je trouve singulier," replied the other. As a rule, however, it was not Rivarol who played the part of butt in such matters. With less venom than Chamfort, he had an almost unequalled knack of saying insolent things. His remark to the un- lucky author of a single couplet, " C'est fort bien, 68 Miscellaneous Essays mais il y a des longueurs," is perhaps the best known of all his sayings. And one can imagine the cordial hatred which CHAMFORT AND must have been generally felt towards RIVA ROL. a man who, meeting the harmless Florian with a manuscript sticking out of his pocket, could exclaim, " Ah, monsieur, si on ne vous connaissait pas on vous volerait" "Condorcet writes with laudanum on lead paper" is not an extraordinary witticism. But this on the funeral sermons of a certain Abb6 de Vauxcelles is again admirable. " On ne sent jamais mieux le ndant de 1'homme que dans la prose de cet orateur." " Champcenetz c'est mon clair de lune " is a specimen of the amiable speeches he gave to his chief literary coadjutor, himself no despicable wit, who, after his condemnation by the revolu- tionary tribunal, asked Fouquier-Tinville " whether one could make arrangements for a substitute ? " The historian Rulhiere, who was one of the most unpopular of men, is said to have com- plained to Rivarol one day of his ill -repute, remarking, "Je n'ai jamais fait qu'une md- chancete" dans ma vie." " Quand finira-t-elle?" was the answer. Some of his less ferocious replies are even better, as this criticism of an epigram- matist, " Ses e"pigrammes font honneur a son cceur," where it would be impossible to select more ingeniously the praise which damns. As a specimen of the success with which he could play the devil's advocate, nothing perhaps can Miscellaneous Essays 69 surpass a criticism of Voltaire reported by Chenedolle". Rivarol, it seems, fully CHAMFORT admitted the excellence of the great RIVAROL. man's lighter poems, but said, "His ' Henriade ' is only a meagre sketch, a skeleton of an epic, destitute of sinew, and flesh, and colour. His tragedies are philosophical exercises, brilliant but cold. In his style there is always something dead : while in Virgil and Racine all is alive. The ' Essai sur les Mceurs et 1'Esprit des Nations,' a paltry parody on Bossuet's immortal discourse, is only an out- line, elegant enough, but dull, dry, and mislead- ing. As for his pompously named Philosophical Dictionary, it is a book of little reach or weight in philosophy. To imagine that the thought of Voltaire cannot be surpassed is to prove one's own thought excessively limited. Nothing can be more imperfect than his manner of thinking. It is empty, superficial, tending only to mockery and dissolution, good to destroy and nothing more. There is neither depth in it, nor height, nor unity, nor future, nothing capable of serving as a foundation, or as a bond." This is unfair and extravagant, no doubt, but it is remarkable how it contains in essence almost everything which has since been said against its subject. In Rivarol's terser maxims the same acuteness, the same felicity of expression, and occasionally the same suspicion of unfairness and insincerity appear. Many of these are scattered 70 Miscellaneous Essays about his longer works, and among them one may often find sayings which under other guise have become well known. CHAMFORT " Le lecteur trouve toujours la peine RIVA ROL. que I'^crivain ne s'est pas donneY' is a better, if less laconic, expression of the truth whose English clothing is attributed to Sheridan. Rivarol has left, in one form or another, a considerable number of pens&s, in which his admiration for Montesquieu and Pascal, the two authors whom he prized most, is evident enough. Some of them suffer from a frequent sin in penste- writing ; they are too ambitious. Thus, the following : " Flambeau de la langage et de tous les arts, la metaphysique 6claire, indique, et ne fait pas," is little more than an ingenious conceit. But this cannot always be objected against his serious thoughts. The same metaphorical tinge is observable in another of the same class, but there is more in the metaphor : " Le temps est le rivage de 1'esprit ; tout passe devant lui et nous croyons que c'est lui qui passe." " The imagination is the mistress of the future " has a somewhat mystic sound, but " On n'a pas le droit d'une chose impossible " is excellent both in matter and form. Some of his political axioms are still more remarkable. " La politique est comme le Sphinx de la fable, elle devore tous ceux qui n'expliquent pas ses enigmes " is one of those sayings which have many claimants. But the following is original Miscellaneous Essays 71 enough, and, in the case of France, remarkably prophetic. " Les corps politiques re- CHAMFORT commencent sans cesse : ils ne vivent RIVAROL. l ue de remedes." When we come to the remark, " Le corps politique est comme un arbre ; a mesure qu'il s'e"leve il a autant besoin du ciel que de la terre," it is perhaps not uncharitable to suppose that this was written when Rivarol had been, at any rate for political purposes, converted. Here, again, is a saying worthy of note : " Les souverains ne doivent jamais oublier qu'un e'crivain peut recruter parmi des soldats, et qu'un general ne peut jamais recruter parmi les lecteurs " ; while the following, on the other side, shows a power of recognising a fact which the contemporaries of the author forgot to their cost : " Les peuples les plus civilises sont aussi voisins de la barbarie que le fer le plus poli Test de la rouille." Here, again, appears the cynic : " II faut plutdt pour ope"rer une revolution une certaine masse de betise de 1'une part qu'une certaine dose de lumiere de 1'autre." But Rivarol did not spare his friends. He said of the Allies, " Ils ont toujours e"te" en arriere d'une anne"e, d'une arme"e, et d'une ide"e," and of the nobles, " Ils prennent leurs souvenirs pour des droits." The Lettre a la Noblesse, written when Brunswick's victorious advent was confidently expected, is a really admirable appeal for moderation and justice in the moment of presumed victory. His religious maxims have the air of being 72 Miscellaneous Essays made to order, but fortunately there are few of them. In ethics he is more copious, and on both these subjects his chief CHAMFORT i f j AND utterances are to be found in a series RIV AROL. of letters to Necker, who was one of his chosen objects of attack. There is, however, in some of his moral sentences a fair measure of the spirit of La Rochefoucauld. " L'indulgence pour ceux qu'on connait est bien plus rare que la pitie* pour ceux qu'on ne connait pas " is not un- worthy of the great anatomist of the seventeenth century. The following, too, from the Treatise " de 1'Homme," a strange mixture of dulness and vivacity, is a fine image : " Les pavots de la vieil- lesse s'interposent entre la vie et la mort pour nous faire oublier 1'une et nous assoupir sur 1'autre." In another saying, verbally good as it is, Rivarol is surely unjust towards his century. " Que pouvait faire," he asks, " le bon sens dans un siecle malade de metaphysique ou Ton ne permettait plus le bonheur de se presenter sans preuves?" This is probably the only time that the eighteenth century has ever been charged with too great nicety in its admittance of things enjoyable. In dealing with literary subjects we might expect greater copiousness from a lover of letters and of language such as Rivarol, who, like Gautier and some other writers, had a genuine affection for words in themselves. His remarks on this head are valuable, but do not seem to have been pre- served in any great numbers. Of these sayings Miscellaneous Essays 73 on language I have already quoted one, the rather too rhetorical remark about the pro- CHAMFORT bity of the French tongue. Others RIVAROL. have to do with the question of the relation between language and thought, but there is one on grammar which deserves citation. " La grammaire tant 1'art de lever les difficult^ d'une langue, il ne faut pas que le levier soit plus lourd que le fardeau." There might be a disposition nowadays to dispute this definition of grammar, but hardly any one will dispute the shrewdness and the necessity of the accompanying caution. Elsewhere are to be found some comparisons between " 1'esprit " and " le talent," which show that Rivarol attached a rather unusual meaning to the many -sensed word esprit. He seems to mean by it the understanding in its widest sense, while he gives to "talent" the equivalent, or pretty nearly the equivalent of " faculty of expres- sion." Shorter maxims are often remarkable, such as " Le g6nie gorge ceux qu'il pille " ; " Plus d'un ecrivain est persuad qu'il a fait penser son lecteur quand il 1'a fait suer." " Celui qui pour etre nai'f emprunte une phrase d'Amyot, demanderait pour etre brave I'armure de Bayard." This last sally, despite its wit, shows that Rivarol was not superior to his contemporaries in his knowledge and understanding of the ancient literature of France. But perhaps the best measure of his faculty is to be found in some remarks on Shakespeare. It does not appear that these remarks were founded 74 Miscellaneous Essays on any real knowledge of the poet, and Rivarol was too much a man of his time to divine fully the phenomenon which he CHAMFORT was not able, or did not care to examine. RIVA ROL. But his view is exactly that which a man of great faculty would take of Shakespeare, from second-hand knowledge of what had been said of him by enthusiasts on the one side, and detract- ors on the other. There are few anecdotes recorded of Rivarol's telling. " Dieu de la conversation," and " Saint Georges de I'dpigramme," as his admirers called him, his speech does not seem to have been that of the raconteur. His faculty, in short, was almost entirely critical, and he knew it so well that he abstained from any attempt at constructive work, except on the smallest scale. He was a born journalist and reviewer, and perhaps under press- ure he might have made a historian. But it is difficult to imagine him either poet, dramatist, or writer of fiction. Chamfort, on the other hand, had novel-writing come into fashion in his days, might very well have anticipated Charles de Bernard, though his graver would have drawn deeper lines. To weigh either of these men in the balance, and assign them their exact place among writers, is not very easy. As we have seen, nothing that they did of any magnitude, with a partial excep- tion in the case of some work of Rivarol's, deserves high estimate. We are therefore forced to judge Miscellaneous Essays 75 them by their maxims, independent or imbedded in larger works, by their reported CHAMFORT conversation, and by doubtful and RIVAROL. treacherous collections of apophthegms and anecdotes. Now pens/e - writing, even at its best, is a kind of composition peculiarly hard to value. The paucity of words which it necessarily affects may be suggestive of much thought : on the other hand it may serve to con- ceal the want of any thought at all. The writer of pens/es always and legitimately claims that his readers shall read between the lines, and some- times it seems as if he relied a little too much on this license. There is also a vast amount of mere trick in this style of composition. Let any man of fair ability and some knack of writing spend a few days over La Rochefoucauld and Joubert, and he will find himself almost unconsciously framing sentences on their model, the goodness or badness of which he can hardly, for the time at least, estimate. In these two writers there is scarcely any alloy, but the same can hardly be said of any other composers of maxims, and it certainly cannot be said of the two who are before us. To write penstes with supreme felicity there is required, either such long experience and keen observation of men as La Rochefoucauld and Chesterfield possessed, or else such familiarity with books, and such a habit of meditation, as was the equipment of Pascal and Joubert Neither Chamfort nor Rivarol possessed either of these advantages in 76 Miscellaneous Essays the highest degree. They knew men, but only from the outside, and from certain limited, superficial, and accidental points CHAMFORT of view. They knew books too, but RIVARO L. their knowledge was circumscribed by the fashions of a time which, whatever its other merits may have been, was a time as little favour- able to literary criticism and valuation as any that the world has seen. Hence their axioms are rather personal than general, rather amusing than instructive, rather showing the acuteness and ingenuity of the authors than able to throw light on the subjects dealt with. As mere tellers of anecdotes and sayers of sharp things they have indeed had few rivals, and rich as French literature is in this class, the hundred pages or so of Cham- fort's Characters and Portraits contain almost as much wealth as all other writers can make up between them. In this point there is no compari- son between the two, and if Chamfort yields to Rivarol as a writer, as a tale-teller in miniature he has absolutely no rival. The singular difference between the promise and the performance, the fame and the deeds of both our authors, naturally invites another con- sideration. How far were circumstances respon- sible for what they did and for what they did not do ? As a rule I must confess that this inquiry seems to me an idle one, but in this case it has its appositeness. It is difficult for any one who studies them to miss an extraordinarily nineteenth Miscellaneous Essays 77 century flavour in both. It is said, indeed, that Rivarol had conceived in his Gascon CHAMFORT head a notion that Voltaire had done RIVAROL. hi m a deadly injury by getting him- self born half a century earlier, and filling the place which otherwise he, Rivarol, would have filled. To me, however, it seems that both Rivarol and his rival and enemy, Chamfort, were born not too late but too early. They had not the creative genius which enables a man to pro- duce good and original work at any time that he may occur. They were of the second or third order, the order which simply falls in more or less with the prevalent ideas and the fashionable forms of its time. Now the literary forms and ideas of the last quarter of the eighteenth century in France must be admitted by any competent and impartial judge to have been nearly hopeless. Tragedies and comedies where every scene, almost every situation and speech, was taken from a recognised catalogue ; ttoges which simply adapted this author and that to certain specified and accepted canons ; poems which were verse-exercises done to scale these were the chief of them. No one who had not genius to break away from these, or genius to transform them, could produce literary work of the first or even of the second class. Forty or fifty years later, both would have found open to them careers for which they were admirably adapted. Rivarol's powers of style and faculty of appreciation would have made him a rival on the 78 Miscellaneous Essays one side to Me'rime'e, on the other to Sainte-Beuve, to both of whom he bears some points of resemblance. Chamfort, with his CHAMFORT smaller literary faculty, possessed, be- RIVA ROL. sides his narrative ability, a germ of political enthusiasm which might have made him a statesman or at least a great orator, and a vein of discontented sentiment which might have pro- duced good work of the melancholy-moralist sort. It is obvious, too, that both were above all things suited for contributing to periodical literature, the special employment of political literary men in this century. When that literature is reviled, as it often is, for turning away spirits and talents capable of doing better work, it is only fair to reckon on the other side the good work it has produced from those who would otherwise have been more or less sterile. Chamfort and Rivarol are examples of such actual historical sterility neither felt the vocation to produce a magnum opus, and to neither was the opportunity open of producing numerous interesting opuscula. It would lead us too far from our subject to apply the reverse method and consider the authors, both in English and in French literature, of the last seventy years who would have been equally sterile, or yet more sterile, but for the impulse and em- ployment which these men lacked. In what they did, however, imperfect as it may be, there is, after all, a charm and an interest which is not to be overlooked. They were among Miscellaneous Essays 79 the last (for Joubert, it must be remembered, was their contemporary, born only a year CHAMFORT or two after Rivarol, though his post- RIVAROL. humous work appeared so much later) of a great and characteristic school of writers. Since them, with the single exception just noticed, no one has made his mark by maxim or apophthegm, and it may be doubted whether any one will do so until society and literature have again gone through some notable changes. Not destitute of serious import and value, they offer at the same time almost unequalled pasture to the merely idle mind that delights in play of words and wit. They have, too, what may be called the merit of making an end. They were the natural outcome of a brilliant, fastidious, and enlightened society, which at last became, in matter of literature, too enlightened to dare to make a mistake, and too fastidious to risk imper- fect work. Their personality is unusually vivid. Almost without the aid of biographers we can see Rivarol, with the curiously innocent smirk which his portrait wears, remarking that " Florian's works consist of nearly as many blank pages as printed ones. It is lucky, too," he adds, " for the blank pages are far the best." We can hear Chamfort, in a brilliant society, recounting the misfortunes of his colleague, who, in the words of the ballad, " came home at e'en, and found a man where no man should be." He tells how the culprit, in the true spirit of his father Adam, upbraids his partner 8o Miscellaneous Essays in the misdeed. " Quand je vous disais, madame, qu'il tait temps que je m'en aille !" " Oue ie m'en allasse. monsieur," cries CHAMFORT AND the scandalised academician, his feel- RI VA ROL. ings as a husband vanishing before his sensitiveness as a grammarian. Their works exactly give the two men. Rivarol, a man of indifferent breeding, of little delicacy, of few illusions, keenly alive to the main chance, and possessing a gladiatorial faculty of fighting on this side or on that, but of fine though intolerant literary taste, and of unexampled powers of malign epigram. Chamfort, thoroughly versed in the ways of society, though not born to it, prone to throw his thought into anecdote rather than reflec- tion, tired of the world and yet anxious to keep in with it and suit its tastes, scornful of his fellows and yet entertaining at heart almost fantastic views of the possibilities of human progress, and of the abstract rights of humanity. Ill MODERN ENGLISH PROSE [I8/6] 1 IN the days when I had to study the two great Histories of Greece which England MODERN ENGLISH produced in the last generation, a PROSE thought, which has most probably often presented itself to other students, fre- quently occurred to me. Much as the two works differ in plan, in views, and in manner of execu- tion, their difference never struck me so much as in the point of style. And the remarkable feature of this difference is, that it is not by any means the natural variation which we allow for, and indeed expect, in the productions of any two men of decided and distinct literary ability. It is not as the difference between Hume and Gibbon, or the difference between Clarendon and Taylor. In the styles of these great writers, and in those of many others, there is the utmost con- ceivable diversity ; but at the same time they are all styles. We can see (we see it, indeed, so clearly that we hardly take the trouble to think about it) 1 See Preface and Essay I. G 82 Miscellaneous Essays that each of them made a distinct effort to arrange his words into their clause, his clauses MODERN into their sentence, and his sentences ENGLISH into their paragraph according to certain PROSE forms, and that though these forms varied in the subtle and indescribable measure of the taste and idiosyncrasy of each writer, the effort was always present, and was only accident- ally if inseparably connected with the intention to express certain thoughts, to describe certain facts, or to present certain characters. But when we come to compare Thirlwall with Grote, we find not a variation of the kind just mentioned, but the full opposition of the presence of style on the one hand and the absence of it on the other. The late Bishop of St. David's will probably never be cited among the greatest masters of English prose style, but still we can see without difficulty that he has inherited its traditions. It would be difficult, on the other hand, to persuade a careful critic that Grote ever thought of such things as the cadence of a sentence or the composition of a paragraph. That he took so much trouble as might suffice to make his meaning clear and his language energetic is obvious ; that in no case did he look beyond this is, I think, certain. But the difference between these two great historians is very far from being a mere isolated fact It marks with extraordinary precision the date and nature of a change which has affected English literature to a degree and in a manner Miscellaneous Essays 83 worthy of the most serious consideration. What this change is. and whether it amounts MODERN ENGLISH to an actual decay or to a mere tem- PROSE porary neglect of style in English prose writing, are questions which are certainly of importance, and the answers to which should not, as it seems to me, lack interest. If, then we take up almost any book of the last century, we shall find that within varying limits the effort of which I have just spoken is distinctly present. The model upon which the writer frames his style may be and probably is faulty in itself, and still more probably is faultily copied ; there may be too much Addison in the mixture, or too much Johnson ; but still we shall see that an honest attempt at style, an honest endeavour at manner as apart from matter, has been made, however clumsy the attempt may be, and however far short of success it may fall. But if we take up any book of the last forty or fifty years, save a very few, the first thing that will strike us is the total absence of any attempt or endeavour of the kind. The matter will, as a rule, have been more or less carefully attended to, and will be presented to the reader with varying degrees of clearness and precision. But the manner, except in so far as certain peculiarities of manner may be conducive or prejudicial to clear- ness and precision of statement sometimes per- haps to apparent precision with any sacrifice of clearness will in most cases be found to have 84 Miscellaneous Essays been totally neglected, if a thing may be said to be neglected which does not appear to , . ,- MODERN have even presented itself within the cir- ENGLISH cumference of the field of view. In PROSE other words, and to adopt a convenient distinction, though there may be a difference of manner, there is usually no difference of style, for there is no style at all. Before going any further, it may be well to follow a commendable, if antiquated and scholastic practice, and to set down accurately what is here meant by style, and of what it consists. Style is the choice and arrangement of language with only a subordinate regard to the meaning to be con- veyed. Its parts are the choice of the actual words to be used, the further selection and juxta- position of these words, the structure of the clauses into which they are wrought, the arrange- ment of the clauses into sentences, and the composition of the sentences into paragraphs. Beyond the paragraph style can hardly be said to go, but within that limit it is supreme. The faults incident to these parts (if I may be allowed still to be scholastic) are perhaps also worthy of notice. Every one can see, though every one is by no means careful to put his knowledge into practice, that certain words are bad of themselves, and certain others to be avoided wherever possible. The next stage introduces difficulties of a higher order, though these also are more or less elemen- tary, such as combination of incongruous notions Miscellaneous Essays 85 and unintentional repetitions of the same word. But these are mere rudiments : it is in MODERN ' ENGLISH the breach or neglect of the rules that PROSE govern the structure of clauses, of sen- tences, and of paragraphs that the real secret of style consists, and to illustrate this breach or observation is less easy. The task will be perhaps made easier if we consider first, in the rough, how the prevalent English style of the present day differs from that of past times. De Quincey, when the century was not yet at the midmost of its way, had already noticed and deplored the deterioration of which we speak. In his Essay on Style more particularly, as well as in other places, he undertakes to discuss at some length the symptoms and causes of the disease. Now De Quincey, as any one who is at all ac- quainted with his works is aware, gave considerable attention to the subject of style, and professed to be no mean authority thereon. There were, in- deed, two peculiarities about him which prevented him from deserving the highest place as a referee on such matters. The first was his mistaken idea that extremely ornate prose the prose which his ally John Wilson called " numerous," and which others have called Asiatic was the highest form attainable, and that any writer who did not aim at this fell naturally into a lower class. The other was his singular crotchetiness, which made him frequently refuse to see any good in the style of writers to whom, for some reason or for no reason, 86 Miscellaneous Essays he had taken a dislike. It will probably be allowed, not merely by persons who hold ' } r MODERN traditional opinions, but by all inde- ENGLISH pendent students of literature, that we PROSE must look with considerable distrust on the dicta of a critic who finds fault with the styles of Plato and of Conyers Middleton. The Essay on Style, however (at least its first part, for the latter portions go off into endless digressions of no pertinence whatever), is much more carefully written and much more carefully reasoned than most of De Quincey's work. The purport of it is, that the decay of style is to be attributed partly to the influence of German literature, but chiefly to the prevalence of journalism. No one will deny that the influence of newspaper writing is in many ways bad, and that to it is due much of the decadence in style of which complaint is made. But either the prevalent manner of journalism has undergone a remarkable change during the past generation, or else the particular influence which De Quincey supposes it to have had was mistaken by him. I do not myself pre- tend to a very intimate acquaintance with the periodical literature of the second quarter of this century, and I am afraid that not even in the pursuit of knowledge could I be tempted to plunge into such a dreary and unbuoyant mare mortuum. With respect to the papers of to-day it is certainly not difficult to discern some peculiarities in their styles, or in what does duty for style in them. Miscellaneous Essays 87 But in most of all this we shall find little to bear out De Quincey's verdict Long and MODERN * ENGLISH involved sentences, unduly stuffed with PROSE f ac t anc j meaning, are what he complains of; and though there is no doubt that we should not have to go far in order to find such at the present day, yet it does not appear, to me at least, that the main fault of contem- porary English style is of this kind. On the con- trary, the sin of which I should chiefly complain is the sin of over-short sentences, of mere gasps instead of balanced periods. Such a paragraph as the following will illustrate what I mean : " That request was obeyed by the massacre of six out of the surviving princes of the imperial family. Two alone escaped. With such a mingling of light and darkness did Constantine close his career." I think that any one who considers this combina- tion of two mutilated clauses with an interjectional copula, and who perceives with what ease its hideous cacophony might have been softened into a complete and harmonious sentence, must feel certain that its present form is to some extent intentional. The writer might very well have written : " That request was obeyed by the massacre of six out of the eight surviving princes of the imperial family, and the career of Constantine was closed in a mixture of light and darkness." Why did he not ? Again, let us take a book of recent [1876] date, whose style has received considerable praise 88 Miscellaneous Essays both in England and abroad Mr. Green's Short History of the English People. The , . * MODERN character of Elizabeth is perhaps the ENGLISH most carefully written, certainly the PROSE most striking, passage in the book, and contains a most elaborate statement of that view of the great queen which many historical students now take. It enforces this view with the great- est energy, and sets it before us in every detail and difference of light and shade. But how in- artistic it is ! how thoroughly bad in conception, composition, and style ! In the first place it occupies some seven printed pages of unusual extent and closeness, each of which is at least equal to two of the ordinary octavo pages of an English classic author. Let any one, if he can, imagine one of the great masters who could both draw and compose Hume or Middleton, Clarendon or Swift giving us a character of fourteen pages. A portrait on the scale of Brobdingnag, with all features and all defects unnaturally emphasised and enlarged, could hardly be more disgusting. 1 It is not necessary to multiply examples, which, 1 I cannot refrain from noticing an instance from this writer of the absurdity into which the passion for picturesque epithet betrays many contemporary authors. At Newbury, we are told, "the London train bands flung Rupert's horsemen roughly off their front of pikes." Here roughly is in the Polonian sense "good." Visions of the sturdy and pious citizen discomfiting the debauched cavalier are aroused. But let us consider it with the sobriety proper to history and to art, and perhaps we shall ask Mr. Green to show us how to Miscellaneous Essays 89 if all the defects of contemporary style were to be noticed and illustrated, would occupy MODERN rj ENGLISH a space longer than the present chapter. PROSE j n a u k^ a ver y f ew writers we shall observe with certain variations the same defects inordinate copiousness of treatment com- bined with an utter inability, or at best an extreme unwillingness, to frame a sentence of due propor- tion and careful structure. It should certainly be possible to trace the origin and examine the nature of a phenomenon so striking and so universal. The secret of the manner will not long escape us if we notice or can disengage the intention with which, willingly or unwillingly, this manner has been adopted. Nor is this intention very hard to discover. It is, as it appears to me, a desire to present the subject, whatever it may be, to the reader in the most striking and arresting fashion. The attention of the reading public generally has, from causes to be presently noticed, become gradually concentrated almost wholly upon subject- matter. Among what may be called, intellectually speaking, the lower classes, this concentration shows itself not in the preference but in the exclusive study of novels, newspapers, and some- times of so-called books of information. A book must be, as they say, " about something," or it fails fling an enemy softly off a pike. Roaring like a sucking-dove would be nothing to this gymnastic effort. [It is now (1892) unfortunately impossible to ask him. But the instance is too characteristic to be omitted.] 9O Miscellaneous Essays altogether to arrest their attention. To such persons a page with (as it has been r & MODERN quaintly put) no "resting-places," no ENGLISH proper names and capital letters to fix PROSE the eye, is an intolerable weariness, and to them it is evident that style can be only a name. Somewhat above them come the (intellectually) middle classes. They are not absolutely confined to personal adventure, real or fictitious, or to interesting facts. They can probably enjoy the better class of magazine articles, superior biographies, travels, and the other books that everybody reads and nobody buys. This class will even read poetry if the poet's name be known, and would consider it a grave affront if it were hinted to them that their appreciation of style is but dull and faulty. A certain amount of labour is therefore required on work which is to please these readers : labour, however, which is generally bestowed in a wrong direction, on ornament and trick rather than on really artistic construction and finish. Lastly there is the highest class of all, consisting of those who really possess, or might possess, taste, culture, and in- tellect. Of these the great majority are now somewhat alienated from pure literature, and devoted rather to social matters, to science, or to the more fashionable and profitable arts of design. Their demand for style in literature is confined chiefly to poetry. They also are interested more by their favourite subjects treated anyhow, than Miscellaneous Essays 91 by subjects for which they care little treated well, so that even by them little encourage- MODERN J ENGLISH ment is given to the cultivation and PROSE little hindrance to the decay of prose 1876. v style. Intimately connected with the influences that arise from this attitude and temper of the general reader, are some other influences which spring from such prevalent forms and subjects of literature as present themselves to the general writer. The first of these forms, and unquestionably the most constant and pervading in its influence, is now, as it was in De Quincey's days, journalism. No one with the slightest knowledge of the subject will pretend that the influence of journalism upon writing is wholly bad. Whatever may have been the case formerly, a standard of excellence which is in some respects really high is usually aimed at, and not seldom reached, in the better class of newspapers. Some appropriateness in the use of words, a rigid avoidance of the more glaring grammatical errors, and a respectable degree of clearness in statement, are expected by the reader and usually observed by the writer. In these respects, therefore, there is no falling off to be complained of, but rather a marked improvement upon past times to be perceived. Yet, as regards the higher excellences of style, it is not possible that the influence of journalism should be good. For it must at any cost be rapid, and rapidity is absolutely incompatible with style. The journalist 92 Miscellaneous Essays has as a rule one of two things to do ; he has either to give a rapid account of certain MODERN facts, or to present a rapid discussion of ENGLISH certain arguments. In either case it PROSE r - t r u- I8 76. becomes a matter of necessity for him to adopt stereotyped phrases and forms of speech which, being ready cut and dried, may abbrevi- ate his labour and leave him as little as possible to invent in his limited time. Now there is nothing more fatal to the attainment of a good style than the habit of using such stereotyped phrases and forms. With the imperiousness natural to all art, style absolutely refuses to avail itself of, or to be found in company with, anything that is ready made. The rule must be a leaden one, the mould made for the occasion, and broken after it has passed. Every one who has ever seriously tried to write must be conscious how sorely he has been beset, and how often he has been overcome, by the almost insensible temptation to adopt the current phrases of the day. Bad, however, as the influence of journalism is in this respect, it is perhaps worse in its tendency to sacrifice everything to mere picturesqueness of style (for the word must be thus misused because there is no other). The journalist is bound to be picturesque by the law of his being. The old phrase, segnius irritant, is infinitely truer of pseudo-picturesque style as compared with litera- ture which holds to its proper means of appeal, than it is of literal spectacle as compared with Miscellaneous Essays 93 narrative. And the journalist is obliged at any cost irritare animos, and that in the least MODERN ENGLISH possible time. PROSE This tendency of journalism is as- sisted and intensified by that of another current form of literature, novel-writing. A very little thought will show that if the novel-writer attains to style it is almost a marvel. Of the four constituent elements of the novel, plot, character, description, and dialogue, none lend themselves in any great degree to the cultiva- tion of the higher forms of style, and some are distinctly opposed to it. The most cunning plot may be developed equally in the style of Plato and in the style of a penny dreadful. Character drawing, as the novelist understands or should understand it, is almost equally unconnected with style. On the other hand, description and dialogue, unless managed with consummate skill, distinctly tend to develop and strengthen the crying faults of contemporary style : its picturesqueness at any cost, its gasping and ungraceful periods, its neglect of purely literary effect Lastly, there must be noticed the enormous influence necessarily exerted by the growth of what is called scientific study (to use the term in its largest and widest sense), and by the dis- placement in its favour of many, if not most, of the departments of literature which were most favourable to the cultivation of style. In whatever quarter we look, we shall see that the primary effort 94 Miscellaneous Essays of the writer and the primary desire of the reader are both directed to what are called scientific or positive results, in other ENGLISH words, to matter instead of manner. PROSE In using the word science here, I have not the slightest intention of limiting its meaning, as it is too often limited, to physical science. I extend it to every subject which is capable of being treated in a scientific way. And I think we shall find that all subjects and all kinds of prose literature which are not capable of this sort of treatment, or do not readily lend themselves to it, are yearly occupying less and less the attention of both artists and audiences. Parliamentary oratory of the elaborate kind, which furnished a vigorous if a somewhat dangerous stimulant to the cultivation of style, is dead utterly. Pulpit eloquence, which at its worst maintained " stylistic " traditions, and at its best furnished some of the noblest examples of style, is dying, partly owing to the gradual divorce between the best men of the universities and the clerical pro- fession, partly to the absence of the serene security of a settled doctrine and position, but most of all to the demands upon the time of the clergy which modern notions enforce, and which make it utterly impossible for the greater number to devote a proper time to study. Philosophy, another great nurse of style, has now turned stepmother, and turns out her nurselings to wander in " thorniest queaches " of terminology and jargon, instead of Miscellaneous Essays 95 the ordered gardens wherein Plato and Berkeley walked. History even, the last or almost MODERN ' ENGLISH the last refuge of a decent and comely PROSE prose, is more busy about records and 1876. , manuscripts than about periods and paragraphs. Only criticism, the youngest and most hopeful birth of time as far as prose style is concerned, has not yet openly apostatized. It is true that even here signs of danger are not wanting, and that already we are told that criticism must be scientific, that its reading must not be desultory, and so forth. But on the whole there is little fear of relapse. The man who would cut himself a coat from another's cloth must bring to the task the care and labour of a skilled fashioner if he is to make good his claim of ownership. The man who has good work in perpetual contemplation is not likely to be satisfied with the complacent production of what is bad. There is, moreover, one influence, or rather one set of influences, hostile to the attainment of style in the present day which I have as yet left un- noticed, and the approach to which is guarded by ground somewhat dangerous to the tread. It will, I think, appear to any one who contemplates the subject fully and impartially that style is essen- tially an aristocratic thing ; and it is already a commonplace to say that the spirit of to-day, or perhaps the spirit of the times immediately behind us, is essentially democratic. It is democratic not in any mere political sense, but in the intolerance 96 Miscellaneous Essays with which it regards anything out of the reach of, or incomprehensible to, the ordinary 7 MODERN Philistine, working by the methods of ENGLISH Philistia. Intellectual and artistic ore- PROSE r -i. ^ l8 7 6 - eminence, except in so far as it ministers to the fancies of the vulgar (great or small), is perhaps especially the object of this intolerance. Every one has witnessed or shared the angry impatience with which the ordinary Briton resents anything esoteric, fastidious, or fine. And the charms of prose style especially merit these epithets, and are not to be read by any one who runs, or tasted by any one who swallows in haste. Gaudy ornament is intelligible, " graphic " drawing is intelligible ; but the finer cadences of the period, the more intricate strokes of composition, fall un- regarded on the common ear and pass unnoticed by the common eye. To be tickled, to be dazzled, to be harrowed, are impressions of which the un- cultured man is capable ; they require little intel- lectual effort, and scarcely any judgment or taste in the direction of that little. But the music of the spheres would form but a sorry attraction in a music-hall programme, and Christopher Sly is not willing to accept nectar in exchange for a pot of even the smallest ale. And if the angry resent- ment of not a few readers gives the votary of style but little chance of an audience, it must be ad- mitted that the lack of what I have called an aristocratic spirit gives the audience little chance of a performer. The conditions of modern life Miscellaneous Essays 97 are unfavourable to the attainment of the peculiar mood of somewhat arrogant indiffer- MODERN . . - ENGLISH ence which is the characteristic of the PROSE scholar. Every one knows Dean Gaisford's three reasons for the cultiva- tion of the Greek language ; and I for my part have no doubt that one of them most accurately describes an important feature of the Wesen des Gelehrten. It may not be necessary for him " to read the words of Christ in the original " ; it may not be of absolute importance that he should " have situations of affluence opened to him." But it certainly is essential that he should "look down on his fellow-creatures from a proper elevation " ; and this is what the tendency of modern social progress is making more and more difficult, at any rate in appearance. You cannot raise the level of the valleys without diminish- ing the relative height of the hills ; and you cannot scatter education and elementary cultiva- tion broadcast without diminishing the value of the privileges which appertain to superior culture. The old republic of letters was, like other old republics, a democracy only in name, but in reality a more or less close oligarchy, looking down on metics and slaves whose degradations and disabilities heightened its courage and gave a zest to its freedom. In letters, as in politics, we are doing our best to change all this ; and the possible result may be, that every one will soon be able to write a newspaper H 98 Miscellaneous Essays article, and that no one will aspire to anything MODERN The general characteristics of style ENGLISH which the influence, combined or partial, PROSE of these forces has produced have been already indicated, but may perhaps now be summed up. Diffuseness ; sacrifice of the graces of literary proportion to real or apparent clear- ness of statement ; indulgence in cut-and-dried phrases ; undue aiming at