VIEWS AND REVIEWS

ESSAYSIN APPRECIATION

By W. E. HENLEY

LITERATURE

LONDONPublished by DAVID NUTTin the Strand1892

* * * * *

FIRST EDITION

Printing begun 28th October 1889, ended 13th May 1890

ORDINARY ISSUE--1000 _copies_

Finest Japanese--20 _copies_

SECOND EDITION

Printing begun May 25th, ended June 18, 1892

1000 _copies_

_Edinburgh_:_ T. & A. CONSTABLE_, _Printers to Her Majesty_

TO THE MEN OF'THE SCOTS OBSERVER'

PREFATORY

_Suggested by one friend and selected and compiled by another_, _thisvolume is less a book than a mosaic of scraps and shreds recovered fromthe shot rubbish of some fourteen years of journalism_. _Thus_, _thenotes on Longfellow_, _Balzac_, _Sidney_, _Tourneur_, '_Arabian NightsEntertainments_, ' _Borrow_, _George Eliot_, _and Mr. Frederick Locker areextracted from originals in_ '_London_'--_a print still remembered withaffection by those concerned in it_; _those on Labiche_, _Champfleury_, _Richardson_, _Fielding_, _Byron_, _Gay_, _Congreve_, _Boswell_, '_Essaysand Essayists_, ' _Jefferies_, _Hood_, _Matthew Arnold_, _Lever_, _Thackeray_, _Dickens_, _M. Theodore de Banville_, _Mr. Austin Dobson_, _and Mr. George Meredith from articles contributed to_ '_The Athenaeum_';_those on Dumas_, _Count Tolstoi's novels_, _and the verse of Dr. Hakefrom_ '_The Saturday Review_'; _those on Walton_, _Landor_, _and Heinefrom_ '_The Scots Observer_, ' '_The Academy_, ' _and_ '_Vanity Fair_'_respectively_; _while the_ '_Disraeli_' _has been pieced together from_'_London_, ' '_Vanity Fair_, ' _and_ '_The Athenaeum_'; _the_ '_Berlioz_'_from_ '_The Scots Observer_' _and_ '_The Saturday Review_'; _the_'_Tennyson_' _from_ '_The Scots Observer_' _and_ '_The Magazine of Art_';_the_ '_Homer and Theocritus_' _from_ '_Vanity Fair_' _and the defunct_'_Teacher_'; _the_ '_Hugo_' _from_ '_The Athenaeum_, ' '_The Magazine ofArt_, ' _and an unpublished fragment written for_ '_The Scottish Church_. '_In all cases permission to reprint is hereby gratefully acknowledged_;_but the reprinted matter has been subjected to such a process ofrevision and reconstitution that much of it is practically new_, _whilelittle or none remains as it was_. _I venture_, _then_, _to hope thatthe result_, _for all its scrappiness_, _will be found to have that unitywhich comes of method and an honest regard for letters_. 

W. E. H. 

_Edinr. _ 8_th_ _May_ 1890

DICKENS

A 'Frightful Minus'

Mr. Andrew Lang is delightfully severe on those who 'cannot readDickens, ' but in truth it is only by accident that he is not himself ofthat unhappy persuasion. For Dickens the humourist he has a mostuncompromising enthusiasm; for Dickens the artist in drama and romance hehas as little sympathy as the most practical. Of the prose of _DavidCopperfield_ and _Our Mutual Friend_, the _Tale of Two Cities_ and _TheMystery of Edwin Drood_, he disdains to speak. He is almost fierce (forhim) in his denunciation of Little Nell and Paul Dombey; he protests thatMonks and Ralph Nickleby are 'too steep, ' as indeed they are. But ofBradley Headstone and Sydney Carton he says not a word; while of _MartinChuzzlewit_--but here he shall speak for himself, the italics being apresent to him. 'I have read in that book a score of times, ' says he; 'Inever see it but I revel in it--in Pecksniff and Mrs. Gamp and theAmericans. _But what the plot is all about_, _what Jonas did_, _whatMontague Tigg had to make in the matter_, _what all the pictures withplenty of shading illustrate_, _I have never been able to comprehend_. 'This is almost as bad as the reflection (in a magazine) that JonasChuzzlewit is 'the most shadowy murderer in fiction. ' Yet it isimpossible to be angry. In his own way and within his own limits Mr. Lang is such a thoroughgoing admirer of Dickens that you are moved tocompassion when you think of the much he loses by 'being constitutionallyincapable' of perfect apprehension. 'How poor, ' he cries, with generousenthusiasm, 'the world of fancy would be, "how dispeopled of her dreams, "if, in some ruin of the social system, the books of Dickens were lost;and if The Dodger, and Charley Bates, and Mr. Crinkle and Miss Squeersand Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp, and Dick Swiveller were to perish, or tovanish with Menander's men and women! We cannot think of our worldwithout them; and, children of dreams as they are, they seem moreessential than great statesmen, artists, soldiers, who have actually wornflesh and blood, ribbons and orders, gowns and uniforms. ' Nor is thisall. He is almost prepared to welcome 'free education, ' since 'everyEnglishman who can read, unless he be an Ass, is a reader the more' forDickens. Does it not give one pause to reflect that the writer of thischarming eulogy can only read the half of Dickens, and is half the idealof his own denunciation. 

His Method. 

Dickens's imagination was diligent from the outset; with him conceptionwas not less deliberate and careful than development; and so much heconfesses when he describes himself as 'in the first stage of a new book, which consists in going round and round the idea, as you see a bird inhis cage go about and about his sugar before he touches it. ' 'I have nomeans, ' he writes to a person wanting advice, 'of knowing whether you arepatient in the pursuit of this art; but I am inclined to think that youare not, and that you do not discipline yourself enough. When one isimpelled to write this or that, one has still to consider: "How much ofthis will tell for what I mean? How much of it is my own wild emotionand superfluous energy--how much remains that is truly belonging to thisideal character and these ideal circumstances?" It is in the laboriousstruggle to make this distinction, and in the determination to try forit, that the road to the correction of faults lies. [Perhaps I mayremark, in support of the sincerity with which I write this, that I am animpatient and impulsive person myself, but that it has been for manyyears the constant effort of my life to practise at my desk what I preachto you. ]' Such golden words could only have come from one enamoured ofhis art, and holding the utmost endeavour in its behalf of which hisheart and mind were capable for a matter of simple duty. They are aproof that Dickens--in intention at least, and if in intention thensurely, the fact of his genius being admitted, to some extent in fact aswell--was an artist in the best sense of the term. 

His Development. 

In the beginning he often wrote exceeding ill, especially when he wasdoing his best to write seriously. He developed into an artist in wordsas he developed into an artist in the construction and the evolution of astory. But his development was his own work, and it is a fact thatshould redound eternally to his honour that he began in newspaperEnglish, and by the production of an imitation of the _novelapicaresca_--a string of adventures as broken and disconnected as theadventures of Lazarillo de Tormes or Peregrine Pickle, and went on tobecome an exemplar. A man self-made and self-taught, if he knew anythingat all about the 'art for art' theory--which is doubtful--he may wellhave held it cheap enough. But he practised Millet's dogma--_Dans l'artil faut sa peau_--as resolutely as Millet himself, and that, too, underconditions that might have proved utterly demoralising had he been lessrobust and less sincere. He began as a serious novelist with RalphNickleby and Lord Frederick Verisopht; he went on to produce suchmasterpieces as Jonas Chuzzlewit and Doubledick, and Eugene Wrayburn andthe immortal Mrs. Gamp, and Fagin and Sikes and Sydney Carton, and manyanother. The advance is one from positive weakness to positive strength, from ignorance to knowledge, from incapacity to mastery, from themanufacture of lay figures to the creation of human beings. 

His Results. 

His faults were many and grave. He wrote some nonsense; he sinnedrepeatedly against taste; he could be both noisy and vulgar; he was aptto be a caricaturist where he should have been a painter; he was oftenmawkish and often extravagant; and he was sometimes more inept than agreat writer has ever been. But his work, whether bad or good, has infull measure the quality of sincerity. He meant what he did: and hemeant it with his whole heart. He looked upon himself as representativeand national--as indeed he was; he regarded his work as a universalpossession; and he determined to do nothing that for lack of pains shouldprove unworthy of his function. If he sinned it was unadvisedly andunconsciously; if he failed it was because he knew no better. You feelthat as you read. The freshness and fun of _Pickwick_--a comic middle-class epic, so to speak--seem mainly due to high spirits; and perhapsthat immortal book should be described as a first improvisation by ayoung man of genius not yet sure of either expression or ambition andwith only vague and momentary ideas about the duties and necessities ofart. But from _Pickwick_ onwards to _Edwin Drood_ the effort afterimprovement is manifest. What are _Dombey_ and _Dorrit_ themselves butthe failures of a great and serious artist? In truth the man's geniusdid but ripen with years and labour; he spent his life in developing froma popular writer into an artist. He extemporised _Pickwick_, it may be, but into _Copperfield_ and _Chuzzlewit_ and the _Tale of Two Cities_ and_Our Mutual Friend_ he put his whole might, working at them with apassion of determination not exceeded by Balzac himself. He hadenchanted the public without an effort; he was the best-beloved of modernwriters almost from the outset of his career. But he had in him at leastas much of the French artist as of the middle-class Englishman; and ifall his life he never ceased from self-education but went unswervingly inpursuit of culture, it was out of love for his art and because hisconscience as an artist would not let him do otherwise. We have beentold so often to train ourselves by studying the practice of workmen likeGautier and Hugo and imitating the virtues of work like _Hernani_ and_Quatre-Vingt-Treize_ and _l'Education Sentimentale_--we have heard somuch of the aesthetic impeccability of Young France and the section ofYoung England that affects its qualities and reproduces its fashions--thatit is hard to refrain from asking if, when all is said, we should not dowell to look for models nearer home? if in place of such moulds of formas _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ we might not take to considering stuff like_Rizpah_ and _Our Mutual Friend_?

Ave atque Vale. 

Yes, he had many and grave faults. But so had Sir Walter and the goodDumas; so, to be candid, had Shakespeare himself--Shakespeare the king ofpoets. To myself he is always the man of his unrivalled and enchantingletters--is always an incarnation of generous and abounding gaiety, atype of beneficent earnestness, a great expression of intellectual vigourand emotional vivacity. I love to remember that I came into the worldcontemporaneously with some of his bravest work, and to reflect that evenas he was the inspiration of my boyhood so is he a delight of my middleage. I love to think that while English literature endures he will beremembered as one that loved his fellow-men, and did more to make themhappy and amiable than any other writer of his time. 

THACKERAY

His Worshippers. 

