LIBRARY University of California. Class Advenhires in Crittcism WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR. lA 3 6 AVandkring Heath G Fairy Tales, Far and Near . 3 6 The Splendid Spur 5 Dead Man's Rock 5 The Blue Pavilions .... 5 The Astonishing History ok Troy Town 5 "I Saw Three Ships" .... 5 Noughts and Crosses .... 5 The Delectable Duchy. 5 Cassell and Company, Limited, Lcndon, Paris & Melbourne. Adventures in Criticism by A. T. OUILLER^COUCH SI'XO.YD KIj 1 TION OF THE UNI VEI^S!"^^ LONDON CASSELL AND COMPANY LIMITED 1896 GiHEML First Edition March 1896, Reprinted October 1896. 16 X^ To A. B. WALKLEY My dear a. B. W. The short papers which follow have been reprinted, with a few alterations, from The Speaker. Possibly you knew this without my telling you. Possibly, too, you have sat in a theatre before now and seen the curtain rise on two characters exchanging information which must have been their common property for years. So this dedication is partly designed to save me the trouble of writing a formal preface. As I remember, then, it was upon this fashion bequeathed us by destiny to write side by side in The Speaker every week, you about Plays and I about Books. Three years ago you found time to arrange a few of your writings in a notable volume of Playhouse Impressions. Some months ago I searched the files of the paper with a similar design, and read my way through an astonishing amount of my own com- position. Noble edifice of toil ! It stretched 18^ --0 \-i Dedica riON away in Imposing proportions and vanishing perspective — week upon week — two columns to the week ! The mischief was, it did not appear to lead to anything : and for the first mile or two even the casual graces of the colonnade were hopelessly marred through that besetting fault of the young journalist, who finds no satis- faction in his business of making bricks without straw unless he can go straightway and heave them at somebody. Still (to drop metaphor), I have chosen some papers which I hope may be worth a second reading. They are fragmentary, by force of the conditions under which they were produced : but perhaps the fragments may here and there suggest the outline of a first principle. And I dedicate the book to you because it would be strange if the time during which we have ap- peared in print side by side had brought no sense of comradeship. Though, in fact, we live far apart and seldom get speech together, more than one of these papers — ostensibly addressed to anybody whom they might concern — has been privately, if but sub-consciously, intended for you. A. T. O. C. CONTENTS ^o« PAGE Chaucer I "The Passionate Pilgrim" 30 Shakespeare's Lyrics . 41 Samuel Daniei 50 William Browne . . . . 61 Thomas Carew . . . . 69 •'Robinson Crusoe" 77 Lawrence Sterne 93 Scott and Burns . 107 Charles Reade . 129 Henry Kingsley . . 137 Alexander William Kinglake . 147 C. S. C. & J. K. S. . 153 Robert Louis Stevenson . 162 M. Zola . 2CO Selection .... . 207 Externals .... . 213 Club Talk .... . 232 Excursionists in Poeiry . 239 Vlll CoXTf.XTS The rorui.AK Concii'tion ok a roFT Poets on Tii^ir own Art . The Attitude or thk Puni.ic towar: A Case of Rook-Stai.i. CKNsoRsnrp The Poor Little Penny Dreadful Irsen's "Peer Gynt" . Mr. Swinburne's Later Ma A Morning with a Boo-x Mr. John Davidson BjORNSTJERNE BjORNSON Mr. George Moore Mrs. Margaret L. Woods Mr, Hall Caine . Mr. Anthony Hope "Trilby" Mr. Stockton Bow-wow Ok Seasonarle Numbers NNER s Lr tt v. 246 257 266 279 2SS 295 310 3 '9 327 346 364 385 395 403 411 419 424 i Adventures in Criticism CHAUCER Aftf.R twenty-five years of close toil, Pro- ^''J^*^^^. fessor Skeat has completed his great edition p^^^^^^^^ of Chaucer* It is obviously easier to be skeaCs dithyrambic than critical in chronicling this Chaucer event ; to which indeed dithyrambs are more appropriate than criticism. For when a man writes Opus vitce mece at the conclusion of such a task as this, and so lays down his pen, he must be a churl (even if he be also a competent critic) who will allow no pause for admiration. And where, churl or no churl, is the competent critic to be found ? The Professor has here compiled an entirely new text of Chaucer, founded solely on the manu- scripts and the earliest printed editions that * The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Edited, from numerous manuscripts, by the Rev. Walter W. Skeat, Litt.D., LL.D., M.A. In six volumes. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press. 1894. B 2 Adventures in Criticism are accessible. Where Chaucer has translated, the originals have been carefully studied : "the requirements of metre and grammar have been carefully considered throughout": and " the phonology and spelling of every word have received particular attention." We may add that all the materials for a Life of Chaucer have been sought out, examined, and pieced together with exemplary care. All this has taken Professor Skeat twenty- five years, and in order to pass competent judgment on his conclusions the critic must follow him step by step through his researches — which will take the critic (even if we are charitable enough to suppose his mental equipment equal to Professor Skeat's) another ten years at least. For our time, then, and probably for many generations after, this edition of Chaucer will be accepted as final. And the And I seem to see in this edition of Clarendon c^^ucer the beginning of the realisation of Ptcss a dream which I have cherished since first I stood within the quadrangle of the Clarendon Chaucer 3 Press — that fine combination of the factory and the palace. The aspect of the Press itself repeats, as it were, the characteristics of its government, which is conducted by an elected body as an honourable trust. Its delegates are not intent only on money- getting. And yet the Clarendon Press makes money, and the University can depend upon it for handsome subsidies. It may well depend upon it for much more. As the Bank of England — to which in its system of government it may be likened — is the focus of all the other banks, private or joint-stock, in the kingdom, and the treasure-house, not only of the nation's gold, but of its com- mercial honour, so the Clarendon Press — traditionally careful in its selections and munificent in its rewards — might become the academy or central temple of English litera- ture. If it would but follow up Professor Skeat's Chaucer with a resolution to publish, at a pace suitable to so large an undertaking, all the great English classics, edited with all the scholarship its wealth can command, I believe that before long the Clarendon Press would be found to be exercising an influence 4 Adventures in Criticism on English letters which is at present lacking, and the lack of which drives many to call, from time to time, for the institution in this country of something corresponding to the French Academy. I need only cite the examples of the Royal Society and the Marylebone Cricket Club to show that to create an authority in this manner is con- sonant with our national practice. We should have that centre of correct information, correct judgment, correct taste — that intel- lectual metropolis, in short — which is the surest check upon provinciality in litera- ture ; we should have a standard of English scholarship and an authoritative dictionary of the English language ; and at the same time we should escape all that business of the green coat and palm branches which has at times exposed the French Academy to much vulgar intrigue. Also, I may add, we should have the books. Where now is the great edition of Bunyan, of Defoe, of Gibbon } The Oxford Press did once publish an edition of Gibbon, worthy enough as far as type and paper could make Chaucer 5 it worthy. But this is only to be found in second-hand book-shops. Why are two rival London houses now publishing editions of Scott, the better illustrated with silly pictures "out of the artists' heads"? Where is the final edition of Ben Jonson ? These and the rest are to come, perhaps. Of late we have had from Oxford a great Boswell and a great Chaucer, and the magni- ficent Dictionary is under weigh. So that it may be the dream is in process of being realised, though none of us shall live to see its full realisation. Meanwhile such a work as Professor Skeat's Chaucer is not only an answer to much chatter that goes up from time to time about nine-tenths of the work on English literature being done out of England. This and similar works are the best of all possible answers to those gentlemen who so often interrupt their own chrematistic pursuits to point out in the monthly magazines the shortcomings of our two great Universities as nurseries of chrematistic youth. In this case it is Oxford that publishes, while Cambridge supplies the learning : and from a natural 6 Adv/'.ntuj^es in Criticism affection I had rather it were always Oxford that pubHshed, attracting to her service the learning, scholarship, intcHigence of all parts of the kingdom, or, for that matter, of the world. So might she securely found new Schools of English Literature — were she so minded, a dozen every year. They would do no particular harm ; and meanwhile, in Walton Street, out of earshot of the New Schools, the Clarendon Press would go on serenely performing its great work. March 23, A WORK such as Profcssor Skeat's Chaucer puts the critic into a frame of mind that lies Essentials ^„^ somewhere about midway between modesty Accidents and cowardice. One asks — " What right have I, who have given but a very few hours of my life to the enjoying of Chaucer ; who have never collated his MSS. ; who have taken the events of his life on trust from his bio- graphers ; who am no authority on his spelling, his rhythms, his inflections, or the spelling, rhythms, inflections of his age ; who have read him only as I have read other great Chaucer 7 poets, for the pleasure of reading — what right have I to express any opinion on a work of this character, with its imposing commentary, its patient research, its enormous accumula- tion of special information ? " Nevertheless, this diffidence, I am sure, may be carried too far. After all is said and done, we, with our average life of three- score years and ten, are the heirs of all the poetry of all the ages. We must do our best in our allotted time, and Chaucer is but one of the poets. He did not write for specialists in his own age, and his main value for suc- ceeding ages resides, not in his vocabulary, nor in his inflections, nor in his indebtedness to foreign originals, nor in the metrical uni- formities or anomalies that may be discovered in his poems ; but in \i\s poetry. Other things are accidental ; his poetry is essential. Other interests — historical, philological, antiquarian — must be recognised ; but the poetical, or (let us say) the spiritual, interest stands first and far ahead of all others. By virtue of it Chaucer, now as always, makes his chief and his convincing appeal to that which is 8 Adventures in Criticism spiritual in men. He appeals by the poetical quality of such lines as these, from Emilia's prayer to Diana: " Chaste goddesse, wel wostow that I Desire to been a mayden al my lyf, Ne never wol I be no love ne wyf. " I am, thou woost, yet of thy companye, A mayde, and love hunting and venerye, And for to vvalken in the vvodes wilde, And noght to been a wyf, and be with childe. . ." Or of these two from the Prioresses' Prologue : " O moder mayde ! O mayde moder free ! O bush unbrent, brenninge in Moyses sighte. . ." Or of these from the general Prologue — also thoroughly poetical, though the quality differs : " Ther was also a Nonne, a Prioresse, That of hir smyling was ful simple and coy ; Hir gretteste ooth was but by seynt Loy ; And she was cleped madame Eglentyne. Ful wel she song the service divyne, Entuned in hir nose ful semely ; And Frensh she spak ful faire and fetisly, After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe, For Freubh of Paris was to hir unknowe . . .*' Now the essential quality of this and of all very great poetry is also what we may call a universal quality ; it appeals to those sym- pathies which, unequally distributed and often Chaucer g distorted or suppressed, are yet the common possessions of our species. This quahty is the real antiseptic of poetry : this it is that keeps a line of Homer perennially fresh and in bloom : — ""^5 l\ri iv irarplSi 70/77." These lines live because they contain some- thing which is also permanent in man : they depend confidently on us, and will as con- fidently depend on our great-grandchildren. I was glad to see this point very courageously put the other day by Professor Hiram Corson, of Cornell University, in an address on " The Aims of Literary Study " — an address which Messrs. Macmillan have printed and published here and in America. "All works of genius," says Mr. Corson, " render the best service, in literary education, when they are first assimilated in their abso- lute character. It is, of course, important to know their relations to the several times and places in which they were produced ; but such knowledge is not for the tyro in literary study. He must first know literature, if he is constituted so to know it, in its absolute B* 10 Adventures in Criticism character. He can go into the philosophy of its relationships later, if he like, when he has a true literary education, and when the * years that bring the philosophic mind ' have been reached. Every great production of genius is, in fact, in its essential character, no more related to one age than to another. It is only in its phenomenal character (its outward manifestations) that it has a special relation- ship." And Mr. Corson very appositely quotes Mr. Ruskin on Shakespeare's historical plays — "If it be said that Shakespeare wrote perfect historical plays on subjects belonging to the pre- ceding centuries, I answer that they are perfect plays just because there is no care about centuries in them, but a life which all men recognise for the human life of all time : and this it is, not because Shakespeare sought to give universal truth, but because, painting honestly and completely from the men about him, he painted that human nature which is, indeed, constant enough — a rogue in the fifteenih century being at heart what a rogue is in the nine- teenth centuiy and was in the twelfth ; and an honest or knightly man being, in like manner, very similar to other such at any other time. And the work of these great idealists is, therefore, always universal : not because it is tiot portrait^ but because it is com- plete portrait down to the heart, which is the same in all ages ; and the work of the mean idealists is Chaucer ii not universal, not because it is portrait, but because it is half portrait — of the outside, the manners and the dress, not of the heart. Thus Tintoret and Shakespeare paint, both of them, simply Venetian and English nature as they saw it in their time, down to the root ; and it does for all time ; but as for any care to cast themselves into the particular ways of thought, or custom, of past time in their historical work, you will find it in neither of them, nor in any other perfectly great man that I know of." — Modern Faiftters. It will be observed that Mr. Corson, whose address deals primarily with literary training, speaks of these absolute qualities of the great masterpieces as thQ first object of study. But his words, and Ruskin's words, fairly support my further contention that they remain the most iiuportant object of study, no matter how far one's literary training may have proceeded. To the most erudite student of Chaucer in the wide world Chaucer's poetry should be the dominant object of interest in connection with Chaucer. But when the elaborate specialist confronts us, we are apt to forget that poetry is meant for mankind, and that its appeal is, or should be, universal. We pay tribute to the unusual : B* 2 12 Adventures in Criticism and so far as this implies respect for pro- tracted industry and indefatigable learning, we do right. But in so far as it implies even a momentary confusion of the essentials with the accidentals of poetry, we do wrong. And the specialist himself continues admirable only so long as he keeps them distinct. I hasten to add that Professor Skeat does keep them distinct very successfully. In a single sentence of admirable brevity he tells us that of Chaucer's poetical excellence " it is superfluous to speak ; Lowell's essay on Chaucer in * My Study Windows ' gives a just estimate of his powers." And with this, taking the poetical excellence for granted, he proceeds upon his really invaluable work of preparing a standard text of Chaucer and illustrating it out of the stores of his appa- rently inexhaustible learning. The result is a monument to Chaucer's memory such as never yet was reared to English poet. Douglas Jerrold assured Mrs. Cowden Clarke that, when her time came to enter Heaven, Shakespeare would advance and greet her with the first kiss of welcome, " even should Chaucer 13 her husband happen to be present." One can hardly with decorum imagine Professor Skeat being kissed ; but Chaucer assuredly will greet him with a transcendent smile. The Professor's genuine admiration, how- ever, for the poetical excellence of his poet needs to be insisted upon, not only because the nature of his task keeps him reticent, but because his extraordinary learning seems now and then to stand between him and the natural appreciation of a passage. It was not quite at haphazard that I chose just now the famous description of the Prioresse as an illustration of Chaucer's poetical quality. The Professor has a long note upon the French of Stratford atte Bowe. Most of us have hitherto believed the passage to be an example, and a very pretty one, of Chaucer's playfulness. The Professor almost loses his temper over this : he speaks of it as a view " commonly adopted by newspaper-writers who know only this one line of Chaucer, and cannot forbear to use it in jest." " Even Tyrwhitt and Wright," he adds more in sorrow than in anger, " have thoughtlessly given currency to this idea." 14 Adventures in Criticism "Chaucer," the Professor explains, "merely states a fact'' (the italics arc his own), "viz. that the Prioress spoke the usual Anf^lo- French of the English Court, of the English law-courts, and of the English ecclesiastics of higher ranks. The poet, however, had been himself in P^rance, and knew precisely the difference between the two dialects ; but he had no special reason for thinking more highly " (the Professor's italics again) " of the Parisian than of the Anglo-French. . . . Warton's note on the line is quite sane. He shows that Queen Philippa wrote business letters in French (doubtless Anglo-French) with ' great propriety ' " . . . and so on. You see, there was a Benedictine nunnery at Stratford-le-Bow ; and as " Mr. Cutts says, very justly, ' She spoke French correctly, though with an accent which savoured of the Benedictine Convent at Stratford-le-Bow, where she had been educated, rather than of Paris.' " So there you have a fact. And, now you have it, doesn't it look rather like Bitzer's horse? " Bitzer," said Thomas Gradgrind. " Your definition of a horse .'* " Cha ucer 1 5 " Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring ; in marshy countries sheds hoofs too. Hoofs hard, but requir- ing to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth." Thus (and much more) Bitzer. Tales " It follows, I hope, from what I said last Marchio, week, that by far the most important service ^ ^ ' The Texts an editor can render to Chaucer and to us is ^^ ^/^^ to give us a pure text, through which the " Canter- native beauty of the poetry may best shine. yJJ/^f > Such a text Professor Skeat has been able to prepare, in part by his own great industry, in part because he has entered into the fruit of other men's labours. The epoch-making event in the history of the Canterbury Tales (with which alone we are concerned here) was Dr. Furnivall's publication for the Chaucer Society of the famous " Six-Text Edition." Dr. Furnivall set to work upon this in 1868. The Six Texts were these : — I. The great " Ellesmere " MS. (so l6 Adventures in Criticism called after its owner, the Earl of Ellcsmere). " The finest and best of all the MSS. now extant." 2. The " Hengwrt " MS., belonging to Mr. William W. E. Wynne, of Peniarth ; very closely agreeing with the " Ellesmere." 3. The "Cambridge" MS., Gg 4.27, in the University Library. The best copy in any public library. This also follows the " Ellesmere " closely. 4. The " Corpus " MS., in the library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. 5. The "Petworth" MS., belonging to Lord Lecon field. 6. The "Lansdowne" MS. in the British Museum. '' Not a good MS., being certainly the worst of the six ; but worth reprinting owing to the fre- quent use that has been made of it by editors." In his Introduction, Professor Skeat enumer- ates no fewer than fifty-nine MSS. of the Tales : but of these the above six (and a Chaucer 17 seventh to be mentioned presently) are the most important. The most important of all is the " Ellesmere " — the great " find " of the Six-Text Edition. " The best in nearly every respect," says Professor Skeat. " It not only gives good lines and good sense, but is also (usually) grammatically accurate and thoroughly well spelt. The publication of it has been a great boon to all Chaucer students, for which Dr. Furnivall will be ever gratefully remembered. . . . This splendid MS. has also the great merit of being com- plete, requiring no supplement from any other source, except in a few cases when a line or two has been missed." Professor Skeat has therefore chiefly em- ployed the Six-Text Edition, supplemented by a seventh famous MS., the " Harleian 7334" — printed in full for the Chaucer Society in 1885 — a MS. of great importance, differing considerably from the " Ellesmere." But the Professor judges it " a most danger- ous MS. to trust to, unless constantly cor- rected by others, and not at all fitted to be taken as the basis of a text." For the basis tS Adventures in Criticism of his text, then, he takes the Ellesmerc MS., correcting it freely by the other seven MSS. mentioned. Now, as fate would have it, in the year 1888 Dr. Furnivall invited Mr. Alfred W. Pollard to collaborate with him in an edition of Chaucer which he had for many years promised to bring out for Messrs. Macmillan. The basis of their text of the Tales was almost precisely that chosen by Professor Skeat, i.e. a careful collation of the Six Texts and the Harleian 7334, due preponderance being given to the EUcsmere MS., and all variations from it stated in the notes. " A beginning was made," says Mr. Pollard, " but the giant in the partnership had been used for a quarter of a century to doing, for nothing, all the hard work for other people, and could not spare from his pioneering the time necessary to enter into the fruit of his own Chaucer labours. Thus the partner who was not a giant was left to go on pretty much by himself. When I had made some progress. Professor Skeat informed us that the notes which he had been for years Chaucer 19 accumulating encouraged him to undertake an edition on a large scale, and I gladly aban- doned, in favour of an editor of so much greater width of reading, the Library Edition which had been arranged for in the original agreement of Dr. Furnivall and myself with Messrs. Macmillan. I thought, however, that the work which I had done might fairly be used for an edition on a less extensive plan and intended for a less stalwart class of readers, and of this the present issue of the Canterbury Tales is an instalment."* So it comes about that we have two texts before us, each based on a collation of the Six-Text edition and the Harleian MS. 7334 —the chief difference being that Mr. Pollard adheres closely to the Ellesmere MS., while Professor Skeat allows himself more freedom. This is how they start— " Whdn that Aprille with hise shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in swich licdur Of which vertu engendred is the flour ; Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth 5 * Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Edited, with Notes and In- troduction, by Alfred W. Pollard. London : Macmillan & Co. 20 Adventures in Criticism Inspired hath in every holt and heeth The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne, And smale foweles maken melodye That slepen al the nyght with open eye, — lo So priketh hem Nature in hir cordges, — Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages . . ." {Pollard^j " Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote, And bathed every veyne in swich licour Of which vertu engendred is the flour ; Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth 5 Inspired hath in every holt and heeth The tendre croppes, and the yong sonne Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne, And smale fowles maken melodye, That slepen al the night with open ye, 10 (So priketh hem nature in hir corages :) Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages . . ." {Skeat) On these two extracts it must be observed (i) that the accents and the dotted e's in the first are Mr. Pollard's own contrivances for helping the scansion ; (2) in the second, 1. 10, "ye" is a special contrivance of Professor Skeat. "The scribes," he says (Introd. Vol. IV. p. xix.), " usually write eye in the middle of a line, but when they come to it at the end of one, they are fairly puzzled. In 1. 10, Chaucer 21 the scribe of Hn (' Hengwrt ') writes lye, and that of Ln (' Lansdowne ') writes yhe ; and the variations on this theme are curious. The spelling ye (= ye) is, however, common. ... I print it * ye ' to distinguish it from ye^ the pi. pronoun." The other differences are accounted for by the varying degrees in which the two editors depend on the EUesmere MS. Mr. Pollard sticks to the EUesmere. Professor Skeat corrects it by the others. Obviously the editor who allows himself the wider range lays himself open to more criticism, point by point. He has to justify himself in each particular case, while the other's excuse is set down once for all in his preface. But after comparing the two texts in over a dozen passages, I have had to vote in almost every case for Professor Skeat The differences, however, are always trifling. The reader will allow that in each case we have a clear, intelligible text : a text that allows Chaucer to be read and enjoyed with- out toil or vexation. For my part, I hope there is no presumption in saying that I could very well do without Mr. Pollard's 22 Adventures in Criticism accents and dotted e's. Remove them, and I contend that any EngHshman with an car for poetry can read either of the two texts without difficulty. A great deal too much fuss is made over the pronunciation The and scansion of Chaucer. After all, we are Alleged Ensflishmen, with an instinct for understand- of Reading ing the language we inherit ; in the evolution Chaucer ^^ ^^j. language we move on the same lines as our fathers ; and Chaucer's English is at least no further removed from us than the Lowland dialect of Scott's novels. More- over, we have in reading Chaucer what we lack in reading Scott — the assistance of rhythm ; and the rhythm of Chaucer is as clearly marked as that of Tennyson. Pro- fessor Skeat might very well have allowed his admirable text to stand alone. For his rules of pronunciation, with their elaborate system of signs and symbols, seem to me (to put it coarsely) phonetics gone mad. This, for instance, is how he would have us read the Tales : — " Whdn-dhat Aprilla / wfdh iz-shuurez s(5ot3 dh9-druuhi' ov-Mdrch3 / hath p6rsed t6o dho-rdot^, ond-bdadhed ev'ri veina / in-s\vich likuur . . ." Chaucer 23 — and so on. I think it may safely be said that if a man need this sort of assistance in reading or pronouncing Chaucer, he had better let Chaucer alone altogether, or read him in a German prose translation. Why is Chaucer so easy to read ? At a first ^prin, 1895. glance a page of the Canterbury Tales appears more formidable than a page of the " Faerie Queene." As a matter of fact, it is less formidable ; or, if this be denied, every- one will admit that twenty pages of the Canterbury Tales are less formidable than twenty pages of the " Faerie Queene." I might bring several recent editors and critics to testify that, after the first shock of the archaic spelling and the final "e," an intelligent public will soon come to terms with Chaucer ; but the unconscious testimony of the intelli- gent public itself is more convincing. Chaucer is read year after year by a large number of men and women. Spenser, in many respects a greater poet, is also read ; but by far fewer. Nobody, I imagine, will deny this. But what is the reason of it } 24 Adventures in Criticism The first and chief reason is this — Forms of language change, but the great art of narra- tive appeals eternally to men, and its rules rest on principles older than Homer. And whatever else may be said of Chaucer, he is a superb narrator. To borrow a phrase from another venerable art, he is always " on the ball." He pursues the story — the story, and again the story. Mr. Ward once put this admirably — " The vivacity and joyousness of Chaucer's poetic temperament .... make him amusingly impatient of epical lengths, abrupt in his transitions, and anxious, with an anxiety usually manifested by readers rather than by writers, to come to the point, *to the great effect,' as he is wont to call it. 'Men,' he says, ' may overlade a ship or barge, and therefore I will skip at once to the effect, and let all the rest slip.' And he unconsciously suggests a striking dif- ference between himself and the great Elizabethan epic poet who owes so much to him, when he declines to make as long a tale of the chaff or of the straw as of the corn, and to describe all the details of a marriage-feast seriatim : ' The fruit of every tale is for to say : They eat and drink, and dance and sing and play.' This may be the fruit ; but epic poets, from Homer downward, have been generally in the habit of not neglecting the foliage. Spenser in particular has that Chaucer 25 impartial copiousness which we think it our duty to admire in the Ionic epos, but which, if truth were told, has prevented generations of Englishmen from acquiring an intimate personal acquaintance with the 'Fairy Queen.' With Chaucer the danger certainly rather lay in the opposite direction." Now, if we are once interested in a story, small difficulties of speech or spelling will not readily daunt us in the time-honoured pursuit of " what happens next " — certainly not if we know enough of our author to feel sure he will come to the point and tell us what happens next with the least possible palaver. We have a definite want and a certainty of being satisfied promptly. But with Spenser this satisfaction may, and almost certainly will, be delayed over many pages : and though in the meanwhile a thousand casual beauties may appeal to us, the main thread of our attention is sensibly relaxed. Chaucer is the minister and Spenser the master : and the difference between pursuing what we want and pursuing we-know-not-what must affect the ardour of the chase. Even if we take the future on trust, and follow Spenser to the end, we cannot look back on a book of the " Faerie Queene " as on part of a good 26 Adventures in Criticism story : for it is admittedly an unsatisfying and ill-constructed story. But my point is that an ordinary reader resents being asked to take the future on trust while the author luxuriates in casual beauties of speech upon every mortal subject but the one in hand. The first principle of good narrative is to stick to the subject ; the second, to carry the audience along in a series of small surprises — satisfying expectation and going just a little beyond. If it were necessary to read fifty pages before enjoying Chaucer, though the sum of eventual enjoyment were as great as it now is, Chaucer would never be read. We master small difficulties line by line because our recompense comes line by line. Moreover, it is as certain as can be that we read Chaucer to-day more easily than our fathers read him one hundred, two hundred, three hundred years ago. And the credit of this does not all belong to the philolo- gists. The Elizabethans, from Spenser onward, found Chaucer distressingly archaic. When Sir Francis Kynaston, toftp. Charles I., Chaucer 27 translated "Troilus and Criseyde," Cartwright congratulated him that he had at length made it possible to read Chaucer without a dictionary. And from Dryden's time to Wordsworth's he was an " uncouthe unkiste " barbarian, full of wit, but only tolerable in polite paraphrase. Chaucer himself seems to have foreboded this, towards the close of his "Troilus and Criseyde," when he addresses his " litel book "— " And for there is so great diversitee In English, and in wryting of our tonge, So preye I God that noon miswryte thee, Ne thee mismetre for defaute of tonge. And red wher-so thou be, or elles songe. That thou be understoude I God beseche ! . . ." And therewith, as though on purpose to defeat his fears, he proceeded to turn three stanzas of Boccaccio into English that tastes almost as freshly after five hundred years as on the day it was written. He is speaking of Hector's death : — " And whan that he was slayn in this manere, His lighte goost ful bhsfuUy it went Up to the holownesse of the seventh spare In convers Icling every element ; 28 Adventures in Criticism And ther he saugh, with ful avysement, The enatik starrcs, herkening armonye With sownes ful of hevenish melodye. " And down from thennes faste he gan avyse This Htel spot of erlhe, that with the see Embraced is, and fully gan despyse This wrecched world, and held al vanitee To respect of the pleyn felicitee That is in hevene above ; and at the laste, Thcr he was slayn, his loking down he caste " And in himself he lough right at the wo Of hem that wepten for his death so faste; And dampned al our werk that folweth so The blinde lust, the which that may not laste, And sholden al our harte on hevene caste. And forth he wente, shortly for to telle, Ther as Mercurie sorted him to dwelle . . . ." Who have prepared our ears to admit this passage, and many as fine? Not the editors, who point out very properly that it is a close translation from Boccaccio's " Teseide," xi. 1-3. The information is valuable, as far as it goes ; but what it fails to explain is just the marvel of the passage — viz. the abiding " English- ness " of it, the native ring of it in our ears after five centuries of linguistic and metrical development. To whom, besides Chaucer himself, do we owe this .'' For while Chaucer CUA UCER 29 has remained substantially the same, appa- rently we have an aptitude that our grand- fathers and great-grandfathers had not. The answer surely is : We owe it to our nineteenth century poets, and particularly to Tennyson, Swinburne, and William Morris. Years ago Mr. R. H. Home said most acutely that the principle of Chaucer's rhythm is " inseparable from a full and fair exercise of the genius of our language in versification." This "full and fair exercise " became a despised, almost a lost, tradition after Chaucer's death. The rhythms of Skelton, of Surrey, and Wyatt, were produced on alien and narrower lines. Revived by Shakespeare and the later Elizabethans, it fell into contempt again until Cowper once more began to claim freedom for English rhythm, and after him Coleridge and the despised Leigh Hunt. But never has its full liberty been so triumphantly asserted as by the three poets I have named above. If we are at home as we read Chaucer, it is because they have instructed us in the liberty which Chaucer divined as the only true way. 30 "THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM" January I, The Passioiiate PUgrivi (1599). Reprinted ^^^^ witJi a Note about the Book, by Arthur L. „ '.^ Humplireys. London : Privately Printed by Pilgrim Arthur L. Humphreys , of 187, Piccadilly. MDCCCXCiv. I was about to congratulate Mr. Humphreys on his printing when, upon turning to the end of this dainty little volume, I discovered the well-known colophon of the Chiswick Press — " Charles Whittingham & Co., Took's Court, Chancery Lane, London." So I congratulate Messrs. Charles Whitting- ham & Co. instead, and suggest that the imprint should have run " Privately Printed for Arthur L. Humphreys." This famous (or, if you like it, infamous) little anthology of thirty leaves has been singularly unfortunate in its title-pages. It was first published in 1599 as TJie Passionate Pilgrime. By W. Shakespeare. At London Printed for W. faggard, and are to be sold ^^The Passionate Pilgrim'' 31 by W. Leake, at the Greyhound in P aides Churchyard. This, of course, was disin- genuous. Some of the numbers were by Shakespeare : but the authorship of some remains doubtful to this day, and others the enterprising Jaggard had boldly con- veyed from Marlowe, Richard Barnefield, and Bartholomew Griffin. In short, to adapt a famous line upon a famous lexicon, " the best part was Shakespeare, the rest was not." For this, Jaggard has been execrated from time to time with sufficient heartiness. Mr. Swinburne, in his latest volume of Essays, calls him an " infamous pirate, liar, and thief." Mr. Humphreys remarks, less viva- ciously, that " He was not careful and prudent, or he would not have attached the name of Shakespeare to a volume which was only partly by the bard — that was his crime. Had Jaggard foreseen the tantrums and contradictions he caused some com- mentators — Mr. Payne Collier, for instance — he would doubtless have substituted * By William Shakespeare and others ' for ' By William Shakespeare.