pictorial effect ; gaudi- ness of unnatural ornament ; preference of gross and glaring effects en bloc to careful composition. Certain authors who are either free from these defects, or have vigour enough to excuse or trans- form them, must now be noticed. For reasons obvious, though various, it is not my intention to discuss in any way at the present time the style of the author of Sartor Resartus. Mr. Carlyle being thus removed, there can be little question who must take the foremost place in a discussion as to the merits and demerits of modern English prose style. And yet, it is at least doubtful whether in strictness we can assign 1 I have for the present thought it better to leave out of con- sideration the probable effect of the diminished study of classics in modern school and university education. That this effect is de- cidedly adverse to the cultivation of style is sufficiently obvious, but the subject is too complicated to be incidentally treated, and perhaps the diminution itself is too recent for its effects to have been as yet much felt. [They have made themselves much more sensible in the sixteen years which have passed since this article was written.] Miscellaneous Essays 99 to Mr. Ruskin a position in the very highest rank of writers if we are to adopt style as a MODERN 1 . ENGLISH criterion. The objection to his manner PROSE of writing is an obvious one, and one which he might very likely take as a compliment ; it is too spontaneous in the first place, and too entirely subordinate to the subject in the second. I hope that it may be very clearly understood that I can see passages in his works which, for splendour of imaginative effect, for appro- priateness of diction, for novelty and grandeur of conception, stand beyond all chance of successful rivalry, almost beyond all hope of decent parallel among the writings of ancient and modern masters. But in most cases this marvellous effect will, when carefully examined, be found to depend on some- thing wholly or partially extrinsic to the style. Mr. Ruskin writes beautifully because he thinks beautifully, because his thoughts spring, like Pallas, ready armed, and the fashion of the armour costs him nothing. Everybody has heard of the unlucky critic whose comment on Scott's fertility was that " the invention was not to be counted, for that came to him of its own accord." So it is with Mr. Ruskin. His beauties of style " come to him of their own accord," and then he writes as the very gods might dream of writing. But in the moments when he is off the tripod, or is upon some casual and un -Delphic tripod of his own construction or selection, how is his style altered ! The strange touches of unforeseen ioo Miscellaneous Essays colour become splashed and gaudy, the sonorous roll of the prophetic sentence-paragraphs drags and wriggles like a wounded ENGLISH snake, the cunning interweaving of PROSE scriptural or poetic phrase is patched and seamy. A Balaam on the Lord's side, he cannot curse or bless but as it is revealed to him, whereas the possessor of a great style can use it at will. He can shine on the just and on the unjust ; can clothe his argument for tyranny or for liberty, for virtue or for vice, with the same splendour of diction, and the same unperturbed perfection of manner ; can convince us, carry us with him, or leave us unconvinced but admiring, with the same unquestioned supremacy and the same unruffled calm. Swift can write a jeu d'esprit and a libel on the human race, a political pamphlet and a personal lampoon, with the same felicity and the same vigour. Berkeley can pre- sent tar- water and the Trinity, the theory of vision and the follies of contemporary free-thinking, with the same perfect lucidity and the same colourless fairness. But with Mr. Ruskin all depends on the subject, and the manner in which the subject is to be treated. He cannot even blame as he can praise ; and there must be many who are ready to accept everything he can say of Tintoret or of Turner, and who feel no call to object to any of his strictures on Canaletto or on Claude, who yet perceive painfully the difference of style in the panegyrist and the detractor, and who Miscellaneous Essays 101 would demand the stricter if less obvious justice, and the more artistic if apparently per- MODERN . . r i i ENGLISH verted sensitiveness, of the thorough PROSE master of style. T 5? *l(\ But if we have to quarrel with Mr. Ruskin because he has not sufficient command of the unquestioned beauties of his style, because he is not, in Carew's words A king who rules as he thinks fit The universal monarchy of wit, but is rather a slave to his own thoughts and fancies, a very opposite fault must be found with the next writer who falls to be mentioned. " We do not," it was once said of him, " we do not get angry so much with what Mr. Matthew Arnold says as with his insufferable manner of saying it." In other words, there is no fear of omitting to notice a deliberate command and peculiarity of manner in Mr. Arnold, whether that manner be considered " insufferable " or no. For myself I must confess, that I could very frequently find it in my heart to wish that Mr. Arnold had chosen any other style than that which appeared to afford him such extreme delight. Irony is an admirable thing, but it must be grave and not grimacing. Innocence is an admirable thing, but it should not be affected. To have a manner of one's own is an admirable thing, but to have a mannerism of one's own is perhaps not quite so admirable. It is curious that his unfor- tunately successful pursuit of this latter possession IO2 Miscellaneous Essays should have led Mr. Arnold to adopt a style which has more than any other the fault he MODERN justly censured many years ago as the ENGLISH special vice of modern art the fault PROSE of the fantastic. No doubt the great masters of style have each a cachet which is easily decipherable by a competent student ; no doubt, in spite of Lord Macaulay, Arbuthnot is to be distinguished from Swift, and the cunningest imitators of Voltaire from Voltaire himself. But to simulate this distinction by the deliberate adop- tion of mere tricks and manners is what no true master of style ever yet attempted, because for no true master of style was it ever yet necessary. Mr. Ruskin, to use the old Platonic simile, has not his horses sufficiently well in hand ; at times the heavenly steed, with a strong and sudden flight, will lift the car amid the empyrean, at times the earth-born yoke-fellow will drag it down, with scarcely the assistance and scarcely the impedi- ment of the charioteer. But even this is better than the driving of one who has broken his horses, indeed, but has broken them to little but mincing graces. It is not possible to speak with equal definite- ness of the style of a third master of English prose, who ranks in point of age and of reputation with Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Arnold. It would cer- tainly be an over-hasty or an ill-qualified critic who should assert that Mr. Froude's style is always faultless ; but, on the other hand, it may Miscellaneous Essays 103 be asserted, without any fear whatever of contra- diction carrying weight, that at its best MODERN m m ENGLISH it is surpassed by no style of the PROSE present day, and by few of any other, and that at its worst its faults are not of a venial character, for no fault in art is venial, but at any rate of a kind which may meet with more ready excuse than those of the writers previously noticed. These faults are per- haps two only undue diffuseness and undue aiming at the picturesque. We have seen that these are the two most glaring faults of the age, and by his indulgence in them, and the splendid effects which he has produced by that indulgence, Mr. Froude has undoubtedly earned his place, if not as a Sacularischer Mensch, at any rate as a representative man. No one, perhaps, who has read can fail to count among the triumphs of English prose the descriptions of the Pilgrimage of Grace in the History > of Sir Richard Grenvil's last fight in the Short Studies, of the wreckers at Ballyhige in the English in Ireland. There are also many shorter passages which exhibit almost every excellence that the most exacting critic could demand. But it is not to be denied that Mr. Froude has very frequently bowed the knee before the altar of Baal. It is unlawful to occupy twelve mighty volumes with the history of one nation during little more than half a century ; it is unlawful for the sound critical reason of St. John, that if such a practice obtained universally, IO4 Miscellaneous Essays the world could not contain the books that should be written ; and also for the reason . MODERN that in such writing it is almost im- ENGLISH possible to observe the reticence and PROSE , . , ., 1876. compression which are among the lamps of style. It is unlawful to imagine and set down, except very sparingly, the colour of which the trees probably were at the time when kings and queens made their entrance into such and such a city, the buildings which they may or may not have looked upon, the thoughts which may or may not have occurred to them. Such sacrificings at the shrine of effect, such trespass- ings on the domains and conveying of the methods of other arts and alien muses, are not to be commended or condoned. But one must, at the same time, allow with the utmost thankfulness that there are whole paragraphs, if not whole pages, of Mr. Froude's, which, for practised skill of composition and for legitimate beauty of effect, may take their place among the proudest efforts of English art. It will probably be agreed that the three writers whom I have noticed stand at the head of contemporary English prose authors in point of age and authority ; but there are other and younger authors who must necessarily be noticed in any account of the subject which aims at com- pleteness. Mr. Swinburne's progress as a prose writer can hardly have failed to be a subject of interest, almost equally with his career as a poet, Miscellaneous Essays 105 to every lover of our tongue. His earliest appear- ance, the Essay on Byron, is even now MODERN * . . ENGLISH m many respects characteristic of his PROSE work ; but it does not contain and 1876. .. . r . it is a matter of sincere congratula- tion for all lovers of English prose that it does not contain any passage at all equal to the magnificent descant on Marlowe which closes its ten years younger brother, the Essay on Chapman. In the work between and since these two limits, the merits and defects of Mr. Swinburne as a prose writer may be read by whoso wills. At times it has seemed as if the weeds would grow up with the good seed and choke it. Mr. Swinburne has fallen into the error, not unnatural for a poet, of forgetting that the figures and the language allow- able in poetry are not also allowable in prose. The dangerous luxury of alliteration has attracted him only too often, and the still more dangerous license of the figure called chiasmus has been to him even as a siren, from whose clutches he has been hardly saved. But the noticeable thing is that the excellences of his prose speech have grown ever stronger and its weaknesses weaker since he began. In the Essay on Blake, admirable as was much thereof, a wilful waste of language not un- frequently verging on a woful want of sense was too frequently apparent. In the Notes on his Poems, and in Under the Microscope, just as was most of the counter-criticism, it was impossible not to notice a tendency to verbiage and a proneness, io6 Miscellaneous Essays I will not say to prefer sound to sense, but unnecessarily to reinforce sense with * . MODERN sound. But at the same time, in the ENGLISH Essays and Studies, and the Essay on PROSE Chapman, no competent critic could fail to notice, notwithstanding occasional outbreaks, the growing reticence and severity of form, as well as the increasing weight and dignity of meaning. Mr. Swinburne, as a prose writer, is in need of nothing but the pruning-hook. Most of his fellows are in want chiefly of something which might be worth pruning. It is obviously impossible in the present essay to notice minutely all even of the more prominent names in contemporary prose. Some there are among the older of our writers who yet retain the traditions of the theological school of writing, to which style owes so much. A good deal might be said of Cardinal Manning's earlier style (for his progress in this hierarchy hardly corresponded with his promotion in the other), as well as of Dr. Newman's admirable clearness and form, joined as it is, perhaps unavoidably, to a certain hardness of temper. Mr. Disraeli's peculiarities in style would almost demand an essay to themselves. They have never perhaps had altogether fair-play ; for novel-writing and politics are scarcely friends to style. But Mr. Disraeli had the root of the matter in him, and never was guilty of the de- gradation of the sentence, which is the crying sin of modern prose ; while his unequalled felicity in Miscellaneous Essays 107 the selection of single epithets gave him a supply of legitimate ornament which few writers MODERN ENGLISH have ever had at command. Tastes, I PROSE suppose, will always differ as to the question whether his ornamentation was not sometimes illegitimate. The parrot-cry of upholstery is easily raised. But I think we have at last come to see that rococo work is good and beautiful in its way, and he must be an ungrateful critic who objects to the somewhat lavish emeralds and rubies of the Arabian Nights. Of younger writers, there are not many whose merits it would be proper to specify in this place ; while the pre- vailing defects of current style have been already fully noticed. But there is one book of recent appearance which sets the possibilities of modern English prose in the most favourable light, and gives the liveliest hope as to what may await us if writers, duly heeding the temptations to which they are exposed, and duly availing themselves of the opportunities for study and imitation which are at their disposal, should set themselves seri- ously to work to develop pro virili the prose resources of the English tongue. Of the merely picturesque beauty of Mr. Pater's Studies in the History of the Renaissance, there can be no neces- sity for me to say anything here. In the first place it cannot escape the notice of any one who reads the book, and in the second, if there be any truth in what has been already said, the present age by no means needs to be urged to cultivate io8 Miscellaneous Essays or to appreciate this particular excellence. The important point for us is the purely J MODERN formal or regular merit of this style, ENGLISH and this is to be viewed with other PROSE eyes and tested by other methods than those which are generally brought to bear by critics of the present day. The main point which I shall notice is the subordinate and yet inde- pendent beauty of the sentences when taken separately from the paragraph. This is a matter of the very greatest importance. In too much of our present prose the individual sentence is un- ceremoniously robbed of all proper form and comeliness. If it adds its straw to the heap, its duty is supposed to be done. Mr. Pater has not fallen in this error, nor has he followed the multi- tude to do evil in the means which he has adopted for the production of the singular " sweet attractive kind of grace" which distinguishes these Studies. A bungler would have depended, after the fashion of the day, upon strongly coloured epithets, upon complicated and quasi-poetic cadences of phrase, at least upon an obtrusively voluptuous softness of thought and a cumbrous protraction of sentence. Not so Mr. Pater. There is not to be discovered in his work the least sacrifice of the phrase to the word, of the clause to the phrase, of the sentence to the clause, of the paragraph to the sentence. Each holds its own proper place and dignity while contributing duly to the dignity and place of its superior in the hierarchy. Often the cadence of Miscellaneous Essays 109 the sentence, considered separately, will seem to be and will in truth be quite different MODERN ^ ENGLISH from that of the paragraph, because PROSE it s separate completeness demands this difference. Yet the total effect, so far from being marred, is enhanced. There is no surer mark of the highest style than this separate and yet subordinate finish. In the words of Mr. Ruskin, it is "so modulated that every square inch is a perfect composition." It is this perfection of modulation to which we must look for the excellence that we require and do not meet with in most of the work of the present day, and it is exactly this modulation with which all the faults that I have had to comment upon in the preceding pages are inconsistent. To an artist who should set before him such a model as either of the passages which I have quoted, lapses into such faults would be impossible. He will not succumb to the easy diffuseness which may obliterate the just proportion and equilibrium of his periods. He will not avail himself of the ready assistance of stereotyped phraseology to spare himself the trouble of casting new moulds and devising new patterns. He will not imagine that he is a scene painter instead of a prose writer, a decorator instead of an architect, a caterer for the desires of the many instead of a priest to the worship of the few. He will not indulge in a style which requires the maximum of ornament in order to disguise and render palatable the minimum no Miscellaneous Essays of art and of thought. He will not consider it his duty to provide, at the least possible cost of intellectual effort on ENGLISH the part of the reader, something which PROSE may delude him into the idea that he is exercising his judgment and his taste. And, above all, he will be careful that his sentences have an independent completeness and harmony, no matter what purpose they may be designed to fulfil. For the sentence is the unit of style ; and by the cadence and music, as well as by the pur- port and bearing, of his sentences, the master of style must stand or fall. For years, almost for centuries, French prose has been held up as a model to English prose writers, and for the most part justly. Only of late has the example come to have something of the Helot about it. The influence of Victor Hugo an influence almost omnipotent among the younger genera- tion of French literary men has been exercised in prose with a result almost as entirely bad as its effect in verse has been good. The rules of verse had stiffened and cramped French poetry unnaturally, and violent exercise was the very thing required to recover suppleness and strength ; but French prose required no such surgery, and it has consequently lost its ordered beauty without acquiring compensatory charms. The proportions of the sentence have been wilfully disregarded, and the result is that French prose is probably now at a lower point Miscellaneous Essays 1 1 1 of average merit than at any time for two centuries. MODERN ENGLISH That an art should be fully recog- PROSE nised as an art, with strict rules and requirements, is necessary to attainment of excellence in it ; and in England this recog- nition, which poetry has long enjoyed, has hardly yet been granted to prose. No such verses as we find by scores in such books as Marston's Satires would now suggest themselves as possible or tolerable to any writer of Marston's powers ; but in prose many a sentence quite as intoler- able as any of these verses is constantly written by persons of presumably sound education and competent wits. The necessities of the prose writer are, an ear in the first place : this is indis- pensable and perhaps not too common. In the second place, due study of the best authors, as well to know what to avoid as what to imitate. Lastly, care, which perhaps is not too much to demand of any artist, so soon as he has recognised and has secured recognition of the fact that he is an artist. Care is indeed the one thrice-to-be- repeated and indispensable property of the prose writer. It is pre-eminently necessary to him for the very reason that it is so easy to dispense with it, and to write prose without knowing what one does. Verse, at least verse which is to stand, as Johnson says, " the test of the finger if not of the ear," cannot be written without conscious effort and observation. But something which may be H2 Miscellaneous Essays mistaken for prose can unfortunately be produced without either taste, or knowledge, or . . MODERN care. With these three requisites there ENGLISH should be no limit to the beauty and PROSE T R*lf\ to the variety of the -results obtained. The fitness of English for prose composition will hardly be questioned, though it may be contended with justice that perhaps in no other language has the average merit of its prose been so far below the excellence of its most perfect specimens. But the resources which in the very beginning of the practice of original composition in fully organised English could produce the splendid and thoughtful, if quaint and cumbrous, embroideries of Euphues and the linked sweetness of the Arcadia, which could give utterance to the symphonies of Browne and Milton, which could furnish and suffice for the matchless simplicity of Bunyan, the splendid strength of Swift, the transparent clearness of Middleton and Berkeley, the stately architecture of Gibbon, are assuredly equal to the demands of any genius that may arise to employ them. It is therefore the plain duty of every critic to assist at least in impressing upon the mass of readers that they do not receive what they ought to receive from the mass of writers, and in suggest- ing a multiplication and tightening of the require- ments which a prose writer must fulfil. There are some difficulties in the way of such impression and suggestion in the matter of style. It is not easy for the critic to escape being bidden, in the words Miscellaneous Essays 113 of Nicholas Breton, " not to talk too much of it, having so little of it," or to avoid the MODERN ... .. . ENGLISH obvious jest of Diderot on Beccana, that PROSE h e had written an "ouvrage sur le style ou il n'y a point de style." But I know no Utopia which ought to be more speedily rendered topic, than that in which at least the same censure which is now incurred by a halting verse, a discordant rhyme, or a clumsy stanza, should be accorded to a faultily-arranged clause, to a sentence of inharmonious cadence, to a paragraph of irregu- lar and ungraceful architecture. 1 1 [See for further remarks and cautions on this subject, Essays VII, X, and XII. 1892.] IV ERNEST RENAN EVERY one who has read MerimeVs Lettres a Une InconnuemMst remember some not wholly complimentary passages respecting M. Renan. There is no need to quote the passages here ; an allusion to them is enough in order to help us to formulate, by a process of contrast, the character of M. Renan as a critic and writer. MeYime'e was himself, in a literary sense if not personally, the most exquisitely accom- plished cynic that has ever existed. The way in which, throughout his not very bulky work, whole schools and regions of thought and art are represented by some little masterpiece, and then apparently dismissed as of no further interest to the author, is unique in literature. The way in which there appears in the beauty of all these representations something sinister, and as it were inhuman, is equally unique. Both in pure fantasy-pieces like the VJnus tfllle, and in pictures of modern society like La Double Mfyrtse, and in such astonishing reproductions of the harsher Miscellaneous Essays 115 sides of the past as La Jacquerie, the same literary perfection and the same cynical KENAN*" f rce are apparent To every one who has, in however faint a measure, the tendency to look at life from the sarcastic side, Me'rime'e must always be the object of an im- mense admiration. But to such a writer him- self nothing could be more unwelcome than anything even approaching what is irreverently called in English " gush," than the tendency not merely to think nobly and hopefully of life, and to dwell upon its more amiable aspects, but to dress it up in bright colours and agreeable forms, and to express these in somewhat effusive and voluble language, full of unction and of appeals to the heart, the sentiments, and the religious principle. I by no means give this as a description of M. Renan, but it is probably a sufficiently true description of Merimee's M. Renan ; and it was upon this subjective being, no doubt, that the author of Colomba vented his spleen. It ought to be remembered that the attacked person took his revenge in a most gentlemanlike correction. In the next volume of the Origines he alluded to Petronius as " Un Me'rime'e sceptique au ton froid et exquis, qui nous a laisse" un roman d'une verve, d'une finesse accomplie en meme temps que d'une corruption raffine'e." The comparison is by no means ungenerous, and withal singularly true. Now it is hardly a paradox to say that in order to detect the character of any man or writer one 1 1 6 Miscellaneous Essays cannot do better than take the reports of his enemies. By stripping these of ma- lignity and exaggeration, by substituting ^^ the quality for the defect and the mean for the excess, such unfavourable accounts, unless they come from wholly untrustworthy or incompetent sources, may be made to yield a much larger amount of truth than the amiable but often vague and random language of panegyrists and partisans. Least of all was such a faculty as Me'rime'e's likely to go altogether astray, though it might very easily overpass the goal. The truth is that the literary and philo- sophical characteristics of M. Renan (for with matters theological we have nothing to do here) are very strongly marked, and for our time by no means common. In his attitude towards books and men he stands apart from any other school or individual of his own country and of the Continent, though perhaps it would not be difficult to name an English critic who, with many points of difference, had some points of agreement with him. To those who simply consider him in the light of an assailant or defender of certain theological or ecclesiastical ideas, these peculiarities are necessarily invisible. Let us see if by keeping theology apart they can be made to emerge into view. It is always interesting and instructive to compare the earliest and the latest work of men of literary distinction. The earliest work of Miscellaneous Essays 117 M. Kenan's known to me putting aside mere college exercises is the article on " L>Etat des Esprits en 1849"; the latest, 1 omitting Lliglise Chrttienne as a simple continuation of a work planned and moulded twenty years ago, is Caliban. Between the enthusiasm of five-and-twenty and the quiet scepticism of fifty-five there is, of course, a good deal of difference ; but the main features of the author's mind, and even to some extent of his literary style, are identical enough. There is the same disbelief in religious and political nostrums, the same preference for a somewhat vague elevation and expansion of heart, the same contempt of utilitarianism on the one side, and of the merely aesthetic attitude towards art and literature on the other. Between the youthful appeal in favour of " la pauvre humanite" assise, morne et silencieuse, sur le bord du chemin," and the ingenious parody of Shakespeare which scandalised grave and precise democrats long after- wards, their author has something more than a fair amount of work done to show. I need take no account of works of pure erudition, though the treatise De tOrigine du Langage is not un- important from the general point of view, because it shows, in a comparatively neutral field, the same reluctance to adopt materialist explanations and to admit the all-powerful action of circumstances as 1 Latest in 1880, the original date of this essay. The subsequent work will be found summarised infra. 1 1 8 Miscellaneous Essays distinguished from innate powers, which character- ises M. Renan elsewhere. The cata- logue of his more properly literary work may be limited to the monograph on Averroes, to the four or five volumes of Essays collected and reprinted under different titles, and to the six volumes of the Origins of Christianity. The book on Averroes, except for its connection with the author's Semitic studies, and perhaps also with the general history of free thought and revolt against religious dogma, does not seem to be particularly germane to his tastes. It is, however, an excellent book in its way, and the labour of its preparation must, beyond a doubt, have had an excellent disciplinary effect on M. Kenan's style and manner. Inclined, as he most undoubtedly is, to be exuberant rather than the reverse, if he had given himself very early to easy literature, which requires much writing, little read- ing, and no research properly so called, the effect could hardly have failed to be unfavourable. Combining, as the book does, a bibliographic study of considerable complexity, an analysis of an extensive work, and a rapid survey of a long period of subsequent history, the amount of labour which it represents is very far out of proportion to its bulk. There are passages here and there, moreover, which distinctly enough foreshadow the manner and method of the author of the Vie de J/sus, such as the section on the curious myth of the Tres Impostures, and that describing Petrarch's Miscellaneous Essays 119 tribulations with the Venetian Averroists. The scattered essays are naturally much more fertile of light on the character KK.N A A of their author than a work where the plan and almost the contents were traced out for him by his subject. His various studies in religious history may be taken partly as sketches for the finished work which was to come, but still more as protreptic discourses put forward to dispose the public to receive that work with understanding and favour, or else critical ap- preciations of different forms of the religious spirit. The least happy of these is probably that on Channing, in which the author, true to a bad habit of his countrymen, seems to start with a preconceived archetypal Englishman or American (for it is much the same to him) and to reason downwards. More interesting still are the papers united under the heading Questions Contemporaines, which for the most part exhibit in various forms that ardent desire for an improvement in the higher education of his country, which is one of M. Kenan's most honourable characteristics, and which, before his old age, he had already lived to see in several ways fulfilled. Nor can the political sketches entitled Rtforme Intellectuelle et Morale be omitted if a full estimate is to be formed of their author. The famous correspondence with the author of the Leben Jesu, while perhaps it exposes only too clearly the sorrowful chances that await the too faithful believer in sweet 1 20 Miscellaneous Essays reasonableness now as in other days, is at least as valuable as a moral tell-tale as it is honourable to the writer. Two long studies, one having the general title of the book, the other headed De la Monarchic Constitutionnelle en France, exhibit not only such practical political ideas as the author has formed, but also a very favourite notion of his, that great moral and intellectual achievements unfit a nation for playing a prominent political part, and that in this order of thought, as in another, it must lose its life to save it. Finally, M. Kenan's more purely personal and literary studies show less an ability on his part to put himself in the place of the subjects criticised, than an ability to improve them in the ecclesiastical sense, that is to say, to use their history and peculiarities for the purpose of illustrating his own ethical, religious, and political ideas. Interesting, however, as are these lesser pieces to the student, and to all who care for idiosyncrasy of work as opposed to mere volume and importance of subject, they can hardly be regarded even now, and will almost certainly not be regarded hereafter, as anything more than a vestibule and precinct to the book which has occupied the prime of the author's life, and upon which, beyond all doubt, he would himself prefer to base his chances of fame. It may be questioned whether any writer ever manifested a more distinct and uniform personality of thought and style than that which M. Renan Miscellaneous Essays 121 maintained through the six volumes of his greatest work, the publication of which KENAN* extended over twenty years. The first impression that the Vie de Jtsus and its successors produce on critical readers, whether they be orthodox or unorthodox, is in all proba- bility identical, nor can it be said that this im- pression is ever wholly removed. Nothing can, to all appearance, be more hopelessly uncritical and arbitrary than the proceeding. To take a con- nected narrative and reject such details as happen not to square with preconceived ideas, while admitting the others ; to reject a prophecy as obviously false, and take it up next minute as a trustworthy history of the events a posteriori ; to see in a reported miracle, not an imposture, but an innocent distortion of some ordinary fact all this seems at first sight to partake decidedly more of the spirit of Dichtung than of Wahrheit. The historian has also, in common with many other historians of the latter half of the nineteenth century, a most remarkable habit of building up whole characters and histories out of slight personal traits. St. James the Less, if he had foreseen that the callosities on his knees and the gold plate on his forehead would bring him into such trouble, would infallibly have discarded the latter and adopted a cushion to obviate the former. The unfortunate Claudius Lysias may fairly complain of the accusation of " stupidity," founded upon one or two casual allusions which certainly do not bear 122 Miscellaneous Essays that sense to all readers ; while, on the other hand, Barnabas has to thank M. Renan for favours received in return for a very slight historical consideration. But before long the rough places become tolerably smooth to an intelligent walker. The object of the book, as a defence of principles and modes of character which seem to the writer of the first importance to the world, soon makes itself ap- parent. M. Renan's two wings, as the mediaeval allegorists would say, are the abstractions which are called, in the technical terms of theology and morals, spirituality and unction. In his use of both of these there are points which are decidedly less akin to the English temperament, and to such half- English temperaments as Mrime's, than to the softer and more feminine temperwhich is so largely represented in the average Frenchman. The words of the hymn, " Gentle Jesus, meek and mild," express the attraction which the critic has found on the moral side in the founder of the Christian religion ; the words " the kingdom of God " represent his attraction on the purely intellectual side. He has inherited from that religion, or has made up for himself (whichever phrase may be preferred), an ideal of unworldliness as distinguished from the self- seeking and materialism of modern life, of mild and impartial affection as opposed to the stormy passions or cold indifference of the individual. With this a priori conception he has started, Miscellaneous Essays 123 and it is this that shapes his handling of his work. In the earliest volume the sentimental RENAfT s ^ e ^ *ke matter h as most play, and it is still most remarkable therein. Without being very cynical, it is permissible to feel the abundance of such adjectives as " delicieux," " charmant," " ravissant," "enivrant," " exquis," as rather cloying. With Les Apotres things improve from this point of view. The sentimental side of the matter is perforce kept in the background, and the " kingdom of God," the battle of spiritualism against materialism of all sorts, comes more to the front. It is in these later volumes, moreover, that the remarkable art of the writer becomes chiefly manifest. To weave a series of fragmentary notices, many of which his critical (or uncritical) method compels him to reject, into a connected narrative, to keep up the contrasted importance of the different parts, and in doing this to keep the double end, the inculcation of spirituality and of moral beauty, in view, without wearying the reader, is a task of sufficient difficulty in itself. But when it is re- membered that to the immense majority of readers the story is already familiar, that they have from earliest youth been taught to expect and welcome it in one form only, and that they are (supposing other prepossessions absent) as much disposed as children are to resent alteration and addition in a favourite tale, the difficulty becomes immensely complicated. Lastly, when we add to all this 124 Miscellaneous Essays that the narrative has perforce to take the shape of something like a perpetual comment- ary, usually the most arid of literary forms, the hardness of the task is raised to very nearly the highest point, and it is clear that only literary faculty of a very remarkable kind could enable the author to discharge it. The treatment of the subject is of course to a great extent conditioned by its nature, yet it is at the same time shaped by the idiosyncrasy of the practitioner. Of the fortunes of the Christian Church, from the date of the Crucifixion to the beginning of the third century, neither document nor tradition, orthodox or unorthodox, gives any connected survey. On the other hand, an immense body of literature of all kinds, sacred and profane, Jewish, Christian, and Pagan, religious, historical, and philosophical, survives containing the materials, the pieces of such a history. A critic of the sober school, whether belonging to the merely dryasdust order or to the product-of-the-circumstances sect, would assuredly find too many gaps to be filled, more or less conjecturally, to please him. Bio- graphers and historians of this class like a subject upon which the full light of day has been thrown, where there is abundant material, and where the task is little more than one of skilful combination and intelligent interpreting. On the other hand, the merely superficial theoriser would find himself hampered by the multitude of scrappy details, jutting up like the tops of submarine rocks, useless Miscellaneous Essays 125 and almost impossible for purposes of landing and agriculture, but sufficient to render care- RENArT ^ ess navigation exceedingly dangerous. Many an ingenious theory has been up- set before now by a troublesome and sterile fact of this kind. But M. Renan happens to combine in remarkably full measure the talent for conjecture and the talent for patient research. The way in which he has followed up in courageous dives the submarine world which connects, or might very conceivably connect, the emerging points of fact or tradition, is a triumph of the combined method. The book, like most other histories where the imagination is strongly represented, and perhaps with greater justice than in any other case, has been called a romance. It would be fairer to call it a conjectural restoration of history. All con- jectural restorations incline to the romantic. A detail worthy of notice in estimating M. Renan's choice and use of his materials, is his extreme predilection for the apocryphal sacred books, both Jewish and Christian, and especially for the apocryphal apocalypses. Since the altera- tion of the Lectionary and the disuse of the custom of binding up the Apocrypha with the Old and New Testaments, it is probable that such of these singular documents as used to be recognised by the Church of England are unknown even to some persons professedly observant of religious matters in this country. Some of them again, such as the Book of Enoch and the Shepherd of Hermas 126 Miscellaneous Essays (which, by the way, is not strictly an apocryphal book), have never among us had even this chance of recognition. As far as literary merits go there can be no doubt that this obsolescence is a great pity. There are not many more delightful books of their class than the Wisdom of Solomon, than Ecclesiasticus, and than the Fourth Book of Esdras. To all these " oublis et de"daigne"s " M. Renan has given his particular attention, and his analyses of many of them, notably of the Shepherd and the Fourth Book of Esdras, are not merely among the most attractive passages of his book, but are also excellent examples of literary abstracts. There are indeed many points about these books which appeal to such a critic. They are perhaps more saturated than the canonical books with the Semitic spirit, in that excited and recalcitrant form which it assumed in the days immediately preceding and immediately following the Christian era ; they are full of vague but poetical imagery ; they lend themselves in the most obliging way to the conjectural interpreta- tions in reference to historical events of which M. Renan is so fond. Moreover they are in many cases romantic pictures of more or less private life which supply abundance of local colour as well as of information as to modes of thought. Thus they are the most fertile of quarries to a patient worker in mosaic, the most precious of colour- stores to such a painter as M. Renan, who has Miscellaneous Essays 127 set himself to depict on a vast scale the whole spiritual and emotional life and move- merit of a time such as the first two centuries. Of the strictly narrative portions of the work produced on these principles and from these sources, it would be impossible here to give examples, nor is it necessary ; but a few short extracts may perhaps help to illustrate the character of M. Kenan's style and also of his thought. The first shall be taken from the eloquent opening of Les Apdtres, in which the author sets forth the subjective view of the Resurrection : But love and enthusiasm know no such thing as situa- tions without an issue. They laugh at the impossible, and rather than abandon hope, will do violence to reality. Many well-remembered words of the Master, especially those in which he had foretold his future advent, could be interpreted in the sense of a resurrection from the tomb. Such a belief was, besides, so natural that the mere faith of the disciples might have sufficed for its production. The great prophets Enoch and Elijah had not tasted death. The belief was even beginning to obtain that the patriarchs and the chief men of the elder dispensation were not really dead, and that their bodies lay in their sepulchres at Hebron still inhabited by life and by the soul. It was certain to happen in the case of Jesus, as it has happened in the case of all men who have arrested the attention of their fellows. The world, accustomed to attribute to them superhuman virtues, cannot admit that they have undergone the unjust and revolting law of death. At the moment when Mahomet expired, Omar quitted the tent, sword in hand, and threat- ened to strike the head off any one who dared to affirm that the prophet had ceased to live. Death is so unreason- able a thing when it falls on men of great heart or great 128 Miscellaneous Essays genius, that the people refuse to believe such an error of nature possible. Heroes do not die. For is not that the true existence which is prolonged ERNEST in the memory of those who love us ? The RENAN. adored Master had for years filled the little world of his companions with joy and hope. Could they consent to leave him to moulder in the tomb ? No ! He had lived too long and too intimately in the hearts of his followers for it not to be affirmed after his death that he was still alive for ever. Here is a passage dealing less with psychology, and more with social theories : The glory of the Jewish nation is to have proclaimed this principle [of social fraternity], whence arose the down- fall of the elder states, and which is itself not destined to perish. The Jewish Law is social, not political ; the prophets, the apocalyptic writers, advocate revolutions of a social, not of a political character. In the first half of the first century the Jews, brought face to face with profane civilisation, are animated with but one idea to refuse the advantages of the Roman Law, a law atheistic, philosophic, productive merely of general equality, and to proclaim the excellence of their own theocratic law, which gives a religious and moral complexion to society. All Jewish thinkers, such as Philo and Josephus, hold that the Law is the secret of happiness. The laws of other peoples will have justice done ; it is no matter to them whether the people be good or happy. The Jewish Law, on the con- trary, descends into the minutest particulars of moral education. Christianity is a development of the same idea. . . . Every Church is a community where each has his claims on all, where there must be no one indigent, no one wicked, and where, in consequence, there is a mutual right of supervision and command. Primitive Christianity might be called a great association of the poor, a heroic effort against egotism based on the principle that the claims of the individual go no farther than to the absolutely necessary, Miscellaneous Essays 129 and that superfluities belong to those who need. Between such a spirit and the spirit of Roman polity ERNEST a war to the death is inevitable, while on the RENAN. other hand Christianity can only succeed in ruling the world by modifying seriously its natural tendencies and its original programme. Yet the needs which Christianity represents will abide eternally. Community of living, by the second half of the Middle Ages, having been abused by an intolerant Church, the monastery having become too often a feudal institution or a barrack of dangerous and fanatical soldiery, the modern spirit has shown itself unfavourable to it. We have for- gotten that it is in the common life that the human soul has tasted most joy. The psalm, " How good and pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity," has ceased to be our song. But when modern individualism has brought forth its final fruits, when humanity, dwarfed and saddened and become impotent, shall return to great institutions and manly discipline, when our mean society of citizens, our world of pygmies, shall have been beaten off by the heroic and idealist elements of humanity, then the common life will regain its value. Science and a crowd of other great things will be organised monastically with a continuity independent of mere fleshly inheritance. The importance attributed by our time to the family will diminish, and egotism, the essential principle of large societies, will no longer suffice great souls. A league of otherwise opposed forces will be formed against vulgarity. The words of Jesus, and the ideas of the Middle Ages on the subject of poverty, will once more appear reasonable. We shall understand how the mere possession of private property was once held to be an inferiority, and how the founders of mysticism argued for centuries whether Jesus had possessed "things which perish in the using." The crotchets of the Franciscans will become serious social problems, and the splendid ideal traced by the author of the Acts will be written as a prophetic revelation on the gates of the para- dise of humanity. 