It is odd to note how opinions differ as to the greatness of Thackerayand the value of his books. Some regard him as the greatest novelist ofhis age and country and as one of the greatest of any country and anyage. These hold him to be not less sound a moralist than excellent as awriter, not less magnificently creative than usefully and delightfullycynical, not less powerful and complete a painter of manners thaninfallible as a social philosopher and incomparable as a lecturer on thehuman heart. They accept Amelia Sedley for a very woman; they believe inColonel Newcome--'by _Don Quixote_ out of _Little Nell_'--as in somethingvenerable and heroic; they regard William Dobbin and 'Stunning'Warrington as finished and subtle portraitures; they think Becky Sharp animprovement upon Mme. Marneffe and Wenham better work than Rigby; theyare in love with Laura Bell, and refuse to see either cruelty orcaricature in their poet's presentment of Alcide de Mirobolant. Thackeray's fun, Thackeray's wisdom, Thackeray's knowledge of men andwomen, Thackeray's morality, Thackeray's view of life, 'his wit andhumour, his pathos, and his umbrella, ' are all articles of belief withthem. Of Dickens they will not hear; Balzac they incline to despise; ifthey make any comparison between Thackeray and Fielding, or Thackeray andRichardson, or Thackeray and Sir Walter, or Thackeray and Disraeli, it isto the disadvantage of Disraeli and Scott and Richardson and Fielding. All these were well enough in their way and day; but they are not to beclassed with Thackeray. It is said, no doubt, that Thackeray couldneither make stories nor tell them; but he liked stories for all that, and by the hour could babble charmingly of _Ivanhoe_ and the_Mousquetaires_. It is possible that he was afraid of passion, and hadno manner of interest in crime. But then, how hard he bore upon snobs, and how vigorously he lashed the smaller vices and the meaner faults! Itmay be beyond dispute that he was seldom good at romance, and saw mostthings--art and nature included--rather prosaically and ill-naturedly, ashe might see them who has been for many years a failure, and is naturallya little resentful of other men's successes; but then, how brilliant arehis studies of club humanity and club manners! how thoroughly heunderstands the feelings of them that go down into the West in broughams!If he writes by preference for people with a thousand a year, is it notthe duty of everybody with a particle of self-respect to have thatincome? Is it possible that any one who has it not can have either witor sentiment, humour or understanding? Thackeray writes _of_ gentlemen_for_ gentlemen; therefore he is alone among artists; therefore he is'the greatest novelist of his age. ' That is the faith of the truebeliever: that the state of mind of him that reveres less wisely thanthoroughly, and would rather be damned with Thackeray than saved with anyone else. 

His Critics. 

The position of them that wear their rue with a difference, and do notagree that all literature is contained in _The Book of Snobs_ and _VanityFair_, is more easily defended. They like and admire their Thackeray inmany ways, but they think him rather a writer of genius who was innatelyand irredeemably a Philistine than a supreme artist or a great man. Tothem there is something artificial in the man and something insincere inthe artist: something which makes it seem natural that his best workshould smack of the literary _tour de force_, and that he should neverhave appeared to such advantage as when, in _Esmond_ and in _BarryLyndon_, he was writing up to a standard and upon a model not wholly ofhis own contrivance. They admit his claim to eminence as an adventurerin 'the discovery of the Ugly'; but they contend that even there he didhis work more shrewishly and more pettily than he might; and in thisconnection they go so far as to reflect that a snob is not only 'one whomeanly admires mean things, ' as his own definition declares, but one whomeanly detests mean things as well. They agree with Walter Bagehot thatto be perpetually haunted by the plush behind your chair is hardly a signof lofty literary and moral genius; and they consider him narrow andvulgar in his view of humanity, limited in his outlook upon life, inclined to be envious, inclined to be tedious and pedantic, prone torepetitions, and apt in bidding for applause to appeal to the baserqualities of his readers and to catch their sympathy by making them feelthemselves spitefully superior to their fellow-men. They look at hisfavourite heroines--at Laura and Ethel and Amelia; and they can but thinkhim stupid who could ever have believed them interesting or admirable orattractive or true. They listen while he regrets it is impossible forhim to attempt the picture of a man; and, with Barry Lyndon in theirmind's eye and the knowledge that Casanova and Andrew Bowes suggested nomore than that, they wonder if the impossibility was not a piece of luckfor him. They hear him heaping contumely upon the murders andadulteries, the excesses in emotion, that pleased the men of 1830 as theyhad pleased the Elizabethans before them; and they see him turning withterror and loathing from these--which after all are effects of vigorouspassion--to busy himself with the elaborate and careful narrative of howBarnes Newcome beat his wife, and Mrs. Mackenzie scolded Colonel Newcometo death, and old Twysden bragged and cringed himself into good societyand an interest in the life and well-being of a little cad like CaptainWoolcomb; and it is not amazing if they think his morality more dubiousin some ways than the morality he is so firmly fixed to ridicule and tocondemn. They reflect that he sees in Beatrix no more than the makingsof a Bernstein; and they are puzzled, when they come to mark the contrastbetween the two portraitures and the difference between the part assignedto Mrs. Esmond and the part assigned to the Baroness, to decide if hewere short-sighted or ungenerous, if he were inapprehensive or onlycruel. They weary easily of his dogged and unremitting pursuit of themerely conventional man and the merely conventional woman; they cannotalways bring themselves to be interested in the cupboard drama, the tea-cup tragedies and cheque-book and bandbox comedies, which he regards asthe stuff of human action and the web of human life; and from theirtheory of existence they positively refuse to eliminate the heroicqualities of romance and mystery and passion, which are--as they haveonly to open their newspapers to see--essentials of human achievement andintegral elements of human character. They hold that his books containsome of the finest stuff in fiction: as, for instance, Rawdon Crawley'sdiscovery of his wife and Lord Steyne, and Henry Esmond's return from thewars, and those immortal chapters in which the Colonel and FrankCastlewood pursue and run down their kinswoman and the Prince. But theyhold, too, that their influence is dubious, and that few have risen fromthem one bit the better or one jot the happier. 

Which is Right?

Genius apart, Thackeray's morality is that of a highly respectableBritish cynic; his intelligence is largely one of trifles; he is wiseover trivial and trumpery things. He delights in reminding us--with anair!--that everybody is a humbug; that we are all rank snobs; that tomisuse your aspirates is to be ridiculous and incapable of real merit;that Miss Blank has just slipped out to post a letter to Captain Jones;that Miss Dash wears false teeth and a wig; that General Tufto is almostas tightly laced as the beautiful Miss Hopper; that there's a bum-bailiffin the kitchen at Number Thirteen; that the dinner we ate t'other day atTimmins's is still to pay; that all is vanity; that there's a skeleton inevery house; that passion, enthusiasm, excess of any sort, is unwise, abominable, a little absurd; and so forth. And side by side with theseassurances are admirable sketches of character and still more admirablesketches of habit and of manners--are the Pontos and Costigan, Gandishand Talbot Twysden and the unsurpassable Major, Sir Pitt and BrandFirmin, the heroic De la Pluche and the engaging Farintosh and theversatile Honeyman, a crowd of vivid and diverting portraitures besides;but they are not different--in kind at least--from the reflectionssuggested by the story of their several careers and the development oftheir several individualities. Esmond apart, there is scarce a man or awoman in Thackeray whom it is possible to love unreservedly or thoroughlyrespect. That gives the measure of the man, and determines the qualityof his influence. He was the average clubman _plus_ genius and a style. And, if there is any truth in the theory that it is the function of artnot to degrade but to ennoble--not to dishearten but to encourage--not todeal with things ugly and paltry and mean but with great things andbeautiful and lofty--then, it is argued, his example is one to depreciateand to condemn. 

 His Style. 

Thus the two sects: the sect of them that are with Thackeray and the sectof them that are against him. Where both agree is in the fact ofThackeray's pre-eminence as a writer of English and the master of one ofthe finest prose styles in literature. His manner is the perfection ofconversational writing. Graceful yet vigorous; adorably artificial yetincomparably sound; touched with modishness yet informed withdistinction; easily and happily rhythmical yet full of colour and quickwith malice and with meaning; instinct with urbanity and instinct withcharm--it is a type of high-bred English, a climax of literary art. Hemay not have been a great man but assuredly he was a great writer; he mayhave been a faulty novelist but assuredly he was a rare artist in words. Setting aside Cardinal Newman's, the style he wrote is certainly lessopen to criticism than that of any other modern Englishman. He wasneither super-eloquent like Mr. Ruskin nor a Germanised Jeremy likeCarlyle; he was not marmoreally emphatic as Landor was, nor was heslovenly and inexpressive as was the great Sir Walter; he neither dalliedwith antithesis like Macaulay nor rioted in verbal vulgarisms withDickens; he abstained from technology and what may be calledLord-Burleighism as carefully as George Eliot indulged in them, and heavoided conceits as sedulously as Mr. George Meredith goes out of his wayto hunt for them. He is a better writer than any one of these, in thathe is always a master of speech and of himself, and that he is alwayscareful yet natural and choice yet seemingly spontaneous. He wrote as avery prince among talkers, and he interfused and interpenetrated Englishwith the elegant and cultured fashion of the men of Queen Anne and withsomething of the warmth, the glow, the personal and romantic ambition, peculiar to the century of Byron and Keats, of Landor and Dickens, ofRuskin and Tennyson and Carlyle. Unlike his only rival, he had learnthis art before he began to practise it. Of the early work of the greaterartist a good half is that of a man in the throes of education: theideas, the thoughts, the passion, the poetry, the humour, are of thebest, but the expression is self-conscious, strained, ignorant. Thackerayhad no such blemish. He wrote dispassionately, and he was a born writer. In him there is no hesitation, no fumbling, no uncertainty. The style of_Barry Lyndon_ is better and stronger and more virile than the style of_Philip_; and unlike the other man's, whose latest writing is his best, their author's evolution was towards decay. 

His Mission. 

He is so superior a person that to catch him tripping is a peculiarpleasure. It is a satisfaction apart, for instance, to reflect that hehas (it must be owned) a certain gentility of mind. Like the M. P. In_Martin Chuzzlewit_, he represents the Gentlemanly Interest. That is hismission in literature, and he fulfils it thoroughly. He appearssometimes as Mr. Yellowplush, sometimes as Mr. Fitzboodle, sometimes asMichael Angelo Titmarsh, but always in the Gentlemanly Interest. In hisyouth (as ever) he is found applauding the well-bred Charles de Bernard, and remarking of Balzac and Dumas that the one is 'not fit for the_salon_, ' and the other 'about as genteel as a courier. ' Balzac andDumas are only men of genius and great artists: the real thing is to be'genteel' and write--as _Gerfeuil_ (_sic_) is written--'in a gentleman-like style. ' A few pages further on in the same pronouncement (a reviewof _Jerome Paturot_), I find him quoting with entire approval Reybaud'ssketch of 'a great character, in whom the _habitue_ of Paris will perhapsrecognise a certain likeness to a certain celebrity of the present day, by name Monsieur Hector Berlioz, the musician and critic. ' Thedescription is too long to quote. It sparkles with all the _fadaises_ ofanti-Berliozian criticism, and the point is that the hero, afterconducting at a private party (which Berlioz never did) his own 'hymn ofthe creation that has been lost since the days of the deluge, ' 'calledfor his cloak and his clogs, and walked home, where he wrote a critiquefor the newspapers of the music which he had composed and directed. ' Inthe Gentlemanly Interest Mr. Titmarsh translates this sorry little libelwith the utmost innocence of approval. It is _The Paris Sketch-Book_over again. That Monsieur Hector Berlioz may possibly have knownsomething of his trade and been withal as honest a man and artist ashimself seems never to have occurred to him. He knows nothing ofMonsieur Hector except that he is a 'hairy romantic, ' and that whateverhe wrote it was not _Batti_, _batti_; but that nothing is enough. 'Whether this little picture is a likeness or not, ' he is ingenuousenough to add, 'who shall say?' But, --and here speaks the bold butsuperior Briton--'it is a good caricature of a race in France, wheregeniuses _poussent_ as they do nowhere else; where poets are prophets, where romances have revelations. ' As he goes on to qualify _JeromePaturot_ as a 'masterpiece, ' and as 'three volumes of satire in whichthere is not a particle of bad blood, ' it seems fair to conclude that inthe Gentlemanly Interest all is considered fair, and that to accuse a manof writing criticisms on his own works is to be 'witty and entertaining, 'and likewise 'careless, familiar, and sparkling' to the genteelestpurpose possible in this genteelest of all possible worlds. 

DISRAELI

His Novels. 