* Thus he might have saved his reputation, and this hornets' nest 32 AdvI'.nturks in Criticism which now and then rouses itself afresh around his aged ghost of three centuries ago." That a ghost can sufter no inconvenience from hornets I take to be indisputable : but as a defence of Jaggard the above hardly seems convincing. One might as plausibly justify a forger on the ground that, had he foreseen the indignation of the prosecuting counsel, he would doubtless have saved his reputation by forbearing to forge. But before constructing a better defence, let us hear the whole tale of the alleged misdeeds. Of the second edition of The Passiojiate Pilgrim no copy exists. Nothing whatever is known of it, and the whole edition may have been but an ideal construction of Jaggard's sportive fancy. But in 1612 ap- peared The Passionate Pilgrinie^ or certaine ainoroits Sonnets between Venus and Adonis^ newly corrected and angniented. By W. Shake- speare. The third edition. Whereunto is newly added two Love Epistles, the first from Paris to Hellen, a7id Hellenes ansivere hack again to Paris. Printed by W. Jaggard. (These "two " The Passionate Pilgrim'' 33 Love Epistles " were really by Thomas Hey- wood.) This title-page was very quickly can- celled, and Shakespeare's name omitted. These are the bare facts. Now observe ^^^- '^"'«- phreys^ how they appear when set forth by Mr. Hum- hypothesis phreys : — " Shakespeare, who, when the first edition was issued, was aged thirty-five, acted his part as a great man very well, for he with dignity took no notice of the error on the title-page of the first edition, attributing to him poems which he had never written. But when Jaggard went on sinning, and the third edition appeared under Shakespeare's name solely^ though it had poems by Thomas Heywood, and others as well, Jaggard was promptly pulled up by both Shakespeare and Heywood. Upon this the publisher appears very properly to have printed a new title-page, omitting the name of Shakespeare." Upon this I beg leave to observe — (i) That although it may very likely have been at Shakespeare's own request that his name was removed from the title-page of the third edition, Mr. Humphreys has no right to state this as an ascertained fact. (2) That I fail C 34 Adventures in Criticism to understand, if Shakespeare acted properly in the case of the third edition, why we should talk nonsense about his "acting the part of a great man very well " and " with dignity taking no notice of the error" in the first edition. In the first edition he was wrongly credited with pieces that belonged to Marlowe, Barnefield, Griffin, and some authors unknown. In the third he was credited with these and some pieces by Heywood as well. In the name of common logic I ask why, if it were " dignified " to say nothing in the case of Marlowe and Barnefield, it suddenly became right and proper to protest in the case of Heywood ? But (3) what right have we to assume that Shakespeare " took no notice of the error on the title-page of the first edition"? We know this only — that if he protested, he did not prevail as far as the first edition was concerned. That edition may have been already exhausted. It is even possible that he did prevail in the matter of the second edition, and that Jaggard reverted to his old courses in the third. I don't for a moment suppose this was the case. I " The Passionate Pilgrim'^ 35 merely suggest that where so many hypo- theses will fit the scanty data known, it is best to lay down no particular hypothesis as fact. For I imagine that anyone can, in five Another minutes, fit up an hypothesis quite as valu- able as Mr. Humphreys'. Here is one which at least has the merit of not making Shake- speare look a fool : — W. Jaggard, publisher, comes to William Shakespeare, poet, with the information that he intends to bring out a small miscellany of verse. If the poet has an unconsidered trifle or so to spare, Jaggard will not mind giving a few shillings for them. "You may have, if you like," says Shake- speare, *'the rough copies of some songs in my Lovers Labours Lost, published last year"; and, being further encouraged, searches among his rough MSS., and tosses Jaggard a lyric or two and a couple of sonnets. Jaggard pays his money, and departs with the verses. When the miscellany appears, Shakespeare finds his name alone upon the title-page, and remonstrates. But, of the defrauded ones, Marlowe is dead ; Barnefield has retired to C 2 36 Adventures in Criticism live the life of a country gentleman in Shrop- shire ; Griffin dwells in Coventry (where he died, three years later). These are the men injured ; and if they cannot, or will not, move in the business, Shakespeare (whose case at law would be more difficult) can hardly be expected to. So he contents himself with strong expressions at The Mermaid. But in 1612 Jaggard repeats his offence, and is indiscreet enough to add Heywood to the list of the spoiled. Heywood lives in London, on the spot ; and Shakespeare, now retired to Stratford, is of more im- portance than he was in 1599. Armed with Shakespeare's authority, Heywood goes to Jaggard and threatens ; and the publisher gives way. Whatever our hypothesis, we cannot main- tain that Jaggard behaved well. On the other hand, it were foolish to judge his offence as if the man had committed it the day before yesterday. Conscience in matters of literary copyright has been a plant of slow growth. But a year or two ago respectable citizens of the United States were publishing " The Passionate Pilgrim'' 37 our books " free of authorial expenses," and even corrected our imperfect works without consulting us. We must admit that Jaggard acted up to Luther's maxim, " Pecca fortiter" He went so far as to in- clude a piece so well known as Marlowe's Live with me and be my love — which proves at any rate his indifference to the chances of detection. But to speak of him as one would speak of a similar offender in this New Year of Grace is simply to forfeit one's claim to an historical sense. What further palliation can we find ? Mr. The Book Swinburne calls the book " a worthless little volume of stolen and mutilated poetry, patched up and padded out with dirty and dreary doggrel, under the senseless and preposterous title of TJie Passionate Pilgritn." On the other hand, Mr. Humphreys maintains that "Jaggard, at any rate, had very good taste. This is partly seen in the choice of a title. Few books have so charming a name as The Passionate Pilgrim. It is a perfect title. Jaggard also set up a good precedent, for this collection was published a vear before 38 Adventures in Criticism Eiigia7icVs Helicon f and, of course, very many years before any authorised collection of Shakespeare's * Poems * was issued. We see in The Passionate Pilgrim a forerunner of T^ie Golden Treasury and other anthologies." Now, as for the title, if the value of a title lie in its application, Mr. Swinburne is right. It has little relevance to the verses in the volume. On the other hand, as a portly and attractive mouthful of syllables T/ie Passionate Pilgrim can hardly be surpassed. If not "a perfect title," it is surely " a charming name." But Mr. Humphreys' contention that Jaggard " set up a good precedent " and produced a " forerunner " of English anthologies becomes absurd when we remember that TotteVs Mis- cellany was published in June, 1557 (just forty- two years before The Passionate Pil- grint)^ and had reached an eighth edition by 1587; that The Paradise of Dainty Devices appeared in 1576; A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions in 1578 ; A Haiidfiill of Pleasant Delights in 1 5 84 ; and The Phoenix Nest in 1 593. Almost as wide of the mark is Mr. " The Passionate Pilgrim" 39 Swinburne's description of the volume as "worthless." It contains twenty-one numbers, besides that lofty dirge, so unapproachably solemn, The PJioenix and the Turtle. Of these, five are undoubtedly by Shakespeare. A sixth {Crabbed age and yonth), if not by Shakespeare, is one of the loveliest lyrics in the language, and I for my part could give it to no other man. Note also that but for Jaggard's enterprise this jewel had been irrevocably lost to us, since it is known only through The Passionate Pilgrim. Marlowe's Live with me and be my love and Barnefield's As it fell upon a day, make numbers seven and eight. And I imagine that even Mr. Swinburne cannot afford to scorn Sweet rose, fair flower, untimely pludcd, soon vaded — which again only occurs in The Passionate Pilgrim. These nine numbers, with The Phoenix and the Turtle, make up more than half the book. Among the rest we have the pretty and respectable lyrics. If music and sweet poetry agree ; Good night, good rest ; Lord, how mine eyes throw gazes to the east ; When as thine eye hath chose the dame, and the gay little song. It was a Lording's 40 Adventures in Criticism daughter. There remain the Venus and Adonis sonnets and My flocks feed 7iot. Mr. Swinburne may call these " dirty and dreary doggrel," an he list, with no more risk than of being held a somewhat over- anxious moralist. But to call the whole book worth- less is mere abuse of words. It is true, nevertheless, that one of the only two copies existing of the first edition was bought for three halfpence.. 41 SHAKESPEARE'S LYRICS In their re-issue of The Aldme Poets ^ Messrs. August ^s. George Bell & Sons have made a number of Shake- concessions to pubhc taste. The new binding speare^s is far more pleasing than the old ; and in Lyrics some cases, where the notes and introductory memoirs had fallen out of date, new editors have been set to work, with satisfactory- results. It is therefore no small disappoint- ment to find that the latest volume, " The Poems of Shakespeare," is but a reprint from stereotyped plates of the Rev. Alexander Dyce's text, notes and memoir. Now, of the Rev. Alexander Dyce it may be fearlessly asserted that his criticism is not for all time. Even had he been less prone to accept the word of John Payne Collier for gospel ; even had Shakespearian criticism The Rev. made no perceptible advance during the last '^' ^^^^ quarter of a century, yet there is that in the Rev. Alexander Dyce's treatment of his poet which would warn us to pause before accept- ed 42 Adventures in Criticism ing his word as final. As a test of his aesthetic judgment we may turn to the " Songs from the Plays of Shakespeare " with which this volume concludes. It had been as well, in a work of this sort, to include all the songs ; but he gives us a selection only, and an uncommonly bad selection. I have tried in vain to discover a single principle of taste underlying it. On what principle, for instance, can a man include the song " Come away, come away, death" from Tzuelfth Nighty and omit " O mistress mine, where are you roam- ing } " ; or include Amiens' two songs from As yoii Like It, and omit the incomparable " It was a lover and his lass " } Or what but stark insensibility can explain the omission of "Take, O take those lips away," and the bridal song " Roses, their sharp spines being gone," that opens TJie Two Noble Kinsmen? But stay : the Rev. Alexander Dyce may attribute this last pair to Fletcher. " Take, O take those lips away" certainly occurs (with a second and inferior stanza) in Fletcher's The Bloody Brother, first published in 1639; but Dyce gives no hint of his belief that Fletcher wrote it. We are, therefore, left to Shakespeare* s Lyrics 43 conclued that Dyce thought it unworthy of a place in his collection. On The Two Noble Kinsmen (first published in 1634) Dyce is more explicit. In a footnote to the Memoir he says : " The title-page of the first edition of Fletcher's Two Noble Kinsmen attributes the play partly to Shakespeare ; I do not think our poet had any share in its composi- tion ; but I must add that Mr. C. Lamb (a great authority in such matters) inclines to a different opinion." When " Mr. C. Lamb " and the Rev. Alexander Dyce hold opposite opinions, it need not be difficult to choose. And surely, if internal evidence count for anything at all, the lines " Maiden pinks, of odour faint, Daisies smell-less, yet most quaint, And sweet thyme true." or- or- " Oxlips in their cradles growing" " Not an angel of the air. Bird melodious, or bird fair, Be absent hence." — were written by Shakespeare and not by Fletcher. Nor is it any detraction from Fletcher to take this view. Shakespeare C* 2 44 Adventures in Criticism himself has left songs hardly finer than Fletcher wrote at his best — hardly finer, for instance, than that magnificent pair from Valentinian. Only the note of Shakespeare happens to be different from the note of Fletcher : and it is Shakespeare's note — the note of " The cowslips tall her pensioners be " (also omitted by the inscrutable Dyce) and of " When daisies pied, and violets blue, And lady-smocks all silver-white, And cuckoo buds of yellow hue Do paint the meadows with delight . . . ." — that we hear repeated in this Bridal Song.* * The opening lines of the second stanza of this poem have generally been printed thus : •' Primrose, firstborn child of Ver, Merry springtime's harbinger, With her bells dim . . . ." And many have wondered how Shakespeare or Fletcher came to write of the "bells" of a primrose. Mr. W. J. Linton proposed "With harebell slim": although if we must read "harebell" or "harebells," "dim" would be a pretty and proper word for the colour of that flower. The conjecture takes some little plausibility from Shakespeare's elsewhere linking primrose and harebell together : "Thoushalt not lack The flower that's like thy face, pale primrose, nor The a2ured harebell, like thy veins " CytnbelinCy iv. 2. I have always suspected, however, that there should be a Shakespeare's Lyrics 45 And if this be so, it is but another proof for us that Dyce was not a critic for all time. Nor is the accent of finality conspicuous in such passages as this from the Memoir : — "Wright had heard that Shakespeare ' was a much better poet than player' ; and Rowe tells us that soon after his admission into the company, he became distinguished, *if not as an extraordinary actor, yet as an excellent writer.' Perhaps his execution did not equal his conception of a character, but we may rest assured that he who wrote the incomparable instruc- tions to the player in Hamlet would never offend his audience by an injudicious performance." I have no more to urge against writing of this order than that it has passed out of fashion, and that something different might reasonably have been looked for in a volume that bears the date 1894 on its title-page. The public owes Messrs. Bell & Sons a heavy debt ; but at the same time the public has a semicolon after "Ver," and that "Merry springtime's harbinger, with her bells dim," refers to a totally different flower — the snowdrop, to wit. And I have lately learnt from Dr. Grosart, who has carefully examined the 1634 edition (the only early one), that the text actually gives a semicolon. The snowdrop may very well come after the primrose in this song, which altogether ignores the process of the seasons. 46 Adventures in Criticism peculiar interest in such a series as that of The Aldiiie Poets. A purchaser who finds several of these books to his mind, and is thereby induced to embark upon the purchase of the entire series, must feel a natural resent- ment if succeeding volumes drop below the implied standard. He cannot go back : and to omit the offending volumes is to spoil his set. And I contend that the action taken by- Messrs. Bell & Sons in improving several of their more or less obsolete editions will only be entirely praiseworthy if we may take it as an earnest of their desire to place the whole series on a level with contemporary know- ledge and criticism. Nor can anyone who knows how much the industry and enthusiasm of Dyce did, in his day, for the study of Shakespeare, do more than urge that while, viewed historically, Dyce's criticism is entirely respectable, it happens to be a trifle belated in the year 1894. The points of difference between him and Charles Lamb are perhaps too obvious to need indication ; but we may sum them up by saying that whereas Lamb, being a genius, Shakespeare's Lyrics ^y belongs to all time^ Dyce, being but an indus- trious person, belongs to a period. It was a period of rapid development, no doubt — how rapid we may learn for ourselves by the easy process of taking down Volume V. of Chalmers's " English Poets," and turning to that immortal passage on Shakespeare's poems which Chalmers put forth in the year 1810:— *' The peremptory decision of Mr. Steevens on the merits of these poems must not be omitted. ' We have not reprinted the Sonnets, etc., of Shakespeare, because the strongest Act of Parliament that could be framed would fail to compel readers into their service. Had Shakespeare produced no other works than these, his name would have reached us with as little celebrity as time has conferred upon that of Thomas Watson, an older and much more elegant sonnetteer.' Severe as this may appear, it only amounts to the general conclusion which modern critics have formed. Still, it cannot be denied that there are many scattered beauties among his Sonnets, and in the Rape of Lucrece ; enough, it is hoped, to justify their admis- sion into the present collection, especially as the Songs, etc., from his plays have been added, and a few smaller pieces selected by Mr. Ellis. . . ." No comment can add to, or take from, the stupendousness of this. And yet it was the criticism proper to its time. " I have only to 48 Adventures in Criticism hope," writes Chalmers in his preface, " that my criticisms will not be found destitute of candour, or improperly interfering with the general and acknowledged principles of taste." Indeed they are not. They were the right opinions for Chalmers ; as Dyce's were the right opinions for Dyce : and if, as we hope, ours is a larger appreciation of Shakespeare, we probably hold it by no merit of our own, but as the common possession of our genera- tion, derived through the chastening experi- ences of our grandfathers. That, however, is no reason why we should not insist on having such editions of Shakespeare as fulfil our requirements, and refuse to study Dyce except as an historical figure. It is an unwise generation that declines to take all its inheritance. I have heard once or twice of late that English poets in the future will set themselves to express emotions more complex and subtle than have ever yet been treated in poetry. I shall be extremely glad, of course, if this happen in my time. But at present I incline to rejoice rather in an assured inheritance, and, when I hear talk Shakespeare's Lyrics 49 of this kind, to say over to myself one par- ticular sonnet which for mere subtlety of thought seems to me unbeaten by anything that I can select from the poetry of this century : — " Thy bosom is endeared of all hearts Which I by lacking have supposed dead ; And there reigns Love and all Love's loving parts, And all those friends which I thought buried. How many a holy and obsequious Tear Hath dear religious love stol'n from mine eye. As interest of the dead, which now appear But things remov'd that hidden in thee lie ! Thou art the grave where buried love doth live, Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone, Who all their parts of me to thee did give ; That due of many now is thine alone ! Their images I lov'd I view in thee, And thou, all they, hast all the all of me." 50 February 24, 1894 Samuel Daniel SAMUEL DANIEL The writings of Samuel Daniel and the cir- cumstances of his life are of course well enough known to all serious students of English poetry. And, though I cannot speak on this point with any certainty, I imagine that our younger singers hold to the tradition of all their fathers, and that Daniel still rejtidet in angulo of their affections, as one who in his day did very much, though quietly, to train the growth of English verse ; and proved himself, in everything he wrote, an artist to the bottom of his conscience. As certainly as Spenser, he was a " poets' poet " while he lived. A couple of pages might be filled almost off- hand with the genuine compliments of his contemporaries, and he will probably remain a " poets' poet " as long as poets write in English. But the average reader of culture — the person who is honestly moved by good poetry and goes from time to time to his Samuel Daniel 51 bookshelves for an antidote to the common cares and trivialities of this life — seems to neglect Daniel almost utterly. I judge from the wretched insufficiency of his editions. It is very hard to obtain anything beyond the two small volumes published in 17 18 (an imper- fect collection), and a volume of selections edited by Mr. John Morris and published by a Bath bookseller in 1855 ; and even these are only to be picked up here and there. I find it significant, too, that in Mr. Palgrave's Golden Treasury Daniel is represented by one sonnet only, and that by no means his best. This neglect will appear the more singular to anyone who has observed how apt is the person whom I have called the " average reader of culture " to be drawn to the perusal of an author's works by some attractive idiosyncrasy in the author's private life or character. Lamb is a staring instance of this attraction. How we all love Lamb, to be sure 1 Though he rejected it and called out upon it, " gentle " remains Lamb's con- stant epithet. And, curiously enough, in the gentleness and dignified melancholy of his life, Daniel stands nearer to Lamb than any 52 Adventures in Criticism other English writer, with the possible excep- tion of Scott. His circumstances were less gloomily picturesque. But I defy any feeling man to read the scanty narrative of Daniel's life and think of him thereafter without sym- pathy and respect. Life He was born in 1562 — Fuller says in Somersetshire, not far from Taunton ; others say at Beckington, near Philip's Norton, or at Wilmington in Wiltshire. Anthony Wood tells us that he came " of a wealthy family " ; Fuller that " his father was a master of music." Of his earlier years next to nothing is known; but in 1579 he was entered as a commoner at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, and left the university three years afterwards without taking a degree. His first book — a translation of Paola Giovio's treatise on Emblems — appeared in 1585, when he was about twenty-two. In 1590 or 1591 he was travelling in Italy, probably with a pupil, and no doubt busy with those studies that finally made him the first Italian scholar of his time. In 1592 he published his " Sonnets to Delia," which at once made his reputation ; in 1 1;94 Samuel Daniel 53 his " Complaint of Rosamond " and " Tragedy of Cleopatra" ; and in 1595 four books of his " Civil Wars." On Spenser's death, in 1 599, Daniel is said to have succeeded to the office of poet-laureate. " That wreath which, in Eliza's golden days, My master dear, divinest Spenser, wore ; That which rewarded Drayton's learned lays, Which thoughtful Ben and gentle Daniel wore. . ." But history traces the Laureateship, as an office, no further back than Jonson, and we need not follow Southey into the mists. It is certain, however, that Daniel was a favourite at Elizabeth's Court, and in some way partook of her bounty. In 1600 he was appointed tutor to the Lady Anne Clifford, a little girl of about eleven, daughter of Margaret, Countess of Cumberland ; and his services were gratefully remembered by mother and daughter during his life and after. But Daniel seems to have tired of living in great houses as private tutor to the young. The next year, when presenting his works to Sir Thomas Egerton, he writes : " Such hath been my misery that whilst I should have written the actions of men, I 54 Adventures in Criticism have been constrained to bide with children, and, contrary to mine own spirit, put out of that sense which nature had made my part." Self- Now there is but one answer to this — that distrust r II • • 1 rr a man of really strong spirit does not suffer himself to be " put out of that sense which nature had made my part." Daniel's words indicate the weakness that in the end made futile all his powers : they indicate a certain "donnish" timidity (if I may use the epithet), a certain distrust of his own genius. Such a timidity and such a distrust often accompany very exquisite faculties : indeed, they may be said to imply a certain exquisite- ness of feeling. But they explain why, of the two contemporaries, the robust Ben Jonson is to-day a living figure in most men's conception of those times, while Samuel Daniel is rather a fleeting ghost. And his self-distrust was even then recognised as well as his exquisiteness. He is indeed " weli- languaged Daniel," "sweet honey-dropping Daniel," " Rosamund's trumpeter, sweet as the nightingale," revered and admired by all his compeers. But the note of apprehension Samuel Daniel 55 was also sounded, not only by an unknown contributor to that rare collection of epigrams, Skialetheia^ or the SJiadozv of Truth — "Daniel (as some hold) might mount, if he list; But others say he is a Lucanist " — but by no meaner a judge than Spenser himself, who wrote in his " Colin Clout's Come Home Again " : " And there is a new shepherd late upsprung The which doth all afore him far surpass ; Appearing well in that well-tuned song Which late he sung unto a scornful lass. Yet doth his tremblitig Muse but lowly fly^ As daring not too rashly 7nount on height ; And doth her tender plumes as yet but try In love's soft lays, and looser thoughts delight. Then rouse thy feathers quickly, Daniel, And to what course thou please thyself advance ; But most, meseems, thy accent will excel In tragic plaints and passionate mischance." Moreover, there is a significant passage in the famous " Return from Parnassus," first acted at Cambridge during the Christmas of 1601 : " Sweet honey-dropping Daniel doth wage War with the proudest big Italian That melts his heart in sugar'd sonneting, Otily let him more sparingly make use Of other^ wit a?id use his own the more." 56 Adventures in Criticism Thi Now it has been often pointed out that ''mauvais considerable writers fall into two classes — pas " of Parnassus (0 those wlio begin, having something to say, and are from the first rather occupied with their matter than with the manner of ex- pressing it ; and (2) those who begin with the love of expression and intent to be artists in words, and come through expression to pro- found thought. It is fashionable just now, for some reason or another, to account Class i as the more respectable; a judgment to which, considering that Shakespeare and Milton belonged undeniably to Class 2, I refuse to assent. The question, however, is not to be argued here.* I have only to point out in this place that the early work of all poets in Class 2 is largely imitative. Virgil was imitative ; Keats was imitative — to name but a couple of sufficiently striking examples. And Daniel, who belongs to this class, was also imitative. But for a poet of this class to reach the heights of song, there must come a time when out of imitation he forms a genuine style of his own, and loses no meiital fertility in the transformatioji. This, if I may use the * It is discussed at pp. 246-56. Samuel Daniel 57 metaphor, is the mauvais pas in the ascent of Parnassus : and here Daniel broke down. He did indeed acquire a style of his own ; but the effort exhausted him. He was no longer prolific ; his ardour had gone : and his innate self-distrustfulness made him quick to recognise his sterility. Soon after the accession of James I., Daniel, at the recommendation of his brother- in-law, John Florio, possibly furthered by the interest of the Earl of Pembroke, was given a post as gentleman extraordinary and groom of the privy chamber to Anne of Denmark ; and a few months after was appointed to take the oversight of the plays and shows that were performed by the children of the Queen's revels, or children of the Chapel, as they were called under Elizabeth. He had thus a snug position at Court, and might have been happy had it been another Court. But in nothing was the accession of James more apparent than in the almost instantaneous blasting of the taste, manners, and serious grace that had marked the Court of Elizabeth. The Court of James was a Court of bad taste, bad OF U W I V E R : or 58 Adventures in Criticism manners, and no grace whatever : and Daniel — " the remnant of another time," as he calls himself — looked wistfully back upon the days of Elizabeth. " But whereas he came planted in the spring, And had the sun before him of respect ; We, set in th' autumn, in the withering And sullen season of a cold defect, Must taste those sour distastes the times do bring Upon the fulness of a cloy'd neglect. Although the stronger constitutions shall Wear out th' infection of distemper'd days . . ." And so he stood dejected, while the young men of *^ stronger constitutions " passed him by. In this way it happened that Daniel, whom at the outset his contemporaries had praised with wide consent, and who never wrote a loose or unscholarly line, came to pen, in the dedicatory epistle prefixed to his tragedy of " Philotas," these words — perhaps the most pathetic ever uttered by an artist upon his work : " And therefore since I have outlived the date Of former grace, acceptance and delight, I would my lines, late born beyond the fate Of her * spent line, had never come to light : * Sc. Elizabeth's. Samuel Daniel 59 So had I not been tax'd for wishing well, Nor now mistaken by the censuring Stage, Nor in my fame and reputation fell, Which I esteem more than what all the age Or the earth can give. But years hath done this wrong. To make me write too tnuch^ and live too long^' I said just now that Daniel had done Ease of his much, though quietly, to train the growth ""^^^^ of English verse. He not only stood up successfully for its natural development at a time when the clever but less largely in- formed Campion and others threatened it with fantastic changes. He probably did as much as Waller to introduce polish of line into our poetry. Turn to the famous " Ulysses and the Siren," and read. Can anyone tell me of English verses that run more smoothly off the tongue, or with a more temperate grace t " Well, well, Ulysses, then I see I shall not have thee here : And, therefore, I will come to thee, And take my fortune there. I must be won that cannot win, Yet lost were I not won ; For beauty hath created been T'undo or be undone." 6o Adventures in Criticism To speak familiarly, this is as easy as an old shoe. To speak yet more familiarly, it looks as if any fool could turn off lines like these. Let the fool try. And yet to how many anthologies do we not turn in vain for " Ulysses and the Siren" ; or for the exquisite spring song, beginning — " Now each creature joys the other, Passing happy days and hours ; One bird reports unto another In the fall of silver showers . . ." — or for that lofty thing, the " Epistle to the Countess of Cumberland " ? — which Words- worth, who quoted it in his *' Excursion," declares to be " an admirable picture of the state of a wise man's mind in a time of public commotion." Certainly, if ever a critic shall arise to deny poetry the virtue we so commonly claim for her, of fortifying men's souls against calamity, this noble Epistle will be all but the last post from which he will extrude her defenders. 6i WILLIAM BROWNE It has been objected to the author of Britan- nia's Pastorals that their perusal sends you to sleep. It had been subtler criticism, as well as more amiable, to observe that you can wake up again and, starting anew at the precise point where you dropped off, continue the perusal with as much pleasure as ever, neither ashamed of your somnolence nor im- puting it as a fault to the poet. For William Browne is perhaps the easiest figure in our literature. He lived easily, he wrote easily, and no doubt he died easily. He no more expected to be read through at a sitting than he tried to write all the story of Marina at a sitting. He took up his pen and composed ; when he felt tired he went off to bed, like a sensible man : and when you are tired of reading he expects you to be sensible and do the same. April 21, 1894. William Browne of Tavistock He was born at Tavistock, in Devon, about ^/^f^'^ 62 Adventures in Criticism. the year 1590 ; and after the manner of mild and sensible men cherished a particular love for his birth-place to the end of his days. From Tavistock Grammar School he passed to Exeter College, Oxford — the old west- country college — and thence to Clifford's Inn and the Inner Temple. His first wife died when he was twenty-three or twenty-four. He took his second courtship quietly and leisurably, marrying the lady at length in 1628, after a wooing of thirteen years. " He seems," says Mr. A. H. BuUen, his latest biographer, "to have acquired in some way a modest competence, which secured him immunity from the troubles that weighed so heavily on men of letters." His second wife also brought him a portion. More than four years before this marriage he had returned to Exeter College, as tutor to the young Robert Dormer, who in due time became Earl of Carnarvon and was killed in Newbury fight. By his fellow-collegians — as by everybody with whom he came into contact — he was highly beloved and esteemed, and in the public Register of the University is styled " vir omni humana literarum et bonarum artium William Browne 63 cognitione instructus." He gained the especial favour of William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, whom Aubrey calls " the greatest Maecenas to learned men of any peer of his time or since," and of whom Clarendon says, " He was a great lover of his country, and of the religion and justice which he believed could only support it ; and his friendships were only with men of those principles," — another tribute to the poet's character. He was familiarly received at Wilton, the home of the Herberts. After his second marriage he moved to Dorking and there settled. He died in or before the year 1645. I" the letters of administration granted to his widow (November, 1645) he is described as " late of Dorking, in the county of Surrey, Esquire." But there is no entry of his death in the registers at Dorking or Horsham : so perhaps he went back to lay his bones in his beloved Devon. A William Browne was buried at Tavistock on March 27th, 1643. This may or may not have been our author. " Tavis- tock, — Wilton, — Dorking," says Mr. Bullen — " Surely few poets have had a more tran- quil journey to the Elysian Fields." 64 Adventures in Criticism. An ami' As with liis life, so with his poetry — he 1 • on Mr. pothesis of Mr. Wrights, brmgs several Wright's arguments against it, which, taken together, ^^'^^ ^^^^ seem to me quite conclusive. To begin with, several children were born to Defoe during this period. He paid much attention to their education, and in 17 13, the penultimate year of this supposed silence, we find his sons helping him in his work. Again, in 1703, Mrs. Defoe was interceding for her husband's release from Newgate. Let me add that it was an age in which personalities were freely used in public controversy ; that Defoe was * Romances and Narratives by Daniel Defoe. Edited by George A. Aitken. Vols, i., ii., and iii. Containing the Life and Adventures, Farther Adventures, and Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe. With a General Intro- duction by the Editor. London : J. M. Dent & Co. 86 Adventures in Criticism continuously occupied with public contro- versy durini^ these twenty-eight years, and managed to make as many enemies as any man within the four seas ; and 1 think the silence of his adversaries upon a matter which, if proved, would be discreditable in the extreme, is the best of all evidence that Mr. Wright's hypothesis cannot be sustained. Nor do I see how Mr. Wright makes it square with his own conception of Defoe's character. " Of a forgiving temper himself," says Mr. Wright on p. 86, "he (Defoe) was quite in- capable of understanding how another person could nourish resentment." This of a man whom the writer asserts to have sulked in absolute silence with his wife and family for twenty-eight years, two months, and nineteen days ! An in- At all events it will not square with our hercfit im- , r t-\ r j m-"! probability conception of Defoe s character. Those of us who have an almost unlimited admiration for Defoe as a master of narrative, and next to no affection for him as a man, might pass the heartlessness of such conduct. *' At first sight," Mr. Wright admits, " it may appear ''Robinson Crusoe'' 87 monstrous that a man should for so long a time abstain from speech with his own family." Monstrous, indeed — but I am afraid we could have passed that. Mr. Wright, who has what I may call a purfled style, tells us that — "To narrate the career of Daniel Defoe is to tell a tale of wonder and daring, of high endeavour and marvellous success. To dwell upon it is to take courage and to praise God for the splendid possi- bilities of life. . . . Defoe is always the hero ; his career is as thick with events as a cornfield with corn ; his fortunes change as quickly and as com- pletely as the shapes in a kaleidoscope — he is up, he is down, he is courted, he is spurned ; it is shine, it is shower, it is couletir de rose^ it is Stygian night. Thirteen times he was rich and poor. Achilles was not more audacious, Ulysses more subtle, ./Eneas more pious." That is one way of putting it. Here is another way (as the cookery books say) : — " To narrate the career of Daniel Defoe is to tell a tale of a hosier and pantile maker, who had a hooked nose and wrote tracts indefatigably — he was up, he was down, he was in the Pillory, he was at Tooting ; it was poide de sole, it was leather and prunella ; and it was always tracts, ^neas was not 88 Adventures in Criticism so pious a member of the Butchers' Com- pany ; and there are a {^\m milestones on the Dover Road ; but Defoe's life was as thick with tracts as a cornfield with corn." These two estimates may differ here and there ; but on one point they agree — that Defoe was an extremely restless, pushing, voluble person, who could as soon have stood on his head for twenty - eight years, two months, and nineteen days as have kept silence for that period with any man or Vv^oman in whose company he found himself frequently alone. Unless we have entirely misjudged his character — and, I may add, unless Mr. Wright has completely misrepre- sented the rest of his life — it simply was not in the man to keep this foolish vow for twenty- four hours. No, I am afraid Mr. Wright's hypothesis will not do. And yet his plan of adding twenty-seven years to each important date in Crusoe's history has revealed so many co- incident events in the life of Defoe that we cannot help feeling he is " hot," as they say in the children's game ; that the wreck upon ''Robinson Crusoe'' 89 the island and Crusoe's twenty-eight years odd of solitude do really correspond with some great event and important period of Defoe's life. The wreck is dated 30th September, 1659. Add the twenty -seven years, and we come to September 30th, 1686. Where was Defoe at that date, and what was he doing ? Mr. Wright has to confess that of his movements in 1686 and the two following years "we know little that is definite." Certainly we know of nothing that can correspond with Crusoe's shipwreck. But wait a moment — The original editions A siitrges- of Robinson Crusoe (and most, if not all, later editions) give the date of Crusoe's departure from the island as December 19th, 1686, instead of 1687. Mr. Wright suggests that this is a misprint ; and, to be sure, it does not agree with the statement respecting the length of Crusoe's stay on the island, if zve assume the date of tJie zvreck to be correct. But (as Mr. Aitken points out) the mistake must be the author's, not the printer's, be- cause in the next paragraph we are told that Crusoe reached England in June, 1687, 90 Adventures av Criiicism not 1688. I agree with Mr. Aitkon ; and I suggest that the date of Crusoe's arj'ival at the island, not the date of his departure, is the date misprinted. Assume for a moment that the date of departure (December 19th, 1686) is correct. Subtract the twenty-eight years, two months, and nineteen days of Crusoe's stay on the island, and we get September 30th, 1658, as the date of the wreck and his arrival at the island. Now add the twenty- seven years which separate Crusoe's expe- riences from Defoe's, and we come to September 30th, 1685. What was happen- ing in England at the close of September, 1685 t Why, Jeffreys was carrying through his Bloody Assize. " Like many other Dissenters," says Mr. Wright on p. 21, "Defoe sympathised with Monmouth ; and, to his misfortune, took part in the rising." His comrades perished in it, and he himself, in Mr, Wright's words, " probably had to lie low." There is no doubt that the Monmouth affair was the beginning of Defoe's troubles : and I suggest that cer- tain passages in the story of Crusoe's voyage *' Robinson Crusoe'' 91 {e.g. the " secret proposal " of the three mer- chants who came to Crusoe) have a peculiar significance if read in this connection. I also think it possible there may be a particular meaning in the several waves, so carefully described, through which Crusoe made his way to dry land ; and in the simile of the reprieved malefactor (p. 50 in Mr. Aitken's delightful edition) ; and in the several visits to the wreck. I am no specialist in Defoe, but put this suggestion forward with the utmost diffidence. And yet, right or wrong, I feel it has more plausibility than Mr. Wright's. Defoe un- doubtedly took part in the Monmouth rising, and was a survivor of that wreck '' on the south side of the island " : and undoubtedly it formed the turning-point of his career. If we could discover how he escaped Kirke and Jeffreys, I am inclined to believe we should have a key to the whole story of tlie ship- wreck. I should not be sorry to find this hypothesis upset ; for the story of Robinson Crusoe is quite good enough for me as it stands, and without any sub-intention. But 92 Adventures in Criticism r> whatever be the true explanation of the parable, if time shall discover it, I confess I expect it will be a trifle less recondite than Mr. Wright's, and a trifle more credit- able to the father of the English novel.