1 30 Miscellaneous Essays After this eloquent prophecy of some of the things (more satisfactory at any rate than the restoration of Picrochole) which will happen a la venue des coquecigrues, let us take a picture of a more historical character : What characterised the religion of Greece in old days, what characterises it still, is its lack of the infinite and the vague ; the tenderness and the feminine softness, the deep religious sentiment of the German and Celtic races, is wanting in the true Hellenes. The piety of the orthodox Greek consists in ritual and in outward observances. His churches, often of sufficient elegance, have none of the element of the terrible which distinguishes a Gothic minster. In this Eastern Christianity there are no tears, no prayers, no inward compunction. Even burials have a certain gaiety about them ; they are celebrated in the evening, at set of sun, when the shadows are long, with soft music and the display of bright colours. The fanatical gravity of the Latins displeases these lively, light-minded, untroubled races. The sick man himself is not depressed ; death approaches him cheerily, and things around him smile. This is the secret of the divine gaiety of Homer and Plato ; even the tale of Socrates' death in the Phcedo has hardly a touch of sadness. To blossom, to bear fruit, that is life, and why ask for more ? It is a superficial people, taking life as a thing with nothing supernatural in it, with no back- ground. Such a simplicity of attitude depends to a great extent upon the climate, the purity of the air, the exhilara- tion which the mere breathing of it gives. But it depends also on the splendidly idealist instincts of the Hellenic race. A mere nothing suffices in Greece to produce the content- ment which the sight of beauty causes. A tree, a flower, a lizard, a tortoise, awaking the remembrance of the thousand metamorphoses sung by the poets: a tiny rivulet; a cranny in the rock dignified as a cave of the nymphs ; a well with a cup on the brink ; a strait like that at Poros, so narrow that the butterflies flit across it, yet navigable by Miscellaneous Essays 131 mighty ships ; orange and cypress groves that throw their shadow over the sea ; a clump of pines on the ERNEST rocks : any of these is enough. To walk at RENAN. night in the gardens, to listen to the cicale, to sit in the moonlight and play the flute, to drink of the mountain spring, bringing with one bread and fish and a flask of wine, with a song to accom- pany the repast ; to crown the head with flowers and the door lintels with leaves, at the family festivals ; on public feast days to carry the thyrsus decked with foliage, to dance all day long, to play with tame kids such are the pleasures of the Greek, pleasures of a poor and thrifty race, always young, inhabiting a delightful country, finding its joys in itself and in the goods the gods provide. The Theocritean idyl was in all Hellenic countries a simple fact ; Greece always delighted in this elegant and amiable style of minor poetry, exact to life in her own case, in the case of all other countries stupid and unreal. Good-humour and joy in living are the special peculiarities of the Greek. He does not construe indulgere genio after the fashion of the English- man's heavy intoxication, of the Frenchman's coarse disport ; it is with him a simple result of reflection that Nature is good, and that it is right to follow her. To the Greek, indeed, Nature is a mistress of good taste, an instructress in virtue and rectitude : the notion of concupiscence, of a temptation by nature to do ill, is to him a contradiction. The fancy for dress which distinguishes the Palikari, and which shows itself so innocently in young Greek girls, is not the pompous vanity of the barbarian, the silly forward- ness of the citizen's wife, puffed up with a low-born pride, it is the simple sentiment of unaffected youth feeling itself the heir of the inventors of beauty. One more short piece of a somewhat sterner character may serve to complete this miniature anthology and to show how M. Renan can, without effort or grandiloquence, convey the idea of the mysterious and the terrible : 132 Miscellaneous Essays Since the Jewish nation, in a kind of despair, had taken to reflecting upon its destiny, the im- agination of the people had directed itself ERNEST with affectionate concentration to the ancient RENAN. prophets. Now of all the personages of the past whose memory came like a dream in the night to agitate and excite the nation, the greatest was Elijah. This giant among the prophets in his savage solitude on Carmel, sharing the life of wild beasts, dwelling in the hollows of the rocks, whence from time to time he descended like a thunderbolt to make and unmake kings, had become, by a series of successive metamorphoses, a kind of super- natural being, sometimes visible, sometimes invisible, who had never tasted death. It was a general belief that Elijah would return and restore Israel. The austere life he had led, the terrible memories which he had left, and which still abide in the imagination of the East, 1 his threatening image, which even now seems to spread terror and death, his whole legend, full of vengeance and fear, produced a lively im- pression on the mind, and stamped, as it were, a birthmark on the results of popular throes. Whosoever aspired to active eminence among the people was bound to imitate Elijah ; and, as the solitary life had been the distinguishing peculiarity of this prophet, it became customary to look on the " man of God " as a hermit. It was imagined that all holy personages had had their period of penance, of austerity, of life in regions far from towns, and a retirement to the desert became thus the condition and prelude of lofty destinies. I have given the note as well as the text here because it illustrates well the manner in which M. Renan builds his most literary passages on 1 [Abdallah, the ferocious Pasha of Acre, nearly died of fright after beholding the Prophet in a dream standing erect on the Mount. In the pictures of the Christian churches the portrait of Elijah is surrounded with severed heads, and the Mussulmans themselves fear him. M. Renan' s Note.} Miscellaneous Essays 133 fragments of fact. A less accomplished artist would probably have dragged the pasha ERNEST RENAN anc * *ke h ea ds i nto ^e text, for the sake of emphasis and colour. In this work M. Renan must be regarded as one of the class of picturesque historians, a class of writers from whom the world has suffered many things in these last days. But he is a picturesque historian with a great many differences, and almost every one of these differences is in his favour. Eclectic and, to a great extent, imaginative as his method is, he can rarely be accused of actual exaggeration, or of affecting the picturesque for the picturesque's sake. He is not in the habit of basing rhetorical generalisations upon nothing at all, merely to add to the forcible character of his picture. There is a sobriety about him which the weary reader, tired of fireworks, in vain demands from certain historians of the same general charac- ter in England. Moreover, his picturesqueness, such as it is, is in the strictest keeping with the general plan and purport of his book, and results logically from the principles which he has set before him. " Que je voudrais," he says some- where of the author of the Imitatio Christi, " etre peintre, pour le montrer tel que je le con^ois, doux et recueilli, assis en son fauteuil de chene, dans le beau costume des b&iedictins de Mont Cassin." The assumption as to the authorship of the famous book may be matter of argument, but the sentence is the key to all the author's own 134 Miscellaneous Essays picturesque passages ; they are resorted to simply to show us the person or the scene, such as the historian conceives it, and KJKMjUlt are thus illuminations, not squibs and crackers let off for the purpose of dazzling and crackling. Sometimes, of course, the sub- jectivity of view is rather excessive ; it is cer- tainly a hard saying when one finds M. Renan pronouncing Ecclesiastes " le seul livre aimable " that the Jewish spirit has ever produced. The Preacher is delightful reading no doubt, but amiable is about the last epithet that one would feel inclined to give him. However, everybody must see with his own eyes, and the most that outsiders can do is to lend spectacles to the short- sighted. M. Renan, if in this particular instance his glasses hardly suit our sight, is usually one of the most serviceable of opticians. With the prin- ciples that human nature, due difference being made for varieties of race, is everywhere and at all times pretty much the same that outward circumstances may modify, but cannot wholly determine its action that happiness, moral good, and intel- lectual cultivation are the objects of life, he has made edification and delight equally the objects of his book. He has, indeed, stated his main theory with sufficient clearness in the preface to his Essais de Morale et de Critique. " Morality is the one thing eminently serious and true, and by itself it suffices to give meaning and direction to life. Impenetrable veils hide from us the secret Miscellaneous Essays 135 of this world, whose reality is at once irresist- ible and oppressive. Philosophy and RENAI^ science will for ever pursue without ever attaining the formula of this Proteus, unlimited by reason, inexpressible in language. But there is one foundation which no doubt can shake, and in which man will ever find a firm ground amidst his uncertainties ; good is good and evil is evil. No system is necessary to enable us to hate the one and love the other ; and it is in this sense that faith and love, possessing no seeming connection with the intellect, are the true base of moral certainty, and the only means possessed by man of understanding in some slight measure the problem of his origin and destiny." Some notable failings and dislikes of M. Kenan's give us important side-lights on his literary and critical character. One such is his attitude towards the Middle Ages. He has written and read about them more than most people, and it requires some courage to bring a charge of short-coming against the author of Averroes, and of the excellent dis- course on the Art of the Fourteenth Century in France. Yet it is soon tolerably clear to an attentive reader, and perfectly clear to one who has some knowledge of mediaeval literature, that M. Renan is out of sympathy with the Ages of Faith. He is even so far out of sympathy with them that he fails altogether to understand them in some important points, which have nothing whatever to do with theology or Church history. 136 Miscellaneous Essays We rub our eyes when we come to the state- ment (in the preface of Averroes et VAverroisme), that the Middle Ages, " intellectually speaking, represent nothing but gropings after a return to an- tiquity." It would be safer to affirm the exact contrary. In hardly a single great instance of the intellectual development of the Middle Ages is there any real affinity with the spirit of classicism. With characteristic and uncritical docility they sometimes borrowed classical forms, dressed them- selves up in scraps of classical ore, proposed classi- cal masters as objects of admiration and reverence. But in reality the two are poles asunder. The author of Roland is separated from the author of the Iliad, the author of Lancelot du Lac from the author of the Odyssey, Audefroy le Bastard from Horace, Anselm from Aristotle, Villehardouin from Thucydides, by a gulf which no possible "gropings" could traverse. Accordingly, whenever M. Renan deals with the Middle Ages, and especially with Scholasticism, he is unsatisfactory, because he is unsympathetic. Nor is the reason of this by any means far to seek ; it is not the religious side of the Middle Ages that repels him, but their moral and aesthetic side. He seems to miss in them the sunny aspect which attracts him alike in things Eastern and in things Greek. The strong shadows that give the character and, to some persons, the attraction of Gothic architecture, make him shiver. If there is any part of Europe during those Miscellaneous Essays 137 times on which he looks with satisfaction it is Spain, Provence, and perhaps Italy a11 lands that love to lie in the sun not his own Brittany and northern France, and England and Germany, with their gloom and their combativeness, and the absence of rose-pink and sky-blue in their pictures. In particular M. Renan' has evidently a strong dis- like to fighting. For such a master of description his sketch of the Siege of Jerusalem is com- paratively tame, and he passes over the Battle of Bedriacum which still awaits its picturesque historian, though surely no battle of the nations ever better deserved one with a hasty shudder at its butchery. It may be suspected that M. Renan, patriotic as he is, by no means shares the modern admiration for " I'Epope'e Franchise," and that the Chansons de Gestes, with the ceaseless ring of their assonances, clashing like lance on shield and sword on helmet, seem to him distinctly barbarous. He is more at home in the Arthurian legends, for which any native of Brittany must feel a certain reverence. But on the whole the presence of the warlike spirit, against which he again and again testifies, is too strong in the Middle Ages for M. Renan. He says somewhere, "J'aime le moyen age," but I venture to doubt whether his affection is spontaneous and genuine. Another interesting point in the critic's mental disposition is his attitude towards philosophy of the more abstract kind. Here again, wherever he 138 Miscellaneous Essays has to touch on such matters, an absence of sym- pathy is apparent strikingly, for in- stance, in the account of the Gnostic sects in the last volume of the Origines. To any one who has a weakness for speculation, there is something especially fascinating in the fragmentary notices of Basilides and Valentinus, which have come down to us in the sorriest possible condition in which any such notices could possibly come, involved, that is to say, in the partisan refutations of their adversaries. To these unfortunates M. Renan devotes indeed some admirable pages, but they do not inspire him with half the interest that is excited by, let us say,* the Shepherd of Hermas, that curious mixture of the devout gallantry of the seventeenth century with the apocalyptic fancies of the second. Not many men have been more in contact with Scholastic literature than M. Renan, but here again the fantastic attraction which that literature has for some people seems to exercise no influence over him. He evidently does not feel the mag- netism of unbridled logic which sometimes tempts the reader in moments of weakness to devote the rest of his life to Qucestiones Quodlibetales, and such like ware. His allusions, not merely in his book on Averroes but elsewhere, to Scholasticism, are possibly just, but certainly harsh. Its absence of form and colour and human interest seems to repel him. This being so, it is not surprising that he should speak of the later philosophy of Germany Miscellaneous Essays 139 with respect indeed, but hardly with affection, and still less with enthusiasm. Hegel cer- RENAN" tainly cannot have much attraction for one who is proof against Basilides and Erigena and Occam. Even in his handling of Spinosa the dialectic element is kept out of sight in a very singular manner. Some of the contents of the Dialogues et Fragments Philo- sophiques may seem to contradict this view. But the greater part of that curious book appears to me to represent no permanent or deep-rooted con- victions of its author. Events had for a moment upset M. Kenan's equanimity, and he retired upon philosophy. Moreover, in the study which con- cludes it (La Me"taphysique et son Aveijir), his more habitual attitude towards such questions re- appears distinctly enough. Indeed it is in this respect that the practical aspect of M. Kenan's mind is most evident. He has his Utopias, no doubt ; indeed he is very largely estated in those shadowy regions. But they are on the whole very practical Utopias, and the inhabitants are more occupied with conduct than with speculation, with their duties towards their neighbours than with the contemplation of their own interiors. In the Royaume de Dieu of which he is so fond, it does not appear that Barbara and Celarent will occupy a very high place among the thrones and dominations recognised by the constitution. Yet one more of these inquiries into the dislikes of the subject. I do not know that 140 Miscellaneous Essays anywhere in a dozen pages a writer has thrown more light upon his own individuality than M. Renan has thrown in the little Kr*!Ni AIS* piece entitled " La Thdologie de Be"r- anger," which may be found reprinted at the end of the Questions Contemporaines. It is, perhaps, the only occasion on which he becomes literally violent and intolerant. In the pieces which concern his own grievances, in those which re- gard the not very handsome treatment he re- ceived during the unlucky Strauss correspondence, there is nothing half so sharp as in this review of " Le Be*ranger des Families." For persons mis- chievously disposed there is something extremely comic in the spectacle of one of the most bene- volent and amiable writers of the last part of the century completely losing his temper and his charity with one of the most benevolent and amiable writers of the first part. As happens, moreover, in nineteen cases out of twenty, when the critic ceases to be impassive he loses his critical faculty. I certainly do not agree with those who, knowing French literature only partially, hold ex- aggerated notions of Stranger's excellence. But there is something more in the author of songs which range from " Le Grenier " to " Les Fous " than the mere vulgarity which is all or nearly all that M. Renan can see in him. In his repeti- tion of the old preference of the insipid pastorals and jargon-ditties of Desaugiers to the work of Be"ranger, I cannot but think that M. Renan makes Miscellaneous Essays 141 a capital error. But this very error is respect- able enough in its way, and certainly characteristic. Be"ranger's Chauvinism, KJIN AlN. his affectation of the unpleasant but purely conventional style which is called in French grivois, his adoption of the stock French habit as old as the Fabliaux of delighting in the degradation of feminine character, are all things that M. Renan cannot away with. Doubtless, too, they are all very bad things. If the present object were the rehabilitation of Be" ranger a task which is superfluous, and for which I have no particular inclination a good deal would have to be said on the other side. But at present the subject is not Be"ranger, but his critic, and that critic's idiosyncrasy. It is easy to see in this protest the outcry of offended spiritualism and delicacy in- dignant at seeing its gods hobnobbed with, its ideals of the eternal-feminine exchanged for the less amiable if more easily found types of the baggage-waggon and the pavements, and its notions of duty, liberty, peace, and justice passed by, in order that homage may be paid to the Napoleonic legend, and that militarism may be held up as the first instinct of man. These three crimes are of all things most distasteful to M. Renan, and un- luckily they are among the things most prominent in Be"ranger's works, at least in the more popular portion of them. Once more our author has told us what he is, by telling us the persons with whom he does not live. 142 Miscellaneous Essays If this account of the principles of M. Renan's literary and critical character be correct, it is evident that it stands in striking contrast to two other schools which have between them divided most of the critical talent of France during the last half century. In the first place it is far removed to the ex- tent, indeed, of complete antipathy from the purely indifferent criticism of form rather than matter in life and literature which has been so strongly represented during that time. Of such criticism there have of course been many varieties, differing with the idiosyncrasy of the critics. The sarcastic and, in a way, severe attitude of Mrime is not the good-natured and purely apolaustic attitude of Gautier. But in all this school there may be said to be sometimes an impatience, sometimes a dislike, sometimes a simple neglect or omission, of the moral view of questions of literature or conduct On the other hand M. Renan's process stands in equally sharp contrast to the still more popular method of Sainte- Beuve, one side of which has been developed to an extent which may fairly be called exaggerated by M. Taine. This latter method, as thus exag- gerated, consists, it need hardly be said, in treating the man and his work as for the most part an effect and not a cause. Its practitioners, in order to explain their patient, set to work to examine his milieu in every possible way, and, at any rate professedly, are content to accept the results of Miscellaneous Essays 143 their examination as an explanation. The spirit of the age, the character of the sur- roundings, the influences of grand- lv I'. -S A .> fathers and grandmothers, the style of education, living, and so forth, are taken as the data out of which the result is to be got It would not be true, of course, to say that moral considerations exercise no influence over this class of critic, or that he has no likes or dislikes. But his likes and his dislikes are not ostensibly governed by any a priori principles, and concern the individual criticised less than the influences which are supposed to have produced him. With M. Renan the case is quite different. He has so much of Cousin in him (of Cousin, of whom he never fails to speak with a some- what exaggerated respect) that the big words Vrai, Beau, and Bien, or, if it be preferred, the great things which these big words signify, are always present before him. As a man or a book happens to fall in or to fall out with these notions of his, so the man or the book is judged. Nor is he apt to attribute much force to the product-of- the-century theory. An accurate student of his- tory is never likely to ignore the general tendency of periods. But in the formation of that general tendency M. Renan is willing to allow a great deal more force to the influence, and especially to the moral influence, of individuals than most other critics of the day. It is thus that in his principal work he is continually striving to hold up the 144 Miscellaneous Essays personality of the actors clearly to view, even when there is the very smallest evidence of that personality to go upon. In judging personalities, too, he never lets himself be carried away by any fascinations of the paradoxical ultra-literary sort. He has perfectly well exposed the oddities of Nero's character, but those oddities have not in- clined him to be lenient to the implacable, beauti- ful tyrant. If he is disposed to let Nero off at all gently, it is not because of his grandiose fancies, his unquiet searching after some new and infinite form of evil, but because Poppaea and Acte were to all appearance really attached to him. In this point even Nero falls among the things that seem to M. Renan lovely and of good report. Indeed the last words fairly enough describe the character of his general predilections. The affections of all kinds though M. Renan has an odd craze that family affection is an " e"go'fsme a plusieurs " very liable to abuse are the co- efficients of human character with which he likes best to deal. In matter of natural beauty he in- clines in the same way to the idyllic and pastoral. Even in such points as his views on education and science, the same solicitude for the presence of a human interest of the softer sort manifests itself. He is exceedingly anxious that France should devote herself more than has hitherto been the case to " hautes Etudes." But the hautes Etudes which attract him are not mathematics Miscellaneous Essays 145 or abstract philosophy, but comparative phil- ology, critical history, the study of religion, all of them more or less in- K K -S AN* timately connected with the hopes and fears, the daily life and daily wants of the endless generations behind us. Whatsoever is abstract, bloodless, and dry, repels him. De- spite the Lettre a M. Berthelot and some other things, I should doubt whether he has much genuine affection for what is commonly called natural science. The touch of materialism and of inhumanity which often accompanies the pursuit of such science, must necessarily revolt him. Thus such force as M. Renan can exert is a force in the direction of spiritualism, morality of a certain kind, peaceable flows of soul. It may sometimes be difficult to square his apparent views and desires with any accurate estimate of the history of the past, or the probabilities of the future. The pleasant cloudy Utopias which he describes, in which great Pan seems to be alive again, and everybody contributes to the foundation and con- firmation of the kingdom of God by inoffensive conduct, freedom from uncomfortable striving and TrXeoi/efta, and the cultivation of compara- tive philology and the domestic affections, seem occasionally to be situated in a land that is very far off. It has indeed been observed by the wisdom of the elders that the rainbow rarely touches the ground quite close to the spectator's feet, and that St. Brandan's Isle, and other regions L 146 Miscellaneous Essays of the blest, have a knack of fleeing before the seeker. Nevertheless it is impossible to J*^ assign any but a beneficial tendency to an influence of this kind at such a time as the present. M. Renan represents in French literature the tradition which his countryman Chateaubriand founded, or borrowed from Rous- seau, nearly a century ago, and which was continued to our own days by George Sand the tendency, that is to say, to rely upon and appeal to the emotions rather than the intellect, to dress up amiable thoughts in gorgeous or elegant language, to philosophise, if possible, aveu /Lia\a/aa9, and to cultivate the beautiful with such regard to eyreXeta as may be. His literary taste is much better than Chateaubriand's, though his imaginative power is considerably less ; and he rarely lapses into the merely tawdry or the merely sentimental. His philosophy is a good deal saner and less windy than George Sand's (though, as we have seen, he too has a slight weakness for apocalypses), and he has a good deal more of the practical spirit than the Chatelaine of Nohant Neither of his forerunners was a very distinguished practitioner of purely literary criticism, nor is M. Renan. His opinions on certain points are too definitely and obtrusively present with him for that, and he does not attain to the absolute catho- licity which is the first requisite of the literary critic. It is doubtful whether in this direction he Miscellaneous Essays 147 could even get as far as the paradox of Thackeray on Swift " I suppose there is no person w ^ rea ds but must admire . . . and I say that, great as he is, we should hoot him." The desire to hoot would get the better even of the preliminary admiration in M. Kenan's case. But if his value as a critic of literature be unequal, it is still considerable. His remarks on the classical French literature of the seven- teenth century are among the very best ever made by a Frenchman, being equally distant from the parrot-cry of admiration which is now raised more loudly than ever by the neo- classic school in France, and from the exaggerated depreciation of the romantique a tons crins. Yet his real value is not that of a critic of letters so much as that of a critic of life. In face of what, with a fine confusion of language, are sometimes called the positive and sometimes the negative tendencies of the day, tendencies which in any case make for a certain hardness of moral texture, the presence of an authority of this kind, taking up his parable and preaching charity, mutual good-will, the admiration of harmless things, and the cultivation of blameless feelings, ought to be counted as on the whole a healthy influence. It is the business no doubt of the avowedly religious person to perform this same function, and to a great extent he does perform it, but in the case of those who do not agree with him he suffers from the reciprocal conjugation of the historical 148 Miscellaneous Essays verb je suis suspect, tu es suspect, etc. The ex- tremer political reformer is very much more occupied in furthering his views * KENAN. at any cost than in taking measures to prevent his own manners or anybody else's from becoming fierce. Ordinary politicians and ordinary men of business have something else to do, and are naturally inclined to look upon the function as by no means a practical one. The quaint sentence of surprised contempt which M. Renan in his essay on Channing devotes to the temperance movement, points out ex- cellently the gulf between the philanthropist of the professional kind and his own larger, if vaguer, philanthropy. To say anything about men of science is as dangerous in these days as it once was to say anything about bishops, but it may at least be hinted that the cultivation of the softer feelings has not hitherto received any very active assistance from them. Last of all comes the class of professed devotees of literature and art ; among whom, after a manner, M. Renan himself must be classed. Their attitude towards his methods and aims is perhaps not less unfavourable than that of other classes. They have, as was hinted at the beginning, a natural horror of any- thing like "gush," and they have had so much trouble to keep their own studies clear of the question of moral tendency and influence, that they are apt to look on that question with dis- favour. Hence sentiment, as distinguished from Miscellaneous Essays 149 passion on one side, business on another, and devotion on a third, has not recently KENAN! had a g ood time of it: in the world > being regarded by some as a mere counterfeit of something better ; by others, as unpractical and womanish ; by others, again, as leading to absurdities and slips of taste which should, above all things, be avoided. It is in the gap thus formed that M. Renan has with sufficient courage taken his stand. His gospel may certainly be said to be a vague gospel, and the enemy may contend that Morgane la Fe"e is architect and clerk of the works at the buildings which he so industriously edifies with graceful words and, at the same time, with a vast quantity of solid learning. But of his literary skill there can be no question, and scarcely less of the admir- able character of his intentions. The concluding volume of his great work is a fitting close to the whole, and moreover one of its most interesting parts. In Marcus Aurelius M. Renan found an example of one of those fortunate persons whom, as he himself said in a juvenile work many years ago, " la tempete a laisse"s au milieu du grand oc6an pacifique, mer sans vagues et sans rivages, ou Ton n'a d'autre e'toile que la raison, ni d'autre boussole que son cceur." Marcus has not exactly produced this effect upon all his readers, but it is all the more interesting to see in what manner he produced the effect on M. Renan. This effect has given us a very satisfactory volume 150 Miscellaneous Essays both from the literary and philosophical point of view. From the former M. Renan has enriched the world with a great K h, IS AN deal of excellent work, free from the stiffness and aridity which too often characterise the work of learned writers, possessed of a singular and somewhat feminine charm of supple- ness, softness, and colour, but seldom deserving the unfavourable epithets of effeminacy, flaccidity, or tawdriness. From the latter he has supplied a distinct want in the thought of the time by ad- vocating charity in the full Pauline sense against egotism, morality against mere aestheticism or mere intellectualism, attention to the spiritual as contrasted with the merely material interests of humanity. I happen (were this of the slightest importance) to differ from his views on a great majority of points, from the life of Christ to the advantages of living in common, and from Marcus Aurelius to Be"ranger. It has been all the greater pleasure to me to try and appreciate his literary character and position, in what I conceive to be the only spirit allowable for the critic. The preceding pages were written in 1880, when M. Renan came to London to deliver the Hibbert Lectures for that year. They comprise a pretty complete survey of his literary work up to that date ; and I think they may be without diffi- culty wrought into a still more complete estimate both of his work and of his life. The life, it is to Miscellaneous Essays 151 be hoped, may be prolonged, but the character of the work is not likely to be much RENAfT a ff ecte d by any subsequent production, remarkable as is the produce which these ten years have yielded. The Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse have given a certain right to speak of the life of a man still living, a subject which, without such provocation, is in my judg- ment always better avoided ; the work has been increased and its characteristics deepened and emphasised (not, I fear it must be said, always favourably) by the chief of the volumes published since the Drames Philosophiques, the Histoire d' Israel, and the long post-dated Avenir de la Science. Ernest Joseph Renan was born at Treguier on the 27th of February 1823, and from very early days was destined to the priesthood. He has told us how, when a seminarist at Saint-Sulpice, he found himself dissatisfied with his proposed pro- fession and the creed which it involved. Or rather he has not told us. No man ever tells that story with perfect sincerity ; there go too many and too subtle influences to the making of it. Nor in a purely literary study of M. Renan is there any need to inquire into these influences. It is suffi- cient to say that his clerical studies determined him in that way of Semitic science in which he persevered when the original determining influence had ceased. I have been assured of his com- petence in it by undoubted authorities, who frankly 1 5 2 Miscellaneous Essays confessed at the same time that they approved neither of his original instruction nor ERNEST of his later method. For a time he divided his attention between Semitic and mediaeval subjects, and his first notable book of a literary character was that on Averroes, above referred to ; though it will be observed that here the two studies met. He became an official of the Bibliotheque Nationale, was favoured in divers ways by divers administra- tions, and in 1860 was sent to Syria on one of those " missions," which are so incomprehensible to the British and so convenient to the French man of letters. He was shortly afterwards made Professor of Hebrew at the College de France. But meanwhile there had appeared, as a conse- quence chiefly of his Syrian visit, the famous Vie de J/sus, which developed itself into the many- volumed Origines du Christianisme, The clamour raised against his appointment to a professor- ship was for a time successful, and M. Renan, as he must have anticipated, had to bear much harsh language. His career, however, at least since 1870, has been one of genuine success, though he never was able to enter the Chamber, despite various attempts. Of late years he has taken up a peculiar attitude, of which the before-mentioned Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse were in a sort the manifesto an attitude of benevolent conde- scension both to the faiths which he has left and to the unfaiths which in a manner have left him. This Miscellaneous Essays 153 is not an easy attitude to maintain without slips of taste, and M. Renan has been RENAN* sufficiently guilty of them; but it has been to some extent excused in his case by the unquestioned supremacy which time and his own merits have given him among French men of letters. There is at the present moment no one who can write French of the best kind as M. Renan can write it ; and it would not be altogether just to attribute this merely to the lapse of time, the death of rivals, and the disuse of good practice by the younger generation. A man who between sixty and seventy can produce such work as the books I have named, work in some respects revealing new faculties and in none showing any degeneration, as far as literature goes, of the old, is rare in any literary history. We need not delay very long over LAvenir de la Science, which could hardly have been pub- lished forty years after date (the original publica- tion having been prevented by sage counsel of friends and the revolution of February) by any man who was less serenely conscious of his own value, or whose literary position was less sure. M. Renan has belittled the formal value of the book in his preface so ingeniously that there is nothing left to say of that. But in truth and in fact its substantial worth is very small except for biographical purposes ; and even here a tolerably experienced student of human nature in general, and of M. Renan's nature in particular, 154 Miscellaneous Essays could almost dispense with it. Take a young man of great intellectual ability, and still greater (though as yet unde- veloped) literary faculty ; suppose in him a wide course of reading and the mental excitement caused on one hand by the abandon- ment of his faith of his childhood and the presence everywhere of novel ideas, socialist and other ; add the study of German models which inclined him to throw his random thoughts on things in general into a form of quasi-system ; add yet again the industry necessary to write five hundred large pages of rather close print and you have L'Avenir de la Science. Very different are the two other works to which I have referred. The Histoire d? Israel is one of the most extraordinary books ever written. With no loss of literary power, it exaggerates the oddities in method of the Origines to a tenfold degree. One of the most diverting critical exercises known to me is that of the late M. Scherer on its first volume. M. Scherer was by no means an ortho- dox person ; he had (later and after far more struggles) gone through the same process which M. Renan performed rather light-heartedly at Saint- Sulpice; he admired the style; he was not shocked at the conclusions. But as a serious critic he was very much shocked at the method. He grows almost plaintive over it. " II fait usage," cries he, " du document condamne comme s'il ne 1'avait pas condamne' ! " Elsewhere " il ge"ne*ralise des Miscellaneous Essays 155 faits individuels, il e"rige des faits accidentels en usages constants." Elsewhere, again, KENAN*" "^ ^ u * an "i ve parfois d'inse"rer dans son re*cit un detail qui complete 1'image et la situation sauf a nous declarer en note qu'il n'en faut rien croire." Alas ! it is but too true ; it is even a great deal less than the truth. Let any one turn to the first volume and examine the structure which M. Renan has built out of the single and doubtful word " Jacobel " ; to the second, and digest the marvellous romance in which, by combining the Book of Kings with the forty-fifth Psalm, applying the terms of the latter to Ahab's bride, and adding any quantity of his own peculiar sentiment, he has succeeded in making a Jezebel who is a sort of compound of Mary Queen of Scots, Maria Theresa, Aspasia, Semiramis, and Cleopatra ; to the third, and con- template the picture of the last days of Jerusalem before the Babylonish conquest. If, knowing something of criticism and of logic, he be a serious person, he will, like M. Scherer, be aghast. If he unite frivolity with the same knowledge, he will be in constant fits of laughter. Never was such icono- clasm joined to such castle-building on nothing, such a determination not to accept documents as wholly true, mingled with such willingness to accept any part that can be made convenient, without the slightest evidence that it is more trustworthy than its context. The book sometimes reads like a designed caricature of the author's own methods in 156 Miscellaneous Essays the earlier Origines, the methods of conjectural restoration which I have indicated. In face of this caricature it is perhaps a critical duty to speak more bluntly, and pronounce the whole thing delightful but pre- posterous. It is indeed no wonder that writers like M. Scherer should have looked gravely on it. For it is something worse than a caricature of M. Renan ; it is a caricature, and a very damaging one, of the whole methods of biblical criticism. And it must have made not a few readers ask themselves whether other professors of that certainly not too modest science, though they may lack M. Renan's exuberance, his luxuriance, and his literary skill, are not at bottom one with him in the habit of arbitrary selection and unfounded judgment. These books, though they brought out and threw up some of the defects in M. Renan's literary character, showed him in no absolutely new light. The Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse and still more the Drames Philosophiques (the series of which had just been opened with Caliban when I wrote originally, and which were later completed by L'Eau de Jouvence, Le Pretre de Ntmi and UAbbesse de Jouarre), did to a certain extent exhibit him in such a light, the effects of which were partly favourable and partly not. The Drames in particular may count among the most remarkable work that a man verging on his sixtieth year with the first of them, and long past it at the date of the last, ever Miscellaneous Essays 157 produced. They had a great success in the case of the last a success decidedly ^ scan dal ; and however mixed may be the feelings of admiration with which a pure taste may regard them, they are certainly clever (a word which I select advisedly) in the very highest degree. One part of their cleverness lies in the manifold and apparently indiscriminate satire which the author pours on things and persons, without ever running into the cut -and -dried. Democracy and aristocracy, the classes and the masses, religion and irreligion, worldliness and unworldliness, morality and im- morality, all come in for this satire ; and if there are not infrequent lapses of taste, there are few of brains. The most curious thing not entirely unexpected perhaps by careful readers, but still curious was the development of a sort of refined but rather ungentlemanly sensuality which M. Renan showed. There is no coarseness in any of these books. But in parts of L'Eau de Jouvence, in the treatment if not the donnte of LAbbesse de Jouarre, and in some prefatory remarks to the Souvenirs especially, there is a most singular Cyrenaicism. The Royaume de Dieu becomes a sort of Otaheite, and each shepherd, provided that he has previously taken all his degrees and is an enlightened person, is permitted, nay ! encouraged, to clasp his yielding fair one in the sage's sight. The effect was not altogether delightful, owing to a sentiment of human nature 158 Miscellaneous Essays which has been put magisterially by the bagman in Pickwick. " You all know, gentle- men, to hear an old fellow who ought to know better talking about these things is very unpleasant." M. Renan has even shocked some disciples and critics, not always old fogies, who cannot pretend to be at all strait- laced in their own principles and practice, and he certainly has exhibited the operations of the spirit in a manner suited not only to shock those who are sensitive, but to cause those of them who are critical and combative to blaspheme him with no small show of reason. These later works, indeed, while even increasing one's respect for M. Kenan's cleverness, for his wonderful command of French, and so forth, may serve to emphasise and fill in a judgment which, as the acute reader will have perceived, was adum- brated from the beginning of the foregoing essay. In some purely literary gifts M. Renan has had few superiors among the men of our time. Never sublime or manly, he can touch almost every chord within the range of the French language except the chords of manliness and sublimity. Pathos, gentle satire, pure narration, exposition which is half argument and half narrative, imaginative con- struction, supple and subtle interpretation ; he can do them all, and do them goldenly. In three things, and three things only, does he go wrong in his excess of egotism, in his defect of taste which comes from a defect of reverence, and in Miscellaneous Essays 159 the weakness of his reasoning power, properly so called. It may be that egotism is a specially French quality, though it is fair to say that third parties do not seem to see much difference between French and English in this matter. But in M. Renan, whether as a matter of idiosyncrasy or a matter of nationality, it has reached its climax. The mere presence of the je and the moi-mme (though perhaps he abuses even them when his subjects are considered) would go for nothing. But every sentence, though the moi haissable may be leagues off in appearance, is saturated with self-conscious- ness. Even Byron is not M. Kenan's superior or inferior in always thinking of himself whatso- ever he is writing about. This of itself would argue a defect of taste ; but the defect is shown in other ways which have been glanced at both in the earlier and in the later part of this essay. I have heard him accused of " greasiness," and I am afraid there is a good deal to be said for the charge. Whether it be due to the advanced age at which he became an erotic writer, or to some other cause, he is deficient in passion. The break- ing of her vows by the Abbesse de Jouarre, on the supposed eve of her execution, is not an im- possible subject by any means, though it is a difficult one ; it is made impossible, or at least offensive, simply by M. Kenan's own manner of dealing with it. Perhaps, however, all his defects may be set 160 Miscellaneous Essays down to the weakness of his reasoning power, which for a professed philosopher is remark- able, and is scarcely less obvious than that of Victor Hugo. The paralogisms and question-beggings visible in the Origines and glaring in the Histoire cT Israel may be paralleled from every division of his work. And so the adversary may say, without too much injustice, of M. Renan that to the discussion of the most serious of subjects he brings chiefly the faculties of a novelist, or rather those of a poet who should happen to be incapacitated for writing poetry and for feeling it in its noblest forms, and who can but write soft, warm, exquisitely coloured, exquisitely undulating and palpitating prose. 