To the general his novels must always be a kind of caviare; for they haveno analogue in letters, but are the output of a mind and temper ofsingular originality. To the honest Tory, sworn to admire and unable tocomprehend, they must seem inexplicable as abnormal. To the professionalRadical they are so many proofs of innate inferiority: for they are fullof pretentiousness and affectation; they teem with examples of all mannerof vices, from false English to an immoral delight in dukes; they provetheir maker a trickster and a charlatan in every page. To them, however, whose first care is for rare work, the series of novels that began with_Vivian Grey_ and ended with _Endymion_ is one of the pleasant facts inmodern letters. These books abound in wit and daring, in originality andshrewdness, in knowledge of the world and in knowledge of men; theycontain many vivid and striking studies of character, both portrait andcaricature; they sparkle with speaking phrases and happy epithets; theyare aglow with the passion of youth, the love of love, the worship ofphysical beauty, the admiration of whatever is costly and select andsplendid--from a countess to a castle, from a duke to a diamond; they areradiant with delight in whatever is powerful or personal orattractive--from a cook to a cardinal, from an agitator to an emperor. They often remind you of Voltaire, often of Balzac, often of _The ArabianNights_. You pass from an heroic drinking bout to a brilliant criticismof style; from rhapsodies on bands and ortolans that remind you of Heineto a gambling scene that for directness and intensity may vie with thebluntest and strongest work of Prosper Merimee; from the extravagantimpudence of _Popanilla_ to the sentimental rodomontade of _HenriettaTemple_; from ranting romanticism in _Alroy_ to vivid realism in _Sybil_. Their author gives you no time to weary of him, for he is worldly andpassionate, fantastic and trenchant, cynical and ambitious, flippant andsentimental, ornately rhetorical and triumphantly simple in a breath. Heis imperiously egoistic, but while constantly parading his ownpersonality he is careful never to tell you anything about it. Andwithal he is imperturbably good-tempered: he brands and gibbets with asmile, and with a smile he adores and applauds. Intellectually he is insympathy with character of every sort; he writes as becomes an artist whohas recognised that 'the conduct of men depends upon the temperament, notupon a bunch of musty maxims, ' and that 'there is a great deal of vicethat is really sheer inadvertence. ' It is said that the Monmouth of_Coningsby_ and the Steyne of _Vanity Fair_ are painted from one and thesame original; and you have but to compare the savage realism ofThackeray's study to the scornful amenity of the other's--as you have butto contrast the elaborate and extravagant cruelty of Thackeray's Alcidede Mirobolant with the polite and half-respectful irony of Disraeli'streatment of the cooks in _Tancred_--to perceive that in certain ways theadvantage is not with 'the greatest novelist of his time, ' and that theMonmouth produces an impression which is more moral because more kindlyand humane than the impression left by the Steyne, while in its way it isevery whit as vivid and as convincing. Yet another excellence, and agreat one, is his mastery of apt and forcible dialogue. The talk of Mr. Henry James's personages is charmingly equable and appropriate, but it isalso trivial and tame; the talk in Anthony Trollope is surprisinglynatural and abundant, but it is also commonplace and immemorable; thetalk of Mr. George Meredith is always eloquent and fanciful, but theeloquence is too often dark and the fancy too commonly inhuman. WhatDisraeli's people have to say is not always original nor profound, but itis crisply and happily phrased and uttered, it reads well, its impressionseldom fails of permanency. His _Wit and Wisdom_ is a kind of _Talker'sGuide_ or _Handbook of Conversation_. How should it be otherwise, seeingthat it contains the characteristic utterances of a great artist in liferenowned for memorable speech?

A Contrast. 

Now, if you ask a worshipper of him that was so long his rival, to repeata saying, a maxim, a sentence, of which his idol is the author, it isodds but he will look like a fool, and visit you with an evasive answer. What else should he do? His deity is a man of many words and no sayings. He is the prince of agitators, but it would be impossible for him to minta definition of 'agitation'; he is the world's most eloquentarithmetician, but it is beyond him to epigrammatise the fact that twoand two make four. And it seems certain, unless the study of Homer andreligious fiction inspire him to some purpose, that his contributions toaxiomatic literature will be still restricted to the remark that 'Thereare three courses open' to something or other: to the House, to the angrycabman, to what and whomsoever you will. In sober truth, he is one whowrites for to-day, and takes no thought of either yesterdays or morrows. For him the Future is next session; the Past does not extend beyond hislast change of mind. He is a prince of journalists, and his excursionsinto monthly literature remain to show how great and copious a master ofthe 'leader'--ornate, imposing, absolutely insignificant--his absorptionin politics has cost the English-speaking world. 

His Backgrounds. 

Disraeli's imagination, at once practical and extravagant, is not of thekind that delights in plot and counterplot. His novels abound in action, but the episodes wear a more or less random look: the impression producedis pretty much that of a story of adventure. But if they fail as storiesthey are unexceptionable as canvases. Our author unrolls them withsuperb audacity; and rapidly and vigorously he fills them in with placesand people, with faces that are as life and words expressive even asthey. Nothing is too lofty or too low for him. He hawks at every sortof game, and rarely does he make a false cast. It is but a step from thewilds of Lancashire to the Arabian Desert, from the cook's first floor tothe Home of the Bellamonts; for he has the Seven-League-Boots of thelegend, and more than the genius of adventure of him that wore them. Hiscastles may be of cardboard, his cataracts of tinfoil, the sun of hisadjurations the veriest figment; but he never lets his readers see thathe knows it. His irony, sudden and reckless and insidious though it be, yet never extends to his properties. There may be a sneer beneath thatmask which, with an egotism baffling as imperturbable, he delights inintruding among his creations; but you cannot see it. You suspect itspresence, because he is a born mocker. But you remember that one of hismost obvious idiosyncrasies is an inordinate love of all that issumptuous, glittering, radiant, magnificent; and you incline to suspectthat he keeps his sneering for the world of men, and admires his scenesand decorations too cordially to visit them with anything so merciless. 

His Men and Women. 

But dashing and brilliant as are his sketches of places and things, theyare after all the merest accessories. It was as a student of Men andWomen that he loved to excel, and it is as their painter that I praisehim now. Himself a worshipper of intellect, it was intellectually thathe mastered and developed them. Like Sidonia he moves among them not tofeel with them but to understand and learn from them. Such sympathy ashe had was either purely sensuous, as for youth and beauty and all kindsof comeliness; or purely intellectual, as for intelligence, artificiality, servility, meanness. And as his essence was satirical, ashe was naturally irreverent and contemptuous, it follows that he is bestand strongest in the act of punishment not of reward. His passion foryouth was beautiful, but it did not make him strong. His scorn forthings contemptible, his hate for things hateful, are at times too bittereven for those who think with him; but in these lay his force--theyfilled his brain with light, and they touched his lips with fire. Thewretched Rigby is far more vigorous and life-like than the amiableConingsby; Tom Cogit--a sketch, but a sketch of genius--is infinitelymore interesting than May Dacre or even the Young Duke; Tancred is a goodfellow, and very real and true in his goodness, but contrast him withFakredeen! And after his knaves, his fools, his tricksters, the moststriking figures in his gallery are those whom he has considered from apurely intellectual point of view: either kindly, as Sidonia, or coolly, as Lord Monmouth, but always calmly and with no point of passion in hisregard: the Eskdales, Villebecques, Ormsbys, Bessos, Marneys, Meltons, and Mirabels, the Bohuns and St. Aldegondes and Grandisons, the Tadpolesand the Tapers, the dominant and subaltern humanity of the world. Allthese are drawn with peculiar boldness of line, precision of touch, andclearness of intention. And as with his men so is it with his women: thefinest are not those he likes best but those who interested him most. Male and female, his eccentrics surpass his commonplaces. He had a greatregard for girls, and his attitude towards them, or such of them as heelected heroines, was mostly one of adoration--magnificent yet a littleawkward and strained. With women, married women, he had vastly more incommon: he could admire, study, divine, without having to feign a warmerfeeling; and while his girls are poor albeit splendid young persons, hismatrons are usually delightful. Edith Millbank is not a very strikingfigure in _Coningsby_; but her appearance in _Tancred_--well, you haveonly to compare it to the resurrection of Laura Bell, as Mrs. Pendennisto see how good it is. 

His Style. 

Now and then the writing is bad, and the thought is stale. Disraeli hadmany mannerisms, innate and acquired. His English was frequently looseand inexpressive; he was apt to trip in his grammar, to stumble over 'andwhich, ' and to be careless about the connection between his nominativesand his verbs. Again, he could scarce ever refrain from the use ofgorgeous commonplaces of sentiment and diction. His taste was sometimesornately and barbarically conventional; he wrote as an orator, and hisphrases often read as if he had used them for the sake of theirassociations rather than themselves. His works are a casket of suchstage jewels of expression as 'Palladian structure, ' 'Tusculan repose, ''Gothic pile, ' 'pellucid brow, ' 'mossy cell, ' and 'dew-bespangled meads. 'He delighted in 'hyacinthine curls' and 'lustrous locks, ' in 'smilingparterres' and 'stately terraces. ' He seldom sat down in print toanything less than a 'banquet', he was capable of invoking 'the irispencil of Hope'; he could not think nor speak of the beauties of womanexcept as 'charms. ' Which seems to show that to be 'born in a library, 'and have Voltaire--that impeccable master of the phrase--for your chiefof early heroes and exemplars is not everything. 

His Oratory. 

It is admitted, I believe, that he had many of the qualities of a greatpublic speaker: that he had an admirable voice and an excellent method;that his sequences were logical and natural, his arguments vigorous andpersuasive; that he was an artist in style, and in the course of a singlespeech could be eloquent and vivacious, ornate and familiar, passionateand cynical, deliberately rhetorical and magnificently fantastic in turn;that he was a master of all oratorical modes--of irony and argument, ofstately declamation and brilliant and unexpected antithesis, ofcaricature and statement and rejoinder alike; that he could explain, denounce, retort, retract, advance, defy, dispute, with equal readinessand equal skill; that he was unrivalled in attack and unsurpassed indefence; and that in heated debate and on occasions when he felt himselfjustified in putting forth all his powers and in striking in with thefull weight of his imperious and unique personality he was the mostdangerous antagonist of his time. And yet, in spite of his mysteriousand commanding influence over his followers--in spite, too, of the factthat he died assuredly the most romantic and perhaps the most popularfigure of his time--it is admitted withal that he was lacking in acertain quality of temperament, that attribute great orators possess incommon with great actors: the power, that is, of imposing oneself upon anaudience not by argument nor by eloquence, not by the perfect utteranceof beautiful and commanding speech nor by the enunciation of eternalprinciples or sympathetic and stirring appeals, but by an effect ofpersonal magnetism, by the expression through voice and gesture andpresence of an individuality, a temperament, call it what you will, thatmay be and is often utterly commonplace but is always inevitablyirresistible. He could slaughter an opponent, or butcher a measure, orcrumple up a theory with unrivalled adroitness and despatch; but he couldnot dominate a crowd to the extent of persuading it to feel with hisheart, think with his brain, and accept his utterances as the expressionnot only of their common reason but of their collective sentiment aswell. He was as incapable of such a feat as Mr. Gladstone's Midlothiancampaign as Mr. Gladstone is of producing the gaming scene in _The YoungDuke_ or the 'exhausted volcanoes' paragraph in the Manchester speech. 

His Speeches as Literature. 

As a rule--a rule to which there are some magnificent exceptions--oratorshave only to cease from speaking to become uninteresting. What has beenheard with enthusiasm is read with indifference or even withastonishment. You miss the noble voice, the persuasive gesture, theirresistible personality; and with the emotional faculty at rest and thereason at work you are surprised--and it may be a little indignant--thatyou should have been impressed so deeply as you were by such cold, baldverbosity as seen in black and white the masterpiece of yesterday appearsto be. To some extent this is the case with these speeches ofDisraeli's. At the height of debate, amid the clash of personal andparty animosities, with the cheers of the orator's supporters to givethem wings, they sounded greater than they were. But for all that theyare vigorous and profitable yet. Their author's unfailing capacity forsaying things worth heeding and remembering is proved in every one ofthem. It is not easy to open either of Mr. Kebbel's volumes withoutlighting upon something--a string of epigrams, a polished gibe, a burstof rhetoric, an effective collocation of words--that proclaims theartist. In this connection the perorations are especially instructive, even if you consider them simply as arrangements of sonorous andsuggestive words: as oratorical impressions carefully prepared, aseffects of what may be called vocalised orchestration touched off asskilfully and with as fine a sense of sound and of the sentiment tocorrespond as so many passages of instrumentation signed 'Berlioz' mightbe. 