^ * Upon this suggestion Mr. Aitken, in a postscript to his seventli volume of tlie Romances and Narratives, has since remarked as follows : — " In a discussion in The Speaker upon Defoe's supposed period of 'silence,' published since the appearance of the first volume of this edition, Mr. Quiller Couch, while agreeing, for the reasons I have given (vol. i. p. Ivii.), that there is no mistake in the date of Robinson Crusoe's departure from his island (December, 1686), has suggested that perhaps the error in the chronology lies, not in the length of time Crusoe is said to have lived on the island, but in the date given for his landing (September, 1659). That this suggestion is right appears from a pas- sage which has hitherto escaped notice. Crusoe was born in 1632, and Defoe makes him say (vol. i. p. 147), ' The same day of the year I was born on, viz. the 30th of September, that same day I had my life so miraculously saved twenty-six years after, when I was cast ashore on this island.' Crusoe must, therefore, have reached his island on September 30, 1658, not 1659, ^.s twice stated by Defoe ; and by adding twenty-eight years to 1658 we get 1686, the date given for Crusoe's departure. " It is, however, questionable whether this rectification helps us 10 interpret the allegory in Rcbinsoft Crusoe. It is true that if, in accord- ance with the 'key' suggested bj' Mr. Wright, we add twenty-seven years to the date of the shipwreck (1658) in order to find the corre- sponding event in Defoe's life, we arrive at September, 1685, when Jeffreys was sentencing many of those who — like Defoe — took part in Monmouth'^ rising. But we have no evidence that Defoe suflfered seriously in consequence of the part he took in this rebellion ; and the addition of twenty-seven years to the date of Crusoe's departure from the island (December, i63d) does not bring us to any corresponding event in Defoe's own story. Those who are curious will find the question discussed at greater length in The Stealer for April 13 and 20, and May 4, 1295." 93 LAWRENCE STERNE It is told by those who write scraps of ^^f*^'^' Thackeray's biography that a youth once ventured to speak disrespectfully of Scott in ani his presence. "You and I, sir," said the Thackiray great man, cutting him short, " should lift our hats at the mention of that great name." An admirable rebuke ! — if only Thackeray had remembered it when he sat down to write those famous Lectures on the English Humourists, or at least before he stood up in Willis's Rooms to inform a polite audience concerning his great predecessors. Concern- ing their work } No. Concerning their genius } No. Concerning the debt owed to them by mankind } Not a bit of it. Concerning their lives, ladies and gentle- men ; and whether their lives were pure and respectable and free from scandal and such as men ought to have led whose works you would like your sons and daughters to handle. 94 Adventures in Criticism I\rr. Frank T. Marzi'als, Thackeray's latest biographer, finds the matter of these Lectures " excellent " :— " One feels in the reading that Thackeray is a peer among his peers — a sort of elder brother,* kindly, appreciative and tolerant — as he discourses of Addi- son, Steele, Swift, Pope, Sterne, Fielding, Goldsmith. 1 know of no greater contrast in criticism — a contrast, be it said, not to the advantage of the French critic — than Thackeray's treatment of Pope and that of M. Taine. What allowance the Englishman makes for the physical ills that beset the * gallant little cripple ' ; with what a gentle hand he touches the painful places in that poor twisted body ! M. Taine, irritated apparently that Pope will not fit into his conception of English literature, exhibits the same deformities almost savagely." I am sorry that I cannot read this kindli- ness, this appreciation, this tolerance, into the Lectures — into those, for instance, on Sterne and Fielding : that the simile of the " elder brother " carries different suggestions for Mr. Marzials and for me : and that the lecturer's attitude is to me less suggestive of a peer among his peers than of a tall " bobby '' — a volunteer constable — determined to warn his polite hearers what sort of men these were * But why "elder"? Lawrence Sterne 95 whose books they had hitherto read unsus- pectingly. And even so — even though the lives and actions of men who lived too early to know Victorian decency must be held up to shock a crowd in Willis's Rooms, yet it had been but common generosity to tell the whole truth. Then the story of Fielding's Voyage to Lisbon might have touched the heart to sympathy even for the purely fictitious low comedian whom Thackeray presented : and Sterne's latest letters might have infused so much pity into the polite audience that they, like lli^ own Recording Angel, might have blotted out his faults with a tear. But that was not Thackeray's way. Charlotte Bronte found " a finished taste and ease " in the Lectures, a " something high bred." Motley describes their style as " hovering," and their method as " the perfection of lecturing to high-bred audiences." Mr. Marzials quotes this expression '* hovering" as admirably descriptive. It is. By judicious selection, by innuendo, here a pitying aposiopesis, there an indignant outburst, the charges are 96 Adventures in Criticism heaped up. Swift was a toady at heart, and used Stella vilely for the sake of that hussy Vanessa. Congreve had captivating manners — of course he had, the dog ! And we all know what that meant in those days. Dick Steele drank and failed to pay his creditors. Sterne — now really I know what Club life is, ladies and gentlemen, and I might tell you a thing or two if I would : but really, speaking as a gentleman before a polite audience, I warn you against Sterne. I do not suppose for a moment that Thackeray consciously defamed these men. The weaknesses, the pettinesses of humanity interested him, and he treated them with gusto, even as he spares us nothing of that horrible scene between Mrs. Mackenzie and Colonel Newcome. And of course poor Sterne was the easiest victim. The fellow was so full of his confounded sentiments. You ring a choice few of these on the counter and prove them base metal. You assume that the rest of the bag is of equal value. You " go one better " than Sir Peter Teazle and damn all sentiment, and lo ! the fellow is Laurence Sterne 97 no better than a smirking jester, whose antics you can expose till men and women, who had foolishly laughed and wept as he moved them, turn from him, loathing him as a swindler. So it is that although Tristram Shandy continues one of the most popular classics in the language, nobody dares to confess his debt to Sterne except in discreet terms of apology. But the fellow wrote the book. You can't deny that, though Thackeray may tempt you to forget it (What proportion does My Uncle Toby hold in that amiable Lecture ?) The truth is that the elemental simplicity of Captain Shandy and Corporal Trim did not appeal to the author of The Book of Snobs in the same degree as the pettiness of the man Sterne appealed to him : and his business in Willis's Rooms was to talk, not of Captain Shandy, but of the man Sterne, to whom his hearers were to feel themselves superior as members of society. I submit that this was not a worthy task for a man of letters who was also a man of genius. I submit that it was an inversion of the true critical method E 98 Adventures in Criticism to wreck Sterne's Sentimental Journey at the outset by picking Sterne's life to pieces, holding up the shreds and warning the reader that any nobility apparent in his book will be nothing better than a sham. Sterne is scarcely arrived at Calais and in conversation with the Monk before you are cautioned how you listen to the impostor. " Watch now," says the critic ; "he'll be at his tricks in a moment. Hey, paillasse! There! — didn't I tell you ? " And yet I am as sure that the opening pages of the Sentimental Journey are full of genuine feeling as I am that if Jonathan Swift had entered the room while the Lecture upon him was going forward, he would have eaten William Makepeace Goliath, white waistcoat and all. Frenchmen, who are either less awed than we by lecturers in white waistcoats, or under- stand the methods of criticism somewhat better, cherish the Sentimental Journey (in spite of its indifferent French) and believe in the genius that created it. But the Briton reads it with shyness, and the British critic speaks of Sterne with bated breath, since Laurence Sterne 99 Thackeray told it in Gath that Sterne was a bad man, and the daughters of Philistia triumphed. We are a strenuous generation, with a New October 6, r • '1 1894. Humour and a number of mterestmg by- Alr. products ; but a new Tristram Shandy stands ivhibigys not yet among our achievements. So Messrs. Edition of Henley and Whibley have made the best Shandy'' of it and given us a new edition of the old Tristram — two handsome volumes, with shapely pages, fair type, and an Introduction. Mr. Whibley supplies the Introduction, and that he writes lucidly and forcibly needs not to be said. His position is neither that so unfairly taken up by Thackeray ; nor that of Allibone, who, writing for Heaven knows how many of AUibone's maiden aunts, summed up Sterne thus : — "A standing reproach to the profession which he disgraced, grovelling in his tastes, indiscreet, if not licentious, in his habits, he lived unhonoured and died unlamented, save by those who found amuse- ment in his wit or countenance in his immorality."* * " Pan might indeed ht proud if ever he begot Such an Allibone ..." Spenser [revised), E 2 100 Adventures in Criticism But tliough he avoids these particular ex- cesses ; though he goes straight for the book, as a critic should ; Mr. Whibley cannot get quit of the bad tradition of patronising Sterne : — " He failed, as only a sentimentalist can fail, in the province of pathos. . . . There is no trifle, animate or inanimate, he will not bewail, if he be but in the mood ; nor does it shame him to dangle before the public gaze those poor shreds of sensibility he calls his feelings. Though he seldom deceives the reader into sympathy, none w^ill turn from his choicest agony without a thrill of disgust. The Sc?iti?nental Joiirney, despite its interludes of tacit humour and excellent narrative, is the last extravagance of irrelevant grief. . . . Genuine sentiment was as strange to Sterne the writer as to Sterne the man ; and he conjures up no tragic figure that is not stuffed with sawdust and tricked out in the rags of the green-room. For- tunately, there is scant opportunity for idle tears in Tristra7n Shafidy. . . . Yet no occasion is lost. . . . Yorick's death is false alike to nature and art. The vapid emotion is properly matched with commonness of expression, and the bad taste is none the more readily excused by the suggestion of self-defence. Even the humour of My Uncle Toby is something degraded by the oft-quoted platitude : ' Go, poor devil,' says he, to an overgrown fly which had buzzed about his nose ; ' get thee gone. Why should I hurt thee? This world surely is big enough to hold both thee and me.' " Laurence Sterne ioi But here Mr. Whibley's notorious hatred of sentiment leads him into confusion. That the passage has been over-quoted is no fault of Sterne's. Of My Uncle Toby, if of any man, it might have been predicted that he would not hurt a fly. To me this trivial action of his is more than merely sentimental. But, be this as it may, I am sure it is honestly characteristic. Still, on the whole Mr. Whibley has justice. Sterne is a sentimentalist. Sterne is indecent by reason of his reticence — more indecent than Rabelais, because he uses a hint where Rabelais would have said what he meant, and prints a dash where Rabelais would have plumped out with a coarse word and a laugh. Sterne is a convicted thief. On a famous occasion Charles Reade drew a line between plagiary and justifiable borrowing. To draw material from a heterogeneous work — to found, for instance, the play of Coriolanus upon Plutarch's Life — is justifiable : to take from a homogeneous work — to enrich your drama from another man's drama — is plagiary. But even on this interpretation I02 Adventures in Criticism of the law Sterne must be condemned ; for in decking out Tristram with feathers from the history of Gargantua he was pillaging a homogeneous work. Nor can it be pleaded in extenuation that he improved upon his originals — though it can, I think, be pleaded that he made his borrowings his own. I do not think much of Mr. Whibley's instance of Servius Sulpicius' letter. No doubt Sterne took his translation of it from Burton ; but the letter is a very well known one, and Burton's translation happened to be uncom- monly good, and the borrowing of a good rendering without acknowledgment was not, as far as I know, then forbidden by custom. In any case, the whole passage is intended merely to lead up to the beautiful perplexity of My Uncle Toby. And that is Sterne's own, and could never have been another man's. " After all," says Mr. Whibley, " all the best in Sterne is still Sterne's own." But the more I agree with Mr. Whibley's strictures the more I desire to remove them from an Introduction to Tristram Shandy, and to read them in a volume of Mr. Whibley's Laurence Sterne 103 collected essays. Were it not better, in reading Tristram Shandy, to take Sterne for once (if only for a change) at his own valuation, or at least to accept the original postulates of the story ? If only for the entertainment he provides, we owe him the effort. There will be time enough afterwards to turn to the cold judgment of this or that critic, or to the evidence of this or that thief- taker. For the moment he claims to be heard without prejudice ; he has genius enough to make it worth our while to listen without prejudice ; and the most lenient *' appreciation " of his sins, if we read it beforehand, is bound to raise prejudice and infect our enjoyment as we read. And, as a corollary of this demand, let us ask that he shall be allowed to present his book to us exactly as he chooses. Mr. Whibley says, *• He set out upon the road of authorship with a false ideal : ' Writing,' said he, ' when properly managed, is but a different name for conversation.' It would be juster to assert that writing is never properly managed, un- less it be removed from conversation as far as possible." Very true ; or, at least, very 104 Adventures in Criticism likely. But since Sterne Jiad this ideal, let us grant him full liberty to make his spoon or spoil his horn, and let us judge afterwards concerning the result. The famous black- ened page and the empty pages (all omitted in this new edition) are part of Sterne's method. They may seem to us trick-work and foolery ; but, if we consider, they link on to his notion that writing is but a name for conversation ; they are included in his demand that in writing a book a man should be allowed to " go cluttering away like hey-go mad." " You may take my word " — it is Sterne who speaks, and in his very first chapter — " You may take my word that nine parts in ten of a man's sense or his nonsense, his success and mis- carriages in this wodd, depend upon their motions and activity, and the different tracks and trains you put them into, so that when they are once set going — whether right or wrong, 'tis not a halfpenny matter — away they go cluttering like hey-go mad ; and by treading the same steps over and over again, they presently make a road of it, as plain and smooth as a garden walk, which, when once they are used to, the devil himself sometimes shall not be able to drive them off it." This, at any rate, is Sterne's own postulate. Laurence Sterne 105 And I had rather judge him with all his faults after reading the book than be pre- pared beforehand to make allowances. Let one thing be recorded to the credit of ^-w. 12 this much - abused man. He wrote two masterpieces of fiction (one of them a work ^^^^'. of considerable length), and in neither will nature you find an ill-natured character or an ill- natured word. On the admission of all critics My Father, My Mother, My Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, and Mrs. Wadman are immortal creations. To the making of them there has gone no single sour or un- charitable thought. They are essentially amiable : and the same may be said of all the minor characters and of the author's disquisi- tions. Sterne has given us a thousand occa- sions to laugh, but never an occasion to laugh on the wrong side of the mouth. For savagery or bitterness you will search his books in vain. He is obscene, to be sure. But who, pray, was ever the worse for having read him ? E^ io6 Adventures in Criticism Alas, poor Yorick ! He had his obvious and deplorable failings. I never heard that he communicated them. Good-humour he has been communicating now for a hundred and fifty years. 107 SCOTT AND BURNS " All Balzac's ?iovels occupy one shelf ^ ^"^- 9» The new edition fifty volumes long" „ , —says Bishop Blougram. But for Scott ^'^^^''' the student will soon have to hire a room. The novels and poems alone stretch away into just sixty volumes in Cadell's edition ; and this is only the beginning. At this very moment two new editions (one of which, at least, is indispensable) are unfolding their magnificent lengths, and report says that Messrs. Hodder and Stoughton already pro- ject a third, with introductory essays by Mr. Barrie. Then the Miscellaneous Prose Works by that untiring hand extend to some twenty-eight or thirty volumes. And when Scott stops, his biographer and his com- mentators begin, and all with like liberal notions of space and time. Nor do they deceive themselves. We take all they give, and call for more. Three years ago, and io8 Adventures in Criticism fifty-eight from the date of Scott's death, his Journal was pubHshed ; and although Lock- hart had drawn upon it for one of the fullest biographies in the language, the little that Lockhart had left unused was sufficient to make its publication about the most im- portant literary event of the year 1890. And now Mr. David Douglas, the publisher of the "Journal," gives us in two volumes a selection from the familiar letters preserved at Abbotsford. The period covered by this correspondence is from 1797, the year of Sir Walter's marriage, to 1825, when the "Journal " begins — "covered," however, being too large a word for the first seven years, which are represented by seven letters only ; it is only in 1806 that we start upon some- thing like a consecutive story. Mr. Douglas speaks modestly of his editorial work. " I have done," he says, " little more than arrange the correspondence in chronological order, supplying where necessary a slight thread of continuity by annotation and illustration." It must be said that Mr. Douglas has done this exceedingly well. There is always a Scott and Burns 109 note where a note is wanted, and never where information would be superfluous. On the taste and judgment of his selection one who has not examined the whole mass of corre- spondence at Abbotsford can only speak on a priori grounds. But it is unlikely that the writer of these exemplary footnotes has made many serious mistakes in compiling his text. Man's perennial and pathetic curiosity about virtue has no more striking example than the public eagerness to be acquainted with every detail of Scott's life. For what, as a mere story, is that life ?— a level narra- tive of many prosperous years; a sudden financial crash ; and the curtain falls on the struggle of a tired and dying gentleman to save his honour. Scott was born in 1771 and died in 1832, and all that is special in his life belongs to the last six years of it. Even so the materials for the story are of the simplest — enough, perhaps, under the hand of an artist to furnish forth a tale of the length of Trollope's The Warden. In pictur- esqueness, in colour, in wealth of episode and TreptTrereta, Scott's career will not no Adventures in Criticism compare for a moment with the career of Coleridge, for instance. Yet who could en- dure to read the life of Coleridge in six volumes ? De Quincey, in an essay first published the other day by Dr. Japp, calls the story of the Coleridges "a perfect romance . . . a romance of beauty, of intellectual power, of misfortune suddenly illuminated from heaven, of prosperity suddenly overcast by the waywardness of the individual." But the " romance " has been written twice and thrice, and desperately dull reading it makes in each case. Is it then an accident that Coleridge has been unhappy in his bio- graphers, while Lockhart succeeded once for all, and succeeded so splendidly? It is surely no accident. Coleridge is an ill man to read about just as certainly as Scott is a good man to read about; and the secret is just that Scott had character and Coleridge had not. In writing of the man of the " grasp- less hand," the biographer's own hand in time grows graspless on the pen ; and in reading of him our hands too grow graspless on the page. We pursue the man and come upon Scott and Burns hi group after group of his friends ; and each, as we demand, " What have you done with Cole- ridge?" answers, "He was here just now, and we helped him forward a little way." Our best biographies are all of men and women of character — and, it may be added, of beautiful character — of Johnson, Scott, and Charlotte Bronte. There are certain people whose biographies ought to be long. Who could learn too much concerning Lamb ? And concerning Scott, who will not agree with Lockhart's remark in the preface to his abridged edition of 1848 : — " I should have been more willing to pro- duce an enlarged edition ; for the interest of Sir Walter's history lies, I think, peculiarly in its minute details " ? You may explore here, and explore there, and still you find pure gold ; for the man was gold right through. So in the present volume every line is of interest because we refer it to Scott's known character and test it thereby. The result is always the same ; yet the employment does not weary. In themselves the letters 112 Adventures in Criticism cannot stand, as mere writing, beside the letters of Cowper or of Lamb. They are just the common-sense epistles of a man who to his last day remained too modest to believe in the extent of his own genius. The letters in this collection which show most acuteness on literary matters are not Scott's, but Lady Louisa Stuart's, who appreciated the Novels on their appearance (their faults as well as their merits) with a judiciousness quite wonderful in a contemporary. Scott's literary observa- tions (with the exception of one passage where the attitude of an English gentleman towards literature is stated thus — " he asks of it that it shall arouse him from his habitual contempt of what goes on about him") are much less amusing ; and his letters to Joanna Baillie the dullest in the volume, unless it be the answers which Joanna Baillie sent. Best of all, perhaps, is the correspondence (scarcely used by Lockhart) between Scott and Lady Abercorn, with its fitful intervals of warmth and reserve. This alone would justify Mr. Douglas's volumes. But, indeed, while nothing can be found now to alter men's conception of Scott, any book about him Scott and Burns 113 is justified, even if it do no more than heap up superfluous testimony to the beauty of his character. Since about one-third of the number of my June 15, particular friends happen to be Scotsmen, it ^ ^ ^ . . A Racial has always distressed and annoyed me that, ^^^^^y^y with the best will in the world, I have never been able to understand on what principle that perfervid race conducts its enthusiasms. Mine is a racial disability, of course ; and the converse has been noted by no less a writer than Stevenson, in the story of his journey " Across the Plains " : — "There were no emigrants direct from Europe — save one German family and a knot of Cornish miners who kept grimly by themselves, one reading the New Testament all day long through steel spectacles, the rest discussing privately the secrets of their old-world mysterious race. Lady Hester Stanhope believed she could make something great of the Cornish ; for my part I can make nothing of them at all. A division of races, older and more original than that of Babel, keeps this close, esoteric family apart from neigh- bouring Englishmen." The loss on my side, to be sure, would be immensely the greater, were it not happily 114 Adventures in Crijicism certain that I can make something of Scotsmen ; can, and indeed do, make friends of them. The Cult All the same, this disability weighs me down with a sense of hopeless obtuseness when I consider the deportment of the average intelligent Scot at a Burns banquet, or a Burns conversazione y or a Burns festival, or the unveiling of a Burns statue, or the putting up of a pillar on some spot made famous by Burns. All over the world — and all under it, too, when their time comes — Scotsmen are preparing after-dinner speeches about Burns. The great globe swings round out of the sun into the dark ; there is always midnight somewhere ; and always in this shifting region the eye of imagination sees orators gesticulating over Burns ; companies of heated exiles with crossed arms shouting " Auld Lang Syne " ; lesser groups —if haply they be lesser — reposing under tables, still in honour of Burns. And as the vast con- tinents sweep " eastering out of the high shadow which reaches beyond the moon," and as new nations, with their cities and Scott and Burns 115 villages, their mountains and seashores, rise up on the morning-side, lo ! fresh troops, and still fresh troops, and yet again fresh troops, wend or are carried out of action with the dawn. None but a churl would wish this enthus- Scott and BliTtlS iasm abated. But why is it all lavished on Burns ? That is what gravels the Southron. Why Burns .? Why not Sir Walter ? Had I the honour to be a fellow-countryman of Scott^ and had I command of the racial tom- tom, it seems to me that I would tund upon it in honour of that great man until I dropped. To me, a Southron, Scott is the niost imaginative, and at the same time the justest, writer of our language since Shake- speare died. To say this is not to suggest that he is comparable with Shakespeare. Scott himself, sensible as ever, wrote in his Journal^ "The blockheads talk of my being like Shakespeare — not fit to tie his brogues." " But it is also true," said Mr. Swinburne, in his review of the Journal^ " that if there were or could be any man whom it would not be a monstrous absurdity to compare with Shake- ii6 Adventures in Criticism speare as a creator of men and inventor of circumstance, that man could be none other than Scott." Greater poems than his have been written ; and, to my mind, one or two novels better than his best. But when one considers the huge mass of his work, and its quaHty in the mass ; the vast range of his genius, and its command over that range ; who shall be compared with him t These are the reflections which occur, somewhat obviously, to the Southron. As for character, it is enough to say that Scott was one of the best men who ever walked on this planet ; and that Burns was not. But Scott was not merely good : he was winningly good : of a character so manly, temperate, courageous that men read his Life, his Journal, his Letters, with a thrill, as they might read of Rorke's Drift or Chitral. How then are we to account for the undeniable fact that his countrymen, in public at any rate, wax more enthusiastic over Burns ? Is it that the homeliness of Burns appeals to them as a wandering race? Is it because, in farthest exile, a line of Burns takes their Scott and Burns 117 hearts straight back to Scotland ? — as when Luath the collie, in " The Twa Dogs," de- scribes the cotters' New Year's Day : — " That merry day the year begins, They bar the door on frosty winds ; The nappy reeks wi' mantling ream. An' sheds a heart-inspirin' steam ; The luntin' pipe an' sneeshin' mill Are handed round wi' richt guid will ; The cantie auld folks crackin' crouse, The young anes rantin' through the house, — My heart has been sae fain to see them. That I for joy hae barkit wi' them." That is one reason, no doubt. But there is another, I suspect. With all his immense range Scott saw deeply into character; but he did not, I think, see very deeply into feeling. You may extract more of the lacrunce rerum from the story of his own life than from all his published works put together. The pathos of Lammermoor is taken-for-granted pathos. If you deny this, you will not deny, at any rate, that the pathos of the last scene of Lear is quite beyond his scope. Yet this is not more certainly beyond his scope than is the feeling in many a single line or stanza of Burns'. Verse after verse, line after line, rise up for quotation- — Or, ii8 Adventures in Criticism " Thou'lt break my heart, thou bonnie bird That sings beside thy mate ; For sae I sat, and sae I sang, And wist na o' my fate." Or, " O pale, pale now, those rosy lips I aft hae kissed sae fondly ! And closed for aye the sparkling glance That dwelt on me sae kindly ! And mouldering now in silent dust The heart that lo'ed me dearly— But still within my bosom's core Shall live my Highland Mary." '' Had we never loved sae kindly, Had we never loved sae blindly, Never met— or never parted, We had ne'er been broken-hearted." Scott left an enormous mass of writing behind him, and almost all of it is good. Burns left very much less, and among it a surprising amount of inferior stuff. But such pathos as the above Scott cannot touch. I can understand the man who holds that these deeps of pathos should not be probed in literature : and am not sure that I wholly disagree with him. The question certainly is discutable and worth discussing. But such pathos, at any rate, is immensely popular : and perhaps this will account for the hold Scott and Burns 119 which Burns retains on the affections of a race which has a right to be at least thrice as proud of Scott. However, if Burns is honoured at the feast, Scott is read by the fireside. Hardly have the rich Dryburgh and Border editions issued from the press before Messrs. Archibald Con- stable and Co. are bringing out their reprint of the famous 48-volume edition of the Novels ; and Mr. Barrie is supposed to be meditating another, with introductory notes of his own upon each Novel. In my own opinion nothing has ever beaten, or come near to beat, the 48-volume " Waverley " of 1829; and Messrs. Constable and Co. were happily inspired when they decided to make this the basis of their new edition. They have improved upon it in two respects. The paper is lighter and better. And each novel is kept within its own covers, whereas in the old editions a volume would contain the end of one novel and beginning of another. The original illustrations, by Wilkie, Landseer, Leslie, Stanfield, Bonington, and the rest, have been retained, in order to make the reprint complete. But this seems to me a 120 Adventures in Criticism pity ; for a number of them were bad to begin with, and will be worse than ever now, being reproduced (as I understand) from im- pressions of the original plates. To do without illustrations were a counsel of perfection. But now that the novels have become historical, surely it were better to illustrate them with authentic portraits of Scott, pictures of scenery, facsimiles of MSS., and so on, than with (e.g^ a worn reproduction of what Mr. F. P. Stephanoff thought that Flora Mac- Ivor looked like while playing the harp and introducing a few irregular strains which harmonised well with the distant waterfall and the soft sigh of the evening breeze in the rustling leaves of an aspen which overhung the fair harpress — especially as F. P. Stephanoff does not seem to have known the difference between an aspen and a birch. In short, did it not contain the same illus- trations, this edition would probably excel even that of 1828. As it is, after many dis- appointments, we now have a cheap Waverley on what has always been the best model. Scott and Burns 121 *'SlR, — In your ' Li-erary Causerie' of last week .... a Protest. the question is discussed why the name of Bums raises in Scotsmen such unbounded enthusiasm while that of Scott falls comparatively fiat This question has puzzled many another Englishman besides 'A. T. Q. C And yet the explanation is not far to seek : Burns appeals to the hearts and feelings of the masses in a way Scott never does. *A. T. Q. C admits this, and gives quotations in support. These quotations, however excellent in their way, are not those that any Scotsman would trust to in support of the above proposition. A Scotsman would at once appeal to ' Scots wha hae,' ' Auld Lang Syne,' and * A man's a man for a' that.' The very familiarity of these quota- tions has bred the proverbial contempt. Think of the soul-inspiring, ' fire-eyed fury ' of * Scots wha hae ' ; the glad, kind, ever fresh greeting of 'Auld Lang Syne ' ; the manly, sturdy independence of ' A man's a man for a' that,' and who can wonder at the ever- increasing enthusiasm for Bums' name ? ' Is there for honest poverty That hangs his head and a' that ? The coward slave we pass him by — We dare be poor for a' that. • The rank is but the guinea stamp — The man's the gowd for a' that.* " Nor is it in his patriotism, independence, and conviviality alone that Burns touches every mood of a Scotsman's heart. There is an enthusiasm of humanity about Burns which you will hardly find equalled in any other author, and which most cer- tainly does not exist in Scott. 122 Adventures in Criticism * Man's inhumanity to man Makes countless thousands mourn.' ' Why has man this will and power To make his fellow mourn ? ' " These quotations might be multiplied were it necessary ; but I think enough has been said to explain what puzzles 'A. T. Q. C I have an un- bounded admiration of Sir W. Scott — quite as great as 'A. T. O. C/ Indeed, I think him the greatest of all novelists ; but, as a Scot, somewhat Anglicised by a residence in London of more than a quarter of a century, I unhesitatingly say that I would rather be the author of the above three lyrics of Burns' than I would be the author of all Scott's novels. Certain I am that if immortality were my aim I should be much surer of it in the one case than the other. I cannot conceive * Scots wha hae,' * Auld Lang Syne, etc., ever dying. Are there any of Scott's writings of which the same could be said ? I doubt it — I am, yours, etc., "J. B. " London, June i8th, 1895." jiinei^, The hopelessness of the difficulty is amus- ingly, if rather distressingly, illustrated by this letter. Here again you have the best will in the world. Nothing could be kindlier than " J. B.'s " tone. As a Scot he has every reason to be impatient of stupidity on the subject of Burns : yet he takes real pains to set me right. Alas ! his explanations leave me more than ever at sea, more desperate 1895. Scott and Burns 12$ than ever of understanding w/iat exactly it is in Burns that kindles this pecuHar enthusiasm in Scotsmen and drives them to express it in feasting and oratory. After casting about for some time, I sug- gested that Burns — though in so many respects immeasurably inferior to Scott — frequently wrote with a depth of feeling which Scott could not command. On second thoughts, this was wrongly put. Scott may have pos- sessed the feeling, together with notions of his own as to the propriety of displaying it in his public writings. Indeed, after reading some of his letters again, I am sure he did possess it. Hear, for instance, how he speaks of Dalkeith Palace, in one of his letters to Lady Louisa Stuart : — •' I am delighted my dear little half god-daughter is turning out beautiful. 1 was at her christening, poor soul, and took the oaths as representing I forget whom. That was in the time when Dalkeith was Dalkeith ; how changed alas ! I was forced there the other day by some people who wanted to see the house, and I felt as if it would have done me a great deal of good to have set my manhood aside, to get into a corner and cry like a schoolboy. Every bit of furni- ture, now looking old and paltry, had some story and recollections about it, and the deserted gallery, which 124 Adventures in Criticism I have seen so happily filled, seemed waste and deso- late, like Moore's ' Banquet hall deserted, Whose flowers are dead. Whose odours fled, And all but I departed.' But it avails not either sighing or moralising ; to have known the good and the great, the wise and the witty, is still, on the whole, a plea..-ing reflection, though saddened by the thought that their voices are silent and their halls empty.'' Yes, indeed, Scott possessed deep feelings, though he did not exhibit them to the public. Now Burns does exhibit his deep feelings, as I demonstrated by quotations. And I suggested that it is just his strength of emo- tion, his command of pathos and readiness to employ it, by which Burns appeals to the mass of his countrymen. On this point " J. B." expressly agrees with me ; but — he will have nothing to do with my quotations ! " How- ever excellent in their way " these quotations may be, they " are not those that any Scots- man would trust to in support of the above proposition " ; the above proposition being that " Burns appeals to the hearts and feelings of the masses in a way that Scott never does." Scott and Burns 125 You see, I have concluded rightly ; but on wrong evidence. Let us see, then, what evidence a Scotsman will call to prove that Burns is a writer of deep feeling. " A Scots- man," says " J. B.," " would at once appeal to ' Scots wha hae,' ' Auld Lang Syne,' and ' A man^s a man for a' that' . . . Think of the soul-inspiring, ' fire-eyed fury ' of ' Scots wha hae ' ; the glad, kind, ever fresh greeting of * Auld Lang Syne ' ; the manly, sturdy independence of ' A man's a man for a' that,' and who can wonder at the ever-increasing enthusiasm for Burns' name } I would rather," says " J. B.," "be the author of the above three lyrics than I would be the author of all Scott's novels." Here, then, is the point at which I give up my attempts, and admit my stupidity to be incurable. I grant "J. B." his "Auld Lang Syne." I grant the poignancy of— " We twa hae paidl't i' the burn, Frae morning sun till dine : But seas between us braid hae roar'd Sin auld lang syne." I see poetry and deep feeling in this. I 126 Adventures in Criticism can see exquisite poetry and deep feeling in " Mary Morison " — " Yestreen when to the trembling string The dance ga'ed thro' the lighted ha', To thee my fancy took its wing, I sat, but neither heard nor saw : The' this was fair, and that was braw, And yon the toast of a' the town, I sigh'd and said amang them a' 'Ye are na Mary Morison.'" I see exquisite poetry and deep feeling in the Lament for the Earl of Glencairn — " The bridegroom may forget the bride Was made his wedded wife yestreen ; The monarch may forget the crown That on his head an hour has been ; The mother may forget the child That smiles sae sweetly on her knee ; But I'll remember thee, Glencairn, And a' that thou hast done for me ! " But — it is only honest to speak one's opinion and to hope, if it be wrong, for a better mind — I do not find poetry of any high order either in " Scots wha hae " or " A man's a man for a' that." The former seems to me to be very fine rant — inspired rant, if you will — hovering on the borders of poetry. Scott and Burns 127 The latter, to be frank, strikes me as rather poor rant, neither inspired nor even quite genuine, and in no proper sense poetry at all. And " J. B." simply bewilders my Southron intelligence when he quotes it as an instance of deeply emotional song. " Ye see yon birkie, ca'd a lord, Wha struts, and stares, and a' that ; Tho' hundreds worship at his word. He's but a coof for a' that : For a' that, and a' that. His riband, star, and a' that, The man of independent mind. He looks and laughs at a' that." The proper attitude, I should imagine, for a man " of independent mind " in these cir- cumstances — assuming for the moment that ribands and stars are bestowed on im- beciles — would be a quiet disdain. The above stanza reminds me rather of ill-bred barking. People of assured self-respect do not call other people "birkies" and "coofs," or " look and laugh at a' that " — at least, not so loudly. Compare these verses of Burns v/ith Samuel Daniel's "Epistle to the Countess of Cumberland," and you will find a higher manner altogether — 128 Adventures in Criticism " He that of such a height hath built his mind, And reared the dwelhng of his thoughts so strong, As neither fear nor hope can shake the frame Of his resolved powers ; nor all the wind Of vanity and malice pierce to wrong His settled peace, or to disturb the same ; What a fair seat hath he, from whence he may The boundless wastes and wilds of men survey ? "And with how free an eye doth he look down Upon these lower regions of turmoil ? " . . . As a piece of thought, " A man's a man for a' that " unites the two defects of obvious- ness and inaccuracy. As for the deep feehng, I hardly see where it comes in — unless it be a feeling of wounded and blatant but militant self-esteem. As for the poetry — well, " J. B." had rather have written it than have written one-third of Scott's novels. Let us take him at less than his word : he would rather have written " A man's a man for a' that " than " Ivanhoe," " Redgauntlet," and " The Heart of Midlothian." Ma sonties I 129 CHARLES READE There is a venerable proposition — I never heard who invented it — that an author is finally judged by his best work. This would be comforting to authors if true : but is it true ? A day or two ago I picked up on a railway bookstall a copy of Messrs. Chatto & Windus's new sixpenny edition of The Cloister and the Hearth, and a capital edition it is. I think I must have worn out more copies of this book than of any other ; but somebody robbed me of the pretty " Elzevir edition " as soon as it came out, and so I have only just read Mr. Walter Besant's Introduction, which the publishers have con- siderately reprinted and thrown in with one of the cheapest sixpennyworths that ever came from the press. Good wine needs no bush, and the bush which Mr. Besant hangs out is a very small one. But one sentence at least has challenged attention. " I do not say that the whole of life, as it was at the end of the fourteenth century, may be found in the F March lo, 1894. " Tke Cloister and the Hearth " 130 Adventures in Criticism Cloister a7id the Hearth ; but I do say that there is portrayed so vigorous, lifelike, and truthful a picture of a time long gone by, and differing in almost every particular from our own, that the world has never seen its like. To me it is a picture of the past more faithful than anything in the works of Scott." This last sentence — if I remember rightly — was called a very bold one when it first appeared in print. To me it seems alto- gether moderate. Go steadily through Scott, and which of the novels can you choose to compare with the Cloister as a " vigorous, lifelike, and truthful picture of a time long gone by".-* Is it Ivanhoef — a gay and beautiful romance, no doubt ; but surely, as the late Mr. Freeman was at pains to point out, not a " lifelike and truthful picture " of any age that ever was. Is it Old Mortality ? Well, but even if we here get something more like a "vigorous, lifelike, and truthful picture of a time long gone by," we are bound to consider the scale of the two books. Size counts, as Aristotle pointed out, and as we usually forget. It is the whole of Western Europe that Reade reconstructs for the groundwork of his simple story. Mr. Besant might have said more. He Charles Reade 131 might have pointed out that no novel of Scott's approaches the Cloister in lofty humanity, in sublimity of pathos. The last fifty pages of the tale reach an elevation of feeling that Scott never touched or dreamed of touching. And the sentiment is sane and honest, too : the author reaches to the height of his great argument easily and without strain. It seems to me that, as an appeal to the feelings, the page that tells of Margaret's death is the finest thing in fiction. It appeals for a score of reasons, and each reason is a noble one. We have brought together in that page extreme love, self-sacrifice, resigna- tion, courage, religious feeling : we have the end of a beautiful love-tale, the end of a good woman, and the last earthly trial of a good man. And with all this, there is no vulgar- isation of sacred ground, no cheap parade of the heart's secrets ; but a deep sobriety relieved with the most delicate humour. Moreover, the language is Charles Reade's at its best — which is almost as good as at its worst it is abominable. That Scott could never reach the emotional F 7 132 Adventures in Criticism height of Margaret's death-scene, or of the scene in Clement's cave, is certain. Moreover in the Cloister Reade challenges comparison with Scott on Scott's own ground — the ground of sustained adventurous narrative — and the advantage is not with Scott. Once more, take all the Waverley Novels and search them through for two passages to beat the adventures of Gerard and Denis the Burgundian (i) with the bear and (2) at "The Fair Star" Inn, by the Burgundian frontier. I do not think you will succeed, even then. Indeed, I will go so far as to say that to match these adventures of Gerard and Denis you must go again to Charles Reade, to the homeward voyage of the Agra in Hard Cash. For these and for sundry other reasons which, for lack of space, cannot be unfolded here, The Cloister avd the Hearth seems to me a finer achievement than the finest novel of Scott's. And now we come to the proposition that an author must be judged by his best work. If this proposition be true, then I must hold Reade to be a greater novelist Charles Reade 133 than Scott. But do I hold this? Does anyone hold this? Why, the contention would be an absurdity. Reade wrote some twenty novels beside The Cloister and the Hearth, and not one of the twenty approaches it. One only — Griffith Gaunt — is fit to be named in the same day with it ; and Griffith Gaunt is marred by an insincerity in the plot which vitiates, and is at once felt to vitiate, the whole work. On everything he wrote before and after The Cloister Reade's essential vulgarity of mind is written large. That he shook it off in that great instance is one of the miracles of literary history. It may be that the sublimity of his theme kept him throughout in a state of unnatural exaltation. If the case cannot be explained thus, it cannot be explained at all. Other of his writings display the same, or at any rate a like, capacity for sustained narra- tive. Hard Cash displays it ; parts of It is Never Too Late to Mend display it. But over much of these two novels lies the trail of that defective taste which makes A Simpleton, for instance, a prodigy of cheap ineptitude. \ 134 Adventures in Criticism But if Reade be hopelessly Scott's inferior in manner and taste, what shall we say of the invention of the two men ? Mr. Barrie once affirmed very wisely in an essay on Robert Louis Stevenson, " Critics have said enthusi- astically — for it is difficult to write of Mr. Stevenson without enthusiasm — that Alan Breck is as good as anything in Scott. Alan Breck is certainly a masterpiece, quite worthy of the greatest of all story-tellers, who, nevertheless, it should be reinentbered, created these rich side-characters by the score, another before dinner-time!' Inventiveness is, I sup- pose, one of the first qualities of a great novelist : and to Scott's invention there was no end. But set aside The Cloister, and Reade's invention will be found to be extra- ordinarily barren. Plot after plot turns on the same old tiresome trick. Two young people are in love : by the villainy of a third person they are separated for a while, and one of the lovers is persuaded that the other is dead. The missing one may be kept missing by various devices ; but always he is supposed to be dead, and always evidence is brought of his death, and always he turns up in the ^wd.. Charles Reade 135 It is the same in The Cloister, in It is Never Too Late to Mend, in Put Yourself in His Place, in Griffiih Gaunt, in A Simpleton. Sometimes, as in Hard Cash and A Terrible Temptation, he is wrongfully incarcerated as a madman ; but this is obviously a variant only on the favourite trick. Now the device is good enough in a tale of the fourteenth century, when news travelled slowly, and when by the suppression of a letter, or by a piece of false news, two lovers, the one in Holland, the other in Rome, could easily be kept apart. But in a tale of modern life no trick could well be stagier. Besides the incomparable Margaret — of whom it does one good to hear Mr. Besant say, " No heroine in fiction is more dear to me " — Reade drew some admirable portraits of women ; but his men, to tell the truth — and especially his priggish young heroes — seem remarkably ill invented. Again, of course, I except The Cloister. Omit that book, and you would say that such a charac- ter as Bailie Nicol Jarvie or Dugald Dalgetty were altogether beyond Reade's range. Open The Cloister and you find in Denis the 136 Adventures in Criticism Burgundian a character as good as the Baih'e and Dalgetty rolled into one. Other authors have been lifted above themselves. But was there ever a case of one sustained at such an unusual height throughout a long, intricate and arduous work? 1^7 HENRY KINGSLEY Mr. Shorter begins his Memoir"^ of the -^^^-9. . ^395. author of Ravenshoe with this paragraph : — " The story of Henry Kingsleys life may well be t^i^^gsley told in a few words, because that life \^as on the whole a failure. The world will not listen very tolerantly to a narrative of failuie unaccompanied by the halo of lemoteness. To write the life of Charles Kingsley would be a quite different task. Here was success, victorious success, sufficient indeed to gladden the heart even of Dr. Smiles — success in the way of Church preferment, success in the way of public veneration, success, above all, as a popular novelist, poet, and preacher. Canon Kingsky's life has been v.ritten in two substantial volumes contain- ing abundant letters and no indiscietions. In this biography the name of Henry Kingsley is absolutely ignored. And yet it is not too much to say that, when time has softened his memory for us, as it has softened for us the memories of Marlowe and Burns and many another, the public interest in Henry Kingsley will be stronger than in his now more famous brother." * The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn. Cy Heniy Kingsley. New Edition, with a Memoir by Clement Shorter. London : Ward, Lock & Bowden. 138 Adventures in Criticism Aprejudice I almost Wish I could believe this. If one confessed cannot get rid of a prejudice, the wisest course is to acknowledge it candidly : and therefore I confess myself as capable of jumping over the moon as of writing fair criticism on Charles or Henry Kingsley. As for Henry, I worshipped his books as a boy ; to-day I find them full of faults — often preposterous, usually ill - constructed, at times unnatural beyond belief John Gilpin never threw the Wash about on both sides of the way more like unto a trundling mop or a wild goose at play than did Henry Kingsley the decent flow of fiction when the mood was on him. His notion of constructing a novel was to take equal parts of wooden melodrama and low comedy and stick them boldly together in a paste of impertinent drollery and serious but entirely irrelevant moralising. And yet each time I read Ravenshoe — and I must be close upon " double figures " — I like it better. Henry did my green unknowing youth engage, and I find it next to impossible to give him up, and quite impossible to choose the venerated Charles as a substitute in my Henry Kingsley 139 riper age. For here crops up a prejudice I find quite ineradicable. To put it plainly, I cannot like Charles Kingsley. Those who have had opportunity to study the deport- ment of a certain class of Anglican divine at a foreign table iVhote may perhaps under- stand the antipathy. There was almost always a certain sleek offensiveness about Charles Kingsley when he sat down to write. He had a knack of using the most insolent language, and attributing the vilest motives to all poor foreigners and Roman Catholics and other extra-parochial folk, and would exhibit a pained and completely ludicrous surprise on finding that he had hurt the feelings of these unhappy inferiors — a kind of indignant wonder that Providence should have given them any feelings to hurt. At length, encouraged by popular applause, this very second-rate man attacked a very first- rate man. He attacked with every advantage and with utter unscrupulousness ; and the first-rate man handled him ; handled him gently, scrupulously, decisively ; returned him to his parish ; and left him there, a trifie dazed, feeling his muscles. F* 2 140 Adventures in Criticism Charles Still, one may dis/ike the man and his c/'^ books without thinking it probable that his '"'■^ brother Henry will supersede him in the public interest ; nay, without thinking it right that he should. Dislike him as you vvill, you must acknowledge that Charles Kingsley had a lyrical gift that — to set all his novels aside — carries him well above Henry's literary level. It is sufficient to say that Charles wrote " The Pleasant Isle of Aves " and " When all the world is young, lad," and the finst two stanzas of " The Sands of Dee." Neither in prose nor in verse could Henry come near such excel- lence. But we may go farther. Take the novels of each, and, novel for novel, you must acknowledge — I say it regretfully — that Charles carries the heavier guns. If you ask me whether I prefer Westward Ho ! or Ravenshoe, I answer without difficulty that I find Rave?ishoe almost wholly delight- ful, and Westward Ho ! as detestable in some parts as it is admirable in others ; that I have read Ravens/we again and again merely for pleasure, and that I can never read a dozen pages of Westward Ho! Henry Kingsley 141 without wishing to put the book in the fire. But if you ask me which I consider the greater novel, I answer with equal readiness that Westzvard Ho I is not only the greater, but much the greater. It is a truth too seldom recognised that in literary criticism, as in politics, one may detest a man's work while admitting his greatness. Even in his episodes it seems to me that Charles stands high above Henry. Sam Buckley's gallop on Widderin in Geoffry Hamlyji is (I imagine) Henry Kingsley's finest achieve- ment in vehement narrativ^e : but if it can be compared for one moment with Amyas Leigh's quest of the Great Galleon, then I am no judge of narrative. The one point — and it is an important one — in which Henry beats Charles as an artist is his sustained vivacity. Charles soars far higher at times ; but Charles is often profoundly dull. Now, in all Henry's books I have not found a single dull page. He may be trivial, inconsequent, irrelevant, absurd ; but he never wearies. It is a great merit : but it is not enough in itself to place a novelist even in the second rank. In a 142 Adventures in Criticism short sketch of Henry Kingsle}', contributed by his nephew, Mr. Maurice Kingsley, to Messrs. Scribner's paper, The Bookbuyer, I find that the younger brother was considered at home " undoubtedly the novehst of the family ; the elder being more of the poet, historian, and prophet." (Prophet !) " My father only wrote one novel pure and simple — viz. Tivo Years Ago — his other works being either historical novels or ' signs of the times.' " Now why an " historical novel " should not be a " novel pure and simple," and what kind of literary achievement a " sign of the times " may be, I leave the reader to guess. The whole passage seems to suggest a certain confusion in the Kingsley family with regard to the fundamental divisions of literature. And it seems clear that the Kingsley family considered novel -writing " pure and simple " — in so far as they differ- entiated this from other kinds of novel- writing — to be something not entirely respectable. Their opinion of Henry Kingsley in par- ticular is indicated in no uncertain manner. Henry Kingsley 143 In Mrs. Charles Kingsley's life of her husband, Henry's existence is completely ignored. The briefest biographical note was furnished forth for Mr. Leslie Stephen's Dictiona)y of National Biography: and Mr. Stephen dismisses our author with a few curt lines. This disposi- tion to treat Henry as an awful warning and nothing more, while sleek Charles is patted on the back for a saint, inclines one to take up arms on the other side and assert, with Mr. Shorter, that " when time has softened his memory for us, the public interest in Henry Kingsley will be stronger than in his now more famous brother." But can we look forward to this reversal of the public verdict } Can we consent with it if it ever comes } The most we can hope is that future generations will read Henry Kingsley, and will love him in spite of his faults. Henry, the third son of the Rev. Charles Kingsley, was born in Northamptonshire on the 2nd of January, 1830, his brother Charles being then eleven years old. In 1836 his father became rector of St. Luke's Church, Chelsea — the church of which such effective 144 Adventures in Criticism use is made in The Hillyars and the Burtons — and his boyhood was passed in that famous old suburb. He was educated at King's College School and Worcester College, Ox- ford, w4iere he became a famous oarsman, rowing bow of his College boat ; also bow of a famous light-weight University " four,'*' which swept everything before it in its time. He wound up his racing career by winning the Diamond Sculls at Henley. From 1853 to 1858 his life was passed in Australia, whence after some variegated experiences he returned to Chelsea in 1858, bringing back nothing but good "copy," which he worked into Geoffry Hanilyn^ his first romance. Ravenshoe \v3^s written in 1861 ; Austin Elliot in 1863 ; The Hillyars and the Burtons in 1865 ; Silcote of Silcotes in 1867 ; Mademoi- selle Mathilde (admired by few, but a favourite of mine) in 1868. He was married in 1864, and settled at Wargrave-on-Thames. In 1869 he went north to edit the Edinburgh Daily Review, and made a mess of it ; in 1870 he represented that journal as field- correspondent in the Franco-Prussian War, was present at Sedan, and claimed to have Henry Kings ley 145 been the first Englishman to enter Metz. In 1872 he returned to London and wrote novels in which his powers appeared to deteriorate steadily. He removed to Cuckfield, in Sussex, and there died in May, 1876. Hardly a man of letters followed him to the grave, or spoke, in print, a word in his praise. And yet, by all accounts, he was a wholly amiable ne'er-do-well — a wonderful flyfisher an extremely clever amateur artist, a lover of horses and dogs and children (surely, if we except a chapter of Victor Hugo's, the children in Raveiishoe are the most delight- ful in fiction), and a joyous companion. " To us children," writes Mr. Maurice Kingsley, " Uncle Henry's settling in Eversley was a great event. ... At times he fairly bubbled over with humour ; while his knowledge of slang — Burschen, Bargee, Parisian, Irish, Cockney, and English pro- vincialisms — was awful and wonderful. Nothing was better than to get our uncle on his 'genteel behaviour,' which, of course, meant exactly the opposite, and brought forth inimitable stories, scraps of old songs and impromptu conversations, the choicest of which were between children, Irishwomen, or cockneys. He was the only man, I believe, who ever knew by heart the famous Irish Court Scenes — naughtiest and most humorous of tales — unpublished, of course, but handed 146 Adventures in Criticism down from generation to generation of the faithful. Most deligluful was an interview between his late Majesty George the Fourth and an itinerant show- man, which ended up with, ' No, George the Fourth, you shall not have my Rumptifoozle ! ' What said animal was, or the authenticity of the story, he never would divulge." I think it is to the conversational quality of their style — its ridiculous and good- humoured impertinences and surprises — that his best books owe a great deal of their charm. The footnotes are a study in themselves, and range from the mineral strata of Australia to the best way of sliding down banisters. Of the three tales already republished in this pleasant edition. Ravens- hoe has always seemed to me the best in every respect ; and in spite of its feeble plot and its impossible lay-figures — Erne, Sir George Hillyar, and the painfully inane Gerty — I should rank The Hilly ai^s and the Bui'tons above the more terrifically imagined and more neatly constructed Geoffry Hanilyn. But this is an opinion on which I lay no stress. 147 His Life ALEXANDER WILLIAM KINGLAKE Alexander William Kinglake was born jan, lo, in 1812, the son of a country gentleman — Mr. W. Kinglake, of Wilton House, Taunton — and received a country gentleman's educa- tion at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge. From college he went to Lincoln's Inn, and in 1837 was called to the Chancery Bar, where he practised with fair but not eminent success. In 1844 he published Eothen, and having startled the town, quietly resumed his legal work and seemed willing to forget the achievement. Ten years later he accom- panied his friend, Lord Raglan, to the Crimea. He retired from the Bar in 1856, and entered Parliament next year as member for Bridge- water. Re-elected in 1868, he was unseated on petition in 1869, and thenceforward gave himself up to the work of his life. He had consented, after Lord Raglan's death, to write a history of the Invasion of the 148 Adventures in Criticism Crimea. The two first volumes appeared in 1863 ; the last was published but two years before he succumbed, in the first days of 1 89 1, to a slow incurable disease. In all, the task had occupied thirty years. Long before these years ran out, the world had learnt to regard the Crimean struggle in something like its true perspective ; but over Kinglake's mind it continued to loom in all its original proportions. To adapt a phrase of M. Jules Lemaitre's, "/\xx^\y the funniest book written in the last ten years. But he has been most shamefully served. Writing with him, Mr. Stevenson has given us The Wrecker and The Ebb- Tide. Faults may be found in these, apart from the criticism that they are freaks in the development of Mr. Stevenson's genius. Nobody denies that they are splendid tales : nobody (I imagine) can deny that they are tales of a singular and original pattern. Robert Louis Stevenson 179 Yet no reviewer praises them on their own merits or points out their own defects. They are judged always in relation to Mr. Steven- son's previous work, and the reviewers con- centrate their censure upon the point that they are freaks in Mr. Stevenson's develop- ment — that he is not continuing as the public expected him to continue. Now there are a number of esteemed novelists about the land who earn comfortable incomes by doing just what the public expects of them. But of Mr. Stevenson's genius — always something wayward — freaks mic{ht have been oredicted from the first. A genius so consciously artistic, so quick in sympathy with other men's writings, however diverse, was bound from the first to make many experiments. Before the public took his career in hand and mapped it out for him, he made such an experiment with The Black Arrozv ; and it was forgiven easily enough. But because he now takes Mr. Osbourne into partnership for a new set of experiments, the reviewers — not considering that these, whatever their faults, are vast i8o Adventures in Criticism improvements on TJic Black Arrow — ascribe all those faults to the new partner. But that is rough criticism. Moreover it is almost demonstrably false. For the weakness of The Wrecker^ such as it was, lay in the Paris and Barbizon business and the author's failure to make this of one piece with the main theme, with the romantic histories of the Currency Lass and the Flying Send. But which of the two partners stands responsible for this Paris-Barbizon business ? Mr. Steven- son beyond a doubt. If you shut your eyes to Mr. Stevenson's confessed familiarity with the Paris and the Barbizon of a certain era ; if you choose to deny that he wrote that chapter on Fontainebleau in Across the Plains ; if you go on to deny that he wrote the opening of Chapter XXI. of The Wrecker ; why then you are obliged to maintain that it was Mr. Osbourne, and not Mr. Stevenson, who wrote that famous chapter on the Roussillon Wine — which is absurd. And if, in spite of its absurdity, you stick to this also, why, then you are only demon- strating that Mr. Lloyd Osbourne is one of Robert Louis Stevenson i8i the greatest living writers of fiction : and your conception of him as a mere imp of mischief jogging the master's elbow is wider of the truth than ever. No ; the vital defect of The Wrecker must be set down to Mr. Stevenson's account. Fine story as that was, it failed to assimilate the Paris-Barbizon business. The Ebb-Tide, on the other hand, is all of one piece. It has at any rate one atmosphere, and one only. And who can demand a finer atmosphere of romance than that of the South Pacific } The Ebb-Tide, so far as atmosphere goes, is all of one piece. And the story, too, is all of one piece — until we come to Attwater : I own Attwater beats me. As Mr. Osbourne might say, " I have no use for " that mon- strous person. I wish, indeed, Mr. Osbourne had said so : for again I cannot help feeling that the offence of Attwater lies at Mr. Stevenson's door. He strikes me as a bad dream of Mr. Stevenson's — a General Gordon out of the Arabian Nights. Do you re- member a drawing of Mr. du Maurier's in Punch, wherein, seizing upon a locution of 1 82 Adventures in Criticism Miss Rhoda r)ioughton's, he gave us a group of " magnificently ugly " men ? I seem to see Attwater in tliat group. But if Mr. Stevenson is responsible for Attwater, surely also he contributed the tv/o splendid surprises of the story. I am the more certain because they occur in the same chapter, and within three pages of each other. I mean, of course, Captain Davis's sudden confession about his " little Adar," and the equally startling discovery that the cargo of the Farallone schooner, supposed to be cham- pagne, is mostly water. These are the two triumphant surprises of the book : and I shall continue to believe that only one living man could have contrived them, until some- body writes to Samoa and obtains the as- surance that they are among Mr. Osbourne's contributions to the tale. Two small complaints I have to make. The first is of the rather inartistically higli level of profanity maintained by the speech of Davis and Huish. It is natural enough, of course ; but that is no excuse if the frequency of the swearing prevent its making its proper Robert Louis Stevenson 183 impression in the right place. And the name "Robert Herrick," bestowed on one of the three beach-loafers, might have been shunned. You may call an ordinary negro "Julius Csesar": for out of such extremes you get the legitimately grotesque. But the Robert Herrick, loose writer of the lovely Hesperides, and the Robert Herrick, shameful haunter of Papeete beach, are not extremes : and it was so very easy to avoid the association of ideas. nam The Editor asks me to speak of Stevenson ^'^- 22, 1894. this week : because, since the foundation of K. L,. Ci. The Speaker, as each new book of Steven- inMemo- son's appeared, I have had the privilege of writing about it here. So this column, too, shall be filled ; at what cost ripe journalists will understand, and any fellow-cadet of letters may guess. For when the telegram came, early on Monday morning, what was our first thought, as soon as the immediate numbness of sorrow passed and the selfish instinct began to 184 Adventures in Criticism reassert itself (as it always does) and whisper " What have / lost ? What is the difference to me f " Was it not something like this — " Put away books and paper and pen. Steven- son is dead. Stevenson is dead, and now there is nobody left to write for." Our children and grandchildren shall rejoice in his books ; but we of this generation pos- sessed in the living man something that they will not know. So long as he lived, though it were far from Britain — though we had never spoken to him and he, perhaps, had barely heard our names — we always wrote our best for Stevenson. To him each writer amongst us— small or more than small — had been proud to have carried his best. That best might be poor enough. So long as it was not slipshod, Stevenson could forgive. While he lived, he moved men to put their utmost even into writings that quite certainly would never meet his eye. Surely another age will wonder over this curiosity of letters — that for five years the needle of literary endeavour in Great Britain has quivered towards a little island in the South Pacific, as to its magnetic pole. Robert Louis Stej^enson 185 Yet he founded no school, though most of us from time to time have poorly tried to copy him. He remained altogether inimit- able, yet never seemed conscious of his great- ness. It was native in him to rejoice in the successes of other men at least as much as in his own triumphs. One almost felt that, so long as good books were written, it was no great concern to him whether he or others wrote them. Born with an artist's craving for beauty of expression, he achieved that beauty with infinite pains. Confident in romance and in the beneficence of joy, he cherished the flame of joyous romance with more than Vestal fervour, and kept it ardent in a body which Nature, unkind from the beginning, seemed to delight in visiting with more unkindness — a "soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed" almost from birth. And his books leave the impression that he did this chiefly from a sense of duty : that he laboured and kept the lamp alight chiefly because, for the time, other and stronger men did not. Had there been another Scott, another 1 86 Adventures in Criticism Dumas — if I may change the image — to take up the torch of romance and run with it, I doubt if Stevenson would have offered him- self. I almost think in that case he would have consigned with Nature and sat at ease, content to read of new Ivanhoes and new D'Artagnans: for — let it be said again — no man had less of the ignoble itch for merely ])crsonal success. Think, too, of what the struggle meant for him : how it drove him unquiet about the world, if somewhere he might meet with a climate to repair the con- stant drain upon his feeble vitality ; and how at last it flung him, as by a " sudden freshet," upon Samoa — to die "far from Argos, dear land of home." And then consider the brave spirit that carried him — the last of a great race — along this far and difficult path ; for it is the man we must consider now, not, for the moment, his writings. Fielding's voyage to Lisbon was long and tedious enough ; but almost the whole of Stevenson's life has been a voyage to Lisbon, a voyage in the very penumbra of death. Yet Stevenson spoke Robert Louis Stevenson 187 always as gallantly as his great predecessor. Their "cheerful stoicism," which allies his books with the best British breeding, will keep them classical as long as our nation shall value breeding. It shines to our dim eyes now, as we turn over the familiar pages of Virglnibus Puerisqae, and from page after page — in sentences and fragments of sen- tences — " It is not altogether ill with the invalid after all " . . . " Who would project a serial novel after Thackeray and Dickens had each fallen in mid- course." \^He had two books at least in hand and uncompleted, the papers say.] " Who would find lieart enough to begin to live, if he dallied with the con- sideration of death ? " . . . " What sorry and pitiful quibbling all this is!" . . . ''It is better to live and be done with it, than to die daily in the sick-room. By all means begin your folio ; even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates over a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week. . . . For surely, at whatever age it overtake the man, this is to die young. . . . The noise of the mallet and chisel is scarcely quenched, the 1 88 Adventures in Criticism trumpets are hardly done blowing, when^ trailing with him clouds of glory, this happy- starred, full-blooded spirit shoots into the spiritual land." As it was in Virginilms Puerisque, so is it in the last essay in his last book of essays : — " And the Kingdom of Heaven is of the childlike, of those who are easy to please, who love and who give pleasure. Mighty men of their hands, the smiters, and the builders, and the judges, have lived long and done sternly, aad yet preserved this lovely character ; and among our carpet interests and two- penny concerns, the shame were indelible if we should lose it. Ge?itle?tess and cheerfulness^ these come before all morality J they are the perfect deities. ..." I remember now (as one remembers little things at such times) that, when first I heard of his going to Samoa, there came into my head (Heaven knows why) a trivial, almost ludicrous passage from his favourite, Sir Thomas Browne : a passage beginning " He was fruitlessly put in hope of advantage by change of Air, and imbibing the pure Aerial Nitre of those Parts ; and therefore, being so far spent, he quickly found Sar- dinia in Tivoli, and the most healthful air Robert Louis Stevenson 189 of little effect, where Death had set her Broad Arrow. . . ." A stateher sentence of the same author occurs to me now " To Hve indeed, is to be again ourselves, which being not only a hope, but an evidence in noble believers, it is all one to lie in St. Innocent's Churchyard, as in the sands of Egypt. Ready to be anything in the ecstacy of being ever, and as content with six foot as the moles of Adrianus." This one lies, we are told, on a mountain- top, overlooking the Pacific. At first it seemed so much easier to distrust a News Agency than to accept Stevenson's loss. " O captain, my captain !".... One needs not be an excellent writer to feel that writing will be thankless work, now that Stevenson is gone. But the papers by this time leave no room for doubt. "A grave was dug on the summit of Mount Vaea, 1,300 feet above the sea. The coffin was carried up the hill by Samoans Vv'ith great difficulty, a track having to be cut through the thick bush which covers the side of the hill from the base to the peak." For the good of man, his father and 1 90 Adventures in Criticism grandfather planted the high sea-h'ghts upon the Inchcape and the Tyree Coast. He, the last of their line, nursed another light and tended it. Their lamps still shi le upon the Bell Rock and the Skerryvore ; and — though \.\\ alien seas, upon a rock of exile — this other light shall continue, unquenchable by age, beneficent, serene. Nov, 2, Eagerly as we awaited this volume, it has proved a gift exceeding all our hopes — a gift, The ''Vaiiima ^ think, almost priceless. It unites in the] Letters " rarest manner the value of a familiar cor- respondence with the value of an intimate journal : for these Samoan letters to his friend Mr. Sidney Colvin form a record, scarcely interrupted, of Stevenson's thinkings and doings from month to month, and often from day to day, during the last four romantic years of his life. The first is dated Novem- ber 2nd, 1890, when he and his household were clearing the ground for their home on the mountain-side of Vaea : the last, October 6th, 1894, just two months before his grave Robert Louis Stevenson 191 was dug on Vaea top. During his Odyssey in the South Seas (from August, 1888, to the spring of 1890) his letters, to Mr. Colvin at any rate, were infrequent and tantalisingly vague ; but soon after settling on his estate in Samoa, " he for the first time, to my in- finite gratification, took to writing me long and regular monthly budgets as full and particular as heart could wish ; and this practice he maintained until within a few weeks of his death." These letters, occupy- ing a place quite apart in Stevenson's cor- respondence, Mr. Colvin has now edited with pious care and given to the public. But the great, the happy surprise of the Vailima Letters is neither their continuity nor their fulness of detail — although on each of these points they surpass our hopes. The great, the entirely happy surprise is their inti- macy. We all knew — who could doubt it ? — that Stevenson's was a clean and trans- parent mind. But we scarcely allowed for the innocent zest (innocent, because wholly devoid of vanity or selfishness) which he took in observing its operations, or for the child- 192 Adventures in Criticism like confidence with which he held out the crystal for his friend to gaze into. One is at first inclined to say that had these letters been less open-hearted they had made less melancholy reading — the last few of them, at any rate. For, as their editor says, "the tenor of these last letters of Stevenson's to me, and of others written to several of his friends at the same time, seemed to give just cause for anxiety. In- deed, as the reader will have perceived, a gradual change had during the past months been coming over the tone of his correspond- ence. . . . To judge by these letters, his old invincible spirit of cheerfulness was begin- ning to give way to moods of depression and overstrained feeling, although to those about him, it seems, his charming, habitual sweet- ness and gaiety of temper were undimin- ished." Mr. Colvin is thinking, no doubt, of passages such as this, from the very last letter : — " I know I am at a climacteric for all men who live by their wits, so I do not despair. But the truth is, I am pretty nearly useless at literature. . . . Were it not for my health, which made it impossible, I Robert Louis Stevenson 193 could not find it in my heart to forgive myself that I did not stick to an honest, commonplace trade when I was young, which might have now supported me during these ill years. But do not suppose me to be down in anything else ; only, for the nonce, my skill deserts me, such as it is, or was. It was a very little dose of inspiration, and a pretty little trick of style, long lost, improved by the most heroic industry. So far, I have managed to please the journalists. But I am a fictitious article, and have long known it. I am read by journalists, by my fellow-novelists, and by boys ; with these iiicipit et explicit my vogue." I appeal to all who earn their living by pen or brush — Who does not know moods such as this? Who has not experience of those dark days when the ungrateful canvas refuses to come right, and the artist sits down before it and calls himself a fraud? We may even say that these fits of incapacity and blank despondency are part of the cost of all creative work. They may be inten- sified by terror for the family exchequer. The day passes in strenuous but futile effort, and the man asks himself, " What will happen to me and mine if this kind of thing con- tinues 1 " Stevenson, we are allowed to say (for the letters tell us), did torment himself with these terrors. And we may say further H 194 Adventures in Criticism that, by whatever causes impelled, he cer- tainly worked too hard during- the last two years of his life. With regard to the passage quoted, what seems to me really melancholy is not the baseless self-distrust, for that is a transitory malady most incident to author- ship ; but that, could a magic carpet have transported Stevenson at that moment to the side of the friend he addressed — could he for an hour or two have visited London — all this apprehension had been at once dispelled. He left England before achieving his full conquest of the public heart, and the extent of that conquest he, in his exile, never quite realised. When he visited Sydney, early in 1893, it was to him a new and disconcerting experience — but not, I fancy, altogether unpleasing — digito inonstrari, or, as he puts it elsewhere, to " do the affable celebrity life- sized." Nor do I think he quite realised how large a place he filled in the education, as in the affections, of the younger men — the Barries and Kiplings, the Weymans, Doyles and Croci;etts — whose courses began after he had left these shores. An artist gains much by working alone and away from chatter and Robert Louis Stevenson 195 criticism and adulation : but his gain has this corresponding loss, that he must go through his dark hours without support. Even a master may take benefit at times — if it be only a physical benefit — from some closer and handier assurance than any letters can give of the place held by his work in the esteem of "the boys." We must not make too much of what he wrote in this dark mood. A i^w days later he was at work on Weir of Heriniston, labour- ing " at the full pitch of his powers and in the conscious happiness of their exercise." Once more he felt himself to be working at his best. The result the world has not yet been allowed to see : for the while we are satisfied and comforted by Mr. Colvin's assur- ances. " The fragment on which he wrought during the last month of his life gives to my mind (as it did to his own) for the first time the true measure of his powers ; and if in the literature of romance there is to be found work more masterly, of more piercing human insight and more concentrated imaginative wisdom, I do not know it." H 2 196 Adventures in Criticism On the whole, these letters from Vaih'ma give a picture of a serene and — allowance being made for the moods — a contented life. It is, I suspect, the genuine Stevenson that we get in the following passage from the letter of March, 1891 : — " Though I write so little, 1 pass all my hours of field-work in continual converse and imaginary cor- respondence. I scarce pull up a weed, but I invent a sentence on the matter to yourself; it does not get written ; autant en e?nportenf les ve^iisj but the intent is there, and for me (in some sort) the companionship. To-day, for instance, we had a great talk. I was toil- ing, the sweat dripping from my nose, in the hot fit after a squall of rain ; methought you asked me — frankly, w-as I happy? Happy (said I); I was only happy once ; that was at Hy^res ; it came to an end from a variety of reasons— decline of health, change of place, increase of money, age with his stealing steps ; since then, as before then, I know not what it means. But I know pleasures still ; pleasure with a thousand faces and none perfect, a thousand tongues all broken, a thousand hands, and all of them with scratching nails. High among these I place the delight of weeding out here alone by the garrulous water, under the silence of the high wood, broken by incongruous sounds of birds. And take my life all through, look at it fore and back, and upside down — I would not change my circumstances, unless it were to bring you here. And yet God knows perhaps this intercourse of writing serves as well ; and I wonder, Robert Louis Stevenson igy were you here indeed, would I commune so con- tinually with the thought of you. I say ' I wonder for a form : I know, and I know I should not." In a way the beauty of these letters is this, that they tell us so much of Stevenson that is new, and nothing that is strange — nothing that we have difficulty in reconciling with the picture we had already formed in our own minds. Our mental portraits of some other writers, drawn from their deliberate writings, have had to be readjusted, and sometimes most cruelly readjusted, as soon as their private correspondence came to be published. If any of us dreamed of this danger in Stevenson's case (and I doubt if anyone did), the danger at any rate is past. The man of the letters is the man of the books — the same gay, eager, strenuous, lov- able spirit, curious as ever about life and courageous as ever in facing its chances. Profoundly as he deplores the troubles in Samoa, when he hears that war has been declared he can hardly repress a boyish excitement. " War is a huge entramement,'' he writes in June, 1893; "there is no other temptation to be compared to it, not one. 198 Adventures in Criticism We were all wet, we had been live hours in the saddle, mostly riding hard ; and we came home like schoolboys, with such a lightness of spirits, and I am sure such a brightness of eye, as you could have lit a candle at." And that his was not by any means mere "literary" courage one more extract will prove. One of his boys, Paatalise by name, had suddenly gone mad : — " I was busy copying David Balfour, with my left hand — a most laborious task — Fanny was down at the native house superintending the floor, Lloyd down in Apia, and Bella in her own house cleaning, when I heard the latter caUing on my name. I ran out on the verandah ; and there on the lawn beheld my crazy boy with an axe in his hand and dressed out in green ferns, dancing. I ran downstairs and found all my house boys on the back verandah, watching him through the dining-room. I asked what it meant 1 — 'Dance belong his place,' they said. — 'I think this is no time to dance,' said I. ' Has he done his work ?' — 'No,' they told me, 'away bush all morning.' But there they all stayed in the back verandah. I went on alone through the dining-room, and bade him stop. He did so, shouldered the axe, and began to walk away ; but I called him back, walked up to him, and took the axe out of his unresisting hands. The boy is in all things so good, that I can scarce say I was afraid ; only I felt it had to be stopped ere he Robert Louis Stevenson 199 could work himself up by dancing to some craziness. Our house boys protested they were not afraid ; all I know is they were all watching him round the back door, and did not follow me till I had the axe. As for the out-boys, who were working with Fanny in the native house, they thought it a bad business, and made no secret of their fears." But indeed all the book is manly, with the manliness of Scott's Journal or of Fielding's Voyage to Lisbon. " To the English-speak- ing world," concludes Mr. Colvin, " he has left behind a treasure which it would be vain as yet to attempt to estimate ; to the profes- sion of letters one of the most ennobling and inspiriting of examples ; and to his friends an image of memory more vivid and more dear than are the presences of almost any of the living." Very few men of our time have been followed out of this world with the same regret. None have repined less at their own fate — " This be the verse you grave for me : — ' Here he lies where he longed to be ; Home is the sailor, home from the sea, And the hunter home from the hill.'" 200 M. ZOLA Sept. 23, To what difTerent issues two men will work 1892. LaDeb&cU ^^^^ same notion ! Imagine this world to be a flat board accurately parcelled out into squares, and you have the basis at once of Alice Thi'ough the Looking-Glass and of Les Rougoii-Macquart. But for the mere fluke that the Englishman happened to be whim- sical and the Frenchman entirely without humour (and the chances were perhaps against this), we might have had the Rougon-Mac- quart family through the looking-glass, and a natural and social history of Alice in par- tenses of existence labelled Drinks War, Money, etc. As it is, in drawing up any comparison of these two writers we should remember that Mr. Carroll sees the world in sections because he chooses, M. Zola because he cannot help it. If life were a museum, M. Zola would stand a reasonable chance of being a Balzac. But I invite the reader who has just laid M. Zola 201 down La Debacle to pick up Eugenie Grandet again and say if that little Dutch picture has not more sense of life, even of the storm and stir and big furies of life, than the detonating Debacle. The older genius " Saw life steadily and saw it whole " — No matter how small the tale, he draws no curtain around it ; it stands in the midst of a real world, set in the white and composite light of day. M. Zola sees life in sections and by one or another of those colours into which daylight can be decomposed by the prism. He is like a man standing at the wings with a limelight apparatus. The rays fall now here, now there, upon the stage ; are luridly red or vividly green ; but neither mix nor pervade, I am aware that the tone of the above paragraph is pontifical and its substance a trifle obvious, and am eager to apologise for both. Speaking as an impressionist, I can only say that La Debacle stifles me. And this is the efl*ect produced by all his later books. Each has the exclusiveness of a dream ; its subject — be it drink or war or J02 Adventures in Criticism money — possesses the reader as a nightmare possesses the dreamer. For the time this place of wide prospect, the world, puts up its shutters ; and life becomes all drink, all war, all money, while M. Zola (adaptable Bacchanal!) surrenders his brain to the intoxi- cation of his latest theme. He will drench himself with ecclcsiology, or veterinary sur- gery, or railway technicalities — everything by turns and everything long ; but, like the gentleman in the comic opera, he " never mixes." Of late he has almost ceased to add even a dash of human interest. Mr. George Moore, reviewing La Dibdcle in the Fortnightly last month, laments this. He reminds us of the splendid opportunity M. Zola has flung away in his latest work. "Jean and Maurice," says Mr. Moore, "have fought side by side ; they have alternately saved each other's I ives ; war has united them in a bond of inseparable friendship ; they have grasped each other's hands, and looked in each other's eyes, overpowered with a love that exceeds the love that woman ever gave to man ; now they are ranged on different sides, armed one against the other. The idea is a fine one, and it is to be deeply regretted that M. Zola did not throw history to the winds and develop the beautiful human M. Zola 203 story of the division of friends in civil war. Never would history have tempted Balzac away from the human passion of such a subject. ..." But it is just fidelity to the human interest of every subject that gives the novelist his rank; that makes — to take another instance — a page or two of Balzac, when Balzac is dealing with money, of more value than the whole of L Argent. Of Burke it has been said by a critic with whom it is a pleasure for once in a way to agree, that he knew how the whole world lived. " It was Burke's peculiarity and his glory to apply the imagination of a poet of the first order to the facts and business of life. . . . Burke's imagination led him to look over the whole land : the legislator devising new laws, the judge expounding and enforcing old ones, the merchant despatching all his goods and ex- tending his credit, the banker advancing the money of his customers upon the credit of the merchant, the frugal man slowly accumulating the store which is to support him in old age, the ancient institutions of Church and University with their seemly provisions for sound learning and true religion, the parson in his pulpit, the poet pondering his rhymes, the farmer eye- ing his crops, the painter covering his canvases, the player educating the feelings. Burke saw all this H* 2 204 Adventures in Criticism with the fancy of a poet, and dwelt on it with the eye of a lover." Now all this, which is true of Burke, is true of the very first literary artists — of Shake- speare and Balzac. All this, and more — for they not only see all this immense activity of life, but the emotions that animate each of the myriad actors. Suppose them to treat of commerce : they see not only the goods and money changing hands, but the ambitions, dangers, fears, delights, the fierce adventures by desert and seas, the slow toil at home, upon which the foundations of commerce are set Like the Gods, "They see the ferry On the broad, clay-laden Lone Chorasmian stream ; — thereon, With snort and strain, Two horses, strongly swimming, tow The ferry-boat, with woven ropes To cither bow Firm-harness'd by the mane ; a chief, With shout and shaken spear, Stands at the prow, and guides them ; but astern The cowering merchants, in long robes, Sit pale beside their wealth. . . " M. Zola 205 Like the Gods, they see all this ; but, unlike the Gods, they must feel also : — " They see the merchants On the Oxus stream ; — hit care Musi visit first them too^ and make them pale. Whether, through whirling sand, A cloud of desert robber-horse have burst Upon their caravan ; or greedy kings. In the waird cities the way passes through; Crush'd them with tolls ; or fever-airs, On some great river's marge, Mown them down, far from home." Mr. Moore speaks of M. Zola's vast imagi- nation. It is vast in the sense that it sees one thing at a time, and sees it a thousand times as big as it appears to most men. But can the imagination that sees a whole world under the influence of one particular fury be compared with that which surveys this planet and sees its inhabitants busy with a million diverse occupations t Drink, Money, War — these may be usefully personified as malignant or beneficent angels, for pulpit purposes. But the employment of these terrific spirits in the harrying of the Rougon-Macquart family re- calls the announcement that " The Death- Angel smote Alexander McGiue," 2o6 Adventurfs in Criticism while the methods of the Roitian Expdri- mental can hardly be better illustrated than by the rest of the famous stanza — *' — And gave him protracted repose : He wore a check shirt and a Number 9 shoe, And he had a pink wart on his nose." 207 SELECTION May 4. " COMING forward and seating himself on the Hazhtt ground in his white dress and tightened turban, the chief of the Indian jugglers begins with tossing up two brass balls, which is what any of us could do, and concludes with keeping up four at the same time, which is what none of us could do to save our lives." . . You remember Hazlitt's essay on the Indian Jugglers, and how their performance shook his self-conceit. "It makes me ashamed of myself I ask what there is that I can do as well as this. Nothing. ... Is there no one thing in which I can challenge competition, that I can bring as an instance of exact perfection, in which others cannot find a flaw .? The utmost I can pretend to is to write a description of what this fellow can do. I can write a book ; so can many others who have not even learned to spell. What abortions are these essays ! What errors, what ill-pieced 2o8 Adventures //V Criticism transitions, w^vat crnoked reasons, what lame conclusions ! How little is made out, and that little how ill ! Yet they are the best I can do." Nevertheless a play of Shakespeare's, or a painting by Reynolds, or an essay by Hazlitt, imperfect though it be, is of more rarity and worth than the correctest juggling or tight-rope walking. Hazlitt proceeds to examine why this should be, and discovers a number of good reasons. But there is one reason, omitted by him, or perhaps left for the reader to infer, on which we may profitably spend a few minutes. It forms part of a big subject, and tempts to much abstract talk on the universality of the Fine Arts ; but I think we shall be putting it simply enough if we say that an artist is superior to an " artiste " because he does well what ninety-nine people in a hundred are doing poorly all their lives. When people compare fiction with "real life," they start with asserting " real life " to be a conglomerate of innumerable details of all possible degrees of pertinence and im- Selection 205 portance, and go on to show that the novelist selects from this mass those which are the most important and pertinent to' his purpose. (I speak here particularly of the novelist, but the same is alleged of all practitioners of the fine arts.) And, in a way, this is true enough. But who (unless in an idle moment, or with a view to writing a treatise in metaphysics) ever takes this view of the world ? Who regards it as a conglomerate of innumerable details ? Critics say that the artist's difficulty lies in selecting the details proper to his purpose, and his justification rests on the selection he makes. But where lives the man whose diffi- culty and whose justification do not lie just here? — who is not consciously or uncon- sciously selecting from morning until night } Sehdio^t You take the most ordinary country walk. How many millions of leaves and stones and blades of grass do you pass without per- ceiving them at all } How many thousands of others do you perceive, and at once allow to slip into oblivion 1 Suppose you have walked four miles with the express object of taking pleasure in country sights. I dare v/ager the objects that have actually engaged 210 Adventures in Criticism your attention for two seconds arc less than five hundred, and those that remain in your memory, when you reach home, as few as a dozen. All the way you have been, quite unconsciously, selecting and rejecting. And it is the brain's bedazzlement over this work, I suggest, and not merely the rhythmical physical exertion, that lulls the more am- bitious walker and induces that phlegmatic mood so prettily described by Stevenson — the mood in which "we can thir.k of this or that, lightly or laughingly, as a child thinks, or as we think in a morning cloze ; we can make puns or puzzle out acrostics, and trifle in a thousand ways with words and rhymes ; but when it comes to honest work, when we come to gather ourselves together for an effort, we may sound the trumpet as long and loud as we please ; the great barons of the mind will not rally to the standard, but sit, each one at home, warming his hands over his own fire and brooding on his own private thought ! " Again, certain critics never seem tired of pelting the novelist with comparisons drawn between painting and photography. " Mr. So-and-So's fidelity to life suggests the camera rather than the brush and palette " ; and the implication is that Mr. So-and-So and the camera resemble each other in their tendency Selection 211 to reproduce irrelevant detail. The camera, it is assumed, repeats this irrelevant detail. The photographer does not select. But is this true.!* I have known many enthusiasts in photo- graphy whose enthusiasm I could not share. But I never knew one, even among amateurs, who wished to photograph everything he saw, from every possible point of view. Even the amateur selects — wrongly as a rule : still he selects. The mere act of setting up a camera in any particular spot implies a process of selection. And when the deed is done, the scenery has been libelled. Our eyes behold the photograph, and go through another process of selection. In short, whatever they look upon, men and women are selecting ceaselessly. The artist therefore does well and con- sciously, and for a particular end, what every man or woman does poorly, and uncon- sciously, and casually. He differs in the photographer in that he has more licence to eliminate. When once the camera is set up, its owner's power over the landscape has come to an end. The person who looks on the resultant photograph must go through 212 Adventures in Criticism the same process of choosing and rejecting that he would have gone through in contem- plating the natural landscape. The sole advantage is that the point of view has been selected for him, and that he can enjoy it without fatigue in any place and at any time. The truth seems to be that the human brain abhors the complexity — the apparently aimless complexity — of nature and real life, and is for ever trying to get away from it by selecting this and ignoring that. And it contrives so well that I suppose the average man is not consciously aware twice a year of that conglomerate of details which the critics call real life. He holds one stout thread, at any rate, to guide him through the maze — the thread of self-interest. ^^ The justification of the poet or the novelist is that he discovers a better thread. He follows up a universal where the average man follows only a particular. But in following it, he docs but use those pro- cesses by which the average man arrives, or attempts to arrive, at pleasure. 213 EXTERNALS I SUPPOSE I am no more favoured than most Nov. is. people who write stories m receivmg from Story unknown correspondents a constant flow of and suggestions, outhnes of plots, sketches of Amcdou situations, characters, and so forth. One cannot but feel grateful for all this spon- taneous beneficence. The mischief is that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred (the fraction is really much smaller) these sug- gestions are of no possible use. Why should this be .? Put briefly, the reason is that a story d'iffers from an anec- dote. I take the first two instances that come into my head : but they happen to be striking ones, and, as they occur in a book of Mr. Kipling's, are safe to be well known to all my correspondents. In Mr. Kipling's fascinating book, Lifes Handicaps On Green- how Hill is a story ; The Lang Men o' Larut is an anecdote. On Greenhoiv Hill is founded 214 AdVKX TURKS IN CRITICISM on a study of the human heart, and it is upon the human heart that the tale constrains one's interest. TJic Lang Men d Larut is just a yarn spun for the yarn's sake : it informs us of nothing, and is closely related (if I may- use some of Mr. Howells* expressive language for the occasion) to "the lies swapped between men after the ladies have left the table." And the reason why the story-teller, when (as will happen at times) his invention runs dry, can take no comfort in the generous out- pourings of his unknown friends, is just this — that the plots are merely plots, and the anecdotes merely anecdotes, and the difference between these and a story that shall reveal something concerning men and women is just the difference between bad and good art. Let us go a step further. At first sight it seems a superfluous contention that a novelist's rank depends upon what he can see and what he can tell us of the human heart. But, as a matter of fact, you will find that four-fifths at least of contemporary criticism is devoted to matters quite different — to what I will call Externals, or the Acci- Externals 2 1 5 dents of Story-telling : and that, as a con- sequence, our novelists are spending a quite unreasonable proportion of their labour upon Externals. I wrote " as a consequence " hastily, because it is always easier to blame the critics. If the truth were known, I dare say the novelists began it with their talk about " documents," " the scientific method," " observation and experiment," and the like. Now you may observe a man until you are The tired, and then you may begin and observe ^ ^^"^ °' him over again : you may photograph him ments '• and his surroundings : you may spend years in studying what he eats and drinks : you may search out what his uncles died of, and the price he pays for his hats, and — know nothing at all about him. At least, you may know enough to insure his life or assess him for Income Tax : but you are not even half- way towards writing a nov^el about him. You are still groping among externals. His un- spoken ambitions ; the stories he tells himself silently, at midnight, in his bed ; the pain he masks with a dull face and the ridiculous fancies he hugs in secret — these are the 2i6 Adventures 'n Criticism Essentials, and you cannot get them by Observation. If )Ou can discover these, you are a Novelist born : if not, you may as well shut up your note-book and turn to some more remunerative trade. You will /never surprise the secret of a soul by accu- jmulating notes upon Externals. Local Then, again, we have Local Colour, an Colmr article inordinately bepraised just now ; and yet an External. For human nature, when every possible allowance has been made for geographical conditions, undergoes surpris- ingly little change as we pass from one degree of latitude or longitude to another. The Story of Ruth is as intelligible to an Englishman as though Ruth had gleaned in the stubble behind Tess Durbeyfield. Levine toiling with the mowers, Achilles sulking in his tent, Iphigenia at the altar, Gil Bias before the Archbishop of Granada have as close a claim on our sympathy as if they lived but a few doors from us. Let me be understood. I hold it best that a novelist should be intimately acquainted with the country in which he lays his scene. Externals 217 But. none the less, the study of local colour is not of the first importance. And the critic who lavishes praise upon a writer for " introducing us to an entirely new atmo- sphere," for "breaking new ground," and " wafting us to scenes with which the jaded novel-reader is scarcely acquainted," and for " giving us work which bears every trace of minute local research," is praising that which is of secondary importance. The works of Richard Jefferies form a considerable museum of externals of one particular kind; and this is possibly the reason why the Cock- ney novelist waxes eloquent over Richard Jefferies. He can now import the breath of the hay-field into his works at no greater expense of time and trouble than taking down the Gamekeeper at Home from his club bookshelf and perusing a chapter or so before settling down to work. There is not the slightest harm in his doing this : the mistake lies in thinking local colour (however acquired) of the first importance. In judging fiction there is probably no safer rule than to ask one's self, How far 2i8 Adventures in Criticism does the pleasure excited in me by this book depend upon the transitory and trivial acci- dents that distinguish this time, this place, this character, from another time, another place, another character ? And how far upon the abiding elements of human life, the constant temptations, the constant am- bitions, and the constant nobility and weak- ness of the human heart ? These are the essentials, and no amount of documents or local colour can fill their room. Sept. 30, The case of a certain small volume of verse 1893. in which I take some interest, and its treat- The Cotmtryas ment at the hands of the reviewers, seems to "Copy" jY^e tQ illustrate in a sufficiently amusing manner a trick that the Ikitish critic has been picking up of late. In a short account of Mr. Hosken, the postman poet, written by way of preface to his Verses by the Way (Methuen & Co.), I took occasion to point out that he is not what is called in the jargon of these days a " nature- poet " ; that his poetic bent inclines rather to meditation than to Externals 219 description ; and that though his early struggles in London and elsewhere have made him acquainted with many strange people in abnormal conditions of life, his interest has always lain, not in these striking anomalies, but in the destiny of humanity as a whole and its position in the great scheme of things. These are simple facts. I found them, easily enough, in Mr. Hosken's verse — where anybody else may find them. They also seem to me to be, for a critic's purpose, ultimate facts. It is an ultimate fact that Publius Virgilius Maro wore his buskins somewhat higher in the heel than did Quintus Horatius Flaccus : and no critic, to my know- ledge, has been impertinent enough to point out that, since Horace had some experience of the tented field, while Virgil was a stay-at- home courtier, therefore Horace should have essayed to tell the martial exploits of Trojan and Rutulian while Virgil contented himself with the gossip of the Via Sacra. Yet — to compare sm.all things with great — this is the mistake into which our critics have 220 Adventures in Criticism fallen in Mr. Hosken's case ; and I mention it because the case is typical. They try to ,get behind the ultimate facts and busy them- selves with questions they have no proper concern with. Some ask petulantly why Mr. Hosken is not a " nature-poet." Some are gravely concerned that '* local talent " {j.e. the talent of a man who happens to dwell in some locality other than the critic's) should not concern itself with local affairs ; and remind him — " To thine orchard edge belong All the brass and plume of song." As if a man may not concern himself with the broader problems of life and attack them with all the apparatus of recorded experience, unless he happen to live on one bank or other of the Fleet Ditch ! If a man have the gift, he can find all the " brass and plume of song " in his orchard edge. If he have not, he may (provided he be a bond- fide traveller) find it elsewhere. What, for in- stance, were the use of telling Keats : " To thy surgery belong all the brass and plume of song " ? He couldn't find it there, Externals 221 SO he betook himself to Chapman and Lemprierc. If you ask, " What right has a country postman to be handling questions that vexed the brain of Plato?" — I ask in return, " What right had John Keats, who knew no Greek, to busy himself with Greek mythology ? " And the answer is that each has a perfect right to follow his own bent. The assumption of many critics that only within the metropolitan cab radius can a comprehensive system of philosophy be con- structed, and that only through the plate- glass windows of two or three clubs is it possible to see life steadily and see it whole, is one that I have before now had occasion to dispute. It is joined in this case to another yet more preposterous — that from a brief survey of an author's circumstances we can dictate to him what he ought to write about, and how he ought to write it And I have observed particularly that if a writer be a countryman, or at all well acquainted with country life, all kinds of odd entertainment is expected of him in the way of notes on the habits of birds, beasts, and fishes, on the 222 Adventures in Criticism growth of all kinds of common plants, on the proper way to make hay, to milk a cow, and so forth. Now it is just the true countryman who would no more think of noting these things down in a book than a Londoner would think of stating in a novel that Bond Street joins Oxford Street and Piccadilly : simply because they have been familiar to him from boyhood. And to my mind it is a small but significant sign of a rather lamentable movement — of none other, indeed, than the " Rural Exodus," as Political Economists call it — that each and every novelist of my acquaintance, while assuming as a matter of course that his readers are tolerably familiar with the Lon- don Directory, should, equally as a matter of course, assume them to be ignorant of the commonest features of open-air life. I protest there are few things more pitiable than the transports of your Cockney critic Richard over Richard Jefferies. Listen, for instance, Jefferies ^^ ^j^j^ j^jj^^ ^f thing :— " Here and there upon the bank wild gooseberry and currant bushes may be found, planted by birds Externals 223 carrying oil ripe fruit from the garden. A wild goose- berry may sometimes be seen growing out of the decayed * touchwood' on the top of a hollow withy- pollard. Wild apple-trees, too, are not uncommon in the hedges. "The beautiful rich colour of the horse-chestnut, when quite ripe and fresh from its prickly green shell, can hardly be surpassed ; underneath the tree the grass is strewn with shells where they have fallen and burst. Close to the trunk the grass is worn away by the restless trampling of horses, who love the shade its foliage gives in summer. The oak- apples which appear on the oaks in spring — generally near the trunk — fall off in summer, and lie shrivelled on the ground, not unlike rotten cork, or black as if burned. But the oak-galls show thick on some of the trees, light green, and round as a ball ; they will remain on the branches after the leaves have fallen, turning brown and hard, and hanging there till the spring comes again." — Wild Life in a Southern County^ pp. 224-5. I say it is pitiable that people should need to read these things in print. Let me apply this method to some district of south-west London — say the Brompton Road : — " Here and there along the street Grocery Stores t' and shops of Italian Warehousemen may be observed, opened here as branches of bigger establishments in the City. Three gilt balls may occasionally be seen hanging out under the first-floor windows of a 'pawn- broker's' residence. House-agents, too, are not un- common along the line of route. 224 Adventures in Criticism " The appearance of a winkle, when extracted from its shell with the aid of a pin, is extremely curious. There is a winkle-stall by the South Kensington Station of the Underground Railway. Underneath the stall the pavement is strewn with shells, where they have fallen and continue to lie. Close to the stall is a cab-stand, paved with a few cobbles, lest the road be worn overmuch by the restless trampling of cab-horses, who stand here because it is a cab- stand. The thick woollen goods which appear in the haberdashers' windows through the winter — generally inside the plate glass — give way to garments of a lighter texture as the summer advances, and are put a^';ay or exhibited at decreased prices. But collars continue to be shown, quite white and circular in form ; they will probably remain, turning grey as the dust settles on them, until they are sold." This is no travesty. It is a hasty, but I believe a pretty exact application of Jefferies' method. And I ask how it would look in a book. If the critics really enjoy, as they pro- fess to, all this trivial country lore, why on earth don't they come into the fresh air and find it out for themselves } There is no imperative call for their presence in London. Ink will stain paper in the country as well as in town, and the Post will convey their articles to their editors. As it is, they do but over- heat already overheated clubs. Mr. Henley Externals 225 has suggested concerning Jefferies' works that "in years to be, when the whole island is one vast congeries of streets, and the fox has gone down to the bustard and the dodo, and outside museums of com- parative anatomy the weasel is not, and the badger has ceased from the face of the earth, it is not doubt- ful that the Gamekeeper and Wild Life and the Poacher — epitomising, as they will, the rural England of certain centuries before — will be serving as material authority for historical descriptions, historical novels, historical epics, historical pictures, and will be hon- oured as the most useful stuff of their kind in being." Let me add that the movement has begun. These books are already supplying the club- novelist with his open-air effects : and, there- fore, the club-novelist worships them. From them he gathers that " wild apple-trees, too, are not uncommon in the hedges," and straightway he informs the public of this wonder. But it is hard on the poor country- man who, for the benefit of a street-bred reading public, must cram his books with solemn recitals of his A, B, C, and impressive announcements that two and two make four and a hedge-sparrow's ^%^ is blue. 226 Adventures in Criticism Aug. i8, Under the title " Three Years of American Copyright " the Daily Chronicle last Tuesday A Defence , ,. , , r • • • i of ''Local published an account of an interview with Fiction'' Mr. Brander Matthews, who holds (among many titles to distinction) the Professorship of Literature in Columbia College, New York. Mr. Matthews is always worth listening to, and has the knack of speaking without offensiveness even when chastising us Britons for our national peculiarities. His conversa- tion with the Daily Chronicle's interviewer contained a number of good things ; but for the moment I am occupied with his answer to the question " What form of literature should you say is at present in the ascendant in the United States?" "Undoubtedly," said Mr. Matthews, " what I may call local fiction." "Every district of the country is finding its ' sacred poet.' Some of them have only a local reputation, but all possess the common characteristic of starling from fresh, original, and loving study of local character and manners. You know what Miss Mary E. Wilkins has done for New England, and you probably know, too, thnt she was preceded in the same path by Miss Sarah Orne Jewett and the late Mrs. Rose Terry Ccoke. Mr. Harold Frederic External^ 227 is perrorming much the same service for rural New York, Miss Murfree (Charles Egbert Craddock) for the mountains of Tennessee, Mr. James Lane Allen for Kentucky, Mr. Joel Chandler Harris for Georgia, Mr. Cable for Louisiana, Miss French (Octave Thanet) for Iowa, Mr. Hamlin Garland for the western prairies, and so forth. Of course, one can trace the same tendency, more or less clearly, in English fiction " And Mr. Matthews went on to instance several living novelists, Scotch, Irish, and English to support this last remark. The matter, however, is not in doubt. With Mr. Barrie in the North, and Mr. Hardy in the South ; with Mr. Hall Caine in the Isle of Man, Mr. Crockett in Gallo- way, Miss Barlow in Lisconnell ; with Mr. Gilbert Parker in the territory of the H.B.C., and Mr. Hornung in Australia ; with Mr. Kipling scouring the wide world, but re- turning always to India when the tim.e comes for him to score yet another big artistic success ; it hardly needs elaborate proof to arrive at the conclusion that 'locality' is playing a strong part in current fiction. The thing may possibly be overdone. Looking at it from the artistic point of view I 2 228 Adventures in Criticism , as dispassionately as I may, I think we are overdoing it. But that, for the moment, is not the point of view I wish to take. If for the moment we can detach ourselves from the prejudice of fashion and look at the matter from the historical point of view — if we put ourselves into the position of the con- scientious gentleman who, fifty or a hundred years hence, will be surveying us and our works — I think we shall find this elaboration of " locality " in fiction to be but a swing- back of the pendulum, a natural revolt from the thin-spread work of the "carpet-bagging" novelist who takes the whole world for his province, and imagines he sees life steadily and sees it whole when he has seen a great deal of it superficially. The " carpet-bagger " still lingers among us. We know him, with his '' tourist's return " ticket, and the ready-made " plot " in his head, and his note-book and pencil for jotting down " local colour." We still find him working up the scenery of Bolivia in the Reading Room of the British Museum. But he is going rapidly out of fashion ; and Externals 229 it as well to put his features on record and pigeon-hole them, if only that we may recognise him on that day when the pen- dulum shall swing him triumphantly back into our midst, and " locality " shall in its turn pass out of vogue. I submit this simile of the pendulum with some diffidence to those eager theorists who had rather believe that their art is advancing steadily, but at a fair rate of speed, towards perfection. My own less cheerful — yet not altogether cheerless view — is that the various fashions in art swing to and fro upon in- tersecting curves. Some of the points of intersection are fortunate points — others are obviously the reverse ; and generally the fortunate points lie near the middle of each arc, or the mean ; while the less fortunate ones lie towards the ends, that is, towards excess upon one side or another. I have already said that, in the amount of attention they pay to locality just now, the novelists seem to be running into excess. If I must choose between one excess and the other — between the carpet-bagger and the writer 2 30 Adventures in Criticism of " dialect -stones," each at his worst — I unhesitatingly choose the latter. But that is probably because I happened to be born in the 'sixties. Let us get back (I hear you implore) to the historical point of view, if possible : anywhere, anywhere, out of the Poetics I And I admit that a portion of the preceding paragraph reads like a bad parody of that remarkable work. Well, then, I believe that our imaginary historian — I suppose he will be a German : but we need not let our imagination dwell upon t/iat — will find a dozen reasons in contemporary life to account for the attention now paid by novelists to " locality." He will find one of them, no doubt, in the development of locomotion by steam. He will point out that any cause which makes communication easier between two given towns is certain to soften the difference in the characteristics of their inhabitants : that the railway made communication easier and quicker year by year ; and its tendency was therefore to obliterate local peculiarities. He will de- Externals 231 scribe how at first the carpet-bagger went forth in raihvay-train and steamboat, rejoicing in his ability to put a girdle round the world in a few weeks, and disposed to ignore those differences of race and region which he had no time to consider and which he was daily softening into uniformity. He will then relate that towards the close of the nineteenth century, when these differences were rapidly perishing, people began to feel the loss of them and recognise their scientific and romantic value ; and that a number of writers entered into a struggle against time and the carpet- bao-o-er to study these differences and place them upon record, before all trace of them should disappear. And then I believe our historian, though he may find that in 1894 we paid too much attention to the viinnticB of dialect, folk-lore and ethnic differences, and were inclined to overlay with these the more catholic principles of human conduct, will acknowledge that in our hour we did the work that was most urgent. Our hour no doubt, is not the happiest ; but, since this is the work it brings, there can be no harm in going about it zealously. 232 CLUB TALK N. 12, Mr. Gilbert Parker's book of Canadian 1892. tales, Pierre and His People (Methuen Gilbert and Co.), is delightful for more than one Parker reason. To begin with, the tales them- selves are remarkable, and the language in which they are told, though at times it overshoots the mark by a long way and offends by what I may call an affected virility, is always distinguished. You feel that Mr. Parker considers his sentences, not letting his bolts fly at a venture, but aiming at his effects deliberately. It is the trick of promising youth to shoot high and send its phrases in parabolic curves over the target. But a slight wildness of aim is easily corrected, and to see the target at all is a more conspicuous merit than the public imagines. Now Mr. Parker sees his target steadily ; he has a thoroughly good notion of what a short story ought to be : V. Clubs Club Talk 233 and more than two or three stories in his book are as good as can be. But to me the most pleasing quality in open Ah the book is its open-air flavour. Here is yet another young author, and one of the most promising, joining the healthy revolt against the workshops. Though for my sins^ I have to write criticism now and then, and use the language of the workshops, I may claim to be one of the rebels, having chosen to pitch a small tent far from cities and to live out of doors : and it rejoices me to see the movement growing, as it undoubtedly has grown during the last few years, and find yet one more of the younger men re- fusing, in Mr. Stevenson's words, to cultivate restaurant fat, to fall in mind "to a thing perhaps as low as many types of bourgeois — the implicit or exclusive artist." London is an alluring dwelling-place for an author, even for one who desires to write about the country. He is among the paragraph- writers, and his reputation swells as a cucumber under glass. Being in sight of the newspaper men, he is also in their I* 234 Adventures in Criticism mind. His prices will stand higher than if he cfo out into the wilderness. More- over, he has there the stimulating talk of the masters in his profession, and will be apt to think that his intelligence is developing amazingly, whereas in fact he is developing all on one side ; and the end of him is — the Exclusive Artist : — *' When the flicker of London sun falls faint on the Club-room's green and gold^ The sons of Adam sit them down and scratch with their pens in the mould — They scratch with their pens in the mould of their graves and the ink and the anguish start^ For the Devil mutters behind the leaves ; ' Ifs pretty, but is it Art V " The spirit of our revolt is indicated clearly enough on that page of Mr. Stevenson's " Wrecker," from which I have already quoted a phrase : — " That was a home word of Pinkerton's, deserving to be writ in letters of gold on the portico of every School of Art : ' What I can't see is why you should want to do nothing else.' The dull man is made, not by the nature, but by the degree of his immersion in a single business. And all the more if that be sedentnry, uneventful, and ingloriously safe. More than half of him will then remain unexercised and undeveloped ; the rest will be distended and deformed Club Talk 235 by over-nutrition, over-cerebration and the heat of rooms. And I have often marvelled at the impudence of gentlemen who describe and pass judgment on the life of man, in almost perfect ignorance of all its necessary elements and natural careers. Those who dwell in clubs and studios may paint excellent pictures or write enchanting novels. There is one thing that they should not do : they should pass no judgment on man's destiny, for it is a thing with which they are unacquainted. Their own life is an excrescence of the moment, doomed, in the vicissitude of history, to pass and disappear. The eternal life of man, spent under sun and rain and in rude physical effort, lies upon one side, scarce changed since the beginning." A few weeks ago our novelists were dis- cussing the reasons why they were novelists and not playwrights. The discussion was sterile enough, in all conscience : but one con- tributor—it was "Lucas Malet"— managed to make it clear that English fiction has a character to lose. ''If there is one thing," she said, " which as a nation we understand, it is out-of-doors by land and sea." Heaven forbid that, with only one Atlantic between me and Mr. W. D. Howells, I should enlarge upon any merit of the English novel : but I do suggest that this open-air quality is a characteristic worth preserving, and that I* 2 236 Adventures in Criticism nothing is so likely to efface it as the talk of workshops. It is worth preserving be- cause it tends to keep us in sight of the elemental facts of human nature. After all, men and women depend for existence on the earth and on the sky that makes earth fertile ; and man^s last act will be, as it was his first, to till the soil. All empires, cities, tumults, civil and religious wars, are transitory >> in comparison. The slow toil of the farm- labourer, the endurance of the seaman, outlast them all. open Air That studio-talk tends to deaden this sense of the open-air is just as certain. It runs not upon Nature, but upon the presentation of Nature, I am almost ready to assert that it injures a critic as surely as it spoils a creative writer. Certainly I remember that the finest appreciation of Carlyle — a man whom every critic among English- speaking races had picked to pieces and discussed and reconstructed a score of times — was left to be uttered by an inspired loafer in Camden, New Jersey. I love to read of Whitman dropping the newspaper Criticism Club Talk 237 that told him of Carlyle's illness, and walking out under the stars — "Every star dilated, more vitreous, larger than usual. Not as in some clear nights when the larger stars entirely outshine the rest. Every little star or cluster just as distinctly visible and just as high. Berenice's hair showing every gem, and new ones. To the north-east and north the Sickle, the Goat and Kids, Cassiopeia, Castor and Pollux, and the two Dippers. While through the whole of this silent indescribable show, inclosing and bathing my whole receptivity, ran the thought of Carlyle dying." In such a mood and place — not in a club after a dinner unearned by exercise— a man is likely, if ever, to utter great criticism as well as to conceive great poems. It is from such a mood and place that we may consider the following fine passage fitly to issue :— " The way to test how much he has left his country were to consider, or try to consider, for a moment the array of British thought, the resultant ensemble of the last fifty years, as existing to-day, but ivith Carlyle left out. It would be like an army with no artillery. The show were still a gay and rich one—Byron, Scott, Tennyson, and many more — horsemen and rapid infantry, and banners flying— but the last heavy roar so dear to the ear of the trained soldier, and that settles fate and victory, would be lacking." For critic and artist, as for their fellow- ? 238 Adventures in Criticism creatures, I believe an open-air life to be the best possible. And that is why I am glad to read in certain newspaper paragraphs that Mr. Gilbert Parker is at this moment on the wide seas, and bound for Quebec, where he starts to collect material for a new series of short stories. His voyage will loose him, in all likelihood, from the little he retains of club art. Of course, a certam proportion of our novel- ists must write of town life : and to do this fitly they must live in town. But they must study in the town itself, not in a club. Before anyone quotes Dickens against me, let him reflect, first on the immensity of Dickens' genius, and next on the conditions under which Dickens studied London. If every book be a part of its writer's autobiography, I invite the youthful author who now passes his evenings in swapping views about Art with his fellow cockneys to pause and reflect if he is indeed treading in Dickens' footsteps or stands in any path likely to lead him to results such as Dickens achieved. ^39 EXCURSIONISTS IN POETRY Besides the glorious exclusiveness of it, ^^^^f' there is a solid advantage just now, in not ^^ being an aspirant for the Laureateship. You Itinerary can Gfo out into the wilderness for a week without troubling to leave an address. A week or so back I found with some difficulty a friend who even in his own judgment has no claim to the vacant office, and we set out together across Dartmoor, Exmoor, the Quan- tocks, by eccentric paths over the southern ranges of Wales to the Wye, and home- wards by canoe between the autumn banks of that river. The motto of the voyage was Verlaine's line — " Et surtout ne parlons pas litterature" — especially poetry. I think we felt inclined to congratulate each other after passing the Quantocks in heroic silence ; but were con- tent to read respect in each other's eyes. Reium to Literature 240 Adventures in Criticism The On our way home we fell across a casual copy of the Globe newspaper, and picked up a scrap of information about the Blorenge, a mountain we had cHmbed three days before. It is (said the Globe) the only thing in the world that rhymes with orange. From this we inferred that the Laureate had not been elected during our wanderings, and that the Anglo-Saxon was still taking an interest in poetry. It was so. Public The progress of this amusing epidemic Excur- nons in may be traced in the Times. It started Verse mildly and decorously with the death of a politician. The writer of Lord Sherbrooke's obituary notice happened to remember and transcribe the rather flat epigram beginning — " Here lie the bones of Robert Lowe, Where he's gone to I don't know. . . " with Lowe's own Latin translation of the same. At once the Times was flooded with other versions by people who remem- bered the lines more or less imperfectly, who had clung each to his own version since childhood, who doubted if the epigram were originally written on Lord Sherbrooke, who Excursionists in Poetry 241 had seen it on an eighteenth-century tomb- stone in several parts of England, and so on. London Correspondents took up the game and carried it into the provincial press. Then country clergymen bustled up and tried to recall the exact rendering ; while others who had never heard of the epigram waxed emulous and produced translations of their own, with the Latin of which the local compositor made sport after his kind. For weeks there continued quite a pretty rivalry among these decaying scholars. The gentle thunders of this controversy had scarcely died down when the Times quoted a four-line epigram about Mr. Leech making a speech, and Mr. Parker making something darker that was dark enough without ; and another respectable profession, which hitherto had remained cold, began to take fire and dispute with ardour. The Church, the Legislature, the Bar, were all excited by this time. They strained on the verge of surpassing feats, should the occasion be given. From men in this mood the occasion is rarely withheld. Lord 242 Adventures in Criticism Tennyson died. He had written at Cambridge a prize poem on Timbuctoo. Somebody else, at Cambridge or elsewhere, had also written about Timbuctoo and a Cassowary that ate a missionary with his this and his that and his hymn-book too. Who was this some- body ? Did he write it at Cambridge (home of poets) ? And what were the " trimmings," as Mr. Job Trotter would say, with which the missionary was eaten ? Poetry was in the air by this time. It would seem that those treasures which the great Laureate had kept close were by his death unlocked and spread over England, even to the most unexpected corners. " All have got the seed," and already a dozen gentlemen were busily growing the flower in the daily papers. It was not to be ex- pected that our senators, barristers, stock- brokers, having proved their strength, would stop short at Timbuctoo and the Cassowary. Very soon a bold egregious wether jumped the fence into the Higher Criticism, and gave us a new and amazing interpretation of the culminating line in Crossing the Bar. The Excursionists in Poetry 243 whole flock was quick upon his heels. "Allow me to remind the readers of your valuable paper that there are tivo kinds of pilot" is the sentence that now catches our eyes as we open the Times. And according to the Globe if you need a rhyme for orange you must use Blorenge. And the press exists to supply the real wants of the public * They talk of decadence. But who will deny the future to a race capable of pro- ducing, on the one hand, Crossing the Baj% with its sweep of emotion solemn as the tide itself, which, " Moving, seems asleep, Too full for sound or foam, When that which drew from out the boundless deep Turns again home " — * Note, Oct. 21, 1893.— The nuisance revived again when Mr. Neltleship the younger perished on Mont Blanc. And again, the friend of Lowe and Nettleship, the great Master of Balliol, had hardly gone to his grave before a dispute arose, not only concerning his parentage (about which any man might have certified himself at the smallest expense of time and trouble), but 'over an unusually pointless epigram that was made at Cambridge many years ago, and neither on him, nor on his father, but on an entirely different Jowett. Sivifer ego atiditor tantuvi ? — If a funny " Cantab " write a dozen funny rhymes, Need a dozen " Cantabs " write about it to the Titnes ? Need they write, at any rate, a generation after, Stating cause and date of joke and reasons for their laughter ? 244 Adventures in Criticism — and, on the other, the following comment upon its triumphant close, " I hope to see my Pilot face to face . . . " — a comment signed " T. F. W.," and sent to the Times from Cam- bridge, October 27th, 1892? — ". . . . a poet so studious of fitness of language as Tennyson would hardly, I suspect, have thrown off such words on such an occasion haphazard. If the analogy is to be inexorably criticised, may it not be urged that, having in his mind not the mere passage ' o'er life's solemn main,' which we all are taking, with or without reflection, but the near approach to an un- explored ocean beyond it, he was mentally assigning to the pilot in whom his confidence was fast the status of the navigator of old days, the sailing-master, on whose knowledge and care crews and captains en- gaged in expeditions ahke relied ? Columbus himself married the daughter of such a man, un piloto Italiano famoso navigante. Camoens makes the people of Mozambique offer Vasco da Gama a piloto by whom his fleet shall be deftly {sabiamente) conducted across the Indian Ocean. In the following century (1520-30) Sebastian Cabot, then in the service of Spain, com- m.anded a squadron which was to pass through the Straits of Magellan to the Moluccas, having been appointed by Charles V. Grand Pilot of Castile. The French still call the mates of merchant vessels — that is, the officers who watch about, take charge of the deck— /z7(?/(?j-. and this designation is not impossibly reserved to them as representing the pilote haiitiirier of former times, the scientific guide of ships dans la Excursionists in Poetry 245 haute vier^ as distinguished from \^t pilote cotter^ who simply hugged the shore. The last class of pilot, it is almost superfluous to observe, is still with us and does take our ships, inwards or outwards, across the bar, if there be one, and does no more. The hauturier has long been replaced in all countries by the captain, and it must be within the experience of some of us that when outward bound the captain as often as not has been the last man to come on board. We did not meet him until the ship, which until his arrival was in the hands of the cdtier^ was well out of harbour. Then our cdtier left us." Prodigious ! 246 June 24, '893 March 3, 1894. In what respect Remark- able THE POPULAR CONCEPTION OF A POET What seems to mc chiefly remarkable in the popular conception of a Poet is its un- likeness to the truth. Misconception in this case has been flattered, I fear, by the poets themselves : — " The poet in a golden clime was bom, With golden stars above ; Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, The love of love. He saw thro' life and death, thro' good and ill ; He saw thro' his own soul. The marvel of the Everlasting Will, An open scroll, Before him lay .... I should be sorry to vex any poet's mind with my shallow wit ; but this passage always reminds me of the delusions of the respectable Glendower : — " At my birth The frame and huge foundation of the earth Shak'd like a coward." The Popular Conception of a Poet 247 — and Hotspur's interpretation (slightly petu- lant, to be sure), " Why, so it would have done at the time if your mother's cat had but kittened, though you yourself had never been born." I protest that I reverence poetry and the poets : but at the risk of being warned off the holy ground as a " dark- brov/ed sophist," must declare my plain opinion that the above account of the poet's birth and native gifts does not consist with fact. Yet it consents with the popular notion, which you may find presented or implied month by month and week by week, in the reviews ; and even day by day — for it has found its way into the newspapers. Critics have observed that considerable writers fall into two classes — (i) Those who start with their heads full Twoihus of great thoughts, and are from the ^^JJ'^'f' ^ ^ Develop- first occupied rather with their matter ment than with the manner of expressing it. (2) Those who begin with the love of ex- pression and intent to be artists in 248 Adventures in Criticism words, and come througJi expression to profou7id thought. Now, for some reason it is fashionable just now to account Class i the more respectable ; a judgment to which, considering that Virgil and Shakespeare belong to Class 2, I refuse my assent. It is fashionable to construct an imaginary figure out of the characteristics of The Class I, and set him up as the Typical Poet. Popular 'pi^g p^g^ ^^ whose nativity Tennyson assists Type in the above verses of course belongs to Class I. A babe so richly dowered can hardly help his matter overcrowding his style ; at least, to start with. But this is not all. A poet who starts with this tremendous equipment can hardly help being something too much for the generation in which he is born. Conse- quently, the Typical Poet is misunderstood by his contemporaries, and probably per- secuted. In his own age his is a voice crying in the wilderness ; in the wilderness he speeds the " viewless arrows of his thought " ; which fly far, and take root as they strike earth, and blossom ; and so The Popular Conception of a Poet 249 Truth multiplies, and in the end (most likely after his death) the Typical Poet comes by his own. Such is the popular conception of the Typical Poet, and I observe that it fascinates even educated people. I have in mind the recent unveiling of Mr. Onslow Ford's Shelley Memorial at University College, Oxford. Those who assisted at that ceremony were for the most part men and women of high culture. Excesses such as affable Members of Parliament commit when distributing school prizes or opening free public libraries were clearly out of the question. Yet even here, and almost within the shadow of Bodley's great library, speaker after speaker assumed as axiomatic this curious fallacy — that a Poet is necessarily a thinker in advance of his age, and therefore peculiarly liable to persecution at the hands of his contempo- raries. But logic, I believe, still flourishes in Ox- ^''^ supported ford ; and induction still has its rules. Now, ly History however many different persons Homer may have been, I cannot remember that one of him 25 o Adventures in Criticism suffered martyrdom, or even discomfort, on account of his radical doctrine. I seem to remember that <£schylus enjoyed the esteem of his fellow-citizens, sided with the old aristocratic party, and lived long enough to find his own tragedies considered archaic ; that Sophocles, towards the end of a very prosperous life, was charged with senile decay and consequent inability to administer his estates — two infirmities which even his accusers did not seek to connect with ad- vanced thinking ; and that Euripides, though a technical innovator, stood hardly an inch ahead of the fashionable dialectic of his day, and suffered only from the ridicule of his comJc contemporaries and the disdain of his wife — misfortunes incident to the most respectable. Pindar and Virgil were court favourites, repaying their patrons in golden song. Dante, indeed, suffered banishment ; but his banishment was just a move in a political (or rather a family) game. Petrarch and Ariosto were not uncomfortable in their generations. Chaucer and Shakespeare lived happy lives and sang in the very key of their own times. Puritanism waited for its hour The Popular Conception of a Poet 251 of triumph to produce its great poet, who lived unmolested when the hour of triumph passed and that of reprisals succeeded. Racine was a royal pensioner ; Goethe a chamberlain and the most admired figure of his time. Of course, if you hold that these poets one and all pale their ineffectual fires before the radiant Shelley, our argument must go a few steps farther back. I have instanced them as acknowledged kings of song. Tennyson was not persecuted. He was "^^^ y"^^ not (and more honour to him for his clear- Tmnysm ness) even misunderstood. I have never met with the contention that he stood an inch ahead of the thought of his time. As for seeing through death and life and his own soul, and having the marvel of the everlasting will spread before him like an open scroll, — well, to begin with, I doubt if these things ever happened to any man. Heaven surely has been, and is, more reticent than th verse implies. But if they ever happened Tennyson most certainly was not the man they happened to. What Tennyson actually 252 Adventures in Criticism sang, till he taught himself to sing better, was : — " Airy, fairy Lilian, Flitting fairy Lilian, When I ask her if she love me, Claps her tiny hands above me, Laughing all she can ; She'll not tell me if she love me, Cruel little Lilian." There is not much of the scorn of scorn, or the love of love, or the open scroll of the everlasting will, about Cruel Little Liliayi. But there is a distinct striving after style — a striving that, as everyone knows, ended in mastery: and through style Tennyson reached such heights of thought as he was capable of. To the end his thought remained inferior to his style : and to the end the two in him were separable, whereas in poets of the very first rank they are inseparable. But that, towards the end, his style lifted his thought to heights of which even In Menioriani gave no promise cannot, I think, be questioned by any student of his collected works. Tennyson belongs, if ever poet belonged, to Class 2 : and it is the prettiest irony of fate The Popular Conception of a Poet 253 that, havin^ unreasonably belauded Class i, he is now being found fault with for not conform- ing to the supposed requirements of that Class, He, who spoke of the poet as of a seer " through life and death," is now charged with seeing but a short way beyond his own nose. The Rev. Stopford Brooke finds that he had little sympathy with the aspirations of the struggling poor ; that he bore himself coldly towards the burning questions of the hour ; that, in short, he stood anywhere but in advance of his age. As if plenty of people were not interested in these things ! Why, I cannot step out into the street without running against somebody who is in advance of the times on some point or another. Virgil and Shakespeare were neither mar- of Virgil tyrs nor preachers despised in their genera- ^^^ tion. I have said that as poets they also ^p^^,^ belong to Class 2. Will a champion of the Typical Poet (new style) dispute this, and argue that Virgil and Shakespeare, though they escaped persecution, yet began with matter that overweighted their style — with deep stuttered thoughts — in fine, with a 254 Adventures in Criticism Message to their Time ? I think that view can hardly be maintained. We have the Eclogues before the ^neid ; and The Comedy of Errors before As You Like It, Expression comes first; and through expression, thought. These are the greatest names, or of the greatest : and they belong to Class 2. Of Milton Again, no English poetry is more thoroughly informed with thought than Milton's. Did he find big thoughts hustling within him for utterance .-* And did he at an early age stutter in numbers till his oppressed soul found relief? And was it thus that he attained the glorious manner of *' Seasons return, but not to me returns Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn. ..." — and so on. No, to be short, it was not. At the age of twenty-four, or thereabouts, he deliberately proposed to himself to be a great poet. To this end he practised and studied, and travelled unweariedly until his thirty-first year. Then he tried to make up his mind what to write about. He took some sheets of paper — they are to be seen at this day in the Library of Trinity College, The Popular Conception of a Poet 25s Cambridge — and set down no less than ninety- nine subjects for his proposed magnum opus, before he could decide upon Paradise Lost. To be sure, when the magnum opus was written it fetched £$ only. But even this does not prove that Milton was before his age. Perhaps he was behind it. Paradise Lost appeared in 1667 : in 1657 it might have fetched considerably more than £^. If the Typical Poet have few points in common with Shakespeare or Milton, I fear that the Typical Poet begins to be in a bad way. Shall we try Coleridge? He had "great ^^Of^ thoughts" — thousands of them. On the other hand, he never had the slightest diffi- culty in uttering them, in prose. His great achievements in verse — his Genevieve, his Christabel, his Kubla Khan, his Ancient Mariner — are achievements of expression. When they appeal from the senses to the intellect their appeal is usually quite simple. He prayeth best who loveth best All things both great and small." Coleridge 256 Adventures in Critic ism No, I am afraid Coleridge is not the Typical Poet. On the whole I suspect the Typical Poet to be a hasty generalisation from Shelley. 557 POETS ON THEIR OWN ART May II, 1895. " To those who love the poets most, who ^ ^^Preiui^ care most for their ideals, this little book to Poetry''' ought to be the one indispensable book of devotion, the credo of the poetic faith," " This little book" is the volume with which Mr. Ernest Rhys prefaces the pretty series of Lyrical Poets which he is editing for Messrs. Dent & Co. He calls it The Prehide to Poetry, and in it he has brought together the most famous arguments stated from time to time by the English poets in defence and praise of their own art. Sidney's magnificent Apologie is here, of course, and two pas- sages from Ben Jonson's Discoveries, Words- worth's preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, the fourteenth chapter of the Biographia Literaria^ and Shelley's Defence. What admirable prose these poets write ! Poets as Southey, to be sure, is not represented in this ^yUers volume. Had he written at length upon his J 258 Adventures in Criticism art — In spite of his confession that, when writing prose, " of what is now called style not a thought enters my head at any time " — we may be sure the reflection would have been even more obvious than it is. But without him this small collection makes out a splendid case against all that has been said in disparagement of the prose style of poets. Let us pass what Hazlitt said of Coleridge's prose ; or rather let us quote it once again for its vivacity, and so pass on — " One of his (Coleridge's) sentences winds its ' forlorn way obscure ' over the page like a patriarchal procession with camels laden, wreathed turbans, household wealth, the whole riches of the author's mind poured out upon the barren waste of his subject. The palm tree spreads its sterile branches overhead, and the land of promise is seen in the distance." All this is very neatly malicious, and par- ticularly the last co-ordinate sentence. But in the chapter chosen by Mr. Rhys from the " Biographia Literaria " Coleridge's prose is seen at its best — obedient, pertinent, at once imaginative and restrained — as in the conclusion — " Finally, good sense is the body of poetic genius, fancy its drapery, motion its life, and imagination the Poets on Their Own Art 259 soul that is everywhere, and in each ; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole." The prose of Sidney's Apologie is Sidney's best ; and when that has been said, nothing remains but to economise in quoting. I will take three specimens only. First then, for beauty : — " Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapistry, as divers Poets have done, neither with plesant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers : nor whatsoever else may make the too much loved earth more lovely. Her world is brasen, the Poets only deliver a golden : but let those things alone and goe to man, for whom as the other things are, so it seemeth in him her utter- most cunning is imployed, and know whether shee have brought forth so true a lover as Theagines, so constant a friende as Pilades^ so valiant a man as Orlando^ so right a Prince as XenophorHs Cyrus ; so excellent a man every way as Virgil's Aeneas . . . ." Next for wit — roguishness, if you like the term better : — " And therefore, if Cato misliked Fulvius, for carry- ing Enniiis with him to the field, it may be answered, that if Cato misliked it, the noble Fulvitis liked it, or else he had not done it." And lastly for beauty and wit combined : — " For he (the Poet) doth not only show the way, but giveth so sweete a prospect into the way, as will J2 26o Adventures in Criticism intice any man to enter into it. Nay he doth, as if your journey should lye through a fayre Vineya'.d, at the first give ycu a cluster of Grapes : that full of that taste, you may long to passe further. He beginneth not with obscure definitions, which must blur the margent with interpretations, and load the memory with doubtfulnesse : but he cometh to you with words set in delightful proportion, either accompanied with or prepared for the well inchanting skill of Musicke : find with a tale forsooth he cometh unto you : wilh a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner." *' Is not this a glorious way to talk } " demanded the Rev. T. E. Brown of this last passage, when he talked about Sidney, the other day, in Mr. Henley's Nezv Review. " No one can fail," said Mr. Brown, amiably assuming the fineness of his own ear to be common to all mankind — " no one can fail to observe the sweetness and the strength, the outspokenness, the downrightness, and, at the same time, the nervous delicacy of pausation, the rhythm all ripple and suspended fall, the dainty biif, the daintier a?id forsooth, as though the pouting of a proud reserve curved the fine lip of him, and had to be atoned for by the homeliness of the chimney- corner ^ Poets on Their Own Art 261 Everybody admires Sidney's prose. But how of this ? — *' Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all know- ledge ; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science. Emphatically it may be said of the Poet, as Shakespeare has said of man, *that he looks before and after.' He is the rock of defence of human nature ; an upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere with him relationship and love. In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs, in spite 0/ things silently gone out of mind, and things violently destroyed^ the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time." It is Wordsworth who speaks — too rhetoric- ally, perhaps. At any rate, the prose will not compare with Sidney's. But it is good prose, nevertheless ; and the phrase I have ventured to italicise is superb. As might be expected, the poets in this Their high volume agree in pride of their calling. We '^^^^^^^^'' have just listened to Wordsworth. Shelley quotes Tasso's proud sentence — " Non c'e in mondo chi merita nome di creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta": and himself says, " The jury which sits in judgment upon a poet, belonging as he does to all time, must be 262 Adventures in Criticism composed of his peers : it must be impanelled by Time from the selectest of the wise of many generations." Sidney exalts the poet above the historian and the philosopher ; and Coleridge asserts that " no man was ever yet a great poet without being at the same time a profound philosopher." Ben Jonson puts it characteristically : " Every beggarly cor- poration affords the State a mayor or two bailiffs yearly ; but Solus rex, aut pocta, non quotamiis nasciturr The longer one lives, the more cause one finds to rejoice that different men have different ways of saying the same thing. Inspira- The agreement of all tlicse poets on some wn no Q^j^Qj- matters is more remarkable. Most of improvi- sation them claim inspiration for the great prac- titioners of their art ; but wonderful is the unanimity with which they dissociate this from improvisation. They are sticklers for the rules of the game. The Poet docs not pour his full heart "In profuse strains oi unpremeditated :i\V* On the contrary, his rapture is the sudden result of long premeditation. The first and Poets on Their Own Art 263 most conspicuous lesson of this volume seems to be that Poetry is an art, and therefore has rules. Next after this, one is struck with the carefulness with which these practitioners, when it comes to theory, stick to their Aristotle. For instance, they are practically unani- mous in accepting Aristotle's contention that Po^i^y ^ot mere it is not the metrical form that makes the Metrical poem. '* Verse," says Sidney, " is an orna- Composi- 1 Hon ment and no cause to poetry, smce there have been many most excellent poets that never versified, and now swarm many versi- fiers that need never answer to the name of poets." Wordsworth apologises for using the word " Poetry " as synonymous with metrical composition. " Much confusion," he says, " has been introduced into criticism by this contradistinction of Poetry and Prose, instead of the more philosophical one of Poetry and Matter of Fact or Science. The only strict antithesis to Prose is Metre : nor is this, in truth, a strict antithesis, because lines and passages of metre so naturally occur in writing prose that it would be scarcely 264 Adventures in Criticism possible to avoid them, even were it desir- able." And Shelley — " It is by no means essential that a poet should accommodate his language to this traditional form, so that the harmony, which is its spirit, be observed. . The distinction between poets and prose writers is a vulgar error." Shelley goes on to instance Plato and Bacon as true poets, though they wrote in prose. " The popular division into prose and verse," he repeats, " is inadmissible in accurate philo- sophy." Then again, upon what Wordsworth calls " the more philosophical distinction " between Poetry and Matter of Fact — quoting, Its Philo- of course, the famous " ^cXocrocfiooTepov koI sophu aiTovhaioTepov" passage in the Poetics — it is Function wonderful with what hearty consent our poets pounce upon this passage, and para- phrase it, and expand it, as the great justification of their art : which indeed it is. Sidney gives the passage at length. Words- worth writes, " Aristotle, I have been told, hath said that Poetry is the most philosophic of all writings : it is so." Coleridge quotes Sir John Davies, who wrote of Poesy (surely with an eye on the Poetics) : Poets on Their Own Art 265 " From their gross matter she abstracts their forms, And draws a kind of quintessence from things ; Which to her proper nature she transforms To bear them light on her celestial wings. " Thus does she, when from individual states She doth abstract the universal kinds j Which then reclothed in divers names and fates Steal access through our senses to our minds." And Shelley has a remarkable paraphrase, ending, " The story of particular facts is as a mirror which obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful : poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted." In fine, this book goes far to prove of poetry, as it has been proved over and over again of other arts, that it is the men big enough to break the rules who accept and ^ observe them most cheerfully. * 266 THE ATTITUDE OF THE PUBLIC TOWARDS LETTERS sej>i. 29, I OBSERVE that our hoary friend, the Great _, Heart of the Public, has been taking^ his The . ' ^ " Great annual outing in September. Thanks to the Heart''' of German Emperor and the new head of the the Public ^^ r r^ y 11111 House 01 Orleans, he has had the opportunity of a stroll through the public press arm in arm with his old crony and adversary, the Divine Right of Kings. And the two have gone once more a-roaming by the light of the moon, to drop a tear, perchance, on the graves of the Thin End of the Wedge and the Stake in the Country. You know the unhappy story } — how the Wedge drove its thin end into the Stake, with fatal results : and how it died of remorse and was buried at the cross-roads with the Stake in its inside ! It is a pathetic tale, and the Great Heart of the Public can always be trusted to discriminate true pathos from false The Public and Letters 267 It was Mr. G. B. Burgin, in the September Miss number of the Idler, who let the Great Heart ^l''^^}^'!'' elli s Opin- loose this time — unwittingly, I am sure; for ion of it Mr. Burgin, when he thinks for himself (as he usually does), writes sound sense and capital English. But in the service of Journalism Mr. Burgin called on Miss Marie Corelli, the authoress of Barabbas, and asked what she thought of the value of criticism. Miss Corelli " idealised the subject by the poetic manner in which she mingled tea and criticism together." She said — " I think authors do not sufficiently bear in mind the important fact that, in this age of ours, the public thinks for z'txe// much, more extensively than we give it credit for. It is a cultured public, and its great brain is fully capable of deciding things. It rather objects to be treated like a child and told ' what to read and what to avoid' ; and, moreover, we must not fail to note that it mistrusts criticism generally, and seldom reads ' reviews.' And why ? Simply because it recognises the existence of ' logrolling.' It is per- fectly aware, for instance, that Mr. Theodore Watts is logroUer-in-chief to Mr. Swinburne ; that Mr. Le Gallienne ' rolls ' greatly for Mr. Norman Gale ; and that Mr. Andrew Lang tumbles his logs along over everything for as many as his humour fits. ..." — I don't know the proportion of tea to J* 2 268 Adventures in Criticism criticism in all this : but Miss Corelli can hardly be said to " idealise the subject " here — "... The public is the supreme critic ; and though it does not write in the Quarterly or the Nineteenth Century^ it thinks and talks independently of every- thing and everybody, and on its thought and word alone depends the fate of any piece of literature." Mr. Hall Then Mr. Burgin called on Mr. Hall Caine, Caiiie's ^yj^Q u j^^^ just finished breakfast." Mr. Hall View Caine gave reasons which compelled him to believe that " for good or bad, criticism is a tremendous force." But he, too, confessed that in his opinion the public is the " ultimate critic." " It often happens that the public takes books on trust from the professed guides of literature, but if the books are not right, it drops them." And he proceeded to make an observation with which we may most cordially agree. " I am feeling," he said, " increasingly, day by day, that rigJitness in imaginative writing is more important than subject, or style, or anything else. If a story is right in its theme, and the evolution of its theme, it will live ; if it is not right, it will die, whatever its secondary literary qualities." The Public and Letters 269 I say that we may agree with this most in what cordially: and it need not cost us much to -^^'^/^^^^ •^ , , Public is own that the public is the " ultimate critic," the " Ulti- if we mean no more than this, that, since the ^"^^^ Critic'*'' public holds the purse, it rests ultimately with the public to buy, or neglect to buy, an author's books. That, surely, is obvious enough without the aid of fine language. But if Mr. Hall Caine mean that the public, without instruction from its betters, is the best judge of a book ; if he consent with Miss Corelli that the general public is a cultured public with a great brain, and by the exercise of that great brain approves itself an infallible judge of the rightness or wrongness of a book, then I would respect- fully ask for evidence. The poets and critics of his time united in praising Campion as a writer of lyrics : the Great Brain and Heart of the Public neglected him utterly for three centuries : then a scholar and critic arose and persuaded the public that Campion was a great lyrical writer : and now the public accepts him as such. Shall we say, then, the Great Heart of the Public is the " ulti- mate judge " of Campion's lyrics .? Perhaps : 2/0 Adventures in Criticism but we might as well praise for his clcanh'ness a boy who has been held under the pump. When Martin Farquhar Tuppcr wrote, the Great Heart of the Public expanded towards him at once. The public bought his effusions by tens of thousands. Gradually the small voice of skilled criticism made itself heard, and the public grew ashamed of itself ; and, at length, laughed at Tupper. Shall we, then, call the public the ultimate judge of Tupper } Perhaps : but we might as well praise the continence of a man who turns in disgust from drink on the morning after a drunken fit.-^- * In a private letter, from which I am allowed to quote, Mr. Hall Caine (October 2nd, 1894) explains and (as I think) amends his position: — "If I had said tvjie instead of the public, I should have expressed myself exactly. It is impossible for me to work up any enthusiasm for the service done to literature by criticism as a whole. I have, no doubt, the unenviable advantage over you of having wasted three mortal months in reading all the literary criticism extant of the first quarter of this century. It would be difficult to ex- press my sense of its imbecility, its blundering, and its bad passions. But the good books it assailed are not lost, and the bad ones it glorified do not survive. It is not that the public has been the better judge, but that good work has the seeds of life, while bad work carries with it the seeds of dis- solution. This is the key to the story of Wordsworth on the one hand, and to the story of Tupper on the other. Tupper did not topple down because James Haiinay smote him. The Public and Letters 271 The proposition that the Man in the Street is a better judge of Hterature than the Critic — the man who knows little than the man who knovv's more — wears (to my mind, at least) a slightly imbecile air on the face of it. It also appears to me that people are either confusing thought or mis- using language when they confer the title of " supreme critic " on the last person to be Fifty James Hannays had shouted him up before. And if there had not been a growing sense that the big mountain was a mockery, five hundred James Hannays would not have brought it down. The truth is that it is not the ' critic who knows ' or the pubHc which does not know that deter- mines the ultimate fate of a book — the immediate fate they may both influence. The book must do that for itself. If it is right, it lives ; if it is wrong, it dies. And the critic who re-establishes a neglected poet is merely articulating the growing sense. There have always been a few good critics, thank God .... but the finest critic is the un- tutored sentiment of the public, not of to-day or to-morrow or the next day, but of all days together— a sentiment which tells if a thing is right or wrong by holding on to it or letting it drop." Of course, I agree that a book must ultimately depend for its fate upon its own qualities. But when Mr. Hall Caine talks of " a growing sense," I ask, In whom does this sense first grow ? And I answer, In the cultured few who enforce it upon the many — as in this very case of Wordsworth. And I hold the credit of the result (apart from the author's share) belongs rather to those few persistent advocates than to those judges who are only " ultimate " in the sense that they are the last to be convinced. 272 Adventures in Criticism What is persuaded. And, again, what is "the public?" lie'' 1 ^ gather that Miss Corelli's story of Barabbas has had an immense popular success. But so, I believe, has the Deadwood Dick series of penny dreadfuls. And the gifted author of Dcadivood Dick may console himself (as I daresay he does) for the neglect of the critics by the thought that the Great Brain * of the Public is the supreme judge of litera- ture. But obviously he and Miss Corelli will not have the same Public in their mind. If for '* the Great Brain of the Public " we sub- stitute " the Great Brain of that Part of the Public which subscribes to Mudic's," we may lose something of impressiveness, but we shall at least know what we arc talking about. * If the reader object that I am using the Great Heart and Great Brain of the PubHc as interchangeable terms, I would refer him to Mr. Du Maurier's famous Comic Alpha- bet, letter Z : — "Z is a Zoopliyte, whose heart's in his head, Aud wliose head's in his turn — rudimentary Z 1" The Public and Letters 273 Astounding as the statement must appear A«?i7, to any constant reader of the Monthly Re- • • -11 T\ r /-■ Mr.Gosses Views, it is mainly because IMr. Gosse happens yie^(j to be a man of letters that his opinion upon literary questions is worth listening to. In his new book "^ he discusses a dozen or so : and one of them — the question, " What In- fluence has Democracy upon Literature ? " — not only has a chapter to itself, but seems to lie at the root of all the rest. I may add that Mr. Gosse's answer is a trifle gloomy. " As we filed slowly out of the Abbey on the after- noon of Wednesday, the 12th of October, 1892, there must have occurred to others, I think, as to myself, a whimsical and half-terrifying sense of the symbolic contrast between what we had left and what we had emerged upon. Inside, the grey and vitreous atmo- sphere, the reverberations of music moaning some- where out of sight, the bones and monuments of the noble dead, reverence, antiquity, beauty, rest. Out- side, in the raw air, a tribe of hawkers urging upon the edges of a dense and inquisitive crowd a large sheet of pictures of the pursuit of a flea by a ' lady,' and more insidious salesmen doing a brisk trade in what they falsely pretended to be ' Tennyson's last poem.' Next day we read in our newspapers affecting accounts of the emotion displayed by the vast crowd outside the Abbey — horny hands dashing away the * Questions at Issue: by Edmund Gosie. London: William Heinemann. 274 Adventures in Criticism tear, seamstresses holding ' the little green volumes to their faces to hide their agitation. Happy for those who could see these with their fairy telescopes out of the garrets of Fleet Street. I, alas ! — though I sought assiduously — could mark nothing of the kind." Nothing of the kind was there. Why- should anything of the kind be there } Her poetry has been one of England's divinest treasures : but of her population a very few understand it ; and the shrine has always been guarded by the elect who happen to possess, in varying degrees, certain qualities of mind and ear. It is, as Mr. Gosse puts it, by a sustained effort of bluff on the part of these elect that English poetry is kept upon its high pedestal of honour. The wor- ship of it as one of the glories of our birth and state is imposed upon the masses by a small aristocracy of intelligence and taste. Mr. Giss- What do the " masses " care for poetry ? ^«/-y In an appendix Mr. Gosse prints a letter Testimony n* /^ /-- • from Mr. George Gissmg, who, as everyone knows, has studied the popular mind assidu- ously, and with startling results. Here are a few sentences from his letter : — (i) "After fifteen years' observation of the poorer classes of EngUsh folk, chiefly in London and the The Public and Letters 275 south, I am pretty well assured that, whatever civil- ising agencies may be at work among the democracy, poetry is not one of them." (2) " The custodian of a Free Library in a southern city informs me that 'hardly once in a month' does a volume of verse pass over his counter ; that the excep- tional applicant (seeking Byron or Longfellow) is generally ' the wife of a tradesman ; ' and that an offer of verse to man or woman who comes simply for ' a book ' is invariably rejected ; * they won't even look at it.' " (3) " It was needless folly to pretend that, because one or two of Tennyson's poems became largely known through popular recitation, therefore Tenny- son was dear to the heart of the people, a subject of their pride whilst he lived, of their mourning when he died. My point is that no poet holds this place in the esteem of the English lower orders." (4) " Some days before (the funeral) I was sitting in a public room, where two men, retired shopkeepers, exchanged an occasional word as they read the morning's news. 'A great deal here about Lord Tennyson' said one. The 'Lord' was significant. I listened anxiously for his companion's reply. * Ah, yes.' The man moved uneasily, and added at once : 'What do you think about this long-distance ride?' In that room {I frequented it on successive days with this object) not a syllable did I hear regarding Tenny- son save the sentence faithfully recorded." Mr. Gissing, be it observed, speaks only of the class which he has studied : but in talk- ing of " demos," or, more loosely, of " demo- 2^6 Adventures in Criticism cracy," we must be careful not to limit these terms to the "lower" and "lower-middle" Poetry not classes. For Poetry, who draws her priests and warders from all classes of society, is any one ^ ' Class. generally beloved of none. The average country magnate, the average church digni- tary, the average professional man, the aver- age commercial traveller — to all these she is alike unknown : at least, the insensibility of each is differentiated by shades so fine that we need not trouble ourselves to make distinctions. A public school and university education does as little for the Squire Westerns one meets at country dinner-tables as a three-guinea subscription to a circulating library for the kind of matron one comes upon at a table d^hote. Five minutes after hearing the news of Browning's death I stopped an acquaintance in the street, a professional man of charming manner, and repeated it to him. He stared for a moment, and then murmured that he was sorry to hear it. Clearly he did not wish to hurt my feelings by confessing that he hadn't the vaguest idea who Browning might be. And if anybody think this an extreme case, let The Public and Letters 277 him turn to the daily papers and read the names of those who were at Newmarket on that same afternoon when our great poet was laid in the Abbey with every pretence of national grief. The pursuit of one horse by another is doubtless a more elevating spec- tacle than " the pursuit of a flea by a ' lady,' " but on that afternoon even a tepid lover of letters must have found an equal incongruity in both entertainments. I do not say that the General Public hates Poetry. But I say that those who care about it are few, and those who know about it are fewer. Nor do these assert their right of interference as often as they might. Just once or twice in the last ten or fifteen years they have pulled up some exceptionally coarse weed on which the General Public had every disposition to graze, and have pitched it over the hedge to Lethe wharf, to root itself and fatten there ; and terrible as those of Poly- dorus have been the shrieks of the avulsed root. But as a rule they have sat and piped upon the stile and considered the good cow grazing, confident that in the 278 Adventures /n Criticism end she must " bite oiT more than she can chew." The'' Out- Still, the aristocracy of letters exists: and siders " in it, if nowhere else, titles, social advantages, and commercial success alike count for no- thing ; while Royalty itself sits in the Court of the Gentiles. And I am afraid we must include in the crowd not only those affable politicians who from time to time open a Public Library and oblige us with their views upon literature, little realising what Hecuba is to them, and still less what they are to Hecuba, but also those affable teachers of religion, philosophy, and science, who con- descend occasionally to amble through the garden of the Muses, and rearrange its labels for us while drawing our attention to the rapid deterioration of the tiower-beds. The author of The Citizen of the World once compared the profession of letters in England to a Per- sian army, " where there are many pioneers, several suttlers, numberless servants, women and children in abundance, and but few sol- diers." Were he alive to-day he would be forced to include the Volunteers. 279 A CASE OF BOOKSTALL CENSORSHIP « In the romantic little town of 'Igbbury, ^^ ^''39^^' My father kept a Succulating Libary ..." ^^^ —and, I regret to say, gave himself airs on ;, j.yo,„an .1 ^' 4-1 f;<- Who Did;' the strength of It. ^ ^^^^^ The persons in my instructive Uttle story Eason who •wouldnt are — H.H. Prince Francis of Teck. Mr. Grant Allen, author of The Woman Who Did. Mr. W. T. Stead, Editor of The Review of Revieius. Messrs. Eason & Son, booksellers and newsvendors, possessing on the rail- ways of Ireland a monopoly similar to that enjoyed by Messrs. W. H. Smith & Son on the railways of Great Britain. Mr. James O'Hara, of 18, Cope Street, Dublin. A Clerk. 28o Advea'tures in Criticism Now, on the appearance of Mr. Grant Allen's The Woman Who Did, Mr. Stead conceived the desire of criticising it as the " Book of the Month " in The Review of Revieivs for February, 1895. He strongly dissents from the doctrine of TJie Woman Who Did, and he also believes that the book indicts, and goes far to destroy, its own doctrine. This opinion, I may say, is shared by many critics. He says *' Wedlock is to Mr. Grant Allen Nehushtan. And the odd thing about it is that the net effect of the book which he has written with his heart's blood to destroy this said Nehushtan can hardly fail to strengthen the foundation of reasoned conviction upon which marriage rests." And again — " Those who do not know the author, but who take what I must regard as the saner view of the relations of the sexes, will rejoice that what might have been a potent force for evil has been so strangely overruled as to become a reinforce- ment of the garrison defending the citadel its author desires so ardently to overthrow. From the point of view of the fervent apostle of Free Love, this is a Boomerang of a Book." A Case of Bookstall Censorship 281 Believing this — that the book would be its own best antidote — Mr. Stead epitomised it in his Review, printed copious extracts, and wound up by indicating his own views and what he deemed the true moral of the discus- sion. The Review was published and, so far as Messrs. W. H. Smith & Son were concerned, passed without comment. But to the Editor's surprise (he tells the story in the Westminster Gazette of the 2nd inst.), no sooner was it placed on the market in Ireland than he received word that every copy had been recalled from the bookstalls, and that Messrs. Eason had refused to sell a single copy. On telegraphing for more information, Mr. Stead was sent the following letter : — " Dear Sir, — Allen's book is an avowed defence of Free Love, and a direct attack upon the Christian view of marriage. Mr. Stead criticises Allen's views adversely, but we do not think the antidote can de- stroy the ill-effects of the poison, and we decline to be made the vehicle for the distribution of attacks upon the most fundamental institution of the Christian state. — Yours faithfully, ." Mr. Stead thereupon wrote to the Man- aging Director of Messrs. Eason & Son, and received this reply : — 282 Adventures in Criticism " Dear Sir, — We have considered afresh the char- acter of the February number of your Review so far as it relates to the notice of Grant Allen's book, and we are more and more confirmed in the belief that its influence has been, and is, most pernicious. " Grant Allen is not much heard of in Ireland, and the laudations you pronounce on him as a writer, so far as we know him, appear wholly unmerited. " At any rate, he appears in your Review as the advocate for Free Love, and it seems to us strange that you should place his work in the exaggerated importance of 'The Book of the Month,' accompanied by eighteen pages of comment and quotation, in which there is a publicity given to the work out of all pro- portion to its merits. "I do not doubt that the topic of Free Love engages the attention of the corrupt Londoner. There are plenty of such persons who are only too glad to get the sanction of writers for the maintenance and prac- tice of their evil thoughts, but the purest and best lives in all parts of the field of Christian philanthropy will mourn the publicity you have given to this evil book. It is not even improbable that the perusal of Grant Allen's book, which you have lifted into im- portance as 'The Book of the Month,' may determine the action of souls to their spiritual ruin. " The problem of indirect influence is full of mystery, but, as the hour of our departure comes near, the possible consequences to other minds of the example and teaching of our lives may quicken our perceptions, and we may see and deeply regret our actions when not directed by the highest authority, the will of God. u4 Case of Bookstall Censorship 283 — We are, dear Sir, yours very truly (for Eason & Son, Limited), " Charles Eason, Managing Director." Exception may be taken to this. letter on many points, some trivial and some im- portant. Of the trivial points we may note with interest Mr. Eason's assumption that his opinion is wanted on the literary merits of the ware he vends ; and, with concern, the rather slipshod manner in which he allows himself and his assistants to speak of a gentleman as " Allen," or " Grant Allen," without the usual prefix. But no one can fail to see that this is an honest letter — the production of a man conscious of responsibility and struggling to do his best in circumstances he imperfectly understands. Nor do I think this view of Mr. Eason need be seriously modified upon perusal of a letter received by Mr. Stead from a Mr. James O'Hara, of 18, Cope Street, Dublin, and printed in the Westminster Gazette of March iith. Mr. O'Hara writes : — " Dear Sir, — The following may interest you and Mr. Eason your readers. I was a subscriber to the library owned "^ ^^<^ by C. Eason & Co., Limited, and in December asked ^tUtii^ies 284 Adventures in Criticism them for Napoleon and the Fair Sex, by Masson. The librarian informed me Mr. Eason had decided not to circulate it, as it contained improper details, which Mr. Eason considered immoral. A copy was also refused to one of the best-known pressmen in Dublin, a man of mature years and experience. " Three days afterwards I saw a young man ask the librarian for the same book, and Eason's manager presented it to him with a low bow. I remarked on this circumstance to Mr. Charles Eason, who told me that he had issued it to this one subscriber only, be- cause he was Prince Francis of Teck. " I told him it was likely, from the description he had given me of it, to be more injurious to a young man such as Prince Francis of Teck than to me ; but he replied : ' Oh, these high-up people are different. Besides, they are so influential we cannot refuse them. However, if you wish, you can now have the book.' " I told Mr. Eason that I did not wish to read it ever since he had told me when I first applied for it that it was quite improper." The two excuses produced by Mr. Eason do not agree very well together. The first gives us to understand that, in Mr. Eason's opinion, ordinary moral principles cannot be applied to persons of royal blood. The second gives us to understand that though, in Mr. Eason's opinion, ordinary moral principles can be applied to princes, the application would A Case of Bookstall Censorship 285 involve more risk than Mr. Eason cares to undertake. Each of his excuses, taken apart, is intelligible enough. Taken together they can hardly be called consistent. But the effects of royal and semi-royal splendour upon the moral eyesight are well known, and need not be dwelt on here. After all, what concerns us is not Mr. Eason's attitude towards Prince Francis of Teck, but Mr. Eason's attitude towards the reading public. And in this respect, from one point of view — which happens to be his own — Mr. Eason's attitude seems to me irreproachable. He is clearly alive to his responsibility, and is honestly concerned that the goods he pur- veys to the public shall be goods of which his conscience approves. Here is no grocer who sands his sugar before hurrying to family prayer. Here is a man who carries his religion into his business, and stakes his honour on the purity of his wares. I think it would be wrong in the extreme to deride Mr. Eason's action in the matter of The Woman Who Did and Mr. Stead's Review. He is doing his best, as Mr. Stead cheerfully allows. 286 Adventures in Criticism But, as I said above, he is doing his best under circumstances he imperfectly under- stands — and, let me add here, in a position which is unfair to him. That Mr. Eason im- perfectly understands his position will be plain (I think) to anyone who studies his ^^^ reply to Mr. Stead. But let me make the Reasonable , . , . . , Objectionto poi^t clear; for it is the crucial point in the Bookstall discussion of the modern Bookstall Censor- "^'■^' ship. A great deal may be said against setting up a censorship of literature. A great deal may be said in favour of a censorship. But if a censorship there must be, the censor should be deliberately chosen for his office, and, in exercising his power, should be directly responsible to the public conscience. If a censorship there must be, let the com- munity choose a man whose qualifications have been weighed, a man on whose judgment it decides that it can rely. But that Tom or Dick or Harry, or Tom Dick Harry & Co. (Limited), by the process of collaring a commercial monopoly from the railway com- panies, should be exalted into the supreme arbiters of what men or women may or may not be allowed to read — this surely is A Case of Bookstall Censorship 287 unjustifiable by any argument ? Mr. Eason may on the whole be doing more good than harm. He is plainly a very well-meaning man of business. If he knows a good book from a bad — and the public has no reason to suppose that he does — I can very well believe that when his moral and literary judgment came into conflict with his business interests, he would sacrifice his business interests. But the interests of good literature and profitable business cannot always be identical ; and whenever they conflict they put Mr. Eason into a false position. As managing director of Messrs. Eason & .Son, he must consider his shareholders ; as supreme arbiter of letters, he stands directly answerable to the public conscience. I protest, therefore, that these functions should never be combined in one man. As readers of The Speaker know, I range myself on the side of those who would have literature free. But even our opponents, who desire control, must desire a form of control such as reason approves. 288 THE POOR LITTLE PENNY DREADFUL Oci.s, The poor little Penny Dreadful has been 1895- catchins^ it once more. Once more the Our _ ^ *^Cru- British Press has stripped to its massive saders'' waist and solemnly squared up to this hardened young offender. It calls this remarkable performance a " Crusade." I like these Crusades. They remind one of that merry passage in Pickwick (p. 254 in the first edition) : — " Whether Mr. Winkle was seized with a temporary attack of that species of insanity which originates in a sense of injury, or animated by this display of Mr. Weller's valour, is uncertain ; but certain it is, that he no sooner saw Mr. Grummer fall, than he made a terrific onslaught on a sinall boy who stood next to him; whereupon Mr. Snodgrass " [Pay attention to Mr. Snodgrass, if you please, and cast your memories back a year or two, to the utterances of a famous Church Congress on the National Vice of Gambling.] Poor Little Penny Dreadful 289 "—whereupon Mr. Snodgrass, in a truly Christian spirit, and in order that he might take no one un- awares, announced in a very loud tone that he was going to begin, and proceeded to take off his coat with the utmost deliberation. He was immediately surrounded and secured ; and it is but common justice both to him and to Mr. Winkle to say that they did not make the slightest attempt to rescue either them- selves or Mr. Weller, who, after a most vigorous re- sistance, was overpowered by numbers and taken prisoner. The procession then re-formed, the chair- men resumed their stations, and the march was re- commenced." "The chairmen resumed their stations, and the march was re-commenced." Is it any wonder that Dickens and Labiche have found no fit successors ? One can imagine the latter laying down his pen and confessing himself beaten at his own game : for really this periodical "crusade" upon the Penny Dreadful has all the qualities of the very best vaudeville— the same bland exhibition of bourgeois logic, the same wanton appre- ciation of evidence, the same sententious alacrity in seizing the immediate explanation — the more trivial the better — the same in- ability to reach the remote cause, the same profound unconsciousness of absurdity. K 290 Adventures in Criticism You remember La Gramniaire ? Cabous- sat's cow has eaten a piece of broken glass, with fatal results. Machut, the veterinary, comes : — Caboussat. "Un morceau de verre . . . esfc-ce drole ? Une vache de quatre ans." Machut. "Ah ! monsieur, les vaches ... 9a avale du verre \ tout age. J'en ai connu une qui a mange une 6ponge a laver les cabriolets ... a sept ans ! Elle en est moite." Caboussat. " Ce que c'est que notre pauvre hu- manite I" Penny Our friends have been occupied with the case tea Jus ^^ ^ half-witted boy who consumed Penny Matricide Dreadfuls and afterwards went and killed his mother. They infer that he killed his mother because he had read Penny Dreadfuls {post hoc ergo propter hoc), and they conclude very naturally that Penny Dreadfuls should be suppressed. But before roundly pro- nouncing the doom of this — to me unat- tractive — branch of fiction, would it not be well to inquire a trifle more deeply into cause and effect? In the first place matricide is so utterly unnatural a crime that there must be something abominably peculiar in a form of \ Poor Little Penny Dreadful 291 literature that persuades to it. But a year or two back, on the occasion of a former crusade, I took the pains to study a consider- able number of Penny Dreadfuls. My read- ing embraced all those — I believe I am right in saying all — which were reviewed, a few days back, in the Daily Chronicle ; and some others. I give you my word I could find nothing peculiar about them. They were even rather ostentatiously on the side of virtue. As for the bloodshed in them, it would not compare with that in many of the five-shilling adventure stories at that time read so eagerly by boys of the middle and upper classes. The style was ridiculous, of course : but a bad style excites nobody but a reviewer, and does not even excite him to deeds of the kind we are now trying to account for. The reviewer in the Daily Chronicle thinks worse of these books than I do. But he certainly failed to quote anything from them that by the wildest fancy could be interpreted as sanctioning such a crime as matricide. Let us for a moment turn our attention K 2 292 Adventures in Criticism The Cause from the Penny Dreadful to the boy — from in the Boy ^^^ c^ponge d hivev les cabriolets to notre panvre ratherthan Jiuinaiiite. Now — to Speak quite seriously — it is well known to every doctor and every C^ schoolmaster (and should be known, if it is not, to every parent), that all boys sooner or later pass through a crisis in growth during which absolutely nothing can be predicted of their behaviour. At such times honest boys have given way to lying and theft, gentle boys have developed an unexpected savagery, ordinary boys — " the small apple - eating urchins whom we know " — have fallen into morbid brooding upon unhealthy subjects. In the immense majority of cases the crisis is soon over and the boy is himself again ; but while it lasts, the disease will draw its sustenance from all manner of things — things, it may be, in themselves quite innocent. I avoid particularising for many reasons ; but any observant doctor will confirm what I have said. Now the moderately affluent boy who reads five-shilling stories of adven- ture has many advantages at this period over the poor boy who reads Penny Dreadfuls. To begin with, the crisis has a tendency to Poor Little Penny Dreadful 293 attack him later. Secondly, he meets it fortified by a better training and more defi- nite ideas of the difference between right and wrong, virtue and vice. Thirdly (and this is very important), he is probably under school discipline at the time — which means, that he is to some extent watched and shielded. When I think of these advantages, I frankly confess that the difference in the literature these two boys read seems to me to count for very little. I myself have written " ad- venture-stories " before now : stories which, I suppose — or, at any rate, hope — would come into the class of " Pure Literature," as the term is understood by those who have been writing on this subject in the news- papers. They were, I hope, better written than the run of Penny Dreadfuls, and per- haps with more discrimination of taste in the choice of adventures. But I certainly do not feel able to claim that their effect upon a perverted mind would be innocuous. For indeed it is not possible to name any Fallacy book out of which a perverted mind will .i^rusi^e'' not draw food for its disease. The whole 294 Adventures in Criticism fallacy lies in supposing literature the cause of the disease. Evil men arc not evil because they read bad books : they read bad books because they are evil : and being evil, or diseased, they are quickly able to extract evil or disease even from very good books. There is talk of disseminating the works of our best authors at a cheap rate, in the hope that they will drive the Penny Dreadful out of the market. But has good literature at the cheapest driven the middle classes from their false gods } And let it be remem- bered, to the credit of these poor boys, that they do buy their books. The middle classes take their poison on hire or exchange. But perhaps the full enormity of the cant about Penny Dreadfuls can best be perceived by travelling to and fro for a week between London and Paris and observing the books read by those who travel with first-class tickets. I think a fond belief in Ivanhoe- within-the-reach-of-all would not long sur- vive that experiment. 295 IBSEN'S *^PEER GYNT''* ^^ Peer Gynt takes its place, as we hold, on the Oct.iy summits of literature precisely because it means so ^ ^^' much more than the poet consciously intended. Is A Master- not this one of the characteristics of the masterpiece, t^^^^ that everyone can read in it his own secret ? In the material world (though Nature is very innocent of symbolic intention) each of us finds for himself the symbols that have relevance and value for him ; and so it is with the poems that are instinct with true vitality." I was glad to come across the above passage in Messrs. William and Charles Archer's introduction to their new transla- tion of Ibsen's Peer Gynt (London : Walter Scott), because I can now, with a clear con- science, thank the writers for their book, even though I fail to find some of the things they find in it. The play's the thing after all. Peer Gynt is a great poem : let us shake hands over that. It will remain a great poem when we have ceased pulling it about to find what is inside or search out texts for homilies in defence of our own particular 29^ Adventures in Criticism views of life. The world's literature stands unaffected, though Archdeacon Farrar use it for chapter-headings and Sir John Lub- bock wield it as a mallet to drive home self-evident truths. Peer Gyut is an extremely modern story founded on old Norwegian folk-lore — the folk-lore which Asbjornsen and Moe col- lected, and Dasent translated for our delight in childhood. Old and new are curiously mixed ; but the result is piquant and not in the least absurd, because the story rests on problems which are neither old nor new, but eternal, and on emotions which are neither older nor newer than the breast of man. To be sure, the true devotee of Ibsen will not be content with this. You will be Not a told by Herr Jaeger, Ibsen's biographer, that Pamphlet p^^^ Gynt is an attack on Norwegian roman- ticism. The poem, by the way, is romantic to the core — so romantic, indeed, that the culminating situation, and the page for which everything has been a preparation, have to be deplored by Messrs. Archer as " a mere commonplace of romanticism, which Ibsen Ibsen's ''Peer Gynt'' 297 had not outgrown when he wrote Peer Gynt'^ But your true votary is for ever taking his god off the pedestal of the true artist to set him on the tub of the hot-gospeller ; even so genuine a specimen of impressionist work as Hedda Gabler being claimed by him for a sermon. And if ever you have been moved by Ghosts, or Brand, or Peer Gynt to exclaim " This is poetry ! " you have only to turn to Herr Jaeger — whose criticism, like his name- sake's underclothing, should be labelled "All Pure Natural Wool " — to find that you were mistaken and that it is really pamphleteering. To be sure, in one sense Peer Gynt is a Yet En- sermon upon a text. That is to say, it is J^?^^,^,^ written primarily to expound one view of man's duty, not to give a mere representa- tion of life. The problem, not the picture, is the main thing. But then the problem, not the picture, is the main thing in Alcestis^ Hamlet, Faust. In Peer Gynt the poet's own solution of the problem is presented with more insistence than in Alcestis, Hamlet, or Faust : but the problem is wider, too. The problem is, What is self? and how K * 298 Adventures in Criticism shall a man be himself? And the poet's answer is, " Self is only found by being lost, gained by being given away " : an answer at least as old as the gospels. The epony- mous hero of the story is a man essentially half-hearted, "the incarnation of a compro- mising dread of self-committal to any one course," a fellow who says, "Ay, think of it — wish it done — will it to boot, But do it . No, that's past my understanding ! " — who is only stung to action by pique, or by what is called the " instinct of self-pre- servation," an instinct which, as Ibsen shows, is the very last that will preserve self. 7h6 Story This fcllow. Peer Gynt, wins the love of Solveig, a woman essentially whole-hearted, who has no dread of self-committal, who surrenders self. Solveig, in short, stands in perfect antithesis to Peer. When Peer is an outlaw she deserts her father's house and follows him to his hut in the forest. The scene in which she presents herself before Peer and claims to share his lot is worthy to stand beside the ballad of the Nut-browne Mayde : indeed, as a confessed romantic I Ibsen's ''Peer Gynt'' 299 must own to thinking Solveig one of the most beautiful figures in poetry. Peer de- serts her, and she lives in the hut alone and grows an old woman while her lover roams the world, seeking everywhere and through the wildest adventures the satisfaction of his Self, acting everywhere on the Troll's motto, " To thyself be enough," and finding every- where his major premiss turned against him, to his own discomfiture, by an ironical fate. We have one glimpse of Solveig, meanwhile, in a little scene of eight Hnes. She is now a middle-aged woman, up in her forest hut in the far north. She sits spinning in the sunshine outside her door and sings : — " Maybe both the winter a7id spring will pass by^ And the next summer too, and the whole of the year; But thou wilt come one day .... God strengthen thee, whereso thou goest in the world! God gladden thee, if at His footstool thou stand ! Here will I await thee till thou comest again; And if thou wait up yonder, then there we'll meet, my friend ! " At last Peer, an old man, comes home. On the heath around his old hut he finds (in a passage which the translators call K* 2 300 Adventures in Criticism "fantastic," intending, I hope, approval by this word) the thoughts he has missed thinking, the watchword he has failed to utter, the tears he has missed shedding, the deed he has missed doing. The thoughts are thread- balls, the watchword withered leaves, the tears dewdrops, etc. Also he finds on that heath a Button-Moulder with an immense ladle. The Button-Moulder explains to Peer that he must go into this ladle, for his time has come. He has neither been a good man nor a sturdy sinner, but a half-and-half fellow without any real self in him. Such men are dross, badly cast buttons with no loops to them, and must go, by the Master's orders, into the melting - pot again. Is there no escape ? None, unless Peer can find the loop of the button, his real Self, the Peer Gynt that God made. After vain and frantic searching across the heath, Peer reaches the door of his own old hut. Solveig stands on the threshold. As Peer flings himself to earth before her, calling out upon her to denounce him, she sits down by his side and says — Ibsen's ''Peer Gynt'^ 301 " TJiou hast 7nade all my life as a beaidifid song. Blessed be thou that at last thou hast come / Blessed^ thrice-blessed our Whitsun-morn meeting /" " But," says Peer, " I am lost, unless thou canst answer riddles." "Tell me them," tranquilly answers Solveig. And Peer asks, while the Button-Moulder listens behind the hut— " Canst tlwu tell me where Peer Gynt has been since we parted ? " Solveig. — Been ? Peer. — With his destiny'' s seal oji his brow; Becn^ as in God^s thought he first spj'aytg forth? Canst thou tell me f If not, I 7nust get me home, — Go dowji to the mist-shrouded regions, Solveig (smiling). — Oh, that riddle is easy. Peer. — Then tell what thou knowest ! Where was /, as i7iyself as the whole 7nan, the true man ? Where was /, with God's sigil upon my brow? Solveig. — In my faith, in my hope, i?t my love. " This," say the Messrs. Archer in effect, -^ ^^'^''^- in " of the " may be — indeed is — magnificent : but it is ^Ethical not Ibsen." To quote their very words — Problem? " The redemption of the hero through a woman's love ... we take to be a mere commonplace o^ romanticism, which Ibsen, though he satirised it, had by no means fully outgrown when he wrote Peer Gynt. 302 Adventures in Criticism Peer's relurn to Solvcig is (in the original) a passage of the most poignant lyric beauty, but it is surely a shirking, not a solution, of the ethical problem. It would be impossible to the Ibsen of to-day, who knows (none better) that No man can save his brother'' s soul^ or pay his brother'* s debt." In a footnote to the italicised words Messrs. Archer add the quotation — ' "No, nor woman, neither." Oct. 22, " Peer's return to Solveig is surely a shirk- 1892. mg, not a solution, of the ethical problem." The mam ^^ ^ , 1.1 Problem Of what cthical problem ? The main ethical probleiTi of the poem is. What is self.? And ~-^ow shall a man he himself.'* As Mr. Wick- steed puts it in his " Four Lectures on Henrik Ibsen," "What is it to be one's self.? God meant sonietJiing when He made each one of us. For a man to embody that meaning of God in his words and deeds, and so become, in a degree, 'a word of God made flesh ' is to be himself But thus to be him- self he must slay himself That is to say, he must slay the craving to make himself the centre round which others revolve, and must Ibsen's ''Peer Gynt" 303 strive to find his true orbit, and swing, self- poised, round the great central light But what if a poor devil can never puzzle out what God did mean when He made him ? Why, then he must feel it. But how often your ' feeling ' misses fire ! Ay, there you have it. The devil has no stauncher ally than wa7tt of perception" This is a fair statement of Ibsen's problem and his solution of it. In the poem he solves it by the aid of two characters, two diagrams we may say. Diagram I. is Peer Gynt, a man who is always striving to make himself the centre round which others revolve, who never sacrifices his Self generously for an- other's good, nor surrenders it to a decided course of action. Diagram II. is Solveig, a woman who has no dread of self-committal, who surrenders Self and is, in short, Peer's perfect antithesis. When Peer is an outlaw she forsakes all and follows him to his hut in the forest. Peer deserts her and roams the world, where he finds his theory of Self upset by one adventure after another and at ast reduced to absurdity in the madhouse at 304 Adventures in Criticism Cairo. But though his own theory is dis- credited, he has not yet found the true one. And its To find this he must be brought face to face, Solutton jj^ ^j^g l^g|. s(;(.j^e^ yyith his deserted wife. There, for the first time, he asks the question and receives the answer. " Where," he asks, " has Peer Gynt's true self been since we parted : — "Where was I, as myself, as the whole man, the true man ? Where was I with God's sigil upon my brow?" And Solveig ans\yers : — " In my faith, in my hope, in my love." In these words we have the main ethical problem solved ; and Peer's perceptiofi of the truth {vide Mr. Wicksteed's remarks quoted above) is the one necessary climax of the poem. We do not care a farthing — at least, I do not care a farthing — whether Peer es- cape the Button-Moulder or not. It may be too late for him, or there may be yet time to live another life ; but whatever the case may be, it doesn't alter what Ibsen set out to prove. The problem which Ibsen shirks (if indeed he does shirk it) is a subsidiary Ibsen's ''Peer Gynt" 305 problem — a rider, so to speak. Can Solveig by her love redeem Peer Gynt ? Can the woman save the man's soul ? Will she, after all, cheat the Button-Moulder of his victim ? The poet, by giving Solveig the last word, seems to think it possible. According to Mr. Archer, the Ibsen of to-day would know it to be impossible. He knows (none better) that " No man can save his brother's soul or pay his brother's debt." "No, nor women neither," adds Mr. Archer. But is this so ? Peer Gynt was published in 1867. I turn to A Doll's House, written twelve years later, and I find there a woman preparing to redeem a man just as Solveig prepares to redeem Peer. I find in Mr. Archer's translation of that play the follow- ing page of dialogue : — Is Peer's Rcdefnp- iion a RoDiantic Fallacy ? Mrs. Linden : There's no happiness in working for oneself, Nils ; give me somebody and something to work for. Krogstad : No, no ; that can never be. It's simply a woman's romantic notion of self-sacrifice. Mrs. Linden : Have you ever found me romantic ? 3o6 Adventures in Criticism Krogstad: Would you really ? Tell me, do you know my past ? Mrs. Linden : Yes. Krogstad: And do you know what people say of me? Mrs. Linden : Didn't you say just now that with me you could have been another man ? Krogstad : I am sure of it. Mrs. Linden : Is it too late ? Krogstad: Christina, do you know what you are doing ? Yes, you do ; I see it in your face. Have you the courage '^. Mrs. Linden : I need someone to tend, and your children need a mother. You need me, and I 1 need you. Nils, I believe in your better self. With you I fear nothing. //>sc-n's Again, we are not told if Mrs. Linden's hopes of experiment is successful; but Ibsen certainly Enfran- chised gives no hint that she is likely to fail. This Women was in 1879. In 1885 Ibsen paid a visit to Norway and made a speech to some working- men at Drontheim, in which this passage occurred : — " Democracy by itself cannot solve the social question. We must introduce an aristocratic element into our life. I am not referring, of course, to an aristocracy of birth, or of purse, or even of intellect. I mean an aristocracy of character, of will, of mind. That alone can make us free. From two classes will this aristocracy I desire come to ws,— front our women Ibsen's ''Peer Gynt'* 307 and our workmen. The social revolution, now pre- paring in Europe, is chiefly concerned with the future of the workers and the women. On this I set all my hopes and expectations. ..." I think it would be easy to multiply instances showing that, though Ibsen may hold that no man can save his brother's soul, he does not extend this disability to women, but hopes and believes, on the contrary, that women will redeem mankind. On men he builds little hope. To speak roughly, men are all in Peer Gynt's case, or Torvald Helmer's. They are swathed in timid conventions, blindfolded with selfishness, so that they cannot perceive, and unable with their own hands to tear off these bandages. They are incapable of the highest renunciation. " No man," says Torvald Hel- mer, "sacrifices his honour, even for one he loves." Those who heard ]\liss Achurch deliver Nora's reply will not easily forget it. " Millions of women have done so." The effect in the theatre was tremendous. This sentence clinched the whole play. Millions of women are, like Solveig, capable of renouncing all for love, of surrendering self 3o8 Adventures in Criticism altogether ; and, as I read Ibsen, it is precisely on this power of renunciation that he builds his hope of man's redemption. So that, unless I err greatly, the scene in Peer Gynt which Mr. Archer calls a shirking of the ethical problem, is just the solution which Ibsen has been persistent in presenting to the world. Let it be understood, of course, that it is only your Solveigs and Mrs. Lindens who can thus save a brother's soul : women who have made their own way in the world, think- ing for themselves, working for themselves, freed from the conventions which man would impose on them. I know Mr. Archer will not retort on me with Nora, who leaves her husband and children, and claims that her first duty is to herself. Nora is just the woman who cannot redeem a man. Her Doll's House training is the very opposite of Solveig's and Mrs. Linden's. She is a silly girl brought up amid conventions, and awakened, by one blow, to the responsibilities of life. That she should at once know the right course to take would be incredible in real life, and impossible in a play the action Ibsen's ''Peer Gynt" 309 of which has been evolved as inevitably as real life. Many critics have supposed Ibsen to commend Nora's conduct in the last act of the play. He neither sanctions nor con- demns. But he does contrast her in the play with Mrs. Linden, and I do not think that contrast can be too carefully studied. 310 Mays, 1894. Aloof ties s of Mr. Swin- biirne's Muse MR. SWINBURNE'S MANNER LATER There was a time — let us say, in the early 'seventies — when many young men tried to write like Mr. Swinburne. Remarkably small success waited on their efforts. Still their numbers and their youth and (for a while also) their persistency seemed to promise a new school of poesy, with Mr. Swinburne for its head and great exemplar : exemplar rather than head, for Mr. Swinburne's attitude amid all this devotion was rather that of the god than of the priest. He sang, and left the worshippers to work up their own enthusiasm And to this attitude he has been constant. Unstinting, and occasionally unmeasured, in praise and dispraise of other men, he has allowed his own reputation the noble liberty to look after itself. Nothing, for instance, could have been finer than the careless, almost disdainful, dignity of his bearing in the months that followed Tenny- Mr. Swinburne's Later Manner 311 son's death. The cats were out upon the tiles, then, and his was the luminous, expressive silence of a sphere. One felt, "Whether he receive it or no, here is the man v/ho can wear the cro.vn." It was not, however, the aloofness of Mr. And Her Swinburne's bearinsf that checked the forma- , " ^^'7 ^ towaids tion of a Swinburnian school of poetry. The Abstrac- cause lay deeper, and has come more and ^^^'" more into the light in the course of Mr. Swinburne's poetic development — let me say, his thoroughly normal development. We can see now that from the first such a school, such a successful following, was an impossibility. The fact is that Mr. Swin- burne has not only genius, but an extremely rare and individual genius. The germ of this individuality may be found, easily enough, in Atalanta and the Ballads ; but it luxuriates in his later poems and through- out them — flower and leaf and stem. It was hardly more natural in 1870 to confess the magic of the great chorus, " Before the beginning of years," or of Dolores^ than to embark upon the vain adventure of 312 Adventures in Criticism imitating them. I cannot imagine a youth in all Great Britain so green or unknowing as to attempt an imitation of A NyinpJiolept^ perhaps the finest poem in Astt'opJiel, the volume now lying before me. I say " in Great Britain ; " because pecu- liar as Mr. Swinburne's genius would be in any country, it is doubly peculiar as the endowment of an English poet. If there be one quality beloved above others by the inhabitants of this island, it is concreteness ; and I suppose there never was a poet in the world who used less concreteness of speech than Mr. Swinburne. Mr. Palgrave once noted that the landscape of Keats falls short of the landscape of Shelley in its comparative lack of the larger features of sky and earth ; Keats's was " foreground work " for the most part. But what shall be said of Shelley's universe after the immense vague regions inhabited by Mr. Swinburne's muse t She sings of the sea ; but we never behold a sail, never a harbour : she sings of passion — among the stars. We seem never to touch earth ; page after page is full of thought — for, Mr. Swinburne's Later Manner 313 vast as the strain may be, it is never empty — but we cannot apply it And all this is extremely distressing to the Briton, who loves practice as his birthright. He comes on a Jacobite song. " Now, at any rate," he tells himself, " we arrive at something definite : some allusion, however small, to Bonny Prince Charlie." He reads — " Faith speaks when hope dissembles ; Faith lives when hope lies dead : If death as life dissembles, And all that night assembles Of stars at dawn lie dead. Faint hope that smiles and trembles May tell not well for dread : But faith has heard it said." " Very beautiful," says the Briton ; " but why call this a ' Jacobite Song'.? " Some thorough-going adm.irer of Mr. Swinburne will ask, no doubt, if I prefer gush about Bonny Prince Charlie. Most decidedly I do not. I am merely pointing out that the poet cares so little for the common human preju- dice in favour of concreteness of speech as to give us a Jacobite song which, for all its indebtedness to the historical facts of the 314 Adventures in Criticism Jacobite Risings, might just as well have been put in the mouth of Judas Maccabaeus. Somebody — I forget for the moment who it was — compared Poetry with Ant^us, who was strong when his feet touched Earth, his mother ; weaker when held aloft in air. The justice of this criticism I have no space here to discuss ; but the difference is patent enough between poetry such as this of Herrick — *' When as in silks my Julia goes, Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows The liquefaction of her clothes." Or this, of Burns — " The boat rocks at the pier o' Leith, Fu' loud the wind blaws frae the ferry, The boat rides by the Berwick-law, And I maun leave my bonny Mary." Or this, of Shakespeare — " When daisies pied, and violets blue, And lady smocks all silver-white, And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue Do paint the meadows with delight." Or this, of Milton— " the broad circumference Hung on his shoulders like the moon, whose orb, Mr. Swinburne's Later Manner 315 Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views At evening from the top of Fesole, Or in Valdarno . . .'* And such lines as these by Mr. Swinburne — " The dark dumb godhead innate in the fair world's hfe Imbues the rapture of dawn and of noon with dread, Infects the peace of the star-shod night with strife, Informs with terror the sorrow that guards the dead. No service of bended knee or of humbled head May soothe or subdue the God who has change to wife : And life with death is as morning with evening wed." Take Burns's song, It was a' for our rightfu* King, and set it beside the Jacobite song quoted above, and it is clear at once that with Mr. Swinburne we pass from the particular and concrete to the general and abstract. And in this direction Mr. Swinburne's muse has steadily marched. In his Erechtheus he tells how the gods gave Pallas the lordship of Athens — " The lordship and love of the lovely land, The grace of the town that hath on it for crown But a headband to wear Of violets one-hued with her hair." 3i6 Adventures in Criticism Here at least wc were allowed a picture of Athens : the violet crown was something definite. But now, when Mr. Swinburne sings of England, wc have to precipitate our impressions from lines fluid as these : — " Things of night at her glance took flight : the strengths of darkness recoiled and sank : Sank the fires of the murderous pyres whereon wild agony writhed and shrank : Rose the light of the reign of right from gulfs of years that the darkness drank." Or— " Change darkens and lightens around her, alternate in hope and in fear to be : Hope knows not if fear speak truth, nor fear whether hope be not blind as she : But the sun is in heaven that beholds her im- mortal, and girdled with life by the sea." I suspect, then, that a hundred years hence, when criticism speaks calm judgment upon all Mr. Swinburne's writings, she will find that his earlier and more definite poems are the ed<^e of his blade, and such volumes as AstropJiel the heavy metal behind it. The former penetrated the affections of his country- men with ease : the latter followed more diffi- cultly through the outer tissues of a people Mr, Swinburne's Later Manner 317 notoriously pachydermatous to abstract speech. And criticism will then know if Mr. Swinburne brought sufficient impact to drive the whole mass of metal deep. At present, in these later volumes, his must A Voice , .... ,1 chanting seem to us a godlike voice chanting in the ^^^ij^^void void. For, fit or unfit as we may be to grasp the elusive substance of his strains, all must confess the voice of the singer to be divine. At once in the range and suppleness of his music he is not merely the first of our living poets, but incomparable. In learning he has Robert Bridges for a rival, and no other. But no amount of learning could give us 228 pages of music that from first to last has not a flaw. Rather, his marvellous ear has taken him safely through metres set by his learning as so many traps. There is one metre, for instance, that recurs again and again in this volume. Here is a specimen of it :— " Music bright as the soul of light, for wings an eagle, for notes a dove, Leaps and shines from the lustrous lines wherethrough thy soul from afar above Shone and sang till the darkness rang with light whose fire is the fount of love." 3i8 Adventures in Criticism These lines are written of Sir Philip Sidney. Could another man have w ritten them they had stood even better for Mr. Swinburne. But we are considering the metre, not the meaning. Now the metre may have great merits. I am disposed to say that, having fascinated Mr. Swinburne, it must have great merits. That I dislike it is, no doubt, my fault, or rather my misfortune. But un- qestionably it is a metre that no man but Mr. Swinburne could handle without producing a monotony varied only by discords. 319 A MORNING WITH A BOOK " Food, warmth, sleep, and a book ; these are all I April 2^ at present ask— the Ultima Thide of my wandering "'^93- desires. Do you not then wish for — HazlitC s Stipula- a friend in your retreat ^^-^ Whom y oil may whisper^ ' Solitude is sweet ' f Expected, well enough : gone, still better. Such attractions are strengthened by distance." So Hazlitt wrote in his Farewell to Essay Writing. There never was such an epicure of his moods as Hazlitt. Others might add Omar's stipulation — " — and Thou Beside me singing in the v/ilderness." But this addition would have spoiled Hazlitt's enjoyment. Let us remember that his love affairs had been unprosperous. "Such attractions," he would object, " are strength- ened by distance." In any case, the book and singer go ill together, and most of us will declare for a spell of each in turn. 320 Adventures in Criticism What are Suppose we choose the book. What kind " The Best Books " ? of book shall it be ? Shall it be an old book which we have forgotten just sufficiently to taste surprise as its felicities come back to us, and remember just sufficiently to escape the attentive strain of a first reading ? Or shall it be a new book by an audior we love, to be glanced through with no critical purpose (this may be deferred to the second reading), but merely for the lazy pleasure of recog- nising the familiar brain at work, and feeling happy, perhaps, at the success of a friend ? There is no doubt which Hazlitt would have chosen ; he has told us in his essay Ofi Reading Old Books. But after a recent ex- perience I am not sure that I agree with him. That your taste should approve only the best thoughts of the best minds is a pretty counsel, but one of perfection ; and is found in practice to breed prigs. It sets a man sailinir round in a vicious circle. What is the best thought of the best minds ? That approved by the man of highest culture. Who is the man of highest culture ? He whose taste approves the best thoughts of the A Morning with a Book 321 best minds. To escape from this foolish whirl- pool, some of our stoutest bottoms run for that discredited harbour of refuge — Popular Acceptance : a harbour full of shoals, of which nobody has provided even the sketch of a chart. Some years ago, when the Pall Mall Gazette sent round to all sorts and conditions of eminent men, inviting lists of " The Hundred Best Books " — the first serious attempt to introduce a decimal system into Great Britain — I remember that these emi- nent men's replies disclosed nothing so wonderful as their unanimity. We were prepared for Sir John Lubbock, but not, I think, for the host of celebrities who followed his hygienic example, and made a habit of taking the Rig Vedas to bed with them. Altogether their replies afforded plenty of material for a theory that to have every other body's taste in literature is the first condition of eminence in every branch of the public service. But in one of the lists — I think it was Sir Monier Williams's — the unexpected really happened. Sir Monier thought that OP ThE \) M f y r p c I T V 322 Adventures in Criticism Mr. T. E. Brown's The Doctor was one of the best books in the world. Now, the poems of Mr. T. E. Brown are not known to the million. But, like Mr. Robert Bridges, Mr. Brown has always had a band of readers to whom his name is more than that of many an acknowledged classic. I fancy it is a case of liking deeply or scarce at all. Those of us who are not celebrities may be allowed to have favourites who are not the favourites of others, writers who (fortuitously, perhaps) have helped us at some crisis of our life, have spoken to us the appropriate word at the moment of need, and for that reason sit cathedrally enthroned in our affections. To explain why the author of Betsy Lee, Tommy Big- Eyes, and The Doctor is more to me than most poets — why to open a new book of his is one of the most exciting literary events that can befall me in now my twenty-ninth year — would take some time, and the explanation might poorly satisfy the reader after all. My Morn- But I set out to describe a morning with ingwiih a ^ y^^^y^ ^j^^ y^^^^ ^^^ y^^ ^ Browtt's Old book A Morning with a Book 323 John^ and other Poems, published but a few days back by Messrs. Macmillan & Co. The morning was spent in a very small garden overlooking a harbour. Hazlitt's conditions were fulfilled. I had enjoyed enough food and sleep to last me for some little time : few people, I imagine, have com- plained of the cold, these last few weeks : and the book was not only new to me for the most part, but certain to please. Moreover, a small incident had already put me in the best of humours. Just as I was settling down to read, a small tug came down the harbour with a barque in tow whose nationality I recognised before she cleared a corner and showed the Norwegian colours drooping from her peak. I reached for the field-glass and read her name — Henrik Ibsen ! I imagined Mr. William Archer applauding as I ran to my own flag-staff and dipped the British ensign to that name. The Norwegians on deck stood puzzled for a moment, but, taking the compliment to themselves, gave me a cheerful hail, while one or two ran aft and dipped the Norwegian flag in response. It was still running frantically up and down the halliards L 2 324 Adventures in Critic ism when I returned to my scat, and the lines of the barque were softening to beauty in the distance — for, to tell the truth, she had looked a crazy and not altogether seaworthy craft — as I opened my book, and, by a stroke of luck, at that fine poem, TJie Schooner. " Just mark that schooner westward far at sea — 'Tis but an hour ago When she was lying hoggish at the quay, And men ran to and fro And tugged, and stamped, and shoved, and pushed, and swore, And ever and anon, with crapulous glee, Grinned homage to viragoes on the shore. " So to the jetty gradual she was hauled : Then one the tiller took. And chewed, and spat upon his hand, and bawled ; And one the canvas shook Forth like a mouldy bat ; and one, with nods And smiles, lay on the bowsprit end, and called And cursed the Harbour-master by his gods. " And, rotten from the gunwale to the keel. Rat-riddled, bilge-bestank Slime-slobbered, horrible, I saw her reel And drag her oozy flank. And sprawl among the deft young waves, that laughed And leapt, and turned in many a sportive wheel As she thumped onward with her lumbering draught. A Morning with a Book 325 *' And now, behold ! a shadow of repose Upon a line of gray She sleeps, that transverse cuts the evening rose, She sleeps and dreams away, Soft blended in a unity of rest All jars, and strifes obscene, and turbulent throes 'Neath the broad benediction of the West — " Sleeps ; and methinks she changes as she sleeps, And dies, and is a spirit pure ; Lo ! on her deck, an angel pilot keeps His lonely watch secure ; And at the entrance of Heaven's dockyard waits Till from night's leash the fine-breathed morning leaps, And that strong hand within unbars the gates." It is very far from being the finest poem in the volume. It has not the noble humanity of Catherme Kinrade — and if this be not a great poem I know nothing about poetry — nor the rapture oi Jessie, nor the awful pathos of Mater Dolorosa, nor the gentle pathos of Aber Stations, nor the fine religious feeling of Planting and Disguises. But it came so pat to the occasion, and used the occasion so deftly to take hold of one's sympathy, that these other poems were read in the very mood that, I am sure, their author would have asked for them. One has not often such 326 Adventures in Criticism luck in reading — " Never the time and the place and the author all together," if I may do this violence to Browning's line. Yet I trust that in any mood I should have had the sense to pay its meed of admiration to this volume. Now, having carefully read the opinions of some half-a-dozen reviewers upon it, I can only wonder and leave the question to my reader, warning him by no means to miss Mater Dolorosa and Catherine Kinrade. If he remain cold to these two poems, then I shall still preserve my own opinion. 327 MR. JOHN DAVIDSON For some weeks now I have been meaning ^/^^^^J' to write about Mr. John Davidson's Plays ^^.^ (Elkin Mathews and John Lane), and ahvays mys shirking the task at the last moment. The book is an exceedingly difficult one to write about, and I am not at all sure that after a few sentences I shall not stick my hands in my pockets and walk off to something easier. The recent fine weather has, however, made me desperate. The windows of the room in which I sit face S. and S.-E. ; consequently a deal of sunshine comes in upon my writing- table. In ninety-nine cases out of the hun- dred this makes for idleness ; in this, the hundredth case, it constrains to energy, be- cause it is rapidly bleaching the puce-coloured boards in which Mr. Davidson's plays are bound— and (which is worse) bleaching them unevenly. I have tried (let the miserable truth be confessed) turning the book daily, as 328 Adventures in Criticism one turns a piece of toast — But this is not criticism of Mr. Davidson's Plays. His Style Now it would be easy and pleasant to ex- i7na