1 [1892.] 1 The publication, while this volume was passing through the press, of a new collection of M. Kenan's miscellanies entitled Feuilles Dtiachtes, necessitates no alteration in the above postscript. Indeed both the text and the preface (the latter partly apologetic) only illustrate further what is there said. V THOUGHTS ON REPUBLICS 1 IT is perhaps too much the custom of those of us who earn our bread by surveying man- THOUGHTS ki nc j f rom China to Peru, and writing REPUBLICS, daily or weekly articles on politics, to take things as they come weekly or daily, and indulge in no further reflections on them. Some indeed have said that it is not the custom of the present day to indulge in further reflections upon anything ; and there are even those who, going yet more to extremes, add that it is a very fortunate thing, the affairs of the moment, and especially the political affairs, being remarkably ill-suited to bear reflection of any kind, above all the " further " kind. Once it was different, and the political article ef the day took the form of The Character of a Trimmer, or The Conduct of the Allies. Let it be allowed to a political journalist of some years' standing than 1 Written shortly after the expulsion of the Emperor Dom Pedro of Brazil. The experiences of the Brazilian Republic since have not weakened whatever force there may be in these Thoughts. M 1 62 Miscellaneous Essays whom nobody can be more conscious of the differ- ence between himself and Halifax or Swift to muse for a while, in the THOUGHTS temper of their musing if not with the REPUBLICS. merit of their expression, on the latest of modern revolutions, the revolution which had the happy thought of making the centenary of 1789 practical. And let this musing take for its subject, first, some expressed opinions on the birth of the Brazilian Republic, then Republics themselves, Brazilian and other. It was natural, no doubt, that the action of the patriotic Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca and his band of brothers should attract most and earliest comment from sympathisers. Mr. Gladstone told us, as an afterthought, that his own benediction on the infant Republic was bestowed in respect rather of the unobtrusive and unsanguinary manner of its birth than of its Republican character. Not all commentators showed even this Epimethean cautiousness. One bird of freedom (I forget its actual perch, but it was somewhere between Maine and Florida) clapped its wings at once over the fact that its own species were now crowing from Cape Horn to the St. Lawrence the bird forgot Honduras, where the shadow of tyranny still broods, but no matter. Echoes of the crowing in England asked how any one could wonder that a people should prefer managing its own affairs to having its affairs managed for it, even by a sove- reign of liberal ideas, benevolent aspirations, Miscellaneous Essays 163 culture, scientific acquirements, and so forth. And some dispirited Monarchists seem to THOUGHTS have found little to reply except in REPUBLICS, groans, after the manner of a Greek chorus, that a Republican dog should have been found to bite so good a man as Dom Pedro. Whether the Brazilian Monarchy had, at any rate for some half century of its not much longer existence, been much more than a Monarchy in name ; whether the substitution of Senhor Deodoro da Fonseca for Dom Pedro d'Alcantara was much more than a case of plus $a change, plus which is partly original and partly translated or adapted from De Quincey. The genius of the latter writer appears to have had an attraction for Baudelaire nearly equal to that exercised by Edgar Poe, with whom indeed De Quincey, on one of the many sides of his mind, had not a little sympathy. Many of the Suspiria are extremely Poesque, indeed, " Our Ladies of Sorrow," which Baudelaire has translated as only he could translate, completely beats Poe on his own ground. Both authors fall far short of Baudelaire himself as regards depth and fulness of passion, but both have a superficial likeness to him in eccentricity of temperament, and in affection 222 Miscellaneous Essays for a certain peculiar mixture of grotesque and horror. But Les Paradis Artificiels is chiefly valuable as illustrating well the I reason of Baudelaire's affection for this mixture, which has been entirely misconstrued. Wine, haschisch, opium, are interesting to him just as the passion of Delphine is interesting, not at all from a diseased craving for stimulus, still less from the perverse desire which a writer who should have known him better has attributed to him, of " finding beauty in recondite wickedness," but simply as some of the different means to which men and women have been driven in the en- deavour to reach the infinite, and avoid the monster which dogs them Ennui. Any one who has ever taken the trouble to read the " Au Lecteur " of the Fleurs du Mai must feel at once this very note, which is there struck with no uncertain sound. The four volumes of Baude- laire's works might be fairly entitled De I'Ennui, for all that they contain is really but an anatomy of this ergotism of the modern spirit under its various forms, with the evasions and prophylactics which its victims have sought or obtained. Per- haps the clearest understanding of Baudelaire's general views may be obtained by comparing the above-mentioned " Au Lecteur " with the two following pieces, the first of which is from the later Fleurs du Ma/, the last one of the Poemes en Prose. Miscellaneous Essays 223 LA RANQON L'homme a pour payer sa rangon Deux champs au tuf profond et riche, Qu'il faut qu'il remue et deTriche Avec le fer de la raison ; Pour obtenir la moindre rose, Pour extorquer quelques e"pis, Des pleurs salis de son front gris Sans cesse il faut qu'il les arrose. L'un est 1'Art et 1'autre PAmour. Pour rendre le juge propice, Lorsque de la stricte justice Paraitra le terrible jour, II faudra lui montrer des granges Pleines de moissons, et des fleurs Dont les formes et les couleurs Gagnent le suffrage des Anges. ENIVREZ-VOUS II faut 6tre toujours ivre. Tout est Ik : c'est 1'unique question. Pour ne pas sentir 1'horrible fardeau du Temps qui brise vos epaules et vous penche vers la terre il faut vous enivrer sans trve. Mais de quoi ? De vin, de poe"sie, ou de vertu, a votre guise. Mais enivrez-vous. Et si quelquefois, sur les marches d'un palais, sur 1'herbe verte d'un fosse, dans la solitude morne de votre chambre, vous vous reVeillez, 1'ivresse deja diminue"e ou disparue, demandez au vent, a la vague, a l'e"toile, a 1'oiseau, a 1'hor- loge, a tout ce qui fuit, a tout ce qui gdmit, a tout ce qui roule, a tout ce qui chante, a tout ce qui parle, demandez quelle heure il est ; et le vent, la vague, 1'etoile, 1'oiseau, 1'horloge vous repondront, " II est 1'heure de s'enivrer ! Pour n'etre pas les esclaves martyrises du Temps, enivrez-vous : 224 Miscellaneous Essays enivrez-vous sans cesse ! De vin, de podsie, ou de vertu, k votre guise." With illustrations of the intoxica- 3^. tion of virtue, our poet, I must confess, has not greatly troubled himself; perhaps he felt no call to such a work, perhaps he regarded it as a mere branch of archaeology ; but I must again repeat that if he has illustrated virtue as virtue but little, he has still less illustrated vice as vice. His amatory studies, like his studies on opium and haschisch, are illustrations of -the " ivresse de vin," of the tendency to resort to any stimulant if only it be strong or strange. Such studies are moreover legitimate as forming part of his own " ivresse de poe"sie," of his labours in tilling the field of art which he has chosen as the means of paying his ransom to Time. In the same way also, we see the reason and justification, according to this general plan of work and life, of the critical studies which form so large a part of his written productions. It is not possible for any one in the highest branch of art, literature, to maintain a continuous production of created or independent matter of the highest kind. Criticism therefore becomes as much a necessity as it is a pleasure, not to mention for the moment the natural bent of that phase of culture which Baude- laire represents towards critical and reflective action. Of the two volumes of criticism which have been published under Baudelaire's name, the first, Curiositts Esthttiques (a title which is his Miscellaneous Essays 225 own, though not actually used by him), is exclu- sively occupied with the arts of design. BAUDELAIRE. ^e otner > L* Art Romantique, is more catholic in its comprehension. It in- cludes not merely pictorial and literary but also musical subjects, and of it, the somewhat famous pamphlet on Wagner's Tannhauser forms part. The characteristics of Baudelaire's picture- criticism are not difficult to discover and describe. It is singularly fluent and pleasant to read, possessing like all his works excellent literary qualities. But on this point it does not stand so very far removed from most French criticism. It has been understood in France ever since the time of Diderot's matchless Salons, that art- criticism must be the work not of a jargonist but of a humanist ; and while such criticism has with us generally taken the form either of random comment, directed for the most part to the subject of the picture, or else of odious technicalities, the French have raised it to a not inconsiderable posi- tion among literary styles. Baudelaire not unfre- quently reminds us of Diderot, and this is of itself high praise. But it is undeniable that his peculiar style of criticism shows its faults (and I cannot agree with Mr. Swinburne that it is faultless), more particularly when it is applied to painting. Baudelaire's criticism is not only intensely, but also narrowly and fragmentarily, subjective. With its subjectivity there is no fault to find. There can be nothing better for us, there can be nothing Q 226 Miscellaneous Essays more true to the truth, than that a critic should simply tell us, in the best manner he can, the effect produced on his own JJJJJ^ mind by a given work of art. But he should at the same time take care to let his mind contemplate the object fully, so that the copy may fairly represent with due differ- ence the phenomenon presented to it. Now Baudelaire is not quite free from the charge of occasionally, indeed not seldom, letting himself go off at a tangent, after very slight contact with a very small portion of the work he has before him. He observes too little and imagines too much, so that his criticism, though it is perhaps in itself more interesting than it would be easy to make it compatibly with faithful representation, is very often far from representing the complete effect of the subject on his own or any mind. In other words, to read a criticism of Baudelaire's without the title affixed, is by no means a sure method of recognising the picture afterwards. Now as far as painting is concerned, this is without doubt a serious defect Painting, with its combined attack of colour and form, produces, or ought to produce, a distinct, definite, and uniform effect on the beholder. It is not content with suggestions, it leaves little to the imagination. And it is surely an immutable rule that criticism should in such matters adjust itself to the peculi- arities of the thing criticised. Hence it is that Baudelaire is far more successful as a critic when Miscellaneous Essays 227 he is dealing with literature and music ; arts which, aiming at less minuteness of BAUDELAIRE delineation, leave more to the recipient, and are therefore capable of vaguer and more manifold interpretation. It is natural that Baudelaire, who is nothing if not literary, should incline to this style of criticism, and a curious evidence of his unconscious thorough- ness therein is his preference, a preference far more singular in his days than it is now, for etching. For it is in this point that etching differs from kindred arts of design, that it is far more literary and less pictorial ; it aims, just as poetry does, rather at calling up in the mind of the beholder an effect similar to something in the mind of the artist, than at the elaborate represent- ation of the artist's own idea. In the recognition of an aim of this sort, Baudelaire is unrivalled among critics ; but he does not always escape the imminent danger of this sort of criticism, the danger of seeing in the picture or the poem all sorts of things which are not there, and are not even directly suggested by anything there, but come by a complicated process of association. A critic who should escape this danger while perfect- ing the style we speak of, who should develop fully but not add to the natural suggestiveness of his subject, and who should not be too hasty or too proud to observe and report as well as inter- pret, would perhaps be the blue dahlia of his class. It is sufficient praise to say of Baudelaire 228 Miscellaneous Essays that his fault, if it be a fault, is only the result of excessive critical sensibility, and so is not far from being a virtue. aSSS., He has, moreover, the one merit which is, perhaps more than any other, the mark of the true critic. He judges much more by the form than by the matter of the work submitted to his notice. It is not necessary to indulge in any elaborate reasoning as to the intrinsic excellence of this mode of proceeding. I may content myself with taking a simple and matter-of-fact criterion as to the goodness of the two styles, namely the question " Which is likely to give us the best criticism ? " Now it is hardly disputable that, in the case of criticism, the one thing needful (given a sufficient faculty and education) is the absence of prejudice. And it is still less disput- able that it is far more difficult for a duly edu- cated critic to err from prejudice, if he be accus- tomed to approach his subject from the side of form, than if he be wont to consider its matter first. There is a loyalty to art in the mind of every man competent to criticise at all which makes it impossible for him to call good work, as work, bad ; or bad work, as work, good. On the other hand attractiveness of matter depends almost entirely on innumerable subtle influences of mood, circumstance, temperament, and habit, against which it is next to impossible to guard. Matter -criticism is particularly untrustworthy where trustworthiness is most to be desired, in Miscellaneous Essays 229 the case of new or exceptional work or workers. Half the critical remarks which have M^tf ifpT? Deen made for instance on Walt BA U D Hi Li A 1 K H/ Whitman are vitiated by this defect. The critic has made up his mind that ultra- democratic views are admirable or damnable as the case may be, and all his criticism is tinged by this prepossession. Nor even in the case of less perilous stuff is there any surer way of going wrong than the direction of one's atten- tion to the matter primarily. And against another great danger, the danger of indifference, the study of form is as good a safeguard as it is against the more obvious but not more real danger of prepossession. Many minds, when their pos- sessors are neither very young nor very enthusi- astic, come to the conclusion that one thing is as well worth saying or as well worth leaving unsaid as another thing. But no mind of any power or accomplishment can ever come to the conclusion that one manner of saying a thing is as good as another manner. It must not be supposed that Baudelaire, because he has to the uttermost this artistic feeling, and as a rule conducts his works, both critical and original, in accordance with it, is unaware of the danger attending it, or of the ridicule which it is apt to bring upon any one who allows it to attain exorbitant dimensions. He is in fact remarkable among French authors (against whom it has become almost a commonplace to urge their 230 Miscellaneous Essays insensibility to the ludicrous aspects of their particular hobbies and raptures) for the perfect sanity with which he looks DA i>AU Uh.L.AlKh.. at both sides of his own peculiarities, and ridicules himself unsparingly whenever he appears to deserve it, or to be lapsing into the theatrical. So rare is this sanity among the greater French writers, that M. Taine speaks of it quite innocently as a characteristic of the Teutonic race, and if anything rather a blemish. " II se moque de ses Emotions au moment meme ou il s'y livre," he says of Heine, and appears to regard this as a somewhat barbarous proceeding, excusable only in a savage who likes bitter ale and "humour." It is quite clear, however, that it is the only safeguard against extravagance and unreality, and that to its presence is owing the unalloyed pathos which distinguishes Heine himself from, let us say, Victor Hugo. This quality Baude- laire possessed in an eminent degree. Almost his first published work, the novelette La Fanfarlo, written when he was a very young man, is a satire, elaborate as far as it goes, and in parts very amusing, upon a personage who is none other than the future poet himself, partly as he actually was, and still more as not very acute readers choose to believe that he represented himself. It is curious to compare Samuel Cramer, the dernier romantique, who writes poems under the cheerful title of Les Orfraies, and at two o'clock in the morning insists on his mistress exchanging the usual dress or Miscellaneous Essays 231 undress of that period for the rouge, tinsel, and spangles of the theatre, with the amusing BAUDELAIRE. but conventional heroes of The"ophile Gautier's Les Jeune- France ; and the comparison is instructive. It would show, if this were not superfluous, that the author of Albertus was only a skin-deep Romantic (being indeed of the class which transcends any special school), whereas the author of La Fanfarlo is perhaps the most typical figure in the whole Romantic cycle. But this is not the only indication of Baude- laire's spirit of compensation. A very remark- able essay, " L'Ecole Pai'enne," published in 1852, follows suit, and indeed contains better arguments against the author's supposed tendencies than a score of Societies for the Suppression of Vice would be likely to elaborate. Here, without any trace of irony, the pseudo-Renaissance worship of paganism, the immoderate love of form and art, the disdain of science and philosophy, are all lashed in a manner which is no doubt not unanswerable, but which is far more effective than most of the assaults made on the poet himself, and on those who are in general of the same temper. Meanwhile the paper is interesting, written as it was when many, if not most, of the Fleurs du Mai were actually composed, and when the poet was intending to publish them, as a proof of his rare power of looking on the other side. It shows what his sentiments were when he took the purely dramatic view of his favourite subjects and feelings, as in 232 Miscellaneous Essays fact he appears very generally to have done ; and a passage from it forms an appropriate pendant to the two already cited, as explanatory both of these subjects and feelings, and also of his attitude towards them : Le gout immode're' de la forme pousse a des de"sordres monstrueux et inconnus. Absorbees par la passion feroce du beau, du drole, du joli, du pittoresque, car il y a des degres, les notions du juste et du vrai disparaissent. La passion fre'ne'tique de Part est un chancre qui devore le reste : et comme 1'absence nette du juste et du vrai dans Part e"quivaut a Pabsence d'art, 1'homme entier s'eVanouit ; la specialisation excessive d'une faculte aboutit au ne"ant. It would be impossible to produce an instance of a mind conceiving and expressing more clearly the dangers of an exaggeration of its own tenden- cies ; it would be impossible also to find any possessing in a fuller degree the rare capacity of seeing all sides of a question. In the critical dicta of such a mind, and in the artistic creations wherein it expresses its ideas, there is a truth and a security which are quite absent from the more apparently moderate utterances of less catholic thinkers. It is necessary, therefore, for the reader who is to understand and appreciate fully and fairly the Fleurs du Mai and the Petits Poemes en Prose, to bear in mind the idiosyncrasies of the author as to taste and temperament, and to comprehend fully the aim and object of the work. This latter is, in few words, to give poetical expression and currency to the vague joys and sorrows, the faint Miscellaneous Essays 233 and fleeting impressions and beliefs, that occupy with more or less obstinacy and con- BAUDELA?RE. tinuitv the modern cultivated mind. Possessing himself a typical mind of this sort, open to all influences, able to detect all motives, and to analyse whatever strange fancy or feeling may present itself, Baudelaire possesses at the same time a singular faculty of projecting himself out of the circle of his individual tastes and sentiments, and of depicting these at once with the impassive accuracy of an impartial observer and with the sympathetic accuracy of a fellow-sufferer. He is further qualified for the task by the possession of a quite extra- ordinary spirit of precision and concentration. The curious particulars which M. Asselineau and others give us of his scrupulous attention to the correction of the press are characteristic of his accuracy in other and less mechanical matters. Dealing as he does with a class of subjects in which vague treatment is particularly tempting, and precise treatment peculiarly difficult, he is as accurate in the choice and conduct of his expres- sions as in the choice and conduct of his verse. The Fleurs du -Mai consisted, in the original and suppressed edition, of one hundred poems ; in the second, of one hundred and twenty-six ; and in the Edition definitive of 1869, of one hundred and fifty-one, to which must be added a score or so of pieces which the French publishers have been unable or unwilling to insert, but which are easily 234 Miscellaneous Essays obtainable in Belgian editions. No one of these poems exceeds a few pages in length, and the great majority are quatorzains or quartettes of four-line stanzas. The general title, Fleurs du Mai, which is said to have been of M. Hippolyte Babou's invention, has several sub-titles, under which the various pieces are grouped. The first of these divisions, which contains by far the greater number of the poems, is entitled Spleen et Idfal. The pieces included under it go far to present a complete picture of the mind and its wanderings in what may be called the second Romantic stage. The first, of which Byron is the natural representative and spokesman, contented itself, as was indeed natural in a child of the eighteenth century, with simple discontent at the limited capacity of its own stomach. A universe not materially differing from the present save in two points, greater attain- ability of sweet victuals and a total absence of headache and indigestion, would have exactly met the views of this school. But as La Mettrie pro- duced Diderot, so does Byron produce Baudelaire. The inadequacy of the complaints and desires of the first school was so glaring, that matters could not fail to take the turn which actually followed. The Byronic and Wertherian youth became a highly respectable solicitor or coal-merchant, whose dark imaginings soon limited themselves to a possible crisis in the money market. Gradually and unequally the second stage in Miscellaneous Essays 235 the disorder made its appearance, the great Romantic movement of 1830 being rather a si n of * than its actual em - bodiment. The Romantic of the second stage suffers from a disorder radically different from the measles incidental to his predecessor. He has not as a rule any very glaring outward symptoms. He does not think it necessary to go to bed at 6 o'clock A.M., to drink half-a-dozen of claret, or to wear collars of peculiar cut. He needs not the e(t)\oKpa a group closely connected in subject as well as in treatment. "Tableaux Parisiens" are the effect resulting from the action of the large and complicated, yet still in a manner restricted, life of a great city, upon such an imagination as we have already described. There are in the latest edition twenty of them, almost all sombre in character, but of singularly uniform excellence. " Rve Parisien " and " Les Petites Vieilles" are among the poet's most frequently cited works, and, indeed, few things are more striking than the address to the Eves octoge'naires Sur qui pese la griffe effroyable de Dieu, which drew from Victor Hugo the characteristic remark that Baudelaire " avait cre'e' un frisson nouveau." " Le Vin," which follows, illustrates the same idea as that which we have already noticed in Les Paradis Artificiels the episodes of forgetfulness intercalated in the intervals of spleen by wine and other stimulants. As is usual with Baudelaire, the five pieces which compose this group are of even excellence, but " Le Vin de 1'Assassin," the idea of which, as we learn from other sources, the poet had intended to dramatise, deserves special mention. A man has murdered his wife, influenced by a curious medley of feelings, and the poem renders his soliloquy after the deed Miscellaneous Essays 239 with a quite unrivalled cunning of interpretation and mastery of expression. But it is in the BAUDELMRE. succeeding division, the "Fleurs du Mai," properly and specially so called, that the poet's powers show themselves at the fullest The group " Re" volte," which follows, does not appear to be equally satisfactory. The three pieces of which it is composed, " Le Reniement de Saint Pierre," " Abel et Cain," and " Les Litanies de Satan," whatever their merits in versification and expression, seem out of place in " Les Fleurs du Mai." The temperament which the poet illustrates does not so much oppose Christianity as ignore it. It is not even the Voltairian " 1'infame," but the general arrangement of the universe which is the object of its aversion, and this aversion is not, as a rule, violently expressed. " ReVolte " is, therefore, dramatically a fault, and mars the otherwise admirable composition of the book. " La Mort " in many of its phases worthily completes the work in a strain of consolation, almost of triumph. In the last poem of all, " La Voyage," the author, after again describing, now no longer partially, the temper of the minds on which he has turned the glimmer of his lantern, concludes thus : O Mort, vieux capitaine, il est temps ! levons 1'ancre. Ce pays nous ennuie, 6 Mort ! Appareillons ! Si le ciel et la mer sont noir comme de Pencre, Nos coeurs que tu connais sont remplis de rayons. 240 Miscellaneous Essays Verse nous ton poison pour qu'il nous rdconforte ! Nous voulons, tant ce feu nous brule le cerveau, Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou ciel qu'importe, Au fond de PInconnu pour trouver du nouveau I It is not difficult to appreciate the general features of Baudelaire's poetry. The first thing, perhaps, which strikes a careful observer is that it is singularly un-French. The characteristics which one is accustomed to look for in French poetry, even in that which has been most ex- posed to the denationalising influences of the Romantic movement, are almost entirely absent. The medium of expression is for the first time entirely under the control of the artist Even Victor Hugo and Th6ophile Gautier, able as they undoubtedly are to say anything, show more traces of the restraining influence of the lan- guage than does Baudelaire. Whether this be owing merely to artistic mastery, or to the absorbing and unprovincial character of the thoughts which he chiefly expresses, it is cer- tain that it exists to a degree which prevents, or long prevented, many Frenchmen from thor- oughly admiring the poet. They miss the accustomed turns of thought and expression, the poncif from which not even 1830 was able thoroughly to disengage French poetry. Both in reading published criticisms and in conversa- tion, it is usual to find them preferring the least characteristic pieces, poems such as " Don Juan aux Enfers " or " La Geante," which are merely Miscellaneous Essays 241 very excellent examples of a style in which fifty Frenchmen have done nearly as well, .'i? and two or three better. But the poems BAU UK .LA I K I'j. quoted above, and many others of equal or superior attractions, which exhibit almost for the first time in French the vague yearnings, aspirations, complaints, and despair to which the English and German languages lend themselves so readily, are far less generally appreciated. The iron of language and prosody has entered into the soul of the average Frenchman to such an ex- tent that he can hardly understand freedom ; and this is indeed scarcely to be wondered at by any one who knows what the laws and conditions of French poetry really are. Judicious recurrence to old modes of speech has to a great extent strengthened and suppled the vocabulary, and diligent study of the Pleiade has enriched the repertory of metres ; but what, after all, is to be done with a language which practically possesses but one foot the iamb ? Let any one take an English poet and see what the result of cancelling almost all his anapaestic and trochaic rhythm would be. The French versifier is in fact very much in the position of a man with one hand tied behind his back, and three fingers of the other hand disabled. Nothing in versification is more wonderful than the ingenuity with which the great French poets of the century have endeavoured to get the better of their restrictions, and have managed to produce such lyrics as Victor R 244 Miscellaneous Essays The resemblance of the Petits Poemes en Prose to the work of another early romantic, Louis Bertrand, though avowed, is less striking. Bertrand's work, Gaspard de la Nuif, which a reprint in 1 869 has enabled those who wish to study, no doubt suggested to Baude- laire the idea of elaborating short pieces of prose with the unity, precision, and adornment of verse ; but the execution of the two is very different, and a consideration of its differences would afford an admirable exercise in criticism. Bertrand seems to have proposed to himself the execution in prose of something similar to those poems which have been among the chief results of 1830, poems exhibiting some definite pictorial subject in a pictorial manner. Accordingly his pieces are all very short, and are divided into staves of about equal length, each of which corresponds to a four- line stanza. The book, even in its reprinted form, being not widely known, I may give as a speci- men, not the best but one of the shortest of the pieces : L'HEURE DU SABBAT C'est ici ! et deja, dans 1'epaisseur des halliers qu'e"claire a peine 1'oeil phosphorique du chat sauvage tapi sous les ramees. Aux flancs des rocs qui trempent dans la nuit des pre- cipices leur chevelure de broussailles ruisselante de rose'e et de vers luisants. Sur le bord du torrent qui jaillit en blanche e'cume au front des pins, et qui bruine en grise vapeur au front des chateaux : Miscellaneous Essays 245 Une foule se ressemble innombrable, que le vieux buche- ron attarde" par les sentiers, sa charge de bois CHARLES sur le dos, entend et ne voit pas. BAUDELAIRE. Et de chne en che'ne, de butte en butte, se repondent mille cris confus, lugubres, effrayants " Hum ! hum ! schup ! schup ! coucou ! coucou ! " C'est ici le gibet ! Et voila paraitre dans la bruine un juif qui cherche quelque chose parmi Fherbe mouille'e, a 1'eclat dore" d'une main de gloire. This book is the very triumph of word-paint- ing, a tour de force of the most wonderful kind, executed in most attractive manner, and with matchless felicity and taste, but still a tour deforce. What is the province of one art is necessarily not the province of another art, and this Baudelaire's finer literary sense enabled him to perceive. There is accordingly in the Petits Poemes en Prose much less of the merely pictorial, and much more appeal to the intellect and the imagination. He has also rejected the division into staves or fragments. Every one of the Petits Poemes is a strictly proper and legitimate piece of prose, in which no ornament or device of an unusual or unprosaic kind is em- ployed. But it is prose employed to serve a new purpose, the presentation of a definite and complete image, thought, or story in a definite, complete, and above all, brief form. The precise presenta- tion within contracted limits, and the employment of an extraordinarily refined and polished style, are the sole differentiating factors, but the variety and originality which their introduction produces are unmistakable. Such pieces as Un Hemisphere 244 Miscellaneous Essays The resemblance of the Petits Poemes en Prose to the work of another early romantic, Louis Bertrand, though avowed, is less. ^ L ^, I > A L 1 ) K 1,AI IvK. striking. Bertrand's work, Gaspard de la Nuit, which a reprint in 1 869 has enabled those who wish to study, no doubt suggested to Baude- laire the idea of elaborating short pieces of prose with the unity, precision, and adornment of verse ; but the execution of the two is very different, and a consideration of its differences would afford an admirable exercise in criticism. Bertrand seems to have proposed to himself the execution in prose of something similar to those poems which have been among the chief results of 1830, poems exhibiting some definite pictorial subject in a pictorial manner. Accordingly his pieces are all very short, and are divided into staves of about equal length, each of which corresponds to a four- line stanza. The book, even in its reprinted form, being not widely known, I may give as a speci- men, not the best but one of the shortest of the pieces : L'HEURE DU SABBAT C'est ici ! et deja, dans 1'epaisseur des halliers qu'e"claire a peine 1'ceil phosphorique du chat sauvage tapi sous les ramies. Aux flancs des rocs qui trempent dans la nuit des pre- cipices leur chevelure de broussailles ruisselante de rose'e et de vers luisants. Sur le bord du torrent qui jaillit en blanche e'cume au front des pins, et qui bruine en grise vapeur au front des chateaux : Miscellaneous Essays 245 Une foule se ressemble innombrable, que le vieux buche- ron attarde par les sentiers, sa charge de bois CHARLES sur le dos, entend et ne voit pas. BAUDELAIRE. Et de che"ne en chene, de butte en butte, se re"pondent mille cris confus, lugubres, effrayants "Hum! hum! schup ! schup ! coucou ! coucou ! " C'est ici le gibet ! Et voila paraitre dans la bruine un juif qui cherche quelque chose parmi 1'herbe mouille'e, a 1'eclat dore" d'une main de gloire. This book is the very triumph of word-paint- ing, a tour de force of the most wonderful kind, executed in most attractive manner, and with matchless felicity and taste, but still a tour deforce. What is the province of one art is necessarily not the province of another art, and this Baudelaire's finer literary sense enabled him to perceive. There is accordingly in the Petits Poemes en Prose much less of the merely pictorial, and much more appeal to the intellect and the imagination. He has also rejected the division into staves or fragments. Every one of the Petits Poemes is a strictly proper and legitimate piece of prose, in which no ornament or device of an unusual or unprosaic kind is em- ployed. But it is prose employed to serve a new purpose, the presentation of a definite and complete image, thought, or story in a definite, complete, and above all, brief form. The precise presenta- tion within contracted limits, and the employment of an extraordinarily refined and polished style, are the sole differentiating factors, but the variety and originality which their introduction produces are unmistakable. Such pieces as Un Hemisphere 246 Miscellaneous Essays dans une Chevelure and Les Bienfaits de la Lune show what prose can do, if not to the utmost extent possible, certainly to the utmost extent known to the present writer. Others, as La Belle Dorothte and V Invitation au Voyage, have an additional interest, because we can compare them with the poet's own treatment of the same subjects in verse. But all, with hardly any exception, dis- play the same extraordinary supremacy of com- position and the same mastery over language. Indeed it is not unusual to find persons of no inadequate competence who actually prefer these prose pieces to the author's poetical works, though the preference is probably in some measure due to the curious secret repugnance to French p6etry which prevails so largely and to which I have already alluded. But there can be no doubt that the Petits Poemes en Prose are of almost equal merit with the poems proper, and deserve almost equal attention. The question of the relation of Baudelaire's poetry to morals is one which were it not forced upon me I should either not treat at all or pass over very lightly. For by so doing I should best express my most hearty concurrence with those who deprecate entirely the introduction of such questions into matters of literature, and who deny ab initio the jurisdiction of the court. For my own part I have little or nothing to add to the arguments which have already been produced on Miscellaneous Essays 247 a subject where the argument is on one side and the authority on the other. It is suffi- cient for me > that the introduction of morality is a /u,era/3acrt9 e? aXXo 761/09, a blunder and a confusion of the stupidest kind. 1 But Baudelaire's position in regard to this matter is so strange that it is impossible to pass it over. The author of a condemned book condemned under a regime which has justly or unjustly be- come almost a by-word for the lax morality in conduct and language which it permitted if it did not actually encourage he has naturally seemed to virtuous men of letters a perfectly safe figure, when they happen to be in need of a vituperative parallel. But if these virtuous persons, in quest (of course only in the pursuit of knowledge) of inspiriting indecency, should happen to invest in a copy of the Fleurs du Mai, even with the con- demned pieces attached, I am afraid they would meet with a disappointment similar to that which Mr. Charles Reade described so graphically in It is never too late to mend. Indeed, on reading the book it is impossible not to understand and sympathise with the poet's astonishment at the prosecution and its result The pervading tone, from a moral point of view, is simply a profound and incurable discontent with things in general, a 1 I may be perhaps permitted to try a formula of this endless debate. If any subject can be poetically treated, that subject becomes poetical : if in the eyes of competent judges the treatment is not poetical, either the subject is impossible generally or impossible in the particular case. [1892.] 248 Miscellaneous Essays discontent which may possibly be unchristian, but which is not yet an indictable offence in any country that I know _. ( : 7 A ^ I & A U UrL.Al KK. of. Among nearly two hundred poems there are barely half-a-dozen the subjects of which come in any way within the scope of that elastic but apparently delicate commandment, infringements of which (or rather incitements to infringements of which) put legislators and moralists so terribly on the qui-vive. We all know of course that you may write about murder as often as you like, and no one will accuse you of having committed that crime. You may depict an interesting brigand without being considered a thief. Nor in either case will you be thought an inciter to either offence. But so soon as you approach the other deadly sin of Luxury in any one of its forms, instantly it appears self-evident that you not only take pleasure in those who do these things but also do them yourself. In Baudelaire's case the immorality is, as Gautier says, " si savante, si abstruse, si enveloppe"e de formes et de voiles d'art," that it might surely have been regarded as comparatively harmless. But it may very likely still be asked what the object of the present essay is? Baudelaire, it will be said, even granting his merits, is not a writer likely to be at any time popular, while on the other hand those who are akin to him by their tastes and studies are probably already acquainted more or less with his works. It might be answered Miscellaneous Essays 249 that the latter point is at least doubtful, and that even were it not so, the purpose of BAUDELAIRE. WOUld P laCC question. To show the value of Baudelaire's work a value most certainly still underrated in England, and not even yet always allowed in France has been the object of this essay, and if this has been in any measure attained I am content. But there is a collateral issue of almost greater importance. It is not merely admiration of Baudelaire which is to be persuaded to English readers, but also imitation of him which is with at least equal earnestness to be urged upon English writers. We have had in England authors in every kind not to be surpassed in genius, but we have always lacked more or less the class of farivains artistes writers who have recognised the fact that writing is an art, and who have applied themselves with the patient energy of sculptors, painters, and musicians to the dis- covery of its secrets. In this literary salt of the earth our soil has not been plentiful, and in a transition epoch, when there is nothing very much to say, the want of care in the manner of saying is especially glaring and painful. In this point France has been far ahead of us for the last fifty years, and it is only of rather late years that much effort has been made on our side. With the usual wastefulness of material affluence we have relied on fulness of thought and natural aptness of lan- guage to supply the want of careful and tasteful 250 Miscellaneous Essays industry. In poetry this reliance has not alto- gether failed us. But in prose matters have been far different A hundred years ago style was not an unknown thing among Englishmen ; at the present day it would be easy to count on one hand the living writers who think of anything but of setting down the first words which occur to them as capable of clearly and grammatically expressing their thought. 1 That word and phrase are capable of management till they present a result as different from the first crude jotting as a Vandyke from a schoolboy's caricature, seems to be a truth utterly neglected if not utterly forgotten. Nor can we wonder at this if we look at the singular ineptitude in this matter of the average critic. When professional critics tell us that we must admire a certain poet's poems because he recognises the divinity of endurance, that we must not admire such and such an author's translations because his reading has been desultory, that the " Ancient Mariner " is defective as a poem because it is inconclusive as a plea against cruelty to animals we can hardly wonder at the attitude of the general public. That attitude was formu- lated once for all in the phrase " I must take pleasure in the thing represented before I take pleasure in the representation." Or, as it was 1 This is not quite true now. But the fingers of one hand will still suffice to count those who, having any thought to express, ex- press it in a style at once individual, adequate, and irreproachable. [1892.] Miscellaneous Essays 251 said of old time to one expatiating on the beauties of Flameng's etching after Herrera, ^>^ <* /* Guitare, "I wonder you like that / thought you hated babies" That any one should care for form apart from subject was incomprehensible. To remove as much as possible this incompre- hensibility by precept and example, in criticism as well as in original work, is the business as it seems to me of all English artists, and of the English prose writer especially, inasmuch as his own art is in worse case than any. If in matter of prose style " nous avons perdu le chemin de Paros," it must be rediscovered. To the end that this may be done I know nothing more important than the study of those authors, in prose and verse, who have been most careful and most successful in like attempts before us, and of such authors I know none more suitable to the purpose than Baudelaire. His work measured by volume is not great. But in that work there is no line of careless or thought- less execution, no paragraph where taste or prin- ciple has been sacrificed for praise or pay, for fear or favour, no page where the humanist and literary ideal is not steadily kept in view and exemplified. Valuable and delightful as he is for private study with no further end, he should be yet more valu- able and productive of multiplied delight as a model and a stimulant. It was once reported of a scholar not unknown at one of our universities, that before going to bed he invariably, in conscious or 252 Miscellaneous Essays unconscious extension of ancient habits, read a sonnet of Shakespeare. If this practice should spread, and manuals of profane devotion become common among men of letters, I know none that I should be tempted to adopt myself, and to recommend to others, in preference to the writings of Charles Baudelaire. 1 1 I have nothing to withdraw in these latter pages, but I may invite reference to some cautionary remarks in a later-written essay the first in this volume. I ought doubtless to have remembered the latter part of the oracle [1892.] VIII THE YOUNG ENGLAND MOVEMENT " They recognised imagination in the government of nations as a qualify not less important than reason. They trusted much to a popular sentiment which rested on a heroic tradition, and was sustained by the high spirit of a free aristocracy. Their economic principles were not unsound, but they looked on the health and knowledge of the multitude as not the least precious part of the wealth of nations. . . . They were entirely opposed to the equality of man. ... They held that no society could be durable unless it was built on the principles of loyalty and religious reverence" THE above words, taken from the well-known pre- face to Lothair, refer, it need hardly THE YOUNG b e sa j c j j ^o the writer's own works. ENGLAND ( . , u 1 T> i ^.1. MOVEMENT. They are books, not men. But the passage is by no means an insufficient description of the persons and the principles that directed what is called Young England. Without an investigation which would certainly be long, and would probably be tedious, it would not be easy to trace the copyright of the adjective "young," as applied in this way to a national substantive. 254 Miscellaneous Essays In the second quarter of this century Young France, Young England, and Young Ireland successively exemplified the THE YOUNG . . ,.. , r ENGLAND compound in different ways. Young MOVEMENT. France was mainly literary and artistic, with a slight dash of politics, chiefly in the eccentric form of bousingotisme : Young Ireland was desperately political, with a slight infusion of literature ; but Young England might justly claim to be a good deal wider in its aspirations than its forerunners who crowded to support Hernani, or its imitators who dilated on the excellence of the pike as a vehicle of reform, in the columns of the Nation. It was political first of all, but it took a wide view of politics, and it recognised quicquia agunt homines as part of the politician's subject and material. This was its main differentia, and in this lies the excuse for the foibles which, as in all such cases, attracted most popular attention to it. No doubt some of its members paid more atten- tion to the fringe than to the stuff: that is usual and inevitable in all such movements. No doubt some joined it for the sake of the fringe only ; that is also inevitable. But any one who talks and thinks of it as of a thing chiefly distinguished by the fact that one of its heroes invented white waist- coats, and by the fact that some of its followers emulated, or suggested, the harmless freaks of Mr. Lyle in Coningsby, and Mr. Chainmail in Crotchet Castle, may rest assured that he knows very little about it. Miscellaneous Essays 255 It is never very easy to trace the exact origin of the complicated phenomena which THE YOUNG are called movements. Few people ENGLAND . .. ., . , , , MOVEMENT, nowadays fall into the slovenly error of attributing the Reformation wholly to Luther, or setting down the French Revolu- tion to the machinations of an entirely unhis- torical Committee of Three, composed of Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau. The movement now specially before us being a much looser, and a much less striking, as well as in its immediate effects a much more unimportant, example of its kind than either of these, is proportionately more difficult to isolate and to analyse. But it is per- fectly certain that it was a branch or an offshoot, whichever word may be preferred, of the great Romantic revival which affected all Europe during the first quarter of the century. This revival has been repeatedly judged in a summary fashion, and the judgments have not, as a rule, been very happy. The reason is not far to seek : it is to be found in the general omission to recognise the fact that it was a revolt, but a revolt against usurped authority, and so partook after all of the nature of reaction and restoration. The formulas of the Reformation and the Renaissance had crusted and crystallised the literary and political, as well as to a less degree the social life of Europe : the Romantic revival cracked the crust, and dissolved the crystals. It would lead us altogether too far to attempt the general results of this process, 256 Miscellaneous Essays but one special result is the special subject before us. The political, social, literary, and THE YOUNG ... ,.- r T? 1 J,L j.1. ENGLAND religious life of England between the MOVEMENT. Revolution and the beginning of the nineteenth century had been exceptionally affected by the formulas just mentioned. It had not developed any gigantic abuses. There was no need of an English Revolution, and no general desire for one. English literature had at no time fallen into the portentous state which French literature presented when the great philosophes dropped off one by one. The Church of England was orthodox in belief, decent in conduct, and influential in the State. But everything was con- ventional, and often most absurdly and contra- dictorily conventional. Morals were somewhat loose, but the code of manners was extraordinarily strict. The country was a free country, but the franchise was quaintly allotted, and seats were sold in the open market. The Government was a party Government ; yet from the fall of Bolingbroke to the rise of Liverpool there were not a half-a-dozen statesmen who can be labelled as distinctly Whig or distinctly Tory in principle. The free and independent elector was the Omphalos of the con- stitution ; but it was understood that the free and independent elector would for the most part vote for members of certain houses, or those who were favoured by certain houses. It was the country of Shakespeare ; yet men of genius and talent Miscellaneous Essays 257 wrote Irene and Douglas, and did not put them in the fire when they had written THE YOUNG them. It was the country of Arthur ENGLAND , , , ,.,, . i i i\ MOVEMENT. ( at least of the Arthurian legends) and Harold, of Coeur de Lion and Becket, of Chandos and Chaucer, of Occam and Scotus ; yet people talked contemptuously of the " dark ages," and never willingly looked beyond 1688, except to pay a regulation compliment to Queen Eliza- beth and the Reformers. Of course there were exceptions to all this, but the general sentiment was as described. The sense of historic, social, literary, religious continuity was, if not lost, at any rate dulled. The pattern politician never looked beyond William the Deliverer : the pattern divine made as deep a trench at the Reformation as did his controversial opponents. Nobody, except a few eccentrics, could give a political reason for the faith that was in him, save from the Bill of Rights and the Act of Settlement ; and the Thirty-nine Articles in the same way closed the ecclesiastical horizon. English poetry began, by grace of Dr. Johnson, with Cowley ; as for English social life, it began and ended with the conventional environ- ment of the individual, with the fashion of the family, " the town," the neighbourhood, the Court, or what not. All this the Romantic movement, and its accompaniment the French Revolution, burst up in different ways ; and most of those ways con- cern us a little, for most of them had something S 258 Miscellaneous Essays to do with Young England. It gradually drew into itself, or would have drawn, if it had ever become really powerful (for THE YOUNG i i_ j .LI ^ *. ENGLAND it must be remembered that it was, as MOVEMENT. far as direct effect went, very much of a failure), the dandyism of Byron and D'Orsay, the mediaevalism of Scott, the Anglicanism of Coleridge and Wordsworth. It never, perhaps, as a matter of history, moulded these various things and others into a doctrine of politics and sociology so coherent as that which its most illustrious politician formulates, somewhat as an after-thought, in the motto of this essay, but it assimilated them more or less uncon- sciously. Among the numerous synonyms of the strictly meaningless terms, " Tory " and " Whig," " traditional " and " doctrinaire," perhaps deserve a place. The Young England movement was in all things traditional in its revolt against eighteenth-century convention, just as its enemy the Radical party was above all things doctrinaire in carrying out the same revolt. The Radical could find no logical reason why men should not be equal in privileges, and proposed to make them so : Young England pointed out that they had never been equal historically, and proposed to leave them as they were. The Radical could think of nothing better than laissez-faire for the regulation of social problems apart from the question of political and religious privilege : Young England had an amiable, if somewhat Miscellaneous Essays 259 visionary, theory of mutual assistance which in a different form has been oddly enough THE YOUNG taken up by some Radicals of to- MOVEMENT. day. With regard to the Church and the aristocracy, the Radical, after trying in vain to argue down to them from his general principles, would have none of them : Young England had its memory filled with the exploits of both in the past, and its imagination with the possibilities of both in the future. It was thus at once, and in a remarkable fashion, both reactionary and innovating. It proposed to em- ploy innumerable forces which the official conven- tion of the eighteenth century ignored ; but they were all forces to be connected with to be geared on to, so to speak the traditional machinery of Government and society, in order to bring" into play many wheels which the convention of the eighteenth century had neglected and left idle. One of these forces was literature. The pen was, of course, no new power in politics, but it had latterly been considered a weapon for the irregu- lars. No Prime Minister, between Bolingbroke and Canning, left a literary reputation ; Pulteney, and other statesmen who followed Pulteney, wrote chiefly in secret. This was, of course, the merest convention. It had no precedent before the eight- eenth century, but the contrary ; it had no founda- tion of reason whatever. Accordingly, the Young England movement was essentially a literary movement, and not least a literary movement 260 Miscellaneous Essays applied to politics. The very dandies were not dandies merely, but wrote as earnestly as they dressed. They saw no reason THE YOUNG , ., i ,, , ENGLAND why a gentleman should not be a MOVEMENT. gentleman of the press, and none why a gentleman of the press should not be a gentleman. In that there appears nothing at all extraordinary now. But when it is remembered that, by no means in the earliest days of the Edinburgh Review, Macvey Napier's contributors minced and made difficulties, which may yet be found in his correspondence, on the subject of receiving cheques, it may be seen that it required some courage to take the style and title which Mr. Disraeli took upon himself in the face of Parliament. The members of the movement, and especially one member, did more than despise the disqualification ; they removed it And in so doing they probably made not their least shocking innovation to steady-going Whigs and Tories, who looked on political writing, if not on all writing except that of an occasional poem or book of travels, as professional and undignified. It is no part of the object of the present essay to go through the list of the men who took part in the movement. To mention the dead without mentioning the living would be incomplete ; to mention the living would be to enter on that domain of gossip and personality which, in the present day especially, faithful servants of history Miscellaneous Essays 261 and literature are especially bound to eschew. 1 The worst enemies of Young England THE YOUNG can hardly deny that it was a singu- ENGLAND . . ., , . r^, MOVEMENT. ^iy wide- reaching movement. ine literature of it corresponds to its width of reach, and any review of that literature would be impossible in the present limits. It had dandy literature, poetical literature, political literature literature of all sorts and kinds. If it could have assumed a general motto, probably no better one could have been taken than a sentence from the Life of Lord George Bentinck : " The liter- ary man who is a man of action is a two-edged weapon." Some of its devotees went in for tournaments, some for social reform, some for society, some for politics, some for art. It would scarcely be unfair to claim for Young England, in different ways, Pugin and the " Graduate of 1 The remark still applies, though the ranks have been still further thinned. To one person thus removed, to Lord Houghton, the invention, not merely of the name, but of the movement itself, has sometimes been attributed. The next time that I met him after writing the essay reprinted in the text, he said to me, " I wish you had told me you were going to write that. I could have set you right on a great many things which nobody knows now except Lord John Manners," and he added, what indeed I knew, as to Mr. Disraeli, " He had nothing to do with it at first ; he came in afterwards." I suggested to him that he had much better write the history himself, and he replied that he had thought of doing so, but "he was too old and it was too much trouble." However, on further persuasion, he said he would think of it ; but I heard nothing further of it, and his executors do not seem to have found anything. The Duke of Rutland is now, I think, the very last survivor of the inner cenacle. [1892.] 262 Miscellaneous Essays Oxford," Rossetti and " Felix Summerly." It had an extraordinary influence on the Universities, a still more extraordinary THE YOUNG . _ ,, ,. f ,. ENGLAND influence on the estimate of artistic MOVEMENT. matters in the press. All this, it may be said, was a matter of fringe to use the phrase which has been already adopted. Be it so ; but the fringe is part of the garment, and it is the part which most catches and touches outward things. Fortunately, however, we are not reduced to arguing from mere retrospect. There is to be found, by any one who looks in the British Museum, a remarkable book, entitled Anti-Con- ingsby, and published in the year 1844. It 1S a very unequal book, and very badly planned ; but there are passages and phrases in it which would not do discredit to Mr. St. Barbe himself. At the end of this book there is a satirical programme of a Young England Journal. The chief points in this programme may not be uninteresting, and are certainly unimpeachable as evidences of what was supposed by contemporaries to be the tend- ency of the movement. There are five points in this hostile representation. The Young England Journal will contain " slashing politics on both sides " ; that is to say, it will advocate measures irrespective of the convenience of special sections of the actual governing cliques. It will contain unusually active foreign correspondence ; that is to say, it will try and interest the average Briton Miscellaneous Essays 263 in something beyond the cackle of his bourg. A very strong point is made (with the THE YOUNG evident expectation of a laugh) over MOVEMENT. tnc " History of Cricket," which a young peer will write in it. Another deals with the statistics which are to be given as to " the use of the new wash-houses." Lastly, a dead set is made on the display which will be made in the Young England Journal of " the virtues of Puseyism." These are the five points omitting minor and personal matters which the satirist marshals in his ironic charge against Young England. They were not of the orthodox Whigs or the orthodox Conservatives ; they tried to interest Englishmen in the doings of the foolish foreigner ; they took an interest in athletics ; they condescended to such degrading particulars as the new wash-houses (washing-houses, to be very exact, is the form which our satirist prefers) ; and they held up the virtues of Puseyism. Now let us look at these objects of the scorn of 1844 through the spectacles of half a century later. It may be as well to assure a sceptical generation that they were not drawn up of malice prepense by the present writer. They happen, indeed, to have been published before he was born. But I think, if we look at public matters to-day, we shall hardly find that the subjects to which the Young England Journal was supposed to be about to devote its attention, have been thrown into that dust-bin which in fifty years infallibly 264 Miscellaneous Essays accepts political crotchets that have not life in them. " He was not of God," said Rochester of Cowley, profanely, doubt- THE YOUNG less, " and therefore he could not stand." MOVEMENT. The crotchets of 1844 have certainly stood. It would be very hard to bring the politics of either or any party to-day under those of one of those two " sides " which the scribe of fifty years ago indignantly assumed that all respectable people must adopt. We are not quite so indifferent about foreign correspondence as he seems to have held that we should be, and it will even be found on inquiry that nearly all the most interesting events of the last thirty years have concerned that matter. The subscribers to a journal of to-day would hardly feel scorn (except in so far as in the course of years the thing may have become stale) at a person of title writing a history of cricket, and athletics do not now occupy exactly the position which the satirist evidently thought they ought to occupy. Have we taken up his cue of sublime contempt of wash-houses, or have we interested ourselves more and more, as years have gone on, in wash-houses and all their kind ? There are still, no doubt, varying opinions about the virtues of Puseyism ; but it must be a singular social historian who will deny that what was at that date called Puseyism has grown and spread, and in itself or its offshoots gone far to cover the land in the last fifty years. So the satirist's own Young England is at any Miscellaneous Essays 265 rate tolerably justified of its works by the pro- gress of time. The demolition of that THE YOUNG p ure ly selfish party spirit which saw all ENGLAND f, . . MOVEMENT, things in the conquest or retention of " twelve hundred a year," is something ; the breaking down of the merely insular con- ception of English politics, is something ; the development of the physical education of the people, is something ; sanitas sanitatum is some- thing ; the revival of vivid religious emotion and the knitting afresh of the connection of religion and art, is something. These are truisms pro- positions almost shameful to be advanced, because of the impossibility of denying them. Yet a belief in these propositions is what our satirist of half a century ago charges on Young England. On his head be it ! It is scarcely possible to reiterate too often the caution that the conscious and the unconscious tendencies of this particular movement cannot be too carefully separated. It has just been seen that, if an enemy may be trusted, the description of the Young England crusade, given in the early part of this essay, is unimpeachable. No one can say Quis vituperavit ? for we have the vitu- peration. But no doubt the movement was in many ways a blind movement. The very multi- plicity of its aims, the diversity of its tendencies, the range of its sympathies, probably prevented most of those who took part in it from taking any- thing like a catholic survey of the field and the 266 Miscellaneous Essays campaign. The accounts of its greatest leader are too characteristically fantastic to be accepted literally. They are more THE YOUNG . - , - ENGLAND or less true as summaries of the facts, MOVEMENT. but they are not to be taken as abso- lutely trustworthy analyses of the motives. It is partly from looking at the results, partly from examining, as we have here examined, the testi- monies of opponents, but most of all from com- parison of the state of rival parties, that the true nature of this generally abortive yet specifically fruitful movement becomes evident. To the political student who has some experience in English history, the middle third of this century is a sufficiently dreary time, unless he has the gift of looking before and after. The ineptitude of most regular Whigs and Tories, each convinced that the country must be ruined if it did not em- ploy them, and too many of each willing to ruin the country if it bade them do so as the price of employment ; the opportunism of the Peelites, as dull and as selfish, but destitute of the traditional orthodoxy which half excuses the others ; the doctrinairism of the Radicals, dullest of all and least irradiated by any sentiment, though faintly relieved by a certain intellectual consistency, make up a grisly procession of phantoms flitting across the political stage, in a manner no doubt supremely important to themselves at the time, but singularly forlorn to the posterity of spectators. Amongst these the men of the Young England Miscellaneous Essays 267 movement cannot be said to present a uniform or logically compact appearance. They THE YOUNG are scattered, uncertain occasionally, ENGLAND f ., - - , , MOVEMENT, futile often, running after a dozen hares at once, frequently failing to catch any. But they are at least generous, intelligent, conscious of the past, hopeful of the future, awake to the changed circumstances of modern life, and ready, each in his self-willed and confused way, with a plan of living to meet those circumstances. Some years ago we had a certain saying of Mencius held up to us in a Radical journal (I always like to quote authorities which cannot be suspected of extreme sympathy with my subject) as " worthy to be written in letters of gold in every legislative hall and municipal chamber in the country." The maxim is that, " if the people are made to share in the means of enjoyment, they will cherish no feelings of discontent." I do not know whether Young England read Chinese; it cer- tainly had no legislative hall or municipal chamber of its own. But the motto was its motto from the beginning. Long after it had as a movement merged in the general stream of progress, Peacock, who had satirised its earliest forms in Crotchet Castle^ returned as a kind of ghost to the world of novelists in Gryll Grange. He then found a new development to laugh at. The young peer did not equip a baronial hall or write (to the deep disgust of the author of Anti-Coningsby) on the history of cricket ; but he lectured, and he was 268 Miscellaneous Essays " pantopragmatic." It is thirty years and more since Gryll Grange was written, but young peers are expected to lecture THE YOUNG j i I- U ENGLAND and be pantopragmatic quite as much MOVEMENT. as ever. That is an offshoot of Young Englandism ; whether good or bad, it is not to the present purpose to decide. It is sufficient to point out the numerous ways in which the movement did actually influence English life. For, on the whole, the influence actually ex- erted was no doubt more social than political. It was of the very nature of the movement to blend social and political matters, and so in the long-run the social influence, transformed in the process, became a political one. But directly in the fusion of classes, or rather in the interesting of one class in another while retaining their division, and still more indirectly in its religious and artistic developments, Young England promoted a quiet social revolution. The historian of the future, if not of the present, will hardly hesitate about his answer to the question, Which have done the most for social progress, the Radical doctrinaires with their reductio ad absurdum in the Charter, or the advocates of cricket and wash- houses and libraries, of friendly communication between classes, of the spread of art, of religious services attractive to the general ? These latter ideas have of course long ceased to be the property of one party, political or other. In scuffling they change rapiers on that as on Miscellaneous Essays 269 other stages, and the result is apt to be confusing to all but careful observers. The real THE YOUNG tendency of the Young England move- ENGLAND . . . , , - MOVEMENT, oicnt is, as always, to be sought far less in the writings of those who supported it, than in the writings of those who opposed or stood aloof from it A search on this principle, between 1840 and 1850, with a certain margin on either side of the decade, will not leave much doubt as to the real influence of the thing. Nowhere, for instance, is that influence more apparent than in the early writings of Charles Kingsley, certainly not a sympathiser with it or with many of its developments. Indeed, to trace the ramifications of agreement, dissent, protest, and silent adoption of more or less of the tend- encies of the movement, would be to make a survey of the literature of the period. It is per- ceptible no less in Past and Present (far removed as Carlyle was from sympathy with Young Eng- land) than in the Broad Stone of Honour, little less in The Princess than in Coningsby. If the greatest literary name of the period, next to those of Carlyle and Tennyson, was rebel to its influ- ence and wrote chiefly against it, that is because Thackeray was, in the first place, a satirist before all, and, in the second place (like Mr. Pendennis), singularly weak on politics and general history, and extraordinarily John Bullish in his preju- dices. Young England was not John Bullish it might, perhaps, have been a little more so with 270 Miscellaneous Essays advantage and it certainly presented a good many handles to the enemy who had command of irony. It was exceedingly THE YOUNG ' , , , ENGLAND easy to represent its members as belong- MOVEMENT. ing to " the order of the gilets blancs" and it was not so easy for an admirer of the eighteenth century to forgive the contempt it poured on that period. The difference is of little importance now. Indeed, cynics who see all things in letters may be rather grateful for it as having given us the admirable parody of Cod- lingsby, and the scarcely less admirable caricature- retort of St. Barbe. It has only been mentioned here because, with what it is hard to regard as anything but simple stupidity, some good people have thought to show their allegiance to Thackeray by scoffing at Young England. That is not the attitude of the critic, who does not take sides in such matters. To sum up the social purport of the move- ment, Young England aimed at loosening the rigid barriers between the different classes of the population by the influence of mutual good offices, by the humanising effects of art and letters, by a common enjoyment of picturesque religious func- tions, by popularising the ideas of national tradi- tion and historical continuity, by restoring the merriment of life, by protesting against the ex- change of money and receipt for money as a sufficient summary of the relations of man and man. These were undoubtedly its objects ; it Miscellaneous Essays 271 would be difficult to show that they were the objects of any other party, school, THE YOUNG sect> or c i ass> at t h e time. But (and MOVEMENT. tm ' s * s really the chief feather in the Young England cap) they were objects so obviously desirable that no one school, especially no one so loosely constituted, could monopolise them. English social life at large has, to a great extent, fallen into the lines thus indicated. It has been generally without much consciousness of the indicators, and often with not a little expressed ingratitude to them ; but this matters very little to the historian. Parties much more definite, leaders much more one-ideaed, per- sistent and successful, have before now gone long without recognition, longer without gratitude. But recognition, if not gratitude, comes sooner or later to most, and it may fairly come now to the despised patrons of cricket and wash-houses who afforded so much amusement to the satirist of fifty years ago. The political mot, on the other hand, of the Young England movement was not very different from Lord Beaconsfield's famous boast. It intro- duced the " gentleman of the press " to practical politics ; it made the politician a gentleman of the press. Before 1830 political government had, in the first place, been recognised as belong- ing more or less to a select circle of families and officials, and, in the second, it had busied itself with a very restricted range of subjects. Social 272 Miscellaneous Essays matters rarely came before Parliament, though they sometimes forced their way in just as outsiders sometimes forced THE , . . .... i , , ENGLAND their way into political place and power. MOVEMENT. The purpose, whether clearly or dimly understood and expressed, of Young England was to break down the monopoly while retain- ing the advantages of aristocracy ; to enlarge the sphere of the politician, and to increase the number of levers on which he can work. It was opposed as much to the mechanical alternation of ready-made sets of governors which it found in existence, as to the mechanical manipulation of the constituencies which has grown up since its time. Whether in such a country as England the ideal of a nation following its "natural" leaders (be their letters of naturalisation due to birth or won by brains), feeling the historic estimate sufficiently to prevent change for change's sake, or for mere class interests, yet open to improve- ment, was a chimerical ideal or not, there is no need to attempt to decide here. But of one thing there is no doubt, that Young England was the most striking political result among us of the vast Romantic revival which influenced literature and religion so vitally ; and that in establishing the impossibility of separating political from social questions, it had in its turn at least one result which cannot fail to be permanent. For polemical purposes certain persons have called it a harlequinade. We make much Miscellaneous Essays 273 allowance in England for polemical purposes, and some of the persons who so call THE YOUNG j t k now t h a t it was much more ENGLAND , , . . . MOVEMENT, than a harlequinade. It was indeed, as has been pointed out, in many ways a failure. It had, according to that Scriptural doctrine which has been a favourite in our time with men so different as Guizot, Lord Tennyson, and M. Renan, to perish in order that it might produce its effect. The men who took part in it had too different and perhaps too inconsistent motives to bring it to any complete end. It lacked a general programme and a single pur- pose. Brilliant as was the talent of many who took part in it, none of them, perhaps, had that single-hearted and single-minded insanity of genius which carries a movement completely to its goal. But there is sufficient evidence to show that Young England on detached points was prophetic as well as enthusiastic, and that it divined and helped the tendency of the times in a manner which secures for it a place, and no mean place, in the social and political history of the country. IX A PARADOX ON QUINET ON the 1 4th of May 1883 there was unveiled, at Bourg-en-Bresse, the statue of a French man of letters, less known, perhaps, to English readers than any of his con- temporaries of equal rank. It cannot be said that most of those who have endeavoured to make . Edgar Quinet known to us have gone a very probable way to do it. Not very many years ago, a Professor of Modern History in one of the English Universities is said to have confessed, with much frankness, that he had never heard of him. He has since found a very sympathetic essayist in Professor Dowden, and a still more enthusiastic biographer in Mr. Richard Heath. But Professor Dowden, in an essay of much literary merit, begins by assuring us that " Quinet was first and chiefly part of the conscience of France." Those (and they are probably numerous) to whom this phrase conveys next to no meaning, may well think that Quinet, a somewhat mystical person himself, Miscellaneous Essays 275 has found a more mystical expositor. Mr. Heath, whose book is a very useful biography as far as it: S es (though/with charac- teristic oddity, it stops dead in the very middle of Quinet's life), has pitched it in an equally high key, even where its actual language is not composed of enigmas or conundrums. Treat- ment of this kind rather discourages a modest critic, who on the one hand feels that he cannot pretend to speak in the language of the seer, and who, on the other, is convinced that Quinet is worth expounding to a generation rather unlikely to study him for itself. He is a decidedly volumin- ous writer, and as some parts of the nominally complete edition of his works have, in accord- ance with a bad habit of French publishers, been re-issued with somewhat altered contents, it re- quires some vigilance on the part of the book- buyer or his book-seller to make certain that the volumes are really complete, and do not present any exasperating combination of gaps and dupli- cates. It so happens, too, that Quinet was a man of very varied sympathies, and in order to com- prehend them it is almost necessary that the student should, at some time or other in his life, have taken an interest in divers sets and bundles of ideas. He was a theologian, a politician, a philosophical student, a literary critic, a poet, a historian, all in one, and sometimes all at once, and it requires a good deal of attention to decide in which character he is speaking at a given 276 Miscellaneous Essays moment. But for this very reason he is very instructive study for a generation which, however much it specialises in the * P ^ \jci (^UlNEr* departments of thought which arrogate to themselves the name of science, mixes up its theology, its politics, its history, its poetry, and its philosophy, in a kind of general hotch-potch. I have ventured to say elsewhere that Quinet, like his friend Michelet, exhibits specially the defects of a period of journalism, and it follows almost naturally from this that he is a useful study for those who live in a period of journalism. But he is more than this. The constant mixture of motives and inclinations in him, and the effect which his political, philosophical, and religious views exercised on the quality and character of his literary productions, make him a singularly favourable subject for critical analysis of that effect and mixture. Such criticism is neither the least interesting nor the least valuable department of the critic's work. There are few writers the character of whose work has been more moulded by external circum- stances than was the case with Quinet. He had an idiosyncrasy certainly, but its development was influenced to a far more than ordinary extent by his parents, his place of abode, his friends, his lot in life. His father, Jerome Quinet, was an ex-commissary of the Republican army, a Bona- parte-hater, a man of science, a martinet, and something of a cynic. His mother, whom he Miscellaneous Essays 277 adored as it is the amiable fashion of Frenchmen to adore their mothers, was nominally a P^testant in religion, but really a kind of undogmatic Christian, with a strong emotional religiosity, directed into the vague, an admiration for Racine, and another admiration for Voltaire. His place of abode in his youth was in one of the most out-of-the- way districts of France, the heathy country near Bourg-en-Bresse, where he was born, a country of hills, sequestered pools, malaria, silence and solitude. Quinet grew up in an odd fashion. The name of the reigning emperor (Edgar was born in 1803) was f r years never pronounced in the house, and the natural result, when the boy did come to hear of it, was a fit of suppressed Bonaparte -worship, which, perhaps, was never wholly cured. He was afraid of his father ; he was taught by his mother to pray fervently to no one in particular, and to act scenes of Racine with her. In these circumstances he became a rather precocious and decidedly old-fashioned child. He was by no means unmanly ; on the contrary, when the invasion came, he formed a kind of corps of boy volunteers ; but neither his amuse- ments nor his ways were those of the average boy, even the average French boy. He believed him- self to be desperately in love when he was about thirteen, as, indeed, many other boys have believed themselves to be, but hardly in his high-flying fashion. When he came to go regularly to school, 278 Miscellaneous Essays first at Bourg and then at Lyons, he was anything but happy, though his work, after a little time, gave him no trouble. At Lyons there was a grand barring-out in which his school-fellow, Jules Janin, took an active part. But Quinet wrote to his mother with portentous good sense, that " he had inquired into the reason of the revolt, the leaders had not been able to answer him, and after that, would she believe him fool enough to compromise his new happiness ? " His principal amusement was play- ing the violin. In 1820 Edgar Quinet was seventeen, full of books, full of dreams, not quite cured of his de- votion to the beautiful Pulcheria, and more than ever given to writing long letters of almost rhap- sodical affection to his mother. His masters at Lyons, finding that there was absolutely no mis- chief in him, had, after the first few months, allowed him almost entirely to take his own way. He was accordingly very ill prepared for his father's wish that he should enter the Ecole Polytechnique to prepare for the army. He re- sisted vigorously, and M. Quinet, less tyrannical than many fathers whose characters have been described as more amiable, gave way, and con- sented that he should go into a banker's office. This did not please him much better. As a pre- paration for Paris and the desk, he went home, and resumed for months his wanderings and broodings among the heaths of the Ain. It is Miscellaneous Essays 279 not to be wondered that he found the banker's office even more distasteful than he had anticipated. He held out for a short time, and then resigned his situa- tion and went into open revolt and a garret. For a time his allowance was withheld, and he was in considerable straits ; but there never seems to have been a complete rupture of relations with his family. During two years he did little but read and write, though he made some desultory and rather half-hearted attempts to study law, and went to a certain extent into society. His first book, the Tablettes du Juif Errant, appeared at his own expense at the end of 1821. He made pedestrian tours in various places ; and though he was still nominally at issue with his father, the worst thing that happened to him seems to have been an occasional penitential residence at home, where he wandered, dreamed, and read as usual. At last his opportunity came to him ; he met with an English translation of Herder's Philosophy of the History of Humanity, and resolved to trans- late it himself into French, though he had to learn German first in order to do so. He did his task rapidly, and he had what must be called the remarkable luck of finding a publisher who gave him a hundred pounds for it, and paid part in advance. Out of this Quinet indulged himself in a trip to England in the spring of 1825. His good luck continued. The book introduced him to Cousin, who was already an influential, and 280 Miscellaneous Essays was not, as he was later, a rather jealous patron ; and at Cousin's house he met his A PARADOX dimidium animce, Michelet. He wrote ON QUINET paper after paper ; he made trips into Germany, studied there, fell in love there. He was always falling in love in an amiable and virtuous manner. At length, in 1829, he re- ceived an appointment on a French commission to Greece, where he gained credit, gathered the materials of a book, and enjoyed himself immensely in his own fashion. Indeed, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that Quinet was an exceptionally lucky man. Save for the one short and not very severe period of trial in Paris, everything fell out as he wished it. The home authorities grumbled, but did not proceed to ex- tremities. When he began to live by literature, it was by the kind of literature that he liked and chose. He had none of the drudgery journalism, or schoolmastering, or even inferior official work which the great majority of men of letters who are not born to fortune experience, and from which many of them never escape. He was always able to work as he liked, on what subject he liked, and as long as he liked. Fortunati nimium are such. After the Greek mission, however, his luck turned a little. The Revolution of 1830 seemed promising ; but Louis Philippe and Guizot did not want visionary Republicans, and Cousin was de- veloping his constitutional jealousy. For a time Quinet was put off with fair words, but he was Miscellaneous Essays 281 now completely familiar with the Paris literary circle, and he formed many projects and did some g od work - His ad - mirers have absurdly exaggerated the supposed discovery of Old French poetry that he made at this time. It did him, no doubt, great credit that he appreciated its merits ; but the name of the late M. Paulin Paris, to men- tion no other, is enough to show how absolutely unnecessary it was for Quinet to " discover " the Chansons de Gestes. For two or three years he employed himself in this miscellaneous manner, and in 1831 the death of his father must have made it still more easy for him to follow his own devices. In 1833 he visited Italy; then he pub- lished Ahasuerus ; then he married Minna More, the German girl with whom he had fallen in love years before. His marriage gave him much happiness, and may be said to have settled him in many ways. He planned and wrote Napoleon and Prometheus, went much into society, wrote a good deal in the Revue des Deux Mondes, and generally became something of a personage ; but it was not till 1839, when he was six-and-thirty, that a settled place was found for him by his nomination (still, it is said, rather against Louis Philippe's will) to a professorship at Lyons. In about three years he was moved by Villemain to a chair at the College de France, but in the mean- time he had delivered the courses which he after- wards shaped into the Gtnie des Religions. 282 Miscellaneous Essays There is no doubt that in a certain sense Quinet had found his vocation in the ON QUINET. professoriate. He could, on occasion, A both argue and state cases with accuracy, precision, and vigour in writing ; but he was, on the whole, of " imagination too diffuse" (to borrow Mr. Gladstone's well-known and rather felicitous blunder) to be a great philo- sopher or a great historian. He had not the organs of expression, necessary to the poet, in any perfection or even in any considerable degree ; but he had the oratorical power, the fertile fancy, the enthusiasm, the command of colour, which tell in lectures on any but purely scientific subjects. He was, accordingly, a very effective lecturer even at Lyons. When in 1841 he was transferred to the College de France, a special chair " des litteVatures Meridionales " was created in his favour. Accord- ing to a system which he was one of the earliest to carry out thoroughly, he took much pains to qualify himself for his task by local and miscellane- ous exploration. But unluckily he conceived it his duty to enter into a crusade against the Jesuits and Ultramontanism, being probably stimulated thereto (for cherchez la femme or cherchez rhomme is a constant caution necessary in Quinet's life and works) by Michelet. The two, with some assist- ance from the Polish poet Mickiewitz, succeeded in making the lecture -rooms of the College de France complete bear-gardens, the clericals and the anti- clericals assembling in equal force to Miscellaneous Essays 283 groan or to applaud. Ministerial and pro- fessorial expostulations as to the ex- O/QUINET! traordinary latitude which Quinet was giving himself were in vain ; and at last, when he definitely announced a course on " Les Institutions de 1'Europe Meridionale " (the reader may be requested to imagine the Taylorian professor at Oxford announcing a course on the Inquisition), the authorities had no choice, in the interests of education as well as of order, but to stop so manifest an abuse. Quinet was bitterly mortified, but time soon brought him his revenge. The Revolution of February saw him, musket on shoulder, at the gate of the Tuileries ; and this manifestation was rewarded by the colonelcy of the 1 1 th Legion, by the restoration of his professorship, and by a seat in the Parliament of the New Republic. Here Quinet made no ill figure. If his politics were unpractical, they were generous and not too subversive of things existing ; while, unlike some future comrades in exile even more illustrious in literature than himself, he from the first divined and distrusted Napoleon III. Exile could not but follow the coup (Fttat in his case, and he established himself at Brussels. His first wife had died shortly before, and he married again. His second wife was a Roumanian lady, the daughter of a local poet named Assaki, and the marriage had hardly less influence on him than Michelet's similar union. The seven years of his Brussels 284 Miscellaneous Essays sojourn were not unfruitful, producing Les Esclaves, an edition (with an interesting memoir) A PARADOX of Marnix de Sainte-Aldegonde, a book QN QUINET on Roumanian independence, and other things. But when in 1858, owing partly to political reasons, he moved to Switzerland and established himself at Veytaux, on Lake Leman, the situation proved even more favourable. The country was stimulating to his genius ; and before the fall of the Empire he had 'written Merlin VEnchanteur, a vast prose dramatic epic (if such a heap of contradictions may be allowed) ; his history of the campaign of 1815; La R^volution^ his largest, and in substance if not in style his most important single work ; La Creation, a semi-literary, semi-scientific production on about the same scale as Merlin ; and a great many pamphlets on current events. The downfall of his enemy at once brought him back to Paris, where he spent the time of the siege, frequently exhorting his fellow - countrymen in eloquent harangues on paper. He survived the conclusion of peace four years, dying on the 2 7th of March 1875. He had been once more restored to his pro- fessorship, and was active with his pen till the last, his chief production being L y Esprit Nouveau, published a year before his death. The work thus produced in more than fifty years of literary life is in many ways some of the most curious work to be anywhere found. No competent critic can read Quinet without Miscellaneous Essays 285 perceiving that his literary powers are almost, if not altogether, of the first class. } * No unprejudiced critic can read Quinet without acknowledging not only that no single performance of his is of the first class, but that it is to the last degree puzzling to what single work to refer a reader who is anxious to verify the flattering opinion of his powers just asserted. The Tablettes du Juif Errant is a clever trifle. The Gtnie des Religions has no doubt considerable merit as an early example of eloquent and ingenious generalisation ; but for fully half a century the secret of its com- position has been such an open secret that it can hardly be said, except for the purely literary merit of its detached passages, to be a very re- markable book. All have got the seed of it now, and one tutor at Oxford or Cambridge must have a difficulty in meeting another without smiling as they think of the patient undergraduate noting vues d'ensemble, which he is perfectly competent to take for himself, with a very little audacity. The lectures against Jesuitry and Ultramontanism are fair one-sided polemics, but the whole volume has not a tithe of the force and fire which dwells in Carlyle's single Latter-day Pamphlet. Les Revolutions d'ltalie has much attraction. Some exquisite passages, an agreeable spirit of sympathy, and poetic appreciation, appear in it ; but it is vitiated throughout by the fundamental his- torical delusion, that there ever was before 1859 286 Miscellaneous Essays a political entity called Italy before entertaining which delusion such a student as Quinet must have had to make believe very much indeed. The polemic against Strauss is indeed in parts extraordinarily vigor- ous ; but here the writer is taking as it were a campaign with the Teutonic knights against the heathen, quite independent of his usual military service and allegiance. Marnix de Sainte-Aldegonde shows all Quinet's generous sympathy with liberty ; but it is injured by the wilful shutting of its author's eyes to the fact that his hero was by no means a saint, and still more by his extraordinary want of humour. Whenever Quinet attempts humour he is simply terrible ; Victor Hugo himself is a Swift to him. His description of the young German visiting France in his Allemagne et Italic, and his pretended critique of his own Vacances en Espagne, are among the most deplorable attempts to be funny of which any man of genius has been guilty for this last half century. In the Marnix he is not directly humorous ; but the reader to whom the gods have given some slight appreciation of what humour is, can hardly fail to resent his comparison of Sainte-Aldegonde's dismal ribaldry with the immortal work of Rabelais from which it is imitated. The Roumanian book is of very little value. The poems, verse and prose, narrative and dramatic, literary and scientific, political and auto- biographic, are, by the confession of Quinet's Miscellaneous Essays 287 warmest admirers, at least as full of faults as of beauties. In verse, the author's im- P er> f ect command of poetical expression, of rhythm, of language, of suitable imagery, constantly makes itself felt. In prose, notwithstanding the almost inevitable passages of beauty sometimes of exquisite beauty the obscurity of the plan, the defect of central object and interest, do the greatest harm to the general effect. The letters and the earlier Histoire de mes Idees are charming, but not of a kind to found a reputation upon, though they contain the pieces for discovering Quinet's weakness. The Campaign of 1815 is a careful and in parts effective though rather one-sided narrative, but it is nothing more. Most of the pamphlets are merely occa- sional, and hardly any are very forcible. La Revolution is a work of singular equity, originality, and (in part) merit ; but its apologetic preface, of which more presently, is a key to all the contra- dictions of the author, and those contradictions assert themselves too vividly in the book itself to make it a masterpiece. The books written after the war show marks of age, and to a certain ex- tent an undue crystallisation of ideas. All through the six-and-twenty volumes the reader wanders seeking a masterpiece, a representative and complete work, and he finds none. Yet when he comes to the end of them he has no doubt that, both as a man of letters, and (though with very extraordinary limitations) as 288 Miscellaneous Essays a thinker, Quinet had not many superiors in his own time. If, however, no result came of the reading of six-and-twenty volumes ex- cept the conviction of this paradox, the said reading would hardly be a justifiable employ- ment for any one not condemned to penal servitude for life. For, owing to Quinet's in- equality, he is not even invariably certain to give the reader pleasure, though a volume of beauties, if not two or three volumes, might be selected from him which would not be inferior in literary attraction to anything else of the kind existing. Such passages as that on the eternity of art in the G/nie des Religions, and the wonder- ful description of the cathedral in Ahasuerus, can- not be too highly praised or too much enjoyed. But nobody who reads for anything besides mere amusement indeed, nobody who finds amusement in getting the utmost edification he can out of his reading can fail to ask himself the reason of this singular inequality and incompleteness. The solution is not very long in being found. It suggests itself even after reading the account of Quinet's early life ; it suggests itself perhaps most strongly on comparing his works with those of Michelet, his sworn brother. No one can doubt that Michelet was a Democrat by the whole com- plexion and direction of his temperament. He is not merely intellectually convinced of Democratic theory : he is full of fervent love and admiration Miscellaneous Essays 289 for Democratic practice. His tastes, his preju- dices, his very imagination all have the Democratic colour. With what vigour of conviction, as well as of colouring, does he endeavour to make out the misery and the vileness of feudal times all the while that he is dwelling on them ! How thoroughly is he convinced of the depravity of kings, ministers, aristocrats, and such -like folk ! He is not intentionally unfair to them (he is never intentionally unfair), but it is quite evident that though his humanity would probably prevent him from personally carrying out Diderot's ingenious plan for the joint and combined extinction of the last king and the last priest, he would be intel- lectually sure that it was a most auspicious event. This undoubting conviction, this child-like faith or un faith, lights up the whole enormous mass of Michelet's work. All his purposes and thoughts are harmonious ; no idea gets, consciously or un- consciously, in the way of another idea, and hinders it from reaching its goal. With Quinet it is altogether different He thinks himself, and has for the most part been thought by others, to be a sincere indeed, an ardent Democrat. He is always talking about " le peuple " ; about its virtues, its con- science (that luckless word !), its destinies, its superiority to everybody else ; for, like other theorisers of the same kidney, Quinet seems to imagine an abstract " peuple " which is not U 290 Miscellaneous Essays noble, nor bourgeois, nor peasant, nor artisan, nor all of these things in general, but simply not any of them in particular. He always takes the Democratic side ; but when we come to examine his work, it is surprising how little of the root of the Demo- cratic matter there is in him. He appears to be a Democrat, as far as one can make him out, partly from his early education, and partly from what may best be called a series of dislikes. He dis- liked the fossil legitimism of the Restoration, the splendid injustice of despotism, the mean and arbitrary constitutionalism-up-to-a-certain-point of the July monarchy ; but in England, at least, he might have disliked all these things, and yet have been a vigorous anti-Democrat. In France there was no such opening for him. So he took up Democracy, or grew up into it, and swallowed, as far as he could, the principles of '89, and glorified "le peuple," and talked elegant mysticism about the regeneration of humanity. He had been taught early that Voltaire was the cleverest of men, and, as I have said, had im- bibed from his mother a kind of undogmatic Pro- testantism. This, for a person so susceptible to early impressions as he was, made Catholicism im- possible ; not to mention that the two chief schools of it the rigid, half-logical, half-legal school of Joseph de Maistre, and the rococo-picturesque school of Chateaubriand were ill-suited to him. So he entered into a polemic against Catholicism, Miscellaneous Essays 291 reserving, however, a heavy fire for Strauss and for all who attempted to deny the ON'QUINE? importance of Christianity. He some- where textually implores France to " come out of the Middle Ages," as Thackeray's Bishop of Ealing implored his flock to " come out of Rome." Yet he is himself always going back into the Middle Ages and the Renaissance ; the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries seem to have had, in comparison, little or no attrac- tion for him. In dealing with mediaeval subjects, he keeps up his Democratic polemic nominally, but his handling is entirely different from Michelet's hearty attitude of horror. He lingers over the period, dwells fondly on its literature, its art, its popular fancies and forms. He borrows these latter for his own original work ; he shows by innumerable touches that, but for his horror of Catholicism, he might almost have adopted the standpoint of Ozanam, certainly that of Monta- lembert. These and many other peculiarities breed a perpetual contradiction in him. In one place, for instance, he speaks enthusiastically of De Wette as " the greatest of critics " ; in another, he puts forcibly and unanswerably that sound and conservative argument, which makes all the labours of all the De Wettes in the world idle : " Re"glez, changez, a votre gre* la chronologic des monuments he"brai'ques : vous ne pourrez nier qu'un meme genie ne regne dans tous, et c'est ce ge*nie A PARADOX 292 Miscellaneous Essays qui est & lui seul toute la difficulte." The con- trast might be repeated indefinitely in other material. It reaches its ON QUINET height in the Revolution : and the critique which he himself prefixed to that book is the most convenient exhibition of it. There is an air of mild surprise about the tone of this paper which is eminently characteristic, and trans- parently genuine. " On m'a rdpondu," says Quinet, " comme on faisait il y a soixante et dix ans a Pitt et Cobourg." " What on earth," the reader who is more impatient than inquisitive may exclaim, "did he expect them to answer ? " The rejoinder to this is, that Democracy, in Quinet's acceptation of the word, is something that never was, is not, and, it may without rashness be asserted, never will be on land or sea. He is, perhaps, the most distin- guished, and certainly the most amiable, of the respectable visionaries who, postulating that De- mocracy shall have all the virtues which have been historically observed in its opposites, and none of the vices which have been historically inseparable from itself, reproachfully ask us afterwards how we can resist their demonstrations of the admirable results to be expected from a Democracy of their fashion. All through his works, and especially in the later of them, the contrast between the sense which Quinet attaches to words, and the sense that the practical politicians of the party to which he apparently belongs attach to them, is alternately ludicrous and bewildering. Shortly before his Miscellaneous Essays 293 death he defined marriage as " la communaute" des choses divines et humaines." How ad- m i ra bly this expresses the sentiments of the French Republican party whose general political views the treatise in which these words occur was written to propagate and defend ! If there is one principle which is inseparable from Democracy, it is the paramount authority of universal suffrage. Without that, Democracy becomes utterly chaotic, hopelessly invertebrate ; its own principles fail to justify it or help it in the slightest degree. What, then, does Quinet say about universal suffrage ? " En quoi," cries he indignantly, just as the highest of English Tories might cry, " en quoi ce vote de millions d'hommes pourrait-il me lier ? " Certainly I have no intention of arguing this point across the Styx with Quinet, or fighting it out when we meet. But it may be permitted to ask, in return, " What becomes of Democracy if this noble protest of the individual is to be permitted ? " The state of confusion and contradiction into which Quinet sometimes comes in his later works is positively pitiable. In the latest of all he has to deal with the question of the decline of population in France. The cause, he says, is obvious to any one who opens his eyes. This cause, which we have only got to open our eyes to see is what ? It is that " Le Catholicisme Ultramontain est aujourd'hui une religion de depopulation." This was published gravely in 1874 by a man whose 294 Miscellaneous Essays knowledge of modern history was far beyond the common, and whose general intelligence was still farther beyond it. The ad- vance of France in Catholicism during the last century is a fact so undoubted, the work- ing of the Code Napoleon has in each generation been accompanied by such a recrudescence of faith, that there is no more to be said. These examples might be multiplied indefinitely ; indeed, it is impossible to take up a single book of Quinet's without finding them. Thus, in one place, he argues very learnedly, with the help of De Candolle and Captain Galton, to prove that the characteristics of aristocracy and race cannot possibly be found in modern persons of title, because of the constant influx of plebeian blood. Drop L' Esfrit Nouveau and take up La Rfyubltque, books published at a very short interval, and you will find him arguing that these very signs of race are to be found, and chiefly found, in the plebs itself. If this be so, how in the name of wonder can intermixture with the plebs destroy them ? A survey, then, of this curious character and his remarkable work authorises, I think, some con- clusions of a practical kind. Quinet, as we have seen, handled a very large number of subjects, and found himself in opposition to, and by consequence in alliance with, remarkably .different parties and persons. We see him taking the positive side in religion as against Strauss, the negative as against the orthodox Churches ; defending an advanced Miscellaneous Essays 295 democracy in his lectures and his books, while manifesting throughout all his imagi- native and most of his critical work an ardent sympathy with periods, in- stitutions, and ideas with which monarchy and aristocracy are indissolubly connected, and which draw most of their charm and interest from their appeal to monarchic and aristocratic sentiment. It is unnecessary to trace further the origin of this contradiction. It may have been due to his early education, or to a genuine idiosyncrasy, or merely to conflict between the spirit of the age and a temperament and taste too weak to assert themselves fully and undividedly. That is a minor point of psychological biography and does not matter much. But what is obvious is that the conservative, and even what would be called by some people the reactionary, elements in Quinet were the source of his strength, while the destruc- tive and revolutionary elements were the source of his weakness. It is chiefly to his having constantly felt in Conservatism while he strove to think in Radicalism, that his failure to achieve a higher position than he actually holds in literature is due. Quinet's strongest faculty was no doubt his faculty of poetic appreciation, though it was unfortunately not accompanied by any adequate faculty of poetic expression. In exercising it he tries to cheat its natural bent, by selecting Prometheus and Ahasuerus for heroes. But the effort is entirely vain. When religious, 296 Miscellaneous Essays monarchic, and aristocratic ideas present them- selves, his imagination kindles at once ; when ideas of the contrary sort are to be dealt with, it sinks and flags. Nor is this inclination a matter of sentiment merely. No controversial passage in his work has half the force of the Strauss refutation. Even in the Revolution, when he had become as it were a Democrat by profession, the strongest passages are anti-Democratic, as is shown by the lukewarm admiration of Republicans for the book. But it would not be wholly fair to say that he had mistaken his vocation, or had been turned aside from it by early associations and teaching. In justice we must rather say that there was no vocation for him in his own country and time. He is perhaps even a stronger instance than Montalembert, inasmuch as his intellectual and literary power were greater by far than those of the author of Les Moines f i.L MINIATURES. siderable lengths ; but Parny s father PARNY . refused his permission to the lovers to marry. The victim consoled himself after the manner of his kind. He wrote a volume of Poesies Pratiques, which at once made him famous, and with which, after the manner of Mr. Pendennis and other verse-makers, he afterwards incorporated much verse originally addressed to other young ladies besides Elonore, but now transferred to her. She married another ; and Parny, finally quitting Bourbon, established himself in a rustic abode near Paris, where he lived very comfortably on his income and nursed his reputation. This life was disturbed by the universal dis- turber the Revolution. That the poet thereby ceased to be Evariste D6sir de Forges, Vicomte de Parny, and became plain Citizen Evariste Parny, does not seem to have troubled him much. But his fortune suffered from the financial confusions of the time, and at last he found himself nearly penniless. A friend in high places gave him a post, which he did not keep long ; and he then took seriously to literature. The chief result was the somewhat famous Guerre des Dieux. In spite of what Sainte-Beuve says, it is difficult to feel much admiration for this performance. It consists of the regulation (and by this time very stale) philosophe ribaldry at the expense of Christianity ; Miscellaneous Essays 339 the wit is very easy wit, and the thing had been much better done before putting out A FRAME OF o f s {ght entirely the question whether it MINIATURES. ' ., PARNY. ought ever to have been done at all. It delayed its author's admission to the Academy for some time, but probably consoled him in his pocket. As Napoleon rose Parny's circumstances improved. As has been remarked, Fontanes, the literary adviser of the Emperor, thought highly of him, and he was pensioned. About the time of the projected English invasion he produced a very wonderful work of a patriotic character. This is entitled " Goddam ! Goddam ! par un French -Dog"; and the terrific irony of the title gives only a faint idea of its remarkable contents. It is a poem in four cantos, containing an allegory of the Norman Conquest. George III. appears as Harold ; his sons under the not too obscure veils of Ansclare, Kyor, Cambrid, etc. The Ministers demand two hundred thousand guineas wherewith to corrupt Parliament, and, on the King demurring, point out that all prices have risen, those of members of Parliament with the rest. The English army marches under the con- duct of familiar spirits, such as L'adroit Robbing, Cheat sa facile sceur. Ansclare bombards Dieppe, and valiantly defeats several French fishermen. A Duchess (of Devon- shire) kisses a savetier a slight variation on the English form of the legend. At last the decisive 340 Miscellaneous Essays battle is fought. The hired Scotchmen behave well, but the English troops, gorged overnight with A FRAME OF MINIATURES. Le lourd pudding et le sanglant rostbeef, make a miserable show. Their few valiant chiefs Le pesant Thorthenthron, Le froid Cranncraft, le triste Whirwherwhon are slain, all the Royal princes run away, and at last Harold, hotly pursued, and in search of an asylum, leaps the gates of Bethlehem Hospital, handsomely relinquishes his crown, and disappears with the words J'aime les fous et je reste a Bedlam. It would, I think, require a wide search through literature to find a parallel to this extra- ordinary production, written by a man of such talent as Parny's. That talent, however, was dis- tinctly on the wane by this time. He addicted himself to the writing of epics, put forth a poem called Les Rose-Croix, which is quite unreadable, and occupied himself towards the close of his life with two still longer poems of a less respectable nature. The first was entitled Les Amours des Reims de France, and he wisely burnt it. The other was an extension of the Guerre des Dieux into a Christianide, the manuscript of which is said to have been bought by the Restoration Govern- ment, careful of the morals and religion of its Miscellaneous Essays 341 subjects, for thirty thousand francs. Can anybody name a European Government in the A FRAME OF present day which is prepared to give MINIATURES. * . , , , , , - , PARNY. twelve hundred pounds for the manu- script of an anti-Christian poem ? All this later work is a mere excrescence. Parny's claims as a poet rest upon his four books of Potsies Pratiques and upon a certain amount of miscellaneous work of a similar kind. The reader of these at the present day may at first, but only at first, find their phraseology artificial, their ideas trite, their passion sentimental. Before he has turned a very few pages he will, if he be in the habit of critically reading poetry, begin to under- stand why Parny appeared to his contemporaries an apostle of naturalism and freshness. There is no attempt at innovation of language, and little at rejection of the commonplaces of the time, the sighs and the flames, the Cytheres and the myrtes, and all the rest of it. But these artificial things are somehow used naturally, and not as if they were artificial, while the undefinable air of simple grace which is over the whole is felt at once. Let us take his most famous piece, the following : VERS SUR LA MORT D'UNE JEUNE FlLLE Son age e'chappait a 1'enfance ; Riante comme 1'innocence, Elle avait les traits de Pamour. Quelques mois, quelques jours encore, Dans ce coeur pur et sans ddtour Le sentiment allait dclore. 34 2 Miscellaneous Essays Mais le ciel avait au trdpas Condamne ses jeunes appas. Au ciel elle a rendu sa vie, Et doucement s'est endormie Sans murmurer centre ses lois. Ainsi le sourire s'efface ; Ainsi meurt, sans laisser de trace, Le chant d'un oiseau dans les bois. Only a few of the writers of the Greek Anthology and of our own seventeenth -century epitaphists have reached such simplicity and grace in treating such a subject. The poet's more amatory style is difficult to illustrate, because, though this part of his work is harmless enough, it has a decidedly creole warmth of colouring, and because, short as are most of the poems, they are yet somewhat too long for quotation. The following very short extract must suffice : DEMAIN Vous m'amusez par des caresses, Vous promettez incessamment, Et vous reculez le moment Qui doit accomplir vos promesses. " Demain " dites-vous tous les jours L'impatience me deVore ; L'heure qu'attendent les amours Sonne enfin, pres de vous j'accours : " Demain " re'pe'tez-vous encore. Rendez gr&ce au Dieu bienfaisant Qui vous donna jusqu'a present L'art d'etre tous les jours nouvelle ; Mais le temps, du bout de son aile, Touchera vos traits en passant ; Des demain vous serez moins belle Et moi peut-6tre moins pressant. Miscellaneous Essays 343 Both these extracts have been chosen rather to show Parny's power of managing the A FRAME OF simplest and most ordinary language MINIATURES PARNY. tnan t exhibit his command of colour and imagery. His work, however, is very far from deficient in these latter respects. A series of tableaux, entitled Les Dtguisements de Ve"nus, are admirable of their kind, and deserve, now that tapestry has come again into fashion, to be wrought out therein. Le Voyage de Cttine is a pleasant tale in verse, and the injurious remarks made in it by a negro who for the first time beholds European beauty are excellent. But we must fall back on the elegies and a few detached poems to Ele"onore for Parny's most enduring contribution to literature. He belongs, of course, to the school of the bards of light love, of whom there are so many. Their song in too many cases becomes insipid to generations whose mode of expression is different from theirs. But Parny has special saving gifts. These are, in the first place, his admirably limpid style and the sweet attractive kind of grace of which he is a master ; in the second, the real tenderness, not to say passion, which pervades his work. He has neither the occasional insincerity and tinkle of Moore, nor the pedantry which sometimes mars our otherwise supreme amatory verse of the Caroline period, nor the monotony of Johannes Secundus, nor the weari- some stock metaphors and cut-and-dried emotions of the French school from Chaulieu to Dorat. It 344 Miscellaneous Essays may be that he only seems a child of nature when compared with these latter. But, if he be not altogether a child of nature, he A FRAME OF ,, , .,j c , . , . . MINIATURES. is the child of a very admirable art, PARN y. limited, indeed, and intermittent in its application, but at its best more than sufficient to give him his passport to at least a minor kind of immortality. The immortality he enjoys is, it is to be feared, of an exceedingly minor kind. But as long as any lover of poetry takes the trouble now and then to recur to his work, so long will the true ring be found in him, amid much that is false and much that has for those who are not his contemporaries absolutely no sound, whether false or true. Che"nier is the fashion and Parny is not, yet there are notes in Parny which Che'nier never succeeded in sounding on his elaborately Grecian lyre. II. DORAT All who know anything of the French literature of the last century know that the Philosophical Church was not much more tolerant of dissenters and free-lances than the elder and more august institution. Those who were not sealed of the tribe of Fran5ois-Marie had to lay their account with a good deal of detraction, a vast amount of sneering, and occasionally some virtuous indignation, which Miscellaneous Essays 345 at this distance of time seems to us not a little ridiculous. Among the men of letters A FRAME OF wno refused to be ranked among the MINIATURES. .,/., ,, , -r DORAT. phtlosophes was the pleasant versifier whose name stands at the head of this section. Dorat, though by no means a man of strait-laced morality, and not inclined to be violently orthodox, was too easy-going, too little given to thinking on serious subjects, and at the same time, we may perhaps say, too sensible to join the army of the enemies of LInf&me. He did more than keep aloof from them ; he occasionally presumed to attack them ; and he had his reward. It became the fashion to sneer at him as a literary trifler. Lebrun, the best representative of Pindar which eighteenth- century France could lay its hands on, called him " Le ver luisant du Parnasse." Galiani, the wittiest and wickedest of all the Philosophic tribe, remarked of his charmingly illustrated books, " Ce poete se sauve du naufrage de planche en planche." Grimm, or some one of Grimm's contributors, informed him that he was " a canary." Dorat did not trouble himself much about these assaults : / and, in his " Epitre aux grands hommes des coteries," showed himself to be possessed of good wit and of better sense than his enemies. The opening lines are worth quoting : Ecoutez-moi, mes chers amis, Je n'aurai pas le ton severe. Soyez (si cela peut vous plaire) 346 Miscellaneous Essays Lumineux, profonds, e*rudits. Regnez par vos calculs hardis Sur la peuplade litteVaire. De Pdtersbourg jusqu'a Paris Tendez le filet salutaire Ou vont se prendre les esprits Que la clarte se deVeloppe Avec chacun de vos pamphlets, Qu'elle e"tonne par ses reflets Tous les aveugles de 1'Europe. Faites galoper vos agens, Extirpez les erreurs funestes ; Mais, pour Dieu, soyez bonnes gens Et si vous pouvez, plus modestes. It would not be easy to hit off the pretensions, the fussiness, and the foibles of the missionary Philo- sophers with, as Cowley somewhere says, " a more gentlemanlike correction." Claude Joseph Dorat was born in 1734 and died in 1780. He belonged to a family of some position and wealth, and expressly disclaimed descent from his quasi-namesake, the teacher and member of the Pliade. After trying the Bar, and serving for some time as a mousquetaire, he betook himself definitely to literature, and made even his enemies confess that he at least possessed industry. Although he died a comparatively young man, his works fill twenty volumes, con- taining examples of almost every style of literature that the time admired. He began, of course, with tragedy, and the collaboration of Crbillon the elder did not save Zulica from qualified damnation. Dorat, however, was not in the least discouraged Miscellaneous Essays 347 discouragement, indeed, seems to have been an unknown feeling with him and during A FRAME OF his life he produced a baker's dozen of MINIATURES. ,. . , . , DORAT. tragedies and comedies, into which the inquisitive may be earnestly dissuaded from looking. But he was very far from con- fining himself to the drama, and indeed if he had done so, he would not be worth writing about. Nor do his prose efforts (romances sometimes in the fairy style of the younger' Cre"billon, and some- times made up of long chains of letters) deserve much more attention. Les Sacrifices de Famour, Les malheurs de V inconstance, Volsidor et Zulmiane, are hardly worth turning over, even for the sake of their illustrations, by which, according to Galiani's spiteful but appropriate pun, Dorat's books are generally saved. His real forte lay in the direction of light poetry of the kind which Voltaire had made fashionable, with an occasional echo of Chaulieu and his followers, or even of older work. Dorat's special mania was the epistle. There is hardly any end to his verse -letters. Some- times they bind themselves up in bundles as in the case of a deplorable " Chanoinesse de Lisbon." More often they are detached, and of these detached epistles the number and the sub- jects are infinite. Dorat and Mr. Toots would have entertained a sincere sympathy for one another. The poet sends epistles to Voltaire, to Hume, to every noteworthy personage of his time ; 348 Miscellaneous Essays he writes "To an atheist," "To a comet," "A la raison d'un homme qui n'en a pas." Had it occurred to him, he A FRAME OF 11 . i L. -M.M. ' ^i MINIATURES. would certainly have written an epistle DOR AT. to Things in General. Besides these Epfares he has odes, epigrams, songs, fables, verse- tales and every conceivable variety of occasional poetry. His fortune, which was fair, enabled him to bring out his books in a delightfully coquettish dress, and upon the illustrations of one alone he is said to have spent thirty thousand livres. The titles correspond to the dress. Les Baisers is indeed borrowed, as well as its contents ; but Mes Fantaisies, Mes Nouveaux Torts, and so forth, are more original, and in their way not less pleasing. Unfortunately for Dorat the sale of his books by no means recompensed him for these extravagances, and for the similar but still more costly fancy which he had for gorgeously equipping his worth- less plays. He got rid of most of his fortune, though it does not appear that he was ever in uncomfortably embarrassed circumstances. At last, and before very long, it was time to die. He was warned of his danger and proceeded to make preparations for it in a style which, from all that we hear of him, seems to have had about it less bravado than childish whimsicality. He had his hair dressed and powdered, arrayed himself fully, and shortly after expired upon a sofa "en corrigeant une e"preuve." Of all the queer variations of " Meum est propositum " that are on record, Miscellaneous Essays 349 certainly this is the queerest. I do not think that literary men of twenty years' A FRAME OF standing usually regard the correction MINIATURES. - - j 11 i i- i_.r i DORAT. f proofs as an ideally delightful em- ployment. It will be sufficiently obvious from what has been already said that Dorat can only be enjoyed by persons of a certain catholicity of taste, and by those persons only when they are in the mood. If Dresden china, minuets, powder, and so forth, are distasteful, Dorat will be distasteful too. If they are not distasteful, Dorat will be able to supply very appropriate music to accompany the entertainment. He is absolutely destitute of passion ; indeed, it may be said that he does not even attempt it. One of his best things is a letter to a young lady " Qui me proposait d'aller passer un mois avec elle " and who seems to have been sentimental enough to recommend the country for the place of the joint sojourn. Dorat suggests the disadvantages of the proceeding in language which Ce"limene, under similar circumstances, would have been thankful for. But while there is thus no passion in him, and hardly any sentiment, he has not a few compensations. He is invariably good- humoured; he is rarely cynical in his good-humour; and though he sometimes tried hard to attain to the fashionable indecency, he was quite unable to make it rude or offensive. His best verse, too, is extraordinarily light and sparkling. " Les Ven- danges de Ve"nus " is remarkable for the manner 350 Miscellaneous Essays in which the short verses catch up and, so to speak, return the quick music of the song. In this French lyric poetry is apt to fail. A FRAME OF ,, , c ', A . , . MINIATURES. the grave harmony of the Alexandrine DO RAT. having so deeply stamped itself upon the whole prosody of the language that it is diffi- cult to get rid of it. If Philine had known this song, it is probable that she would have sung it, and William Blake must surely have had it in his head when he wrote a certain vigorous epigram about "age and sickness." Of this sort of sparkling verse there is not a little scattered about Dorat's twenty volumes. Here for instance is an almost perfect example of the lestement enleve kind, not in the least shocking in the language of its day and generation, whatever it may be now : Que pour Bacchus ou pour L' Amour On fasse une partie, Que ce soit de nuit ou de jour J'en ai d'abord en vie ! J'ai toujours soif, j'aime sans fin Rouge et blanc, brune et blonde ; Je voudrais boire tout le vin Et baiser tout le monde ! A poet who more absolutely demands the aid of the selector could hardly be found. Yet the original volumes have, as has been before remarked, a special charm of their own. No one who has read them fails afterwards to associate in some inextricable manner the light and fluttering verses with the illustrations so bountifully scattered about them. These illustrations, in the earlier volumes Miscellaneous Essays 351 chiefly by Eisen, in the later by Marillier, are admirable examples of the charming A FRAME OF taille douce, the secret of which the MINIATURES. . i_, . i DORAT. eighteenth century seems to have carried off with it. In the fables, for instance, every poem has its headpiece illustrating the subject, and besides this an elaborate tailpiece, which may or may not directly concern the poem, but which is always delicately conceived and ad- mirably drawn. Sometimes it is a Cupid paying attention to a hooped and powdered damsel in a " cabinet of verdure," sometimes a bouquet of roses and myrtles and all the flora of Venus, sometimes a conventional pile of masks and scutcheons and armour, but always something attractive and fanciful. The frontispieces, as usual, are simple, but especially careful in style. All this forms a very pleasant and seductive framework and scenery for the Parnassus in which Dorat, according to his enemies, performs the undignified functions of glow-worm and canary. All I can say is that uglier birds than canaries, and insects very much more offen- sive than glow-worms, have sometimes found their way to the holy hill. When the contemporary critics were in a good humour they admitted that, if Dorat was an imitator of Voltaire, he was at any rate the best of such imitators. I should be inclined to say that in some respects he was less an imitator of Voltaire than was thought, at a time when it was matter of breviary 352 Miscellaneous Essays that Voltaire had tried every style and was un- surpassable in all. In mere wit, of course, the comparison would be absurd. A FRAME o* _, L . , j . , MINIATURES. But Dorat has made a closer approach DO RAT. to really lyrical versification than his master. Voltaire's verse, admirable as it is in some ways, usually deserves the reproach, from which so little French poetry from Malherbe to Lamartine can escape, that it is Alexandrines cut up into lengths, and it very seldom possesses the springing and bounding movement of which Dorat, as has been shown by example, was capable. To keep up the zoological metaphors with which his enemies treated him, no poet was ever more of a butterfly than Dorat. But butterflies in fine weather and in suitable surroundings are pretty enough to look at III. DfiSAUGIERS In the extremely interesting autobiography which BeVanger has left us he gives an account of his own convictions at the beginning of his career as to the necessity of some alteration in the style of French song-writing. The old themes were com- pletely worn out, he says, and the old treatment of them had ceased to be acceptable. A people who had made the Revolution had risen above tales of " tricked husbands, greedy lawyers, and Miscellaneous Essays 353 Charon's bark." One cannot be too grateful to any theory which led to the writing A FRAME OF o f Dans un grenier qu'on est bien & MINIATURES. . , * _, DESAUGIERS. vitigt ans or of the Chanson des fous." Nor is it necessary to inquire too deeply whether, as often happens, the poet, writing long after the events, did not attribute to formal reasoning and system the results of instinctive taste and sometimes of accident. It is sufficient to say that the implied censure of the style of song-writing prevalent in his own youth is amply justified. Of that style De"saugiers was the last, the most finished, and the most popular representative. Even after Branger there have never been wanting in France persons who lament the innovations of the later singers, and who sigh for the more artless and Gallic strains of the good- natured president of the Caveau. " D^saugiers c'est la chanson " somebody has said, with the ineffable satisfaction at summing up the matter neatly which only a Frenchman can feel. Ap- parently, then, we have only to examine De"saugiers to discover the essence of what has been sometimes held up as a specially French form of composition. He was born in 1772 at Frejus, of a musical and literary stock. His father was a composer of some note, his elder brother wrote operas and plays in considerable numbers, and though the younger brother betook himself chiefly to the graver ways of diplomacy, he left some literary remains. Marie -Antoine- Madeleine, the second 2 A 354 Miscellaneous Essays son, was very early distinguished as a general favourite. A benevolent bishop wished to make an abb6 of him ; but Dsaugiers A FRAME OF , , . , .,. ., . , , , MINIATURES. was not long in deciding that he had MSAUGIERS. no vocation ; and, indeed, about the same time the Revolution made the professional prospects of an abb6 none of the brightest. Such political sentiments as he had were decidedly Royalist, and he was glad of the opportunity given him, by the marriage of his sister with a colonist, to leave France. In San Domingo he again showed himself master of Vart de plaire, until, unluckily for him, the negro revolt broke out. He was captured by the rebels, and was within an ace of being shot. Escaping this fate, he embarked for the United States. But his bad luck pursued him. On board ship he sickened of some disease which was mistaken for yellow fever, and the terrified sailors unceremoniously put him ashore. Forlorn and destitute, he was taken in by a lady, who nursed him till he recovered. Philadelphia rather than New York was then the chief resort of strangers in the United States, and there Dsaugiers for some time maintained himself by giving lessons on the pianoforte. He did not, however, remain long in America. The worst days of the Revolution were past, and Paris was an irresistible attraction to a man of De"saugiers's temperament. Thither he accordingly returned. From this time to the end of his life his chief occupations were theatrical, the writing of the Miscellaneous Essays 355 songs by which his name is now preserved being mainly an amusement. He wrote, A FRAME OF chiefly in collaboration, about a hun- MINIATURES. . , . ... ... . ,. , DESAUGIERS. dred vaudevilles, feenes, parodies, and similar dramatic trifles, which are only distinguished from the general run of such things by the greater abundance and better quality of the couplets which abound in them. After a time he was made director of the Vaudeville Theatre, and managed it with considerable success, not- withstanding his easy-going temperament He was one of the most popular personages of his day, though, like most men in such a position, he was sometimes anonymously attacked, opinion being kind enough to father some of the attacks on B Granger. Perhaps, however, his most important post was the presidentship of the celebrated Caveau. This convivial society, originally founded in the second half of the last century by Gallet, a grocer who ought to have saved his fellows from the obloquy attached to their name, survived for more than a century in the form of a club which later generations have accused of displaying very little of the jollity of its ancestors. The life of the Caveau, however, has been far from continuous, and there have been not a few breaks in its history. In the second and third decades of this century, under Desaugiers, it was in the height of its glory. The devotion of most of its members to Bacchus was by no means merely conventional, and Desaugiers was one of the most ardent of the 356 Miscellaneous Essays devotees. As is the case with most professedly gay persons, stories are told of his uneasy melancholy when he was not under the A FRAME * . ., f , TT MINIATURES. influence of company and wine. He DES AUGIERS. paid the penalty usual with the seekers of artificial paradises. Symptoms of calculus showed themselves as he grew older, and in 1825 he succumbed to an operation which had become necessary. De"saugiers has in one sense a really historical interest He is perhaps the last literary specimen of the skipping, grinning, and shrugging type which our good grandfathers used to associate with the idea of a Frenchman. Large portions of his work depend for any comic effect that they have, or ever might have had, upon the pantomimic gestures by which they are intended to be accompanied. Thus in one case the singer is directed to yawn and stretch his arms all through the song. Another resource of his is the affixing of refrains of the^an- pan, zic-zoc order to his verses. In yet a third class, and it is one of the largest, provincialisms are the means resorted to to raise a laugh. Cadet Buteux is a blockhead who goes through all sorts of experiences, and then gives an account of them in jargon. Even Frenchmen at the present day do not seem to find any great fund of amusement in such verses as Depuis longtemps j'avions le coeur tout en cendres Pour les appas d'mam'selle Manon Giroux. Nous v'la fiances. . . . J'lis Les deux gendres J'm'dis, "gna qeuqu' mariage la-d'sous.' ; Miscellaneous Essays 357 It is quite easy to understand that songs of this kind, sung in good character after A FRAME OF dinner, might obtain applause : but it MINIATURES. . 111 DESAUGIERS. ls not eas 7 to understand how any literary merit can be thought to be discernible in them. It is true that De"saugiers does not always rely on such means of obtaining a laugh. He has passages of simple Epicurean lyric which are far from bad of their kind, such, for instance, as the following : MORALITfe Enfants de la folie, Chantons ; Sur les maux de la vie Glissons ; Plaisir jamais ne coute De pleurs ; II seme notre route De fleurs. Oui, portons son delire Partout ; Le bonheur est de rire De tout. Pour e"tre aim des belles, Aimons ; Un beau jour changent-elles, Changeons. Deja Phiver de 1'age Accourt ; Profitons d'un passage Si court ; 358 Miscellaneous Essays L'avenir peut-il etre Certain ? Nous finirons peut-etre Demain. The matter of this is trivial enough, but its manner is light and brisk, and not destitute of a certain music. Another successful style with D6saugiers was the proverb-song, in which some well-known maxim serves as a refrain. His work in this line seems to have been more serviceable to BeYanger as a model than any other; and admirers of the greater singer may trace some resemblance to his faire in these verses of the lesser : TOUT CE QUI LUIT N'EST PAS OR Pour une chanson nouvelle J'invoquais mon Apollon, Quand je vis a ma chandelle Se bruler un papillon ; Et cet incident tragique M'inspira, sans nul effort, Ce refrain philosophique : Tout ce qui luit n'est pas or. Sans argent, sans esperance Figeac plaignait son destin. " H ! morgue ! d'la patience," Lui dit Pierre, son voisin ; " L'soleil luit pour tout le monde." II luit, j'en tombe d'accord, Mais lorsque 1'estomac gronde Tout ce qui luit n'est pas or. Dans mille pieces mesquines Qu'un jour voit s'eVanouir, Costumes, de'cors, machines, Tout est fait pour eblouir ; Miscellaneous Essays 359 Mais au bout de la quinzaine La baisse du coffre-fort Prouve au caissier qu'a la scfene Tout ce qui luit n'est pas or. Quand une Agnes se dit riche, Quand un fat vante son nom, Quand un me'decin s'affiche, Quand une belle dit non, Quand un voyageur bavarde, Quand un Anglais se dit lord, Mes amis, prenez-y garde : Tout ce qui luit n'est pas or. These two pieces are perhaps as good short specimens of Dsaugiers as can be found ; and, though they may show that he exerted some in- fluence on Be>anger's style and versification, they show still more clearly how great an advance his pupil made upon the manner, the subjects, and the general tone of the master. It was this tone which Marchangy charged Be>anger with altering and spoiling by the introduction of political and other burning topics into the hitherto peaceable region of the chanson. Readers may judge of the justice of the charge and of the reasonableness of the regrets which have sometimes been expressed in France at the alteration. " Mais a present c'est bien fini de rire " is no doubt a lamentable reflection ; but, if the laugh can only be kept up by such unreal means as those which Desaugiers resorted to, per- haps it might be as well to cry for a change. In some of his longer and narrative pieces he displays, indeed, the usual French faculty of telling a tale 360 Miscellaneous Essays pleasantly, and with a certain pleasant slyness. But on the general run of his songs hardly any more favourable verdict can A FRAME o p U J A!.'' *.!- A.1- L 4JL L i. MINIATURES. be pronounced than this that the best D S AUGIERS. of them would be fair impromptus for a convivial meeting, and that the worst of them are at about music-hall level in point of wit, if not of vulgarity. Nor must it be thought that this is merely the opinion of Englishmen, enemies of gaiety, eaten up with moroseness and spleen, and apt to depreci- ate the excellences which they cannot comprehend. The view of De'saugiers which I have taken is decidedly less unfavourable than that of M. Hippo- lyte Babou, a Frenchman of Frenchmen, and one who specially devoted himself to the light litera- ture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. " Rien de moins gai au monde," " inanite"," " fadaises," "ton glacial," " Boufflers d'arriere- boutique," are some of the stones which, in spite of a somewhat ghastly punning prayer of De'saugiers or somebody else, M. Babou flings at the harmless president of the French " Cave of Harmony." In this judgment there is perhaps some harshness. But it is not to be denied that De'saugiers is some- what dreary reading at the present day. He was, unluckily for himself, born just too early or too late, and the Revolution did not do him the favour which it did to many of his contemporaries, the favour of cutting off their heads, so that they could not make anachronisms of themselves. De'saugiers Miscellaneous Essays 361 was certainly an anachronism. With Lamartine and Chateaubriand in full force, with A FRAME OF Victor Hugo " mewing his mighty MINIATURES. , . . , T . DESAUGIERS. youth, with Courier, and Lamennais, and others, adjusting themselves in this way and that to the new order of things, he went on imitating in falsetto the tones of Colle" and Panard, tones always more or less false, but in his time jarring hopelessly with all around. Worse than all this, too, was the existence of a contem- porary, not many years his junior, who had seen and grappled with and triumphed over the diffi- culties which he himself ignored or shirked. It is, however, that contemporary who gives Dsaugiers his interest. It is very seldom critically permis- sible to regard any author merely as a foil to another ; but the temptation to do so is irresistible in the case before us. The true value of B6ranger can hardly be estimated without some knowledge of his immediate forerunner. rv. VAD It is sometimes rather irritating to lovers of English literature who happen to be also lovers of French, to perceive what a much better fate French authors of the second or third class have than our own in the matter of reprints. Even our great classics are not always too accessible to those who cannot hunt up original editions ; and as for the 362 Miscellaneous Essays lesser stars, most of them may be said to be hardly accessible at all. In France, on the other hand, the three great A FRAME OF 11 ^ f ii/n\T T\'J M. /-i_ ..' MINIATURES. collections of MM. Didot, Charpentier, V ADE. and Gamier supply for a few francs copies of almost all French authors of any emi- nence since the middle of the seventeenth cen- tury, with a good many of earlier date ; while the innumerable editions de luxe which MM. Lemerre, Quantin, Jouaust, and others, not to mention the Bibliotheque ElzeVirienne, have supplied during the last thirty or forty years, extend the list to almost every author, not merely of eminence, but of any considerable literary and personal interest. It is certainly a curious contrast that, taking names almost at random and as they occur to the memory, we should have no full modern editions of Otway, of Green Spleen-Green or of Anstey ; * while in the course of four years two careful and elaborate reprints of the author whose name stands at the head of this article appeared in France. In 1875 M. Julien Lemer made an excellent, though unpretentious, selection of Vade" for the Gamier collection. In the spring of 1879 "ce polisson de Vade" " (as Voltaire, with exceeding injustice, used to designate him) had the honour of mak- ing the first of a sumptuous little collection of eighteenth -century poets, published by Quantin. 1 These three names require no change at the end of thirteen years, though there has been a certain amount of rather unsystematic reprinting among us meanwhile. [1892.] Miscellaneous Essays 363 This volume, however, pretty as it is, is not nearly so full or so characteristic as the earlier A FRAME OF selection. MINIATURES. ,, ,, . - , , , VADE. Vade is one of those authors who have a real interest, and even a real importance, in literary history, for reasons not directly concerned with the intrinsic merit of their works. In the first place, the history of his reputation is a very curious one. He had for a time a great vogue, and that vogue ceased chiefly as a consequence of the unceremonious borrowing of his name for the purpose of father- ing work of greater merit than his own. Voltaire, as we have noticed, was wont to mention him with anything but respect, his crime being the unpardonable one of friendship and association with the detested Fre"ron. But no sooner was he dead than Voltaire took his name, and set it to some of his own best productions. The Contes de G. Vade, and, still more, the famous Pauvre Diable, helped, by their attribution to a certain non-exist- ent Guillaume and his equally non-existent cousin Catherine, to obscure the fame of the authentic Jean-Joseph ; and Voltaire's example raised up a whole family of pseudonymous Vads, who per- formed the same ungrateful part of sometimes eclipsing and sometimes throwing discredit upon the personage to whom they owed their name. Except that his works continued to be repub- lished, and that he retained a vague celebrity as the inventor of the genre poissard, Vade" passed 364 Miscellaneous Essays pretty well out of literary cognisance. It was even long before he reaped the benefit of the nineteenth-century tendency to A F RAME OF ,,, , MINIATURES. rummage the cupboards and waste V ADE. heaps of the past for curiosities. Until quite recently his best chance of being read was the fact of the existence of an exceedingly beauti- ful edition of him, printed "on grey paper," but by no means " with blunt type," at the very best period of the Didot press, and embellished with lovely tinted illustrations. Madame Angot and M. Zola between them helped to resuscitate him, the argument being apparently that the langue verte of one day is as interesting as the langue verte of another, while in Vade" there is at least plenty of fun, no horrors, and no morbid pseudo-psychology to spoil the enjoyment of him. Jean- Joseph Vad was a Picard.and was born at Ham in 1 7 1 9. He died at Paris in 1 7 5 7, so that his life, if a tolerably merry one, was also decidedly short. He was an incorrigible dunce in his youth, but before very long showed a talent for verse- writing. A series of small employments in the Revenue Department at last landed him in a tolerably comfortable sinecure at Paris, where he thenceforth lived. It was not long before he began to write comic operas and other light pieces for the stage ; and his scraps of song, either in these pieces or published independently, soon made him a popular favourite. One of Voltaire's charges against him is that to him was due the famous and Miscellaneous Essays 365 unlucky surname of Bien-Aim, which was con- ferred upon Louis XV. at the time of A FRAME OF the temporary dismissal of Mme. de MINIATURES. ~, A , , VAD. Chateauroux ; and the accusation at least shows that Vade" was popular. Like most of the song-writers of the eighteenth century, he was strongly Royalist ; attachment to the monarchy and hatred of the English being the obligatory stock-in-trade of a chansonnier who wished to please at once the people and the police. But Vade"'s private character, from the point of view of the easy-going morality of the time, was far from bad, and the term polisson is certainly an injustice. Even the censorious and uncharitable Colle", who, in the journal which he was secretly keeping, registered every peccadillo of his friends, expressly describes Vade" as " un galant homme qui a des mceurs et de 1'honnetete." It is not known what induced him to take to the genre poissard, but it is certain that he imitated no one in so doing. The market-women of Paris had long been famous for freedom of tongue, and it had been there, as elsewhere, an occasional amuse- ment with idle men of fashion to visit the Halles and attempt to bandy compliments with them. But Vade" seems to have been the first to attempt, on any large scale, the presentation of their dialect in literature. His experiments in this way took various forms. His principal work is a mock- heroic poem entitled La Pipe cass/e, in which it is told how an estimable person named La Tulipe 366 Miscellaneous Essays had an invaluable and beautifully coloured pipe broken in his efforts to restore peace be- tween his enraged womankind. Next A FRAME F ..... T ~ MINIATURES. to this in importance come Les Quatre V AD. Bouquets poissards, telling the unhappy fate of a lover who, with the harmless design of buying a bouquet for his mistress, has to run the gauntlet of the flower-sellers' satire. Many of Vade"'s comic operettas are also written in the same language. But perhaps the best of his work is to be found in the Lettres de la Grenouillere and in the Dejeuner de La RdpJe, both of which are mainly in prose. The personages of the first work are M. Je"r6me Dubois, fisherman, and Mile. Nanette Dubut, laundress, and the letters are written with a very charming delicacy and at the same time with great naturalness and truth of touch. Delicacy is not the prevailing characteristic of the other work mentioned ; but in vividness and quaint nature it is quite the equal of the Grenouillere correspondence. Nor is all this work so frivolous as it appears at first sight. Vade" does not merely aim at surprising his patrons with something strange, and tickling them with something in- decorous. He has a real sympathy with his subjects, a sympathy which breaks out in such lines as those in which he describes his fishwives, who En gueulant arpentent Paris Pour aider leurs pauvres maris. It is this sympathy, no doubt, which gives value Miscellaneous Essays 367 to his work and renders it interesting in spite of its apparent frivolity and sometimes of A FRAME OF jt s unworthiness. Of form and culture MINIATURES. - _ . , . . , , . ^ VADE. Vade had little or nothing. One of his favourite styles was the amphigouri, a variety of nonsense-verse to which the earlier eighteenth century was very much addicted, and which consisted mainly in an assemblage of the most incongruous names and things arranged so as to give plenty of startling rhymes, thus : Alaric A Dantzic Vit Pdgase, Qui jouait avec Brdbeut Au volant dans un ceuf Au pied du mont Caucase, Etc. etc. etc. Perhaps this nonsense is better worth quoting than it seems, for it may be remembered that the eighteenth century had not a monopoly of the taste for literary follies. Vad6, however, is no doubt the lightest of all the foam bubbles that were flung up before the great torrent dashed over the precipice of the Revolution. " On ne ressuscite pas la gaiet^, qui n'est que gai," some one has said, and the phrase certainly applies to Vad His poissarderies are hardly suitable for quotation. In his other work it is only now and then that one comes across a lively and well -expressed passage like the following : Je suis un Narcisse nouveau, Qui s'aime et qui s'admire ; 368 Miscellaneous Essays Mais dans le vin et non dans 1'eau Sans cesse je me mire. En y voyant le coloris, Qu'il donne a mon visage, De 1'amour de moi-meme e"pris J'avale mon image. He left behind him, besides these vain and light compositions, a daughter as vain and as light as they are. Mile. Vad was for a moment one of the stars of the Com^die Fran9aise, a star, however, who appears to have shone rather by her personal gifts than by any great success in her art. She died, it is thought, before she was five- and-twenty, everything that owed its origin to Vad6 being apparently as short-lived as it was graceful and popular. Vad, however, has a real importance in the literary and social history of the eighteenth cen- tury. It was he who, in however frivolous a manner and for whatever unworthy purposes, first brought up into the notice of the cultivated and fashionable world of Paris the actual thoughts, speech, and manners of the lower classes. Litera- ture even in its least constrained moments had for nearly a century been always in full dress. Every man of letters had talked or tried to talk en marquis, and when an alternative was wanted to Versailles, it was found only in the hopelessly unreal Arcadia peopled by the models of Sevres and Dresden. Vade^s boatmen and laundresses, fishwomen and forts de la kalle, were studied from nature, even if the studies were caricatured. For Miscellaneous Essays 369 half a century at least, from the flourishing of Chaulieu to the flourishing of Bernis, A FRAME OF a \\ tfght poetry had been utterly and MINIATURES. - ,. ,. . , TT j, VAD * malice prepense artificial. Vads strains were, at any rate, natural. Nor does it seem to be a far-fetched explanation of his apparently fanciful choice of style to connect it with the general uprising of the wider and more popular sympathies which were shortly to show themselves in the social and political theories that in their turn led to a terribly practical revolution. From the poissardes of Vade" to the poissardes of '93 is a long step ; but it was in La Pipe casste and Les Bouquets poissards that the idiosyn- crasies of the working-men and working-women, with whom their children were destined later to make so terrible an acquaintance, were first in- troduced to the world of marquises and great ladies, of tax-farmers and drawing-room abbe's. Here, as in other instances, Samson made sport for the Philistines for some time before he ex- hibited his powers as other than a sport-maker. It is something to have been master of the cere- monies on the first introduction of two such classes to each other, and this position at least " ce polisson nomine" Vade" " may claim. V. PIRON The author of La Mttromanie is one of those 2 B 37O Miscellaneous Essays literary persons of whom everybody knows one thing, and hardly anybody knows any more A FRAME OF Ci-git Piron, quinefotrien, Pas meme Academician, is familiar to thousands of readers who have no idea whatever of the history and other writings of the witty epigrammatist, or whose further know- ledge, if it exists at all, is limited to his only famous comedy. Among those few, too, who have taken the trouble to inform themselves further, there is a very considerable difference of opinion as to the merits of the " machine a saillies," as Grimm termed him. One class of critics (including, it must be confessed, names of the greatest weight) is inclined to see in the Burgundian poet little more than a wilful offender against decency, and a spiteful Ishmaelite of the pen, whose errors are barely here and there redeemed by witty sallies and pointed raillery. Another class reverses the arrangement, and regards Piron as something of an eighteenth-century Rabelais, whose sins are more than atoned for by the humour and verve of his style and sayings. In this case, as in many others, it is necessary to look narrowly at literary records, in order to appraise properly the judg- ments which literary historians have passed, for there is no branch of history in which second-hand opinions are so readily accepted and so persistently handed on. When we remember that Piron was emphatically a free-lance, that he scandalised the Miscellaneous Essays 371 orthodox at the same time that he lampooned the philosophers, that while he wrote A FRAME OF thirty-two epigrams on Fre>on and fifty- MINIATURES. - _ r f . . . PIRON. f ur on Desfontames he was little more sparing of his irreverent criticisms on their great opponent, it becomes clear that we should accept opinions about him with a good deal of caution. On the face of it the author of the epigram-epitaph cannot have been a dull man ; and the uncle who, when his niece had clandestinely married, and had kept the secret, fearing his dis- pleasure, made over the greater part of his property to her in solemn form, beginning "Je legue a Nanette ma niece, FEMME DE CAPRON," with the words femme de Capron in capitals, cannot have been an ill-natured one. Alexis Piron was born at Dijon on the gth of July 1689, and died at Paris in 1773. It does not appear that he entertained for his native city any of the enthusiasm which a Dijonnais of this century, the admirable and unfortunate Louis Bertrand, has expressed ; but his father, Aim6 Piron, was a zealous Burgundian, and showed his provincialism, if the term may be allowed in a new and more favourable acceptation, in more ways than one. He wrote a good deal of verse in patois, especially Noels, a Burgundian form which La Monnoye, the well-known commentator on Old French, made famous. Alexis very early showed himself to be a son of his father in the possession of a tendency to rhyme. He showed, too, the 372 Miscellaneous Essays curious mixture, or rather alternation, of piety and profanity which afterwards characterised him. One of his earliest preserved A FRAME OF . , ,. i . MINIATURES. poems is purely devotional in character PIRO N. and very earnest in tone ; another is of so scandalous a kind that it was perpetually brought up against him, and excluded him from the Academy. He was educated for the law, but seems to have had little affection for it, and at length he wandered to Paris and drifted into literary work of one kind or another. At first he undertook the dreary and ungrateful task of " buckwashing " the bad verses of a nobleman. Soon, however, he displayed a certain dramatic talent. Piron was one of those literary men who are better at tours de force than at regular work, and it was a tour de force that brought him into notice. The jealousy of the Come'die Fran$aise had procured an edict whereby the Ope>a Comique was restricted to a single actor speaking on the scene. This remarkable relegation of theatrical conditions to their earliest form completely non- plussed the usual writers, including even Lesage, and the manager, in a despairing state, appealed to Piron, whose offers to write he had previously refused. Piron gave him Arlequin - Deucalion, which was completely successful. He did not limit himself to work of this kind, but transgressed into regular tragedy and comedy, in which walks he had, with the exception of La Mtiromanie, no great success. His reputation, however, was high. Miscellaneous Essays 373 The Academy, indeed, shut its doors to him, earning thereby an unceasing shower of A FRAME OF ^he bitterest and best epigrams in the MINIATURES. , -. , -..7 PIRON. language. But the King and many noblemen were his liberal patrons ; and he seems, at any rate during the last half-century of his life, to have been very well off. His private life was chiefly led in two different circles, both interesting in their way. He was a member of the first Caveau, sharing its chief honours with Gallet, Panard, Cre"billon fils, and Gentil-Bernard. He also had a kind of feminine cenacle, which recalls, as others of his characteristics also recall, some particulars of the life of Swift. Piron's feminine allies were Mile. Quinault, an actress, and Mile, de Bar, companion to the Marchioness de Mimeure. The former was beauti- ful and witty ; the latter, witty and ugly. After twenty years of friendship Piron married Mile, de Bar, and tended her with unfailing gentleness during an attack of mental disease which soon came upon her, and which killed her at last. Mile. Quinault's affection does not seem to have been altered by the marriage, and the poet con- tinued to be on the best terms with her. In their correspondence, prose and verse, Piron is Binbin ; she is Tonton ; her cousin, Mile. Bali- court, is Bouri, and so forth ; while benevolent patrons, like the Count de Livry and the Count de Saint-Florentin, make occasional appearances. To the outer world, however, Piron was very far 374 Miscellaneous Essays from being amiable, and very few of the prominent men of letters of the day escaped his sting. One of his chief abominations A FRAME OF XT- 11 J i r*\ t ^1 MINIATURES. was Nivelle de la Chausse, the inventor PIRO N. of ComJdie larmoyante. Two of Piron's hits at this personage are worth quoting. The first is in allusion to the frosty welcome given to a piece of the victim's : Chaleur subite Faisait trop vite Pousser les bids ; Monsieur Nivelle Adit "Qu'ilgele", II a gele. The second explains itself: Connaissez-vous sur I'He'licon L'une et 1'autre Thalie ? L'une est chausse'e, et 1'autre non, Mais c'est la plus jolie. L'une a le rire de Venus, L'autre est froide et pince'e ; Honneur a la belle aux pieds nus ; N argue de La Chausste! Here is one of his innumerable assaults on the Academy, the chief merit of which is the mock gravity given to it by a slight archaism of lan- guage : En France on fait, par un plaisant moyen, Taire un auteur quand d'e'crits il assomme. Dans un fauteuil d'Acaddmicien, Lui quarantieme, on fait asseoir cet homme. Miscellaneous Essays 375 Lors il s'endort et ne fait plus qu'un somme. Plus n'en avez prose ni madrigal. Au bel esprit ce fauteuil est, en somme, Ce qu'a 1'amour est le lit conjugal. Very admirable, too, is his summary of the tedious process of reception. Says the novice, " Monsieur, grand merci " ; replies the director, " Monsieur, il n'y a pas de quoi." The stories of his sharp sayings are infinite. Once, it is said, in one of his curious fits of piety, he attended the levee of the Archbishop of Paris, who, wishing to be gracious, asked him, " Avez-vous lu mon dernier mandement, Monsieur Piron ?" Whereto the poet replied, " Et vous, Monseigneur ? " Even better known is the legend of his listening to a poem full of plagiarisms which some aspirant insisted on read- ing to him. At each reminiscence he solemnly lifted his hat, until at last the author, nettled, asked him what was the matter. " C'est que j'ai la coutume de saluer les gens de ma connaissance," was the reply. One can fancy how that young man loved Piron ever after ; and, in truth, a great majority of his acquaintances in the literary world had some- thing of the kind to quicken their affection for him. When he died, we are told that only Diderot, of all the men of letters in Paris, attended his funeral. The fact is characteristic of Diderot ; characteristic also of Piron's popularity. There have been three or four reprints of selections from Piron of late years ; and at the appearance of one of these the Revue des Deux 376 Miscellaneous Essays Mondes asked whether a reprint of him could be said to be called for. If the question be decided with reference to the actual A FR AME OF 1 1 r iU 1 ^ J ^ MINIATURES. material value of the work reprinted, the P i RO N. answer might perhaps be negative. But good French, good wit, and good style can never be obsolete. The inspirations of the author of La Mttromanie were almost always purely occasional, and the occasions were by no means always of the worthiest But in his manner of availing himself of them there was much of the specially French merits which distinguished the best literature of the eighteenth century. The sharp crispness of language, the admirable concinnity of expression, the strong and straight-flying (if too often spiteful) wit that directed and accompanied his sallies, are not perhaps at the present day so frequently or so invariably found in his successors as to make the representation of this model superfluous. It was Piron's misfortune that he lived at a time when there was not much employment for occasional literary talent which had no particular vocation, and that his incurably frondeur spirit excluded him from the ranks of the philosophe party, the only one which had anything like a common object and a serious purpose. Born fifty years later, he would have been a formidable rival to Chamfort and Rivarol in the war of sharp sayings which preceded the Revolution. Born a hundred years later, he would have been an ideal journalist of the lighter kind, and might have made in his Miscellaneous Essays 377 own way a reputation equal to that of Paul Louis Courier or of Benjamin Constant. As A FRAME OF fa was> h e devoted himself avowedly to MINIATURES. , . , , . , . . , . PIRON. nothing, and nothing has rewarded him in its own way. The following verses are the extended form of the famous epitaph which he himself compressed into a distich for the benefit of short memories : Ci-git . . . Qui ? Quoi ? Ma foi ! personne, rien. Un qui vivant ne fut valet ni maitre, Juge, artisan, marchand, praticien, Homme des champs, soldat, robin ni pretre, Marguillier, meme Acade'micien, Ni frimagon. II ne voulut rien tre, Et vdquit nul : en quoi certe il fit bien ; Car, apres tout, bien fou qui se propose, Venu de rien et revenant a rien, D'etre en passant ici-bas quelque chose. Unfortunately in the case of those " qui ne veulent rien tre " posterity, not altogether unreasonably, is a little prone to take them according to the letter of their desire. Epigrams may be good things to temper despotisms with, but they are themselves a somewhat untempered mortar wherewith to build a durable reputation. VI. PANARD An essayist who should not fear to touch the titles of Charles Lamb might perhaps take a worse subject than the decay of drinking-songs. For 378 Miscellaneous Essays the last half-century it would be difficult to find any instance in the more prominent literatures of Europe of a Bacchanalian A FRAME O F , ,, - ,, , MINIATURES. poet, and the instances of those who PANARD . have recently tried to make themselves exceptions to the rule are rather more convincing than the silence of the majority. The mcdadie du siecle does not seem to have had any unfavourable effect on the consumption of fermented liquors, but it certainly has interfered with their poetical celebration. Perhaps nobody now requires to be lyrically converted to the faith of Bacchus ; per- haps nobody has a sufficiently genuine belief in that faith to celebrate it. Certain it is that neither in English nor in French has the worship of the dive bouteille been poetically fertile of late. The last considerable man of letters in England who produced genuine drinking-songs was, I suppose, Peacock. Even he, however, had ceased to write them for many years before his death. Gryll Grange contains no drinking-song to match its admirable "Love and Age" ; Crotchet Castle even has but one snatch, though a noble one ; and if we want genuine stuff of the kind, we must go back to Maid Marian and her elders. It is true that Thackeray's Ballads contain certain exhortations to conviviality, the poetical merit of which no one will contest. But these are rarely, if ever, pure anacreontics, and the charm of " The Mahogany Tree," of " The Age of Wisdom," and of the close of the " Ballad of Bouillabaisse " is due at least as Miscellaneous Essays 379 much to their melancholy as to their mirth. It may be laid down that no one in Eng- A FRAME OF j anc j wnose youth came much later than MINIATURES. , / PANARD. tne days of the Regency has had the secret of this sort of composition ; in France it is very doubtful whether anybody born since the Revolution has had it. This peculiarity of our time makes us look with something more than merely antiquarian interest on poets who have in good faith given themselves up to this extinct variety of poetry. Such a one, and a remarkably typical representative of the class, was Panard, the chief singer of the first Caveau, whose glass (holding a full bottle of claret) is to this day religiously preserved by the society which inherits the title, whose practice was fully commensurate with his theory, and whose character appears to have approached with re- markable closeness the ideal of an anacreontic and epicurean bard. Panard was none of the hypo- crites who chant Bacchus under the inspiration of toast and water, and exhort their friends to be merry over a captain's biscuit ; nor was he, as far as at this distance of time it is possible to dis- cover, in any way hypocritical in his affectation of joyeusete. He kept no malicious diary in secret, like Colle", jotting down the weaknesses and mis- fortunes of his friends ; he carried on no war of epigrams with the world at large, like Piron ; he had even, it would seem, no moments of depression and Q)\oKpa manners, and raise into prominence as an ordinary phase so different a side of human character, that the analytic novelist may once more find ready to his hand new material. This in its turn will grow stale, just as the ordinary middle-class person, fairly educated and acquainted with the novelists from Scott downwards, is now getting stale in all European countries, even in those which, like Russia and America, seem as if they ought to have plenty of virgin soil to culti- vate. And then that generation, whether it is the next or the next after, will have to return as we are doing to the romance for something fresh. For the romance is of its nature eternal and pre- liminary to the novel. The novel is of its nature transitory and is parasitic on the romance. If some of the examples of novels themselves par- take of eternity, it is only because the practitioners have been cunning enough to borrow much from the romance. Miss Austen is the only English novelist I know who attains the first rank with something like a defiance of interest of story, and we shall see another Homer before we see another Jane. As for what we often hear about the novel of science, the novel of new forms of religion, the novel of altruism, and Heaven knows what else, it is all stark naught. The novel has nothing to do with any beliefs, with any convictions, with any 398 Miscellaneous Essays thoughts in the strict sense, except as mere garnishings. Its substance must always be life not thought, conduct not belief, THE ENGLISH ,, . ,, . , ,, NOVEL the passions not the intellect, manners ,g 92 and morals not creeds and theories. Its material, its bottom, must always be either the abiding qualities or the fleeting appear- ances of social existence, quicquid agunt homines not quicquid cogitant. In the first and most important division there has been no change within recorded history, and if esoteric Buddhism were to become the Church of England established by law, and a Great British Republic were to take the place of the monarchy, there would be no change in these. There would probably be none if the whole human race were evicted from this earth and re-established in Mars. In the other class of materials there is a change, and the very fact of this change necessitates a certain intermis- sion of dead seasons to let the new form germinate and ripen. There is perhaps no reason why a really great romance should not be written at any time. But it is almost impossible that a continu- ous supply of great character-novels or novels of manners should be kept up, and no one will deny that the novel of character and manners has been the favourite until quite recently. And so in a manner consummatum est. The average man and woman in England of the middle and late nine- teenth century, has been drawn and quartered, analysed and "introspected," till there is nothing Miscellaneous Essays 399 new to be done with him or her either as an tcorcht, or with the skin on, or with clothes THE ENGLISH on the skin. Merely as a man or NOVEL , , ... , 1892. woman, he or she can still be dealt with profitably, but then you have a romance and not a novel. Unfortunately, many of our best proved writers continue to write the novel and not the romance, or to treat the romance as if it were the novel. Thus we do not, and for this and the other reasons given and to be given, we cannot, get the best things.] x We get indeed many things that are good : good in ways which not so many years ago were unexpected if not undesired. The present year is the twentieth from that in which I first began to review novels, and during the earlier part of the intervening period it was possible, without being unduly given to pessimism, to take a very gloomy view of the future of English fiction, not merely on the considerations just advanced but for other reasons. The novelists of the elder generation were dropping off one by one, and were not in their later years giving anything that could on just critical estimate rank with even their own best work. No actual " youngsters " of decided genius or even very remarkable talent had appeared in the early seventies. Between the old and the new there were practitioners of various, sometimes of great, ability, but hardly any who fulfilled the two conditions of absolutely great literature. The first 1 Here ends the previously published part of this essay. 400 Miscellaneous Essays of these is that something phrase, personality, situation, what not shall survive the reading of the book, the second that it THE ENGLISH shall be impossible to read it once only l8g2 that it shall of necessity and impera- tively take its place on the shelves of that smaller library of predilection which the greater library even of the most limited book-collector contains. One exception there has been indeed to this throughout the whole period, and he to whom I refer remains an exception still. I remember when as a boy I read The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, thinking more or less dimly that here was a man from whom at any time an Esmond or an Anti- quary^ a Manon Lescaut (though I do not think I had read Manon then) or a Trots Mousquetaires might be expected. Thirty years later I read One of Our Conquerors with feelings almost exactly the same. , I do not know whether Mr. Meredith will write that book yet I know no reason why he should not. Defoe was on the eve of sixty when he wrote Robinson Crusoe, and Dryden was on the eve of seventy when he wrote the Fables. During the last ten or fifteen years, but especi- ally during the last five or ten, things have been different. There has been a great stir .among the dry bones. Some new comers, of power which would have been remarkable at any time, have arisen : not a few oldsters have aroused themselves to take their craft very seriously, and perhaps to magnify their office even a little overmuch : Miscellaneous Essays 401 journeyings have been made by well - willing neophytes and others to the ends of THE ENGLISH the earth for models and motives : 1892. an immense enthusiasm has been shown for that one representative of the giant race before the flood who has just been referred to. There have been schools, methods, a propa- ganda, and indeed more than one Principle ! principle ! principle ! that's what I hears 'em say, if the Laureate will pardon me. Our novelists have been, whether by self-examination or by stress of critics, convinced of sin in the matter of not taking enough trouble with the style of their books, with the plot, with the general stage manage- ment and stage carpentry. One has said to him- self, " Go to, let us treat life with candour " ; another, " Shall I live and die in respect of the young person ? " a third, " Is there not something to be made of the undogmatically Christian romance?^' a fourth, " Let us cease to be insular " ; a fifth, " A bas 1'incident ! " a sixth (this is a rather favourite cry just now), " Let us raise language to a higher power and never say anything simply." Even that other symptom of the uprising of novelists against critics, and their demand that every news- paper shall give at least a column to the sober and serious laudation (for nothing else is to be thought of) of every serious work of fiction that issues from the press, is, though rather a grotesque, a cheering and healthy sign. The novelist, like the actor and 2 D 402 Miscellaneous Essays the poet, is taking his sacerdoce sacerdotally, and is indignant at being treated lightly by the profane. This is, I say, a THEENGLISH healthy sign : and should be reverently X g 92 treated by those who have only too much difficulty in taking themselves or anything else with due seriousness. But when we come to look a little narrowly into the results of this activity it may be that they will not strike us as altogether in correspondence. I saw not long ago a half-shamefaced apology for the singular succession of roars which has of late years hailed the advent of divers new novelists and novels. This vociferation, it was urged, was at any rate better than a nasty cold system of ignoring or sneering at the lambs of the flock. I am not quite so sure of that. As a critic I begin to feel myself like Mr. Browning's legate, and am constantly murmuring, " I have known four-and- twenty new stars in the firmament of the English novel." This state of things, looked at from a personal point of view, is no doubt pleasant for the four -and -twentieth, and until the five-and- twentieth appears. But I doubt whether the three-and-twenty like it, and what is of much more importance, I doubt whether it is a good state of things either for the stars or the star-gazers, the latter especially. It must sometimes have seemed to cool-headed onlookers during the last few years that the British public, critics and all, had simply lost all faculty of distinguishing good from bad. Miscellaneous Essays 403 Among the new reputations of the last decade we all know some cases not merely of THE ENGLISH undoubted and quite remarkable talent 1892. f talent that must have made its way at any time, though it might have made it more healthily under a less forcing system but of something that may be called genius by those who are least prodigal of the word. And we all all of us who are in the least critical know some cases either of utter worthlessness or of worth so excessively small that one wonders how on earth it has come to be recognised. This can hardly be a healthy state of things states of " boom " seldom or never are signs of real health in the business in which they from time to time occur. Indeed, if nothing else were considered save the encouragement to over-production, the case would be perilous enough. It is sometimes the fashion to throw Scott in the face of those who demur to it, and who are very often admirers of Scott. But it seems to be forgotten that when Scott began novel - writing seriously he was a man far advanced in life, with an immense accumu- lated experience of reading, of society, of business, even of the practice of literature in other kinds. This is not usually the case with those new novelists of whom we have recently had about one a year, and of whom we may, it seems, shortly expect one a month. Once more let it be said that some at least of these new novelists would have made their way at any time 404 Miscellaneous Essays and against any odds. But the others would not. However, let us count the positive THE ENGLISH gains of this recent bustle. These are at least three variety of method and subject, increased carefulness of treatment, and increased carefulness of style. Perhaps all three are chequered advantages, but they are advantages. Some fifteen years ago the novel, the unconquerable unconventionality of Mr. Meredith once more excepted, had certainly got rather into a rut. The difference between George Eliot and Miss Yonge, between Mr. Trollope and Mr. Black to take examples as widely different in appearance as possible, but all of the upper class of novelists might at first seem huge, but when it was subjected to true critical analysis it became very much smaller. Hardly anything I do not say nothing was cultivated but the novel as opposed to the romance ; and the novel was for the most part further narrowed to ordinary upper middle-class English life. Now we have at least altered all that. The differences may still be a little more apparent than real, but the reality has advanced in proportion far more than the appear- ance. We have revived the romance, if not on the greatest scale, on a scale which, with almost the solitary exceptions in the first class of Lorna Doom and Westward Ho ! a whole generation had not seen. We have wound ourselves up to some- thing like the pitch of the Romantics of sixty or Miscellaneous Essays 405 seventy years ago in our demand for local colour, and that not merely external, as theirs THE ENGLISH too o f ten was> k ut the local colour 1892. which derives from local peculiarities of thought and feeling, of manners and life. We have to a great extent shaken off the " diffusion-of-knowledge " Philistinism and the "sword-and-pen" cant of the middle of the century. If we are not more gay in one sense (for 'tis a generation which jocks wi' extreme deeficulty), we are much more what I believe the very newest school of critics calls bunt. In short, we are " boxing it about " merrily, with the old Jacobite confidence that "it will come to our father." Let us hope it will. At the same time there is no doubt that the English novelist of the present day, incited partly by his study of foreign models and partly by the exhortations of the wicked critics, whose crimes he is never tired of denouncing (especially when, as frequently happens, he is holding the pen of the critic himself), has bestirred himself mightily in the matter of construction. Something has been said already on this point, and there is no doubt that, from having been the most scholarly of all novelists in the last century, Englishmen had become the most haphazard and lawless in this. We have altered that too to some extent nay, to a great one. From the teller of short tales who bestirs himself to take away the well-known reproach from England, to the constructor of three-deckers who 406 Miscellaneous Essays labours to avoid the razeeing of that time-honoured form, by constructing it more con- scientiously and scientifically, all our THE ENGLISH " fictionists " (as, I regret to observe, ^ 2 they allow some of their admirers to call them without instantly taking the offenders' lives) are as busy as bees. And they are as busy once more in the direction of style, where also their predecessors, good easy men, used to be a little, nay, more than a little, remiss. Here Mr. Meredith's epigrams and his quaint remotely worded pictures in phrase are religiously copied as far as the copier can. There the dissection and mounting on microscopic slides of action and thought which have become fashionable in America occupy the reformers. A third set shall be found vying with one another in the endeavour to select and stick together the most gorgeous adjectives, to use words in the most unfamiliar, not to say impos- sible senses. In short, there is, as Mr. Carlyle observed in one of the best because one of the quietest of his sardonic passages, a cheerful ap- pearance of work going forward. And to do the workers justice, their intention is not, as in that case, destruction at all, but on the contrary con- struction. How far has that intention been attained, and what are the drawbacks attending these efforts ? This is the less cheerful, but perhaps also the more important, side of the subject. It would be Miscellaneous Essays 407 uncritical to attack it by asking whether any, and if so what, remarkable books have been THE ENGLISH produced. Remarkable books may NOVEL , , , * 1892. be and are produced at any time when there happen to be remarkable book-producers. The last decade in England has seen at least three, perhaps more, new writers of fiction who would have been remarkable at any time. But the things to put the finger on if possible are not these prize specimens, but the general results of the efforts just described. And perhaps here we shall have occasion to remember once more that exceedingly uncomfortable proverb " Seldom comes a better." For the advantages above chronicled, with, I trust, impartiality and the absence of prejudice, have brought divers disadvantages in their train. To begin with, there is that extraordinary oppres- sion which weighs upon so many of our novelists in regard to what is called the Young Person. For some time past divers of our most eminent hands have been lifting themselves up against the Young Person, deploring the terrible restraints that she imposes on their growing reputation, occasionally even emancipating themselves from her in a timid British way, and committing excesses in another variety of that shivering consciousness of sin which made Leigh Hunt, when he was a little boy of seven, and had said a naughty word, for a long time afterwards, when anybody took kind notice of him, say to himself, " Ah, they little 408 Miscellaneous Essays think I'm the boy who said d n ! " Ambition to be the boy who says d n causes these fiery souls to languish. But THE ENGLISH U " J rf. J J NOVEL why do they not say d n, and have done with it? The creeping and gingerly approaches to continental licenses of speech and subject which we have seen lately seem to me, I confess, inexpressibly puerile. Nor can I doubt that on the whole the general convention of English novelists during this century has been a sound one. There is, so far as I know, only one instance Scott's alteration of the plot of St.Ronaris Well where it did distinct, unremedied, irremediable harm. I very much doubt whether Pendennis would have been improved by the different cast of one of its episodes which some of my friends desiderate, and I am sure Vanity Fair positively gains by the ambiguity in which Becky's technical " guilt " is left. The fact is that the spring of what is very liberally called passion is one which, in appearance facile and powerful, is really a very difficult one to bring into play, and is lament- ably monotonous and ineffective when abused, as it is apt to be. For my part, I would excuse either novelist or poet for violating any conven- tion of the kind, but only on the admirable old condition that he comes in with a rope about his neck and is strung up ruthlessly if he fails to pro- duce a masterpiece. This, however, is of course only part of the great Realist mistake, and that has been spoken of Miscellaneous Essays 409 already, and elsewhere. The rules as I take it, if rules can be spoken of in such a THE ENGLISH matter, are two only. The first is, NOVEL _. ,. ,. ' 1892. Disrealise everything, and never for- get that whatever art is, it is not nature." The second is the same as that just given, " Try all things if you like : but if you try the excep- tional, the abnormal, the unconventional, remember that you try it at your own peril, and that you must either make a great success or an intolerable and inexcusable failure." So far, however, we are concerned simply with the subject ; and as a rule very little depends in any art on the subject. The most that the subject can do is to give the measure of the artist in point of strength. If he is a good artist it does not matter how bad the subject is : if he is a bad artist it does not matter how good the subject is. All really depends on the treatment ; and here we get into quite a different region a region, however, which happens to be that which chiefly invites our attention. The two chief innova- tions in treatment which have been seen in the period under discussion, and the signs of which are most particularly evident at the present moment, are innovations, the one in handling incident, situation, motive, and so forth, the other in style. The first may be said to consist in a great extension, as compared with the practice ever since the revival of the novel some eighty years ago, of the representation of the component parts, 4io Miscellaneous Essays the intermediate processes, of thought and action. This is not in itself new : nothing is. Another form was, or, rather, THE ENGLISH other forms of this extension were I8g2 conspicuous in the novel of Richard- son in England and Marivaux in France. The last great practitioner of it was Miss Austen, who indeed raised it to something like absolute perfection ; but it died with her among ourselves, at the same time, within a few years, as that at which Benjamin Constant in Adolphe was pro- ducing the last masterpiece of its older manner in France. With us it had no immediate resurrec- tion : it was hardly dead in France before it was revived with a considerable difference by Beyle and Balzac on the other side of the Channel : and this later form, with many alterations and variants, is that which has survived in other countries to this day, is more popular in some of them than ever, and has from their practice been regrafted upon the English novel. The completest exaggerations of it are to be found in America and Russia. Now of this kind of novel (to use the singular for convenience sake) it is sometimes said that " the story is abolished," that " nothing happens," and so forth. This is, of course, not strictly true. A good deal often happens in Russian novels, and I have read American stories of the straitest sect in which incident was not entirely tabooed. But in both the poor creature is taught to know its place. Miscellaneous Essays 411 The story, even if there is one, is of the last importance : the solemn and pains- THE ENGLISH taking indication, as was said of Mari- NOVEL ' 1892. vaux, of everything you have said, and everything you have thought, and everything you would have liked to think but did not," is of the first. Instead of the presentation of the result you have an endless description of the process ; instead of a succinctly presented quotient, an endless array of dividends and divisors. To say that this is never satisfactory would be too much : I know at least one instance, Count Tolstoi's Ivan Ilyitch, which may defy criticism. But this very instance shows that the success is a tour de force, and it has never, that I know of, been reached in a long story by any one. As a contrast to the average Russian and American novel, take that admirable masterpiece Pepita Jimenez. Senor Valera is, I believe, some- times pointed at for theirs by the ghostly Banquos of the analytic school. O creatures as unfortu- nate as doleful ! It would be impossible to find a more complete or convincing instantia con- tradictoria of their principles. The only weak points in the book are those which draw to their side. Its interest depends on the manners-paint- ing, the characters, and the story, the three things that they never reach, or reach in spite of their tendency to potter and trifle. Fortunately it cannot be said that this particular form has laid much hold on us, but it has laid some, and I 412 Miscellaneous Essays expect it to lay more. For it is naturally attractive to the half-educated : and half-education is advancing with us by leaps and THE ENGLISH , , NOVEL bounds. 1892> It is also to this kind of imperfect culture that the other innovation of treatment, which has been widely described as one of style, appeals. This is more rampant with us, but it has also a more plausible pretext for ramping, for it has excuses of precedent contrast, and excuses of precedent pattern. Scott was notoriously and confessedly a rather careless writer, and the fashion of writing, either in parts separately published or in chapters of magazines, which set in after his death was the very likeliest fashion in the world to encourage careless writing. On the other hand, some of the most popular, and some of the greatest novelists of the second and third quarters of the century Dickens, George Eliot, Mr. Meredith wide apart as they were in other ways, agreed in having styles the reverse of careless, styles mannered and mannerised to the very -th. We know from their own descriptions how some much younger writers of fiction have set themselves to acquire manners of their own : we know from their books how they and others have succeeded. It would be superfluous to repeat here the various remarks bearing on the exact amount and character of that success which will be found in certain earlier essays of this volume. But, as I was writing this paper, a passage remarkably to Miscellaneous Essays 413 the point came before me in the latest published volume of the Journal des Goncourt, THE ENGLISH t he last, as M. Edmond de Goncourt NOVEL ^ L 11 1 1892. assures us, that we shall have in his lifetime. He was a little annoyed, it seems, at rinding that his old friend Flaubert had, in his correspondence with George Sand, spoken disrespectfully of the Goncourtian epithet. " No, my dear Flaubert," retorts M. de Goncourt, "you had not the epithets ose"es, te'me'raires et personnelles which authors who shall be nameless have. You had only les tpithetes, excellemment bonnes, de tout le monde." Now there is no doubt that " les deux Goncourt," whatever may be thought of the posi- tive value of their work, did anticipate, and have for many years (less excellently, perhaps, since the death of M. Jules, but that is neither here nor there) exhibited the tendencies and preoccupa- tions as to style which have prevailed among the more careful men of letters in all European countries during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, it seems to me that the distinction which M. de Goncourt here puts sharply and well tells in a direction exactly opposite to that in which he intended it to tell. The epithets of genius are exactly the epithets de tout le monde, but "good to an excellent degree." These are the epithets of Shakespeare, of Dante, of Homer, of all who have the Shakespearian, the Homeric, the Dantesque qualities. It is the attainment of this " excellent " degree that is the test-rub of genius. 414 Miscellaneous Essays Whereas the " daring," the " rash," the " personal " epithet, which is the special game and object of talent, and especially of the THEENGUSH talent of our day, stands in an entirely ' different category. When the talent is great the epithet is sometimes very happy, and you give it a hearty hand of approbation, as to the successful trick of a master in conjuring. It is sometimes anything but happy, and if you are well-bred you do not hiss it, but let it pass with as much indulgence as may be, like the couac of a generally well-graced singer. In the lower order of attempts, it is at its best a little fatiguing, at its worst utterly unendurable. Never does it excite the immediate assent, the almost silent rapture, the intense unceasing ever-novel admira- tion which are aroused by the great efforts of genius in making the common as though it were not common, in sublimating the ordinary language terrestrial to the seventh heaven. Now it stands, I think, to reason that the deliberate seeker after style will too often stray in the direction of the 0s/, the t/m/razre, the personnel, not merely in epithets but in other things. Whether it stands to reason or not he certainly does it ; and though there may not be many at the moment who perceive his error, the meet con- sequences of that error never have failed, and are never likely to fail. They are also, as it happens, illustrated unusually well in the history of novels. I have myself gone about for many years a very Miscellaneous Essays 415 different and inferior La Fontaine asking, " Avez vous lu ? " Hysminias and THE ENGLISH ffysmine, which the books of reference 1892. sometimes call Ismenias and Ismene. There must be people who have read it, though I never personally met one. Here, in a very wonderful kind of Greek (it is perfectly use- less to attempt to read the book in a translation, for all its charms are necessarily lost), did a certain person of the twelfth century, by genius of anticipation or following of originals mostly lost to us, concentrate in one book Euphuism, Mari- vauage, aestheticism, divers isms of the present day which I could only indicate by taking divers respected proper names in vain even Naturalism in a way, except that the author was a gentleman after his Lower Empire fashion. If the task of reading him is too great and I must own that his lingo is extraordinary and his matter of a marvellous tediousness there is Lyly, there is Madeleine de Scude'ry, there is Marivaux, there is the Mr. Cumberland whom gods call Sir Fretful, there are the followers of Mrs. Radcliffe, there are many, others, great and small, persons of genius, persons of talent, and persons equally destitute of either. They do not always aim specially or principally at style, but they often do so, and they always expend an immense determination, an almost piteous endeavour, on the attempt .to do something great by taking thought, by exaggerat- ing popular fashions, by running directly counter 4 1 6 Miscellaneous Essays to them, by being eccentric, by being scrupulously correct, by anything, in short, but wait- ing for the shepherd's hour and pro- THE ENGLISH fiting thereby in the best and most l892 straightforward way they can. The point to which we are coming will no doubt have been foreseen for a long time. It is that in this busy, this conscientious, this serious period of novel-writing, our novelists are, as a rule, far too much of Marthas and far too little of Maries. They cumber themselves tremendously about the fashion of serving us, and it seems horribly ungracious to criticise the viands served ; yet it may be permissible to suggest that they are in the wrong way. They seem to be beguiled by the dictum true and important enough in itself that novel-writing is an art. It is and a fine art. No doubt also all art has its responsibilities. But the responsibilities of different arts are different, and the methods of discharging them are different too. What makes the art of literature in general the most difficult of all is the fact that nowhere is it more necessary to take pains, and yet that nowhere is mere painstaking not merely so insufficient but so likely to lead the artist wrong. And in this par- ticular division of the literary art there is the still further difficulty that it is easiest, most obvious, and in the special circumstances of recent English literature apparently most praiseworthy, to take pains about those things which are not the root of the matter. In poetry the so-called " formal " Miscellaneous Essays 4 1 7 part is of the essence. A halting verse, a caco- phonous rhyme, a lack of musical THE ENGLISH accompaniment and atmosphere, will NOVEL . , * l892 render unpoetical the very finest, and in happier circumstances the most really poetical, thoughts. Yet even in poetry attention to these formal matters will but rarely it will sometimes when it is extraordinary do of itself. In prose fiction, the nearest to poetry of the kinds of literature when it is at its best, the case is quite different. It is a pity that a novel should not be well written : yet some of the greatest novels of the world are, as no one of the greatest poems of the world is, or could possibly be, written any- thing but well. It is, at any rate, rather annoying that the plot of a novel should hang loosely together, that the chronology should be obviously impossible, that the author should forget on page 200 what page 100 has told his readers, that there should be little beginning, less middle, and no end. Yet some of the great, some of the greatest novels of the world, are open to objections of this kind. The truth is, that the novel is, while the poem is not, mainly and firstly a criticism of life. Great truths always lurk in great errors, and Naturalism, with its kindred faults, reveals this truth at once. The life may be life as it is, and we have the novel proper life as we would have it to be, and we have the romance ; but one or the other, not photographed, not grovellingly dis- sected, but rendered in the mediums and by the 2 E 4 1 8 Miscellaneous Essays methods proper to art, it must be. All the require- ments of the novelist are subsidiary and secondary to this, that he shall THE ENGLISH , . , ,, ,, c .. NOVEL in his pages show us the result of the l892 workings of the heart and brain, of the body, soul, and spirit of actual or possible human beings. Poetry is not so limited novel- writing is. Now the mistake of many of our careful and clever ones at the present day seems to me some- times that, forgetting this chief and principal thing, they concentrate themselves on the secondary and subsidiary matters ; sometimes that, accepting the requirement of rendering life, they prove unequal to it. I have already said that I would not have any subject ruled out as such. Remembering what a certain dramatist did with a certain Bellafront centuries ago, I should not be disposed to refuse permission to a certain novelist to experiment with a certain Tess, though I greatly prefer the straight- forwardness of the earlier artist's title. I think that many attempts, and an exactly equal number of failures, have shown the impossibility of making a great historical character of whom much is directly known the central and ostensible hero or heroine of a novel : but if any will try it, he or she may try it at their own peril, and I will applaud if they succeed. I can even conceive (though I have never read one) a novel in which undogmatic Christianity might play a considerable part, and which yet might be readable, and a novel. We Miscellaneous Essays 419 have not, as it seems to me, a right to complain of any experiments : we have only THE ENGLISH a r ight to complain when experiments 1892. are ma de in the teeth of the teaching of experience, and do not succeed. Paradox, crotchet, new moralities, new theories of religion all may be susceptible of being made into novels that ought to live and will live. It only seems to me that at the present day our clever novelists are a great deal too fond of de- liberately selecting the most unsuitable materials and then endeavouring to varnish over the rickety construction with fine writing, with fashionable tricks of expression or treatment, with epithets osees, ttmtraires et fiersonnelles, with doses of popular talk. One special difficulty which besets the novelist, and of which he not infrequently complains when he aims at excellence, remains to be noticed. He is at the present moment, perhaps, the only artist whose art is liable to be confounded with the simple business of the ordinary tradesman. There is, and has been for at least two generations perhaps indeed for three or four a certain steady and increasing demand for " something to read " in the way of fiction. There are no parallels, so far as I know, to his difficulty in this respect. The only persons who stand in the same position are the purveyor of sermons and the purveyor of newspaper articles. But neither of these is ex- pected, and it is entirely at his own risk if either 420 Miscellaneous Essays undertakes, to present himself as a maker of books, that is to say, as a producer of some- thing which is intended to last. The THE ENGLISH novel - producer, as distinguished from l892 the novelist, is in really evil case in this matter : and the novelist, as distinguished from the novel-producer, is perhaps in worse. Nobody insists (thank Heaven !) that the usual journalist shall produce all his articles, or the usual preacher all his sermons, for the year in book form : I can answer for one class that some representatives of it, at any rate, though they may try to do their work as well as possible, would be horrified at the idea. The require- ments of the circulating library insist upon the novel-producer doing this very thing : and as we know, the novelist, or he who hopes that he is a novelist, is very angry at the confusion which thus arises from their both addressing the same lady. It is natural, it is inevitable, that the results of this confusion should be almost always bad. When a man, as has just been said, caters for the general in sermon or article or platform speech, it is perfectly understood that he does not, except as a secondary thing and at his own peril and distinct volition, enter for any other stakes or seek to gain the Land of Matters Unforgot. When a man writes verse and publishes it, he does in form enter for the stakes, but the race is not run in public. The minor bard competes, except in the rarest instances, for his own pleasure before an extremely Miscellaneous Essays 421 select audience composed of a few critics and a number, which it rests with him THE ENGLISH to ii m j t j n one direction and with NOVEL ,, . .... Ig92> themselves to limit m another, of holders of presentation copies. For myself I own that I am rather fond of reading minor poetry much fonder of it than of reading minor novels. But that is a purely personal detail. It is an understood thing that the minor poet is not I do not say that he does not wish to be read. He publishes either because he cannot help it or because he likes it. The ambition of the curate, of the leader-writer, of the platform speaker, is sufficed by the day or the day after. But the unhappy novelist is obliged by the state of the demand to divulge himself widely, and put him- self on more or less perpetual record. There are those of his kind who are very angry with the managers of literary newspapers for taking account of this fact. They would have literary notice restricted to novels which aim at something higher than the circulating library demand. I have never indeed, being a person with some experi- ence of newspapers, understood quite how their demand is to be complied with. Is the editor to read every novel and decide whether it is novel- journalism or novel-literature? I think this is barely feasible, for even an editor's day has but twenty- four hours, and even an editor's brain requires occasional rest and refreshment. Is he to have a special novel - referee, one, in fact, to 422 Miscellaneous Essays whom all novels are to be handed over, and according to whose dictum they are to be reviewed or not ? The selection THE ENGLISH of such referees would be difficult, and ^ 2 would, to take an abominably prosaic view, cost the proprietors of newspapers a vast sum of money, for which, except in prayers and curses, they would certainly not receive any appreciable return. Or are the deciding persons to be guided by name, vogue, previous work ? In this I am bound again, from no small experience, to express my fear that a great deal of injustice would be done by inclusion in the selected circle, and a little (but the most serious in the long-run) by exclusion from it. This may seem something of a digression : but it has a real connection with our subject. It is easily conceivable that when journalism and litera- ture are in this way inextricably mixed and blended, almost any means will seem justifiable, nay, praise- worthy, to the aspirant to literature who wishes to declare himself, at once and unmistakably, to be other than those who are content with journalism. And this being so, we can hardly wonder at that strain and stress which I have noticed as marking our present more ambitious novels, without on the whole any corresponding excellence of result. Except at very rare intervals, it is acknowledged that a nation is a lucky nation if it possesses half a dozen persons who really deserve the name of poet : and if the poets in the course of an ordinary Miscellaneous Essays 423 human life fill half a dozen volumes of the ordinary content of the volume of a circulat- THE ENGLISH m cr library novel, it is acknowledged NOVEL , , ' 1892. tnat tnev have done very handsomely. We expect to have our novelists by dozens, by scores, by hundreds, and we expect them to produce their volumes, if not by hundreds, yet almost by scores, and certainly by dozens. Is this reasonable ? Is this treating the artist as he deserves to be treated ? * I do not take the other side and say, Is the acceptance of such an expectation and the attempt to fulfil it worthy of the novelist ? For then we get into that hopeless and endless question of what Mr. Anthony Trollope used delicately to call " details " meaning thereby pounds, shillings, and pence of the arguing of which there is no end, and which, after all, does not concern novel-writing more than any other kind of literature except in one point which is a little important. It is much more difficult for the novelist pure and simple to write, as it has been phrased, " articles for money and books for love," than for almost any other variety of man of letters. His novel-journalism without his name would be a drug : and with his name it at once enters into competition with his novel-literature. 1 Since this was written I have found a counterpart of this argu- ment in M. Ferdinand Brunetiere's just published Essais sur la Litterature Contemporaine, art. " Critique et Roman," an excellent example of the author's robust polemic, which, however, takes more of a side than I think it necessary to take in a quarrel which would be much better unfought. 424 Miscellaneous Essays It may seem as if I were shaping a course towards the somewhat paradoxical proposition that it will never be merry THE ENGLISH JL 1- A. i-MI *.!. l_1- ' NOVEL with novelists till the public gives ,g g2( over reading novels. And indeed there might be something to be said for this, for as long as the public insists on novels by the hundred and five hundred every year to read, certain things will follow. There will be a vast amount of unworthy stuff produced : there will be now and then for popular (not necessarily or probably for good) novels those huge prizes which entice more and more competitors into the race. There will be more and more the inducement, subtly extending, at once for the tradesman who aspires to be popular and for the artist who aspires to be good, to strive for distinction of whatever kind by illegitimate or scarcely legitimate means by oddity, by license, by quaintness, by strangeness, by spreading the sail, no matter at what angle, to the popularis aura. Demand no doubt creates supply, and supply stimulates demand : but what sort of each does the reflex action produce ? I fear that churlish thing, the study of history, would reply, A supply that is by turns cheap and nasty, or dis- tinguished from the cheap and nasty by fantastic preciousness ; a demand that is by turns coarse and uncritical or squeamish and morbid. And all this while there may be some who remember that the novel has never yet shown itself an enduring form in literature ; that it rose Miscellaneous Essays 425 very late, and so may be expected not to die nothing dies but to dwindle or change THE ENGLISH ver y ear i y . t hat it has already had NOVEL , . , - , . 1892. an almost unexampled nourishing time in slightly different varieties of one particular form ; and that as for many centuries of ascertained progress, or rather con- tinuance, in literature the unchanging human mind was content with brief and occasional indulgences in it, it is by no means impossible that the period of this particular indulgence is drawing to a close. To such reminders I neither assent wholly nor do I wholly rule them out. The printing-press and the common half-educated reader must be taken into consideration. No former age possessed this combination of means to produce supply and circumstances to create demand. The newspaper and the novel, though each has produced in its time literature of the highest value, are both in themselves rather low forms of literature, and it is, I believe, an axiom of physical science, which has given itself to observing such things, that the low form is the most tenacious of life. As long as the Board School lasts, the ordinary manufacture of news- papers and novels must go on a reflection which may have its consolations to those who are obliged to get their living by working at either mill. But whether either art or craft is likely to develop improvements such as will render it more prolific of real literature, that is one of the too numerous 426 Miscellaneous Essays < things which are " obscure to all except to God." The novel has at least produced some of nearly the greatest things in litera- THE ENGLISH ,,..., ., ,. NOVEL ture ; this is its great, its exceeding l892 great merit. That it has produced vast volumes of things that to-day are and to- morrow are cast into the oven, is not perhaps, rightly considered, a fact for regret. And so we end with Quien sabe ? Enormous fatalism, I take it, impresses itself on careful students of the history of literature so obstinate is the wind in blowing where it listeth without the slightest reference either to the literary clerk of the weather, or to ingenious and diligent persons who, like our young officers in Burmah, get up on high places and explode large quantities of blasting powder in the hope of coaxing or forcing the wind and the rain with it. All things are possible in a time when a novelist of real talent like M. Zola dismisses Sir Walter Scott as a "boarding-school novelist," and when a critic of real intelligence like my friend Mr. Brander Matthews takes Mr. Howells for an excellent critic. The safer plan is to stand still and see the wondrous works of the Lord. After all, the critic and the prophet are two extremely different persons : and criticism has not been usually most happy when it meddled with prophecy. INDEX ACADEMIES, English and French, 317-320 Addison, 12 Areopagitica, 17 Armstrong, 19 Arnold, Mr. Matthew, 101, 102 Austen, Miss, 397, 410 BANVILLE, Th. de, 220 Baudelaire, Charles, Essay on, 216-252; Baudelaire's position, 216-218; his life and works, 218-222; examples, 223 ; char- acteristics, 224-233 ; sketch of work, 233-246; general re- marks, 247-252 Beaconsfield, Lord, 27, 106, Essay viii. passim Beranger, 141 Bertrand, Louis, 244 Bolingbroke, 17 Borel, Petrus, 243 Brazil, Revolutions in, 161 sqq. Browning, Robert, 25 Brunetiere, M. Ferdinand, 423 note Bunyan, 14 Burke, 16, 24 Butler, Bishop, 16 Byron, 20 CANDALE, Duke de, 184; por- trait of, 199-201 Canning, 24 Carlyle, 23, 25 Cazotte, 51-53 Chamfort and Rivarol, Essay on, 42-80 ; litterateurs of society, 42-46 ; editions of Chamfort and Rivarol, 46-48 ; Chamfort's life, 48-51 ; the Prophecy of Cazotte, 51-53; Rivarol's life, 53"57 5 their work considered generally, 57 '59 5 character- istics of Chamfort, 59-67 ; characteristics of Rivarol, 67- 74 ; general remarks on both, 74-80 Champcenetz, 45, 59 Chateaubriand, 61, 146 Chinedolle, 47, 57, 69 Chesterfield, Lord, 43 Clarendon, Lord, 7 Cobbett, 26 Coleridge, 3, 20 Cousin, Victor, 143, 280 DALGETTY, Captain Dugald, 306 Dante, 54 Defoe, 14, 16 De Quincey, 22, 37, 42 note, 85- 87, 221 Desaugiers, 140, 352-361 Dickens, 26, 392 Diderot, 27, 63, 113, 225, 289 428 Index Disraeli, Mr. See Beaconsfield, Lord Dorat, 344-352 Dowden, Professor, 274 Dryden, 3, 10, n, 12, 13, 14, 28 EARLE, Professor, 308 English and French Literature, The Contrasts of, 300-335 ; con- trasts not to be dealt with, 300- 308 ; greater and more con- tinuous length of French, 308- 310 ; order and license in the two languages, 310-320 ; separ- ate powers of contrast, 320- 329 ; conclusion, 329-335 English Prose Style, Essay on, 1-41 ; differences of prose and verse style, 1-3; character of modern style, 4, 5 ; beginning of style proper in English, 5 ; history of its changes, 5-27 ; summary thereof, 28, 29 ; the rhythm of prose and its laws, 3-37 ; general remarks, 37-41 FIELDING, 15, 16 Florian, 79 Froude, Mr., 103, 104 Fuseli, 44 GAISFORD, Dean, 97 Gautier, L., 180 Gautier, Th., 56, 142, 231 Gibbon, 14-18 Goncourt, M. de, 413 Gray, 16 Green, Mr. J. R., 88 and note Grote, 24, 82 HALIFAX, Lord, n Headlong Hall, 4 Heath, Mr. Richard, 274, 275 Hobbes, 9, 2OI Houghton, Lord, 261 note Hugo, Victor, i, 112, 297 Hume, 15, 16, 81 Hysminias and Hysmine, 415 Inheritance, The, 18 JANIN, Jules, 278 Jeffrey, 23 Johnson, 14 Joubert, 75 KINGSLEY, Charles, 36 LA HARPE, 49, 51-53 Lamb, 26 Landor, 23 La Rochefoucauld, 75 Leconte de Lisle, M., 214 Lemaitre, M. Jules, 331, 332 Lenclos, Ninon de, 208 Lescure, M. de, 42 note Locke, 13 Lockhart, 23 Lowell, Mr., 30 Lyiy, s Lyndhurst, Lord, 24 MACAU LAY, 23 Maistre, J. de, 299 Mazarin, Hortense Mancini, Duchess de, 185 sqq. Meredith, Mr. George, 25, 400 Merime'e, 114-116, 142 Michelet, Jules, 280, 282, 288, 289 Middleton, Conyers, 17 Mill, J. S., 24,305 Milton, 3, 7, 9, 17 Miniatures, A Frame of, 336 ; Parny, 336-344; Dorat, 344- 352; Desaugiers, 352-361; Vade", 361-369 ; Piron, 369-377 ; Panard, 377-387 Modern English Prose [1876], Essay on, 81-113; the disuse of style, 81-85 5 faults of style in 1876, 85-91 ; influence of journalism, 91-93; of other prevalent modes of writing, 93 98 ; remarks on some authors, 98-109; general re- marks, 109-113 Index 429 Montalembert, 291 Moore, 20 Morley, Mr. John, 4 Morris, Mr. Lewis, 219 note NOVEL, The State of the English, 388-426 OZANAM, F., 291 PANARD, 377-387 Paris, Paulin, 281 Parny, 336-344 Pater, Mr., 107-109 Peacock, 27, 267, 314 Peter Wilkins, 15 Piron, 369-377 Pope, 3 Poulet-Malassis, 47 QUANTITY IN ENGLISH, 30-34 Querouaille, Louise de, 213 Quinet, Edgar, A Paradox on, 274-299 ; Quinet's panegyrists, 274, 275 ; his life, 276-284 ; survey of his work, 284-288 ; secret of Quinet's peculiarities his democracy, 288 - 296 ; a Tory strayed, 296-299 RANGE, Abbe de, 193 and note Renan, Ernest, Essay on, 114- 160; Merimee and M. Renan, 114-116; sketch of work to 1880, 116 sqq. ; M. Renan's method, 120-126 ; examples of it, 127-133 ; some character- istics, 133-150 ; his life, 151- 1 53 ; later work and summary, 153-160 Rivarol. See Chamfort and Rivarol Rulhiere, 68 Ruskin, Mr., 24, 34, 99 SAINT- EVREMOND, Essay on, 180-215 5 special interest of Saint - Evremond, 1 80 - 182 ; his life, 182-186 ; editions of him, 187 ; his subjects, 187- 190 ; the Conversation du Pert Canaye, 191-197; other ex- amples, 198-207; character- istics, 208-215 Saint-Real, Abbe de, 206 Scherer, M., 154-156, 217 note Scott, Sir W., 20, 21, 391, 408 Shakespeare, 3 Shelley, 3, 20 Southey, 20 Style, English. See Essays i. iii. vii. x. xii. Swift, 13, 14 Swinburne, Mr., 104-106 TAINE, M., 230 Taylor, Jeremy, 7 Temple, Sir W., n Thackeray, 26, 167, 269 Thirlwall, 82 Thoughts on Republics, 161-179 Tillotson, 10 VADE, 361-369 Verlaine, M. Paul, 219 note Voltaire, 69, 77 WALPOLE, Horace, 16 Wette, De, 291 Whitman, Walt, 229 Wilson, John, 22, 85 Wordsworth, 20 YOUNG ENGLAND MOVEMENT, The, 253-273 Printed by R. & R. CLARK, Edinburgh. A 000675870