The Great Earl. 

Fruits fail, and love dies, and time ranges; and only the whippersnapper(that fool of Time) endureth for ever. Moliere knew him well, and hesaid that Moliere was a liar and a thief. And Disraeli knew him too, andhe said that in these respects Disraeli and Moliere were brothers. Thathe said so matters as little now as ever it did; for though thewhippersnapper is immortal in kind, he is nothing if not futile andephemeral in effect, and it was seen long since that in life and deathDisraeli, as became his genius and his race, was the Uncommonplaceincarnate, the antithesis of Grocerdom, the Satan of that revolt againstthe yielding habit of Jehovah-Bottles the spirit whereof is fast comingto be our one defence against socialism and the dominion of the CommonFool. He was no sentimentalist: as what great artist in government hasever been? He loved power for power's sake, and recognising to the fullthe law of the survival of the fittest he preferred his England to theworld. He knew that it is the function of the man of genius to show thattheory is only theory, and that in the House of Morality there are manymansions. To that end he lived and died; and it is not until one hascomprehended the complete significance of his life and death that one isqualified to speak with understanding of such a life and death as his whopassed at Khartoum. 

ALEXANDRE DUMAS

His Components. 

The life of Dumas is not only a monument of endeavour and success, it isa sort of labyrinth as well. It abounds in pseudonyms and disguises, insudden and unexpected appearances and retreats as unexpected and sudden, in scandals and in rumours, in mysteries and traps and ambuscades ofevery kind. It pleased the great man to consider himself of moreimportance than any and all of the crowd of collaborators whose ideas hedeveloped, whose raw material he wrought up into the achievement we know;and he was given to take credit to himself not only for the success andvalue of a particular work but for the whole thing--the work in itsquiddity, so to speak, and resolved into its original elements. On theother hand, it pleased such painful creatures as MM. Querard and 'Eugenede Mirecourt, ' as it has since pleased Messrs. Hitchman and Fitzgerald toconsider the second- and third-rate literary persons whom Dumasassimilated in such numbers as of greater interest and higher merit thanDumas. To them the jackals were far nobler than the lion, and theyworked their hardest in the interest of the pack. It was their missionto decompose and disintegrate the magnificent entity which M. Blaze deBury very happily nicknames 'Dumas-Legion, ' and in the process not torender his own unto Caesar but to take from him all that was Caesar's, and divide it among the mannikins he had absorbed. And their work was inits way well done; for have we not seen M. Brunetiere exulting inagreement and talking of Dumas as one less than Eugene Sue and not muchbigger than Gaillardet? Of course the ultimate issue of the debate isnot doubtful. Dumas remains to the end a prodigy of force and industry, a miracle of cleverness and accomplishment and ease, a type of generousand abundant humanity, a great artist in many varieties of form, a princeof talkers and story-tellers, one of the kings of the stage, a benefactorof his epoch and his kind; while of those who assisted him in theproduction of his immense achievement the most exist but as fractions ofthe larger sum, and the others have utterly disappeared. 'Combien, ' sayshis son in that excellent page which serves to preface _le FilsNaturel_--'combien parmi ceux qui devaient rester obscurs se sonteclaires et chauffes a ta forge, et si l'heure des restitutions sonnait, quel gain pour toi, rien qu'a reprendre ce que tu as donne et ce qu'ont'a pris!' That is the true verdict of posterity, and he does well whoabides by it. 

Himself. 

He is one of the heroes of modern art. Envy and scandal have done theirworst now. The libeller has said his say; the detectives who make aspecialty of literary forgeries have proved their cases one and all; thejudges of matter have spoken, and so have the critics of style; thedistinguished author of _Nana_ has taken us into his confidence on thesubject; we have heard from the lamented Granier and others as much aswas to be heard on the question of plagiarism in general and theplagiarisms of Dumas in particular; and Mr. Percy Fitzgerald has donewhat he is pleased to designate the 'nightman's work' of analysing_Antony_ and _Kean_, and of collecting everything that spite has saidabout their author's life, their author's habits, their author's mannersand customs and character: of whose vanity, mendacity, immorality, ascore of improper qualities besides, enough has been written to furnish agood-sized library. And the result of it all is that Dumas is recognisedfor a force in modern art and for one of the greatest inventors andamusers the century has produced. Whole crowds of men were named as thereal authors of his books and plays; but they were only readable when hesigned for them. His ideas were traced to a hundred originals; but theyhad all seemed worthless till he took them in hand and developed themaccording to their innate capacity. The French he wrote was popular, andthe style at his command was none of the loftiest, as his critics haveoften been at pains to show; but he was for all that an artist at onceoriginal and exemplary, with an incomparable instinct of selection, aconstructive faculty not equalled among the men of this century, anunderstanding of what is right and what is wrong in art and a mastery ofhis materials which in their way are not to be paralleled in the work ofSir Walter himself. Like Napoleon, he was 'a natural force let loose';and if he had done no more than achieve universal renown as the prince of_raconteurs_ and a commanding position as a novelist wherever novels areread he would still have done much. But he did a vast deal more. Anatural force, he wrought in the right direction, as natural forces mustand do. He amused the world for forty years and more; but he alsocontributed something to the general sum of the world's artisticexperience and capacity, and his contribution is of permanent worth andcharm. He has left us stories which are models of the enchanting art ofnarrative; and, with a definition good and comprehensive enough toinclude all the best work which has been produced for the theatre fromAEschylus down to Augier, from the _Choephorae_ on to _le Gendre de M. Poirier_, he has given us types of the romantic and the domestic drama, which, new when he produced them, are even now not old, and which asregards essentials have yet to be improved upon. The form and aim of themodern drama, as we know it, have been often enough ascribed to theingenious author of _une Chaine_ and the _Verre d'Eau_; but they mightwith much greater truth be ascribed to the author of _Antony_ and _laTour de Nesle_. Scribe invents and eludes where Dumas invents and dares. The theory of Scribe is one of mere dexterity: his drama is a perpetual_chasse-croise_ at the edge of a precipice, a dance of puppets amongswords that might but will not cut and eggs that might but will notbreak; to him a situation is a kind of tight-rope to be crossed with everso much agility and an endless affectation of peril by all his charactersin turn: in fact, as M. Dumas _fils_ has said of him, he is 'leShakespeare des ombres chinoises. ' The theory of Dumas is the veryantipodes of this. 'All I want, ' he said in a memorable comparisonbetween himself and Victor Hugo, 'is four trestles, four boards, twoactors, and a passion'; and his good plays are a proof that in this hespoke no more than the truth. Drama to him was so much emotion inaction. If he invented a situation he accepted its issues in theirentirety, and did his utmost to express from it all the passion itcontained. That he fails to reach the highest peaks of emotional effectis no fault of his: to do that something more is needed than a perfectmethod, something other than a great ambition and an absolute certaintyof touch; and Dumas was neither a Shakespeare nor an AEschylus--he wasnot even an Augier. All the same, he has produced in _la Tour de Nesle_a romantic play which M. Zola himself pronounces the ideal of the _genre_and in _Antony_ an achievement in drawing-room tragedy which is out ofall questioning the first, and in the opinion of a critic so competentand so keen as the master's son is probably the strongest, thing of itskind in modern literature. On this latter play it were difficult, Ithink, to bestow too much attention. It is touched, even tainted, withthe manner and the affectation of its epoch. But it is admirablyimagined and contrived; it is very daring, and it is very new; it dealswith the men and women of 1830, and--with due allowance for differencesof manners, ideal, and personal genius--it is in its essentials a play inthe same sense as _Othello_ and the _Trachiniae_ are plays in theirs. Itis the beginning, as I believe, not only of _les Lionnes Pauvres_ but of_Therese Raquin_ and _la Glu_ as well: just as _la Tour de Nesle_ is thebeginning of _Patrie_ and _la Haine_. 

At Least. 

And if these greater and loftier pretensions be still contested; if thetheory of the gifted creature who wrote that the works of the masterwizard are 'like summer fruits brought forth abundantly in the full blazeof sunshine, which do not keep'--if this preposterous fantasy begenerally accepted, there will yet be much in Dumas to venerate and love. If _Antony_ were of no more account than an ephemeral burlesque; if _laReine Margot_ and the immortal trilogy of the Musketeers--that 'epic offriendship'--were dead as morality and as literature alike; if it werenothing to have re-cast the novel of adventure, formulated the moderndrama, and perfected the drama of incident; if to have sent all France tothe theatre to see in three dimensions those stories of Chicot, EdmondDantes, d'Artagnan, which it knew by heart from books were an achievementwithin the reach of every scribbler who dabbles in letters; if all thiswere true, and Dumas were merely a piece of human journalism, produced to-day and gone to-morrow, there would still be enough of him to make his amemorable name. He was a prodigy--of amiability, cleverness, energy, daring, charm, industry--if he was nothing else. Gronow tells that hehas sat at table with Dumas and Brougham, and that Brougham, out-facedand out-talked, was forced to quit the field. 'J'ai conserve, ' says M. Maxime du Camp, in his admirable _Souvenirs litteraires_, 'd'AlexandreDumas un souvenir ineffacable; malgre un certain laisser-aller qui tenaita l'exuberance de sa nature, c'etait un homme _dont tous les sentimentsetaient eleves_. On a ete injuste pour lui; comme il avait enormementd'esprit, on l'a accuse d'etre leger; comme il produisait avec unefacilite incroyable, on l'a accuse de gacher la besogne, et, comme iletait prodigue, on l'a accuse de manquer de tenue. Ces reproches m'onttoujours paru miserables. ' This is much; but it is not nearly all. Hehad, this independent witness goes on to note, 'une generosite naturellequi ne comptait jamais; il ressemblait a une corne d'abondance qui sevide sans cesse dans les mains tendues; _la moitie_, _sinon plus_, _del'argent gagne par lui a ete donnee_. ' That is true; and it is also truethat he gave at least as largely of himself--his prodigious temperament, his generous gaiety, his big, manly heart, his turn for chivalry, hisgallant and delightful genius--as of his money. He was reputed a violentand luxurious debauchee; and he mostly lived in an attic--(the worst roomin the house and therefore the only one he could call his own)--with acamp-bed and the deal table at which he wrote. He passed for aloud-mouthed idler; and during many years his daily average of work wasfourteen hours for months on end. 'Ivre de puissance, ' says George Sandof him, but 'foncierement bon. ' They used to hear him laughing as hewrote, and when he killed Porthos he did no more that day. It would havebeen worth while to figure as one of the crowd of friends and parasiteswho lived at rack and manger in his house, for the mere pleasure ofseeing him descend upon them from his toil of moving mountains andsharing in that pleasing half-hour of talk which was his commonrefreshment. After that he would return to the attic and the deal table, and move more mountains. With intervals of travel, sport, adventure, andwhat in France is called 'l'amour'--(it is strange, by the way, that hewas never a hero of Carlyle's)--he lived in this way more or less forforty years or so; and when he left Paris for the last time he had buttwo napoleons in his pocket. 'I had only one when I came here first, 'quoth he, 'and yet they call me a spendthrift. ' That was his way; andwhile the result is not for Dr. Smiles to chronicle, I for one persist inregarding the spirit in which it was accepted as not less exemplary thandelightful. 

His Monument. 

On M. Du Camp's authority there is a charming touch to add to his son'sdescription of him. 'Il me semble, ' said the royal old prodigal in hislast illness, 'que je suis au sommet d'un monument qui tremble comme siles fondations etaient assises sur le sable. ' 'Sois en paix, ' repliedthe author of the _Demi-Monde_: 'le monument est bien bati, et la baseest solide. ' He was right, as we know. It is good and fitting thatDumas should have a monument in the Paris he amazed and delighted andamused so long. But he could have done without one. In what language ishe not read? and where that he is read is he not loved? '_Exegimonumentum_, ' he might have said: 'and wherever romance is a necessary oflife, there shall you look for it, and not in vain. '

GEORGE MEREDITH

His Qualities. 

To read Mr. Meredith's novels with insight is to find them full of therarest qualities in fiction. If their author has a great capacity forunsatisfactory writing he has capacities not less great for writing thatis satisfactory in the highest degree. He has the tragic instinct andendowment, and he has the comic as well; he is an ardent student ofcharacter and life; he has wit of the swiftest, the most comprehensive, the most luminous, and humour that can be fantastic or ironical or humanat his pleasure; he has passion and he has imagination; he has consideredsex--the great subject, the leaven of imaginative art--with notableaudacity and insight. He is as capable of handling a vice or an emotionas he is of managing an affectation. He can be trivial, or grotesque, orsatirical, or splendid; and whether his _milieu_ be romantic or actual, whether his personages be heroic or sordid, he goes about his task withthe same assurance and intelligence. In his best work he takes rank withthe world's novelists. He is a companion for Balzac and Richardson, anintimate for Fielding and Cervantes. His figures fall into their placebeside the greatest of their kind; and when you think of Lucy Feverel andMrs. Berry, of Evan Harrington's Countess Saldanha and the Lady Charlotteof _Emilia in England_, of the two old men in _Harry Richmond_ and theSir Everard Romfrey of _Beauchamp's Career_, of Renee and Cecilia, ofEmilia and Rhoda Fleming, of Rose Jocelyn and Lady Blandish and RiptonThompson, they have in the mind's eye a value scarce inferior to that ofClarissa and Lovelace, of Bath and Western and Booth, of AndrewFairservice and Elspeth Mucklebacket, of Philippe Bridau and Vautrin andBalthasar Claes. In the world of man's creation his people are citizensto match the noblest; they are of the aristocracy of the imagination, thepeers in their own right of the society of romance. And for all that, their state is mostly desolate and lonely and forlorn. 

His Defects. 

For Mr. Meredith is one of the worst and least attractive of greatwriters as well as one of the best and most fascinating. He is a sunthat has broken out into innumerable spots. The better half of hisgenius is always suffering eclipse from the worse half. He writes withthe pen of a great artist in his left hand and the razor of a spiritualsuicide in his right. He is the master and the victim of a monstrouscleverness which is neither to hold nor to bind, and will not permit himto do things as an honest, simple person of genius would. AsShakespeare, in Johnson's phrase, lost the world for a quibble and wascontent to lose it, so does Mr. Meredith discrown himself of thesovereignty of contemporary romance to put on the cap and bells of theprofessional wit. He is not content to be plain Jupiter: his lightningsare less to him than his fireworks; and his pages so teem with finesayings and magniloquent epigrams and gorgeous images and fantasticlocutions that the mind would welcome dulness as a bright relief. He istediously amusing; he is brilliant to the point of being obscure; hishelpfulness is so extravagant as to worry and confound. That is thesecret of his unpopularity. His stories are not often good stories andare seldom well told; his ingenuity and intelligence are alwaysmisleading him into treating mere episodes as solemnly and elaborately asmain incidents; he is ever ready to discuss, to ramble, to theorise, todogmatise, to indulge in a little irony or a little reflection or alittle artistic misdemeanour of some sort. But other novelists have donethese things before him, and have been none the less popular, and areactually none the less readable. None, however, has pushed the fopperyof style and intellect to such a point as Mr. Meredith. Not infrequentlyhe writes page after page of English as ripe and sound and unaffected asheart could wish; and you can but impute to wantonness and recklessnessthe splendid impertinences that intrude elsewhere. To read him at therate of two or three chapters a day is to have a sincere and heartyadmiration for him and a devout anxiety to forget his defects and makemuch of his merits. But they are few who can take a novel on such termsas these, and to read your Meredith straight off is to have anindigestion of epigram, and to be incapable of distinguishing good frombad: the author of the parting between Richard and Lucy Feverel--a high-water mark of novelistic passion and emotion--from the creator of Mr. Raikes and Dr. Shrapnel, which are two of the most flagrant unrealitiesever perpetrated in the name of fiction by an artist of genius. 

Another Way. 

On the whole, I think, he does not often say anything not worth hearing. He is too wise for that; and, besides, he is strenuously in earnest abouthis work. He has a noble sense of the dignity of art and theresponsibilities of the artist; he will set down nothing that is to hismind unworthy to be recorded; his treatment of his material isdistinguished by the presence of an intellectual passion (as it were)that makes whatever he does considerable and deserving of attention andrespect. But unhappily the will is not seldom unequal to the deed: theachievement is often leagues in rear of the inspiration; the attempt atcompleteness is too laboured and too manifest--the feat is done but by apainful and ungraceful process. There _is_ genius, but there is _not_felicity: that, one is inclined to say, is the distinguishing note of Mr. Meredith's work, in prose and verse alike. There are magnificentexceptions, of course, but they prove the rule and, broken though it be, there is no gainsaying its existence. To be concentrated in form, to besuggestive in material, to say nothing that is not of permanent value, and only to say it in such terms as are charged to the fullest withsignificance--this would seem to be the aim and end of Mr. Meredith'sambition. Of simplicity in his own person he appears incapable. Thetexture of his expression must be stiff with allusion, or he deems it illspun; there must be something of antic in his speech, or he cannotbelieve he is addressing himself to the Immortals; he has praised withperfect understanding the lucidity, the elegance, the ease, of Moliere, and yet his aim in art (it would appear) is to be Moliere's antipodes, and to vanquish by congestion, clottedness, an anxious and determineddandyism of form and style. There is something _bourgeois_ in hisintolerance of the commonplace, something fanatical in the intemperanceof his regard for artifice. 'Le dandy, ' says Baudelaire, 'doit aspirer aetre sublime sans interruption. Il doit vivre et dormir devant unmiroir. ' That, you are tempted to believe, is Mr. Meredith's theory ofexpression. 'Ce qu'il y a dans le mauvais gout, ' is elsewhere theopinion of the same unamiable artist in paradox, 'c'est le plaisiraristocratique de deplaire. ' Is that, you ask yourself, the reason whyMr. Meredith is so contemptuous of the general public?--why he will stoopto no sort of concession nor permit himself a mite of patience with theherd whose intellect is content with such poor fodder as Scott andDickens and Dumas? Be it as it may, the effect is the same. Our authoris bent upon being 'uninterruptedly sublime'; and we must take him as hewills and as we find him. He loses of course; and we suffer. But nonethe less do we cherish his society, and none the less are we interestedin his processes, and enchanted (when we are clever enough) by hisresults. He lacks felicity, I have said; but he has charm as well aspower, and, once his rule is accepted, there is no way to shake him off. The position is that of the antique tyrant in a commonwealth oncerepublican and free. You resent the domination, but you enjoy it too, and with or against your will you admire the author of your slavery. 

Rhoda Fleming. 

_Rhoda Fleming_ is one of the least known of the novels, and in a senseit is one of the most disagreeable. To the general it has always beencaviare, and caviare it is likely to remain; for the general is beforeall things respectable, and no such savage and scathing attack upon thesuperstitions of respectability as _Rhoda Fleming_ has been written. Andbesides, the emotions developed are too tragic, the personages tooelementary in kind and too powerful in degree, the effects too poignantand too sorrowful. In these days people read to be amused. They carefor no passion that is not decent in itself and whose expression is notrestrained. It irks them to grapple with problems capable of none save atragic solution. And when Mr. Meredith goes digging in a very bad temperwith things in general into the deeper strata, the primitive deposits, ofhuman nature, the public is the reverse of profoundly interested in theoutcome of his exploration and the results of his labour. But for themwhose eye is for real literature and such literary essentials ascharacter largely seen and largely presented and as passion deeply feltand poignantly expressed there is such a feast in _Rhoda Fleming_ as noother English novelist alive has spread. The book, it is true, is fullof failures. There is, for instance, the old bank porter Anthony, who issuch a failure as only a great novelist may perpetrate and survive; whosuggests (with some other of Mr. Meredith's creations) a close, deliberate, and completely unsuccessful imitation of Dickens: a writerwith whom Mr. Meredith is not averse from entering into competition, andwho, so manifest on these occasions is his superiority, may almost bedescribed as the other's evil genius. Again, there is Algernon the fool, of whom his author is so bitterly contemptuous that he is never oncepermitted to live and move and have any sort of being whatever and who, though he bears a principal part in the intrigue, like the Blifil of _TomJones_ is so constantly illuminated by the lightnings of the ironicalmode of presentation as always to seem unreal in himself and seriously toimperil the reality of the story. And, lastly, there are the chivalrousPercy Waring and the inscrutable Mrs. Lovell, two gentle ghosts whoseproper place is the shadow-land of the American novel. But when allthese are removed (and for the judicious reader their removal is far fromdifficult) a treasure of reality remains. What an intensity of life itis that hurries and throbs and burns through the veins of the twosisters--Dahlia the victim, Rhoda the executioner! Where else in Englishfiction is such a 'human oak log' as their father, the Kentish yeomanWilliam Fleming? And where in English fiction is such a problempresented as that in the evolution of which these three--with a followingso well selected and achieved as Robert Armstrong and Jonathan Eccles andthe evil ruffian Sedgett, a type of the bumpkin gone wrong, and MasterGammon, that type of the bumpkin old and obstinate, a sort of humansaurian--are dashed together, and ground against each other till theweakest and best of the three is broken to pieces? Mr. Meredith may anddoes fail conspicuously to interest you in Anthony Hackbut and AlgernonBlancove and Percy Waring; but he knows every fibre of the rest, and hemakes your knowledge as intimate and comprehensive as his own. Withthese he is never at fault and never out of touch. They have the unityof effect, the vigorous simplicity, of life that belong to great creativeart; and at their highest stress of emotion, the culmination of theirpassion, they appeal to and affect you with a force and a directness thatsuggest the highest achievement of Webster. Of course this soundsexcessive. The expression of human feeling in the coil of a tragicsituation is not a characteristic of modern fiction. It is thought to benot consistent with the theory and practice of realism; and the averagenovelist is afraid of it, the average reader is only affected by it whenhe goes to look for it in poetry. But the book is there to show thatsuch praise is deserved; and they who doubt it have only to read thechapters called respectively 'When the Night is Darkest' and 'Dahlia'sFrenzy' to be convinced and doubt no longer. It has been objected to theclimax of _Rhoda Fleming_ that it is unnecessarily inhumane, and thatDahlia dead were better art than Dahlia living and incapable of love andjoy. But the book, as I have said, is a merciless impeachment ofrespectability; and as the spectacle of a ruined and broken life isinfinitely more discomforting than that of a noble death, I take it thatMr. Meredith was right to prefer his present ending to the alternative, inasmuch as the painfulness of that impression he wished to produce andthe potency of that moral he chose to draw are immensely heightened andstrengthened thereby. 

The Tragic Comedians. 

Opinions differ, and there are those, I believe, to whom Alvan andClotilde von Rudiger--'acrobats of the affections' they have beencalled--are pleasant companions, and the story of those feats in thegymnastics of sentimentalism in which they lived to shine is theprettiest reading imaginable. But others not so fortunate or, to beplain, more honestly obtuse persist in finding that story tedious, andthe bewildering appearances it deals with not human beings--not of thestock of Rose Jocelyn and Sir Everard Romfrey, of Dahlia Fleming and LucyFeverel and Richmond Roy--but creatures of gossamer and rainbow, phantasms of spiritual romance, abstractions of remote, dispiritingpoints in sexual philosophy. 

The Egoist. 

Just as Moliere in the figures of Alceste and Tartuffe has summarised andembodied all that we need to know of indignant honesty and the falsefervour of sanctimonious animalism, so in the person of Sir WilloughbyPatterne has Mr. Meredith succeeded in expressing the qualities of egoismas the egoist appears in his relations with women and in his conceptionand exercise of the passion of love. Between the means of the two menthere is not, nor can be, any sort of comparison. Moliere is brief, exquisite, lucid: classic in his union of ease and strength, of purityand sufficiency, of austerity and charm. In _The Egoist_ Mr. Meredith iseven more artificial and affected than his wont: he bristles withallusions, he teems with hints and side-hits and false alarms, heglitters with phrases, he riots in intellectual points and philosophicalfancies; and though his style does nowhere else become him so well, hiscleverness is yet so reckless and indomitable as to be almost asfatiguing here as everywhere. But in their matter the great Frenchmanand he have not much to envy each other. Sir Willoughby Patterne is a'document on humanity' of the highest value; and to him that would knowof egoism and the egoist the study of Sir Willoughby is indispensable. There is something in him of us all. He is a compendium of the Personalin man; and if in him the abstract Egoist have not taken on his finalshape and become classic and typical it is not that Mr. Meredith hasforgotten anything in his composition but rather that there are certaindefects of form, certain structural faults and weaknesses, which preventyou from accepting as conclusive the aspect of the mass of him. But theMoliere of the future (if the future be that fortunate) has but to pickand choose with discretion here to find the stuff of a companion figureto Arnolphe and Alceste and Celimene. 

In Metre. 

His verse has all the faults and only some of the merits of his prose. Thus he will rhyme you off a ballad, and to break the secret of thatballad you have to take to yourself a dark lantern and a case of jemmies. I like him best in _The Nuptials of Attila_. If he always wrote as here, and were always as here sustained in inspiration, rapid of march, nervousof phrase, apt of metaphor, and moving in effect, he would be delightfulto the general, and that without sacrificing on the vile and filthy altarof popularity. Here he is successfully himself, and what more is thereto say? You clap for Harlequin, and you kneel to Apollo. Mr. Meredithdoubles the parts, and is irresistible in both. Such fire, such vision, such energy on the one hand and on the other such agility and athleticgrace are not often found in combination. 

The Fashion of Art. 

This is the merit and distinction of art: to be more real than reality, to be not nature but nature's essence. It is the artist's function notto copy but to synthesise: to eliminate from that gross confusion ofactuality which is his raw material whatever is accidental, idle, irrelevant, and select for perpetuation that only which is appropriateand immortal. Always artistic, Mr. Meredith's work is often great art. 

BYRON

Byron and the World. 

Two obvious reasons why Byron has long been a prophet more honouredabroad than at home are his life and his work. He is the most romanticfigure in the literature of the century, and his romance is of thatsplendid and daring cast which the people of Britain--'an aristocracymaterialised and null, a middle class purblind and hideous, a lower classcrude and brutal'--prefers to regard with suspicion and disfavour. He isthe type of them that prove in defiance of precept that the safest pathis not always midway, and that the golden rule is sometimes unspeakablyworthless: who set what seems a horrible example, create an apparentlyshameful precedent, and yet contrive to approve themselves an honour totheir country and the race. To be a good Briton a man must tradeprofitably, marry respectably, live cleanly, avoid excess, revere theestablished order, and wear his heart in his breeches pocket or anywherebut on his sleeve. Byron did none of these things, though he was apublic character, and ought for the example's sake to have done them all, and done them ostentatiously. He lived hard, and drank hard, and playedhard. He was flippant in speech and eccentric in attire. He thoughtlittle of the sanctity of the conjugal tie, and said so; and he marriedbut to divide from his wife--who was an incarnation of the nationalvirtue of respectability--under circumstances too mysterious not to bediscreditable. He was hooted into exile, and so far from reforming hedid even worse than he had done before. After bewildering Venice withhis wickedness and consorting with atheists like Shelley and conspiratorslike young Gamba, he went away on a sort of wild-goose chase to Greece, and died there with every circumstance of publicity. Also his work wasevery whit as abominable in the eyes of his countrymen as his life. Itis said that the theory and practice of British art are subject to theinfluence of the British school-girl, and that he is unworthy the name ofartist whose achievement is of a kind to call a blush to the cheek ofyouth. Byron was contemptuous of youth, and did not hesitate to write--in_Beppo_ and in _Cain_, in _Manfred_ and _Don Juan_ and the_Vision_--exactly as he pleased. In three words, he made himselfoffensively conspicuous, and from being infinitely popular became utterlycontemptible. Too long had people listened to the scream of this eaglein wonder and in perturbation, and the moment he disappeared they grewashamed of their emotion and angry with its cause, and began to hearkento other and more melodious voices--to Shelley and Keats, to Wordsworthand Coleridge and the 'faultless and fervent melodies of Tennyson. ' Incourse of time Byron was forgotten, or only remembered with disdain; andwhen Thackeray, the representative Briton, the artist Philistine, the foeof all that is excessive or abnormal or rebellious, took it upon himselfto flout the author of _Don Juan_ openly and to lift up his heavy handagainst the fops and fanatics who had affected the master's humours, hedid so amid general applause. Meanwhile, however, the genius and thepersonality of Byron had come to be vital influences all the world over, and his voice had been recognised as the most human and the least insularraised on English ground since Shakespeare's. In Russia he had createdPushkin and Lermontoff; in Germany he had awakened Heine, inspiredSchumann, and been saluted as an equal by the poet of _Faust_ himself; inSpain he had had a share in moulding the noisy and unequal talent ofEspronceda; in Italy he had helped to develop and to shape the melancholyand daring genius of Leopardi; and in France he had been one of thepresiding forces of a great aesthetic revolution. To the men of 1830 hewas a special and peculiar hero. Hugo turned in his wake to Spain andItaly and the East for inspiration. Musset, as Mr. Swinburne hassaid--too bitterly and strongly said--became in a fashion a Kaled to hisLara, 'his female page or attendant dwarf. ' He was in some sort thegrandsire of the Buridan and the Antony of Dumas. Berlioz went to himfor the material for his _Harold en Italie_, his _Corsaire_ overture, andhis _Episode_. Delacroix painted the _Barque de Don Juan_ from him, withthe _Massacre de Scio_, the _Marino Faliero_, the _Combat du Giaour et duPacha_, and many a notable picture more. Is it at all surprising that M. Taine should have found heart to say that alone among modern poets Byron'atteint a la cime'? or that Mazzini should have reproached us with ourunaccountable neglect of him and with our scandalous forgetfulness of theimmense work done by him in giving a 'European _role_ . . . To Englishliterature' and in awakening all over the Continent so much 'appreciationand sympathy for England'?

Byron and Wordsworth. 

He had his share in the work of making Matthew Arnold possible, but he isthe antipodes of those men of culture and contemplation--those artistspensive and curious and sedately self-contained--whom Arnold best lovedand of whom the nearest to hand is Wordsworth. Byron and Wordsworth arelike the Lucifer and the Michael of the _Vision of Judgment_. Byron'swas the genius of revolt, as Wordsworth's was the genius of dignified anduseful submission; Byron preached the dogma of private revolution, Wordsworth the dogma of private apotheosis; Byron's theory of life wasone of liberty and self-sacrifice, Wordsworth's one of self-restraint andself-improvement; Byron's practice was dictated by a vigorous andvoluptuous egoism, Wordsworth's by a benign and lofty selfishness; Byronwas the 'passionate and dauntless soldier of a forlorn hope, ' Wordswortha kind of inspired clergyman. Both were influences for good, and bothare likely to be influences for good for some time to come. Which is thebetter and stronger is a question that can hardly be determined now. Itis certain that Byron's star has waned, and that Wordsworth's has waxed;but it is also certain that there are moments in life when the _Ode toVenice_ is almost as refreshing and as precious as the ode on the_Intimations_, and when the epic mockery of _Don Juan_ is to the full asbeneficial as the chaste philosophy of _The Excursion_ and the _Ode toDuty_. Arnold was of course with Michael heart and soul, and was onlyinterested in our Lucifer. He approached his subject in a spirit ofundue deprecation. He thought it necessary to cite Scherer's opinionthat Byron is but a coxcomb and a rhetorician: partly, it would appear, for the pleasure of seeming to agree with it in a kind of way and partlyto have the satisfaction of distinguishing and of showing it to be amistake. Then, he could not quote Goethe without apologising for thewarmth of that consummate artist's expressions and explaining some ofthem away. Again, he was pitiful or disdainful, or both, of Scott'sestimate; and he did not care to discuss the sentiment which made thatgreat and good man think _Cain_ and the _Giaour_ fit stuff for familyreading on a Sunday after prayers, though as Mr. Ruskin has pointed out, in one of the wisest and subtlest bits of criticism I know, the sentimentis both natural and beautiful, and should assist us not a little in thetask of judging Byron and of knowing him for what he was. That Arnoldshould institute a comparison between Leopardi and Byron was probablyinevitable: Leopardi had culture and the philosophic mind, which Byronhad not; he is incapable of influencing the general heart, as Byron can;he is a critics' poet, which Byron can never be; he was always an artist, which Byron was not; and--it were Arnoldian to take the comparisonseriously. Byron was not interested in words and phrases but in thegreater truths of destiny and emotion. His empire is over theimagination and the passions. His personality was many-sided enough tomake his egoism representative. And as mankind is wont to feel first andto think afterwards, a single one of his heart-cries may prove to theworld of greater value as a moral agency than all the intellectualreflections that Leopardi contrived to utter. After examining this andthat opinion and doubting over and deprecating them all, Arnold touchedfirm ground at last in a dictum of Mr. Swinburne's, the most pertinentand profound since those of Goethe, to the effect that in Byron there isa 'splendid and imperishable excellence which covers all his offences andoutweighs all his defects: the excellence of sincerity and strength. 'With this 'noble praise' our critic agreed so vigorously that it becamethe key-note of the latter part of his summing up, and in the end youfound him declaring Byron the equal of Wordsworth, and asserting of this'glorious pair' that 'when the year 1900 is turned, and the nation comesto recount her poetic glories in the century which has just then ended, the first names with her will be these. ' The prophecy is as little liketo commend itself to the pious votary of Keats as to the ardentShelleyite: there are familiars of the Tennysonian Muse, the Sibyl of_Rizpah_ and _Vastness_ and _Lucretius_ and _The Voyage_, to whom it mustseem impertinent beyond the prophet's wont; there are--(but _they_ scarcecount)--who grub (as for truffles) for meanings in Browning. But it wasnot uttered to please, and in truth it has enough of plausibility toinfuriate whatever poet-sects there be. Especially the Wordsworthians. 

HUGO

His Critics. 

To many Hugo was of the race of AEschylus and Shakespeare, a world-poetin the sense that Dante was, an artist supreme alike in genius and inaccomplishment. To others he was but a great master of words andcadences, with a gift of lyric utterance and inspiration rarely surpassedbut with a personality so vigorous and excessive as to reduce itsliterary expression--in epic, drama, fiction, satire and ode and song--tothe level of work essentially subjective, in sentiment as in form, inintention as in effect. The debate is one in which the only possiblearbiter is Time; and to Time the final judgment may be committed. Whatis certain is that there is one point on which both dissidents anddevout--the heretics who deny with Matthew Arnold and the orthodox whoworship with Mr. Swinburne and M. De Banville--are absolutely agreed. Plainly Hugo was the greatest man of letters of his day. It has beengiven to few or none to live a life so full of effort and achievement, sorich in honour and success and fame. Born almost with the century, hewas a writer at fifteen, and at his death he was writing still; so thatthe record of his career embraces a period of more than sixty years. There is hardly a department of art to a foremost place in which he didnot prove his right. From first to last; from the time of Chateaubriandto the time of Zola, he was a leader of men; and with his departure fromthe scene the undivided sovereignty of literature became a thing of thepast like Alexander's empire. 

Some Causes and Effects. 

In 1826, in a second set of _Odes et Ballades_, he announced his vocationin unmistakeable terms. He was a lyric poet and the captain of a newemprise. His genius was too large and energetic to move at ease in thenarrow garment prescribed as the poet's wear by the dullards and thepedants who had followed Boileau. He began to repeat the rhythms ofRonsard and the Pleiad; to deal in the richest rhymes and in words andverses tricked with new-spangled ore; to be curious in cadences, carelessof stereotyped rules, prodigal of invention and experiment, defiant ofmuch long recognised as good sense, contemptuous of much till thenapplauded as good taste. In a word, he was the Hugo of the hundredvolumes we know: an artist, that is, endowed with a technical imaginationof the highest quality, the very genius of style, and a sense of theplastic quality of words unequalled, perhaps, since Milton. The time wasripe for him: within France and without it was big with revolution. Inverse there were the examples of Andre Chenier and Lamartine; in prosethe work of Rousseau and Diderot, of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre andChateaubriand; in war and politics the tremendous tradition of Napoleon. Goethe and Schiller had recreated romance and established the foundationsof a new palace of art; their theory and practice had been popularised inthe novels of Walter Scott; and in the life and work of Byron the racehad such an example of revolt, such an incitement to liberty and change, such a passionate and persuasive argument against authority andconvention, as had never before been felt in art. Hugo like all greatartists was essentially a child of his age: 'Rebellion lay in his way, and he found it. ' In 1827 he published his _Cromwell_, and came forth asa rebel confessed and unashamed. It is an unapproachable production, tedious in the closet, impossible upon the stage; and to compare it tosuch work as that which at some and twenty Keats had given to theworld--_Hyperion_, for instance, or the _Eve of St. Agnes_--is to gloryin the name of Briton. But it had its value then, and as an historicaldocument it has its value now. The preface was at once a profession offaith and a proclamation of war. It is crude, it is limited, it ismistaken, in places it is even absurd. But from the moment of itsappearance the old order was practically closed. It prepared the way for_Albertus_ and for _Antony_, for _Rolla_ and the _Tour de Nesle_; and itwas also the '_fiat lux_' in deference to which the world has acceptedwith more or less of resignation the partial eclipse of art and moralseffected in _Salammbo_ and _l'Education sentimentale_ and the Egyptiandarkness achieved in work like _la Terre_ and _une Vie_ and _lesBlasphemes_. In its ringing periods, its plangent antitheses andaesthetic epigrams, it preluded and vindicated the excesses of whatsoevermanifestations of romanticism mankind and the arts have since been calledupon to consider and endure: from the humours of Petrus Borel to theexperiments of Claude Monet and the 'discoveries' of Richard Wagner. 

Environment. 

It is too often forgotten that from the first Hugo was associated withmen of pretensions and capacities not greatly inferior to his own, andthat in no direction was victory the work of his single arm. In paintingthe initiative had been taken years before the publication of the_Cromwell_ manifesto by Gericault with the famous _Radeau de la Meduse_, and by Delacroix with the _Dante et Virgile_ (1822) and the _Massacre deScio_ (1823). In music Berlioz, at this time a student in theConservatoire, was fighting hard against Cherubini and the bewigged onesfor liberty of expression and leave to admire and imitate the audacitiesof Weber and Beethoven, and three years hence, in the year of _Hernani_, was to set his mark upon the art with the _Symphonie fantastique_. Onthe stage as early as 1824 Frederick and Firmin had realised in thepersonages of Macaire and Bertrand the grotesque ideal, the combinationof humour and terror, of which the character of Cromwell was put forwardas the earliest expression, and had realised it so completely that theirwork has taken rank with the greater and the more lasting results of themovement. In the literature of drama the old order was ruined and thevictory won on all essential points not in 1830 with _Hernani_ but in1829 with _Henri Trois et sa Cour_, the first of the innumerablesuccesses of Alexandre Dumas, who determined at a single stroke thefundamental qualities of structure and form and material, and left hischief no question to solve save that of diction and style. Musset'searlier poems date from 1828, the year of _les Orientales_, Gautier'sfrom 1830; and these are also the dates of Balzac's _Chouans_ and _laPeau de Chagrin_. Moreover, among the intimates of the young leader weremen like Sainte-Beuve, who was two years his junior, and the brothersDeschamps: whose influence was doubtless exerted more frequently toencourage than to repress. Towards the end we lost sight of all this, and saw in Victor Hugo not so much the most glorious survival ofromanticism as romanticism itself, the movement in flesh and blood, therevolution in general 'summed up and closed' in a single figure. Thisagreeable view of things was Hugo's own. From the beginning he tookhimself with perfect seriousness, and his followers, however enthusiasticin admiration, had excellent warrant from above. 'Il _trone_ trop, ' saysBerlioz of him somewhere; and M. Maxime du Camp has given an edifyingaccount of the means he was wont to use to make himself beloved andhonoured by the youth who came to him for counsel and encouragement. Howperfectly he succeeded in this the political part of his function ismatter of history. Gautier's first visit to him was that of a devotee tohis divinity; and years afterwards the good poet confessed that not evenin pitch darkness and in a cellar fathoms under ground should he dare towhisper to himself that a verse of the Master's was bad. So far asdevotion went there were innumerable Gautiers. Sainte-Beuve was not longa pillar of orthodoxy; Dumas was always conscious of his own pre-eminencein certain qualities, and made light of Hugo's dramas as candidly as hemade much of the style in which they are written; and when some creatureof unwisdom saluted Delacroix as 'the Hugo of painting, ' the artist ofthe _Marino Faliero_ and the _Barque de Don Juan_ resented the complimentwith bitterness. But these were exceptions. The youth of 1830 wereHugolaters almost to a man. 

Equipment and Achievement. 

Their enthusiasm was not all irrational. Hugo's supremacy was not thathe was the greatest artist in essentials, for here Dumas was immeasurablyhis superior. It was not that he knew best the heart of man, or hadapprehended most thoroughly the conditions of life; for Balzac so farsurpassed him in these sciences that comparison was impossible. It wasnot that he sang the truest song or uttered the deepest word, for Mussetis the poet of _Rolla_ and the _Nuits_ in verse and the poet of_Fantasio_ and _Lorenzaccio_ and _Carmosine_ in prose. But the epochHugo represented was interested in the manner rather than the substanceof things: the revolution at whose front he had been set and whose mostshining figure he became was largely a revolution of externals. With animmense amount of enthusiasm there was, as Sainte-Beuve confessed, anincredible amount of ignorance--so that _Cromwell_ was supposed to behistorical; and with a passionate delight in form there co-existed astrangely imperfect understanding of material--so that _Hernani_ wassupposed to be Shakespearean. To this ignorance and to this imperfectunderstanding Hugo owed a certain part of his authority; the other andgreater he got from his unrivalled mastery of style, from hisextraordinary skill as an artist in words. To the opposing faction hisinnovations were horrible: his verse was poison, his example an outrage, his prosody a violation of all laws, his rhymes and tropes and metaphorsso many offences against Heaven and the Muse. But to the ardentyoungsters who fought beneath his banner it was his to give a somethingpriceless and unique--a something glorious to France and never beforeexampled in her literature. For the distichs of Boileau--'strong, heavy, useful, like pairs of tongs, '--he found them alexandrines with the leapand sparkle of sea waves and the sound of clashing swords and the coloursof sunset and the dawn. They were tired of whitewash and cold distemper;and he gave them hangings of brocade and tapestries of price and tissuesstiff with gold and glowing with new dyes. He flung them handfuls ofjewels where his rivals scattered handfuls of marbles. And they paid himfor his gifts with an intemperance of worship, a fury of belief, arapture of admiration, such as no other man has known. The substance wasstriking, was peculiar, was novel and full of charm; but the manner wasall this and something besides--was magnificent, was intoxicating, wasirresistible; and Victor Hugo by virtue of it became the foremost man ofliterary France. The great battle of _Hernani_ was merely a battle ofstyle. From Dumas the artist of _Henri Trois_ and _Antony_, the languageof Boileau was safe enough; and his triumph, all-important andsignificant as it was, seemed neither fatal nor abominable. It wasanother matter with _Hernani_. Its success meant ruin for the Academyand destruction for the idiom of Delille and M. De Jouy; and theclassicists mustered in force, and did their utmost to stay the comingwrath and arrest the impending doom. They failed of course; for theyfought with a vague yet limited apprehension of the question at issue, they had nothing to give in place of the thing they hated. And VictorHugo was made captain of the victorious host, while the men who mighthave been in a certain sort his rivals took service as lieutenants, andaccepted his ensign for their own. 

His Diary. 

All his life long he was addicted to attitude; all his life long he was a_poseur_ of the purest water. He seems to have considered theaffectation of superiority an essential quality in art; for just as thecock in Mrs. Poyser's apothegm believed that the sun got up to hear himcrow, so to the poet of the _Legende_ and the _Contemplations_ it musthave seemed as if the human race existed but to consider the use he madeof his 'oracular tongue. ' How tremendous his utterances sometimeswere--informed with what majesty yet with what brilliance--is one of thethings that every schoolboy knows. One no more needs to insist upon themerits of his best manner than to emphasise the faults of his worst. Athis best as at his worst, however, he was always an artist in his way. His speech was nothing if not artificial--in the good sense of the wordsometimes and sometimes in the bad. Simplicity (it seemed) wasimpossible to him. In the quest of expression, the cult of antithesis, the pursuit of effect, he sacrificed directness and plainness with notless consistency than complacency. In that tissue of 'apocalypticepigram' which to him was style there was no room for truth andsoberness. His Patmos was a place of mirrors, and before them he drapedhimself in his phrases like Frederick in the mantle of Ruy Blas. Thatthis grandiosity was unnatural and unreal was proved by the publicationof _Choses Vues_. When Hugo wrote for himself he wrote almost as simplyand straightforwardly as Dumas. The effect is disconcerting. You rubyour eyes in amazement. It is evidently Hugo. But Hugo plain, sober, direct? Hugo without rhetoric? Hugo declining antithesis and content tobe no gaudier than his neighbours? Hugo expressing himself in thefearless old fashion of pre-romantic ages? A page of commonplace fromMr. Meredith, a book for boarding-schools by M. Zola, were not morestartling. 

For and Against. 

Some primary qualities of his genius are pretty evenly balanced by someprimary faults. Thus, for breadth and brilliance of conception, forenergy and sweep of imagination, for the power of dealing as a masterwith the greater forces of nature, he is unsurpassed among modern men. But the conception is too often found to be empty as well as spacious;the imagination is too often tainted with insincerity; in his dramas ofthe elements there are too many such falsehoods as abound in his dramasof the emotions. Again, he is sometimes grand and often grandiose; buthe has a trick of affecting the grandiose and the grand which is constantand intolerable. He had the genius of style in such fulness as entitleshim to rank with the great artists in words of all time. His sense ofverbal colour and verbal music is beyond criticism; his rhythmicalcapacity is something prodigious. He so revived and renewed the languageof France that in his hands it became an instrument not unworthy tocompete with Shakespeare's English and the German of Goethe and Heine;and in the structure and capacity of all manner of French metrical formshe effected such a change that he may fairly be said to have received theorchestra of Rameau from his predecessors and to have bequeathed hisheirs the orchestra of Berlioz. On the other hand; in much of his laterwork his mannerisms in prose and in verse are discomfortably glaring; theoutcome of his unsurpassable literary faculty is often no more than aparade or triumph of the vocables; there were times when his brainappears to have become a mere machine for the production of antithesesand sterile conceits. What is perhaps more damning than all, his work issaturate in his own remarkable personality, and is objective only hereand there. His dramas are but five-act lyrics, his epics the romance ofan egoist, his history is confession, his criticism the opinions ofVictor Hugo. Even his lyrics, the 'fine flower' of his genius, theloveliest expression of the language, have not escaped reproach as a'Psalter of Subjectivity. ' Even his essays in prose romance--a form ofart on which he has stamped his image and superscription in a manner allhis own, the work by which he is best known to humanity at large--arevitiated by the same defect. For one that believes in Bishop Myriel asBishop Myriel there are a hundred who see in him only a pose of VictorHugo; it is the same with Ursel and Javert, with Cimourdain and Lantenacand Josiane; the very _pieuvre_ of _les Travailleurs_ is a Hugolater atheart. It is a proof of his commanding personality, that in spite ofthese objections he held in enchantment the hearts and minds of men forover sixty years. He is almost a literature in himself; and if it betrue that his work is as wholly lacking in the radiant sanity ofShakespeare's as it is in the exquisite good sense of Voltaire's, it isalso true that he left the world far richer than he found it. 

What Lives of Him. 

To select an anthology from his work were surely the pleasantest oftasks. One richer in grace and passion and sweetness might he chosen outof Musset; one wrought more truly of the finer stuff of humanity as wellas more bountifully touched with tact and dignity and temper from thework of Tennyson. But the Hugo selection would combine the raresttechnical merits with a set of interests all its own. It would give, forinstance, the _Stella_ of the _Chatiments_ and the _Pauvres Gens_ of the_Legende_. On one page would be found that admirable _Souvenir de laNuit du Quatre_, which is at once the impeachment and the condemnation ofthe Coup d'Etat; and on another the little epic of _Eviradnus_, with itsimmortal serenade, a culmination of youth and romance and love:

 'Si tu veux, faisons un reve. Montons sur deux palefrois. Tu m'emmenes, je t'enleve. L'oiseau chante dans les bois. 

 . . . . . 

 Allons-nous-en par l'Autriche! Nous aurons l'aube a nos fronts. Je serai grand et toi riche, Puisque nous nous aimerons. 

 . . . . . 

 Tu seras dame et moi comte. Viens, mon oeeur s'epanouit. Viens, nous conterons ce conte Aux etoiles de la nuit. '

Here, a summary of all the interests of romanticism, would be thecomplaint of Gastibelza:

 'Un jour d'ete, ou tout etait lumiere, Vie et douceur, Elle s'en vint jouer dans la riviere Avec sa soeur. Je vis le pied de sa jeune compagne Et son genou . . . -- Le vent qui vient a travers la montagne Me rendra fou!'--

here the adorable _Vieille Chanson du Jeune Temps_:

 'Rose, droite sur ses hanches, Leva son beau bras tremblant Pour prendre une mure aux branches: Je ne vis pas son bras blanc. 

 Une eau courait, fraiche et creuse, Sur les mousses de velours; Et la nature amoureuse Dormait dans les grands bois sourds. '--

and here, not unworthy to be remembered with _Proud Maisie_, thatwonderful harmony of legend and superstition and the facts and dreams ofcommon life, the death-song of Fantine:

 'Nous acheterons de bien belles choses, En nous promenant le long de faubourgs. 

 La Vierge-Marie aupres de mon poele Est venue hier, en manteau brode, Et m'a dit: Voici, cache sous mon voile, Le petit qu'un jour tu m'as demande. Courez a la ville; ayez de la toile, Achetez du fil, achetez un de. 

 Les bluets sont bleus, les roses sont roses, Les bluets sont bleus, j'aime mes amours. '

And from this masterpiece of simple and direct emotion, which to me hasalways seemed the high-water mark of Hugo's lyrical achievement as wellas the most human of his utterances, one might pass on to masterpieces ofanother inspiration: to the luxurious and charming graces of _Sara laBaigneuse_; to the superb crescendo and diminuendo of _les Djinns_; to'Si vous n'avez rien a me dire, ' that daintiest of songlets; to theringing rhymes and gallant spirit of the _Pas d'Armes du Roi Jean_:

 'Sus, ma bete, De facon Que je fete Ce grison! Je te baille Pour ripaille Plus de paille, Plus de son, Qu'un gros frere, Gai, friand, Ne peut faire, Mendiant Par les places Ou tu passes, De grimaces En priant!'--

to the melodious tenderness of 'Si tu voulais, Madelaine'; to the gaymusic of the _Stances a Jeanne_:

 'Je ne me mets pas en peine Du clocher ni du beffroi. Je ne sais rien de la reine, Et je ne sais rien du roi. '--

to the admirable song of the wind of the sea:

 'Quels sont les bruits sourds? Ecoutez vers l'onde Cette voix profonde Qui pleure toujours, Et qui toujours gronde, Quoiqu'un son plus claire Parfois l'interrompe . . . Le vent de la mer Souffle dans sa trompe. '--

to the _Romance Mauresque_, to the barbaric fury of _les Reitres_, to themagnificent rodomontade of the _Romancero du Cid_. 'J'en passe, et desmeilleurs, ' as Ruy Gomez observes of his ancestors. Here at any rate arejewels enough to furnish forth a casket that should be one of the richestof its kind! The worst is, they are most of them not necessaries butluxuries. It is impossible to conceive of life without Shakespeare andBurns, without _Paradise Lost_ and the _Intimations_ ode and the immortalpageant of the _Canterbury Tales_; but (the technical question apart) toimagine it wanting Hugo's lyrics is easy enough. The largesse of whichhe was so prodigal has but an arbitrary and conventional value. Like themagician's money much has changed, almost in the act of distribution, into withered leaves; and such of it as seems minted of good metal is notfor general circulation. 

HEINE

The Villainy Translation. 

Heine had a light hand with the branding-iron, and marked his subjectsnot more neatly than indelibly. And really he alone were capable ofdealing adequate vengeance upon his translators. His verse has onlyviolent lovers or violent foes; indifference is impossible. Once read asit deserves, it becomes one of the loveliest of our spiritualacquisitions. We hate to see it tampered with; we are on thorns as thetranslator approaches, and we resent his operations as an individualhurt, a personal affront. What business has he to be trampling among ourborders and crushing our flowers with his stupid hobnails? Why cannot hecarry his zeal for topsy-turvy horticulture elsewhere? He comes and laysa brutal hand on our pet growths, snips off their graces, shapes themanew according to his own ridiculous ideal, paints and varnishes themwith a villainous compound of his contrivance, and then bids us admirethe effect and thank him for its production! Is any name too hard forsuch a creature? and could any vengeance be too deadly? If he walkedinto your garden and amused himself so with your cabbages, you could puthim in prison. But into your poets he can stump his way at will, andupon them he can do his pleasure. And he does it. How many men havebrutalised the elegance, the grace, the winning urbanity of Horace! Byhow many coarse and stupid fingers has Catullus been smudged and fumbledand mauled! To turn _Faust_ into English (in the original metres) is afashionable occupation; there are more perversions of the _Commedia_ thanone cares to recall; there is scarce a great or even a good work of thehuman mind but has been thus bedevilled and deformed. _Don Quixote_, _lePere Goriot_, _The Frogs_, _The Decameron_--the trail of the translatoris over them all. Messrs. Payne and Lang and Swinburne have turned poorVillon into a citizen of Bedford Park, Fitzgerald and Florence Macarthyhave Englished Calderon, Messrs. Pope, Gladstone and others have donetheir worst with Homer. If Rossetti had not succeeded with _la VitaNuova_, if Fitzgerald had not ennobled Omar, if Mr. Lang had not betteredupon Banville and Gerard de Nerval, the word 'translator' would be odiousas the word 'occupy. ' And 'occupy' on the authority of Mrs. DorothyTearsheet is an odious word indeed. 

The Proof of It. 

The fact is, the translator too often forgets the difference between hissubject and himself; he is too often a common graveyard mason that wouldplay the sculptor. And it is not nearly enough for him to be a decentcraftsman. To give an adequate idea of an artist's work a man must behimself an artist of equal force and versatility with his original. Thetypical translator makes clever enough verses, but Heine's accomplishmentis remote from him as Heine's genius. He perverts his author as rhymeand rhythm will. No charge of verbal inaccuracy need therefore be made, for we do not expect a literal fidelity in our workman. Let him conveythe spirit of his original, and that, so far as meaning goes, is enough. But we do expect of him a something that shall recall his author's form, his author's personality, his author's charm of diction and of style; andhere it is that such an interpreter as Sir Theodore Martin (say) failswith such assurance and ill-fortune. The movement of Heine's rhythms, simple as they seem, is not spontaneous; it is an effect of art: the poetlaboured at his cadences as at his meanings. Artificial he is, but hehas the wonderful quality of never seeming artificial. His verses danceand sway like the nixies he loved. Their every motion seems informedwith the perfect suavity and spontaneity of pure nature. They tinkledown the air like sunset bells, they float like clouds, they wave likeflowers, they twitter like skylarks, they have in them something of theswiftness and the certainty of exquisite physical sensations. In such atranscript as Sir Theodore's all this is lost: Heine becomes a mereprentice-metrist; he sets the teeth on edge as surely as Browninghimself; the verse that recalled a dance of naiads suggests a springlesscart on a Highland road; Terpsichore is made to prance a hobnailedbreakdown. The poem disappears, and in its place you have an indifferentcopy of verses. You look at the pages from afar, and your impression isthat they are not unlike Heine; you look into them, and Heine hasvanished. The man is gone, and only an awkward, angular, clumsilyarticulated, entirely preposterous lay-figure remains to show that thetranslator has been by. 

MATTHEW ARNOLD

His Verse. 

In every page of Arnold the poet there is something to return upon and toadmire. There are faults, and these of a kind this present age is ill-disposed to condone. The rhymes are sometimes poor; the movement of theverse is sometimes uncertain and sometimes slow; the rhythms areobviously simple always; now and then the intention and effect are coldeven to austerity, are bald to uncomeliness. But then, how many of therarer qualities of art and inspiration are represented here, and herealone in modern work! There is little of that delight in material formaterial's sake which is held to be essential to the composition of agreat artist; there is none of that rapture of sound and motion and noneof that efflorescence of expression which are deemed inseparable from theendowment of the true singer. For any of those excesses in technicalaccomplishment, those ecstasies in the use of words, those effects ofsound which are so rich and strange as to impress the hearer withsomething of their author's own emotion of creation--for any, indeed, ofthe characteristic attributes of modern poetry--you shall turn to him invain. In matters of form this poet is no romantic but a classic to themarrow. He adores his Shakespeare, but he will none of his Shakespeare'sfashions. For him the essentials are dignity of thought and sentimentand distinction of manner and utterance. It is no aim of his to talk fortalking's sake, to express what is but half felt and half understood, toembody vague emotions and nebulous fancies in language no amount ofrichness can redeem from the reproach of being nebulous and vague. Inhis scheme of art there is no place for excess, however magnificent andShakespearean--for exuberance, however overpowering and Hugoesque. Humanand interesting in themselves, the ideas apparelled in his verse arecompletely apprehended; natural in themselves, the experiences hepictures are intimately felt and thoroughly perceived. They have beenresolved into their elements by the operation of an almost Sophocleanfaculty of selection, and the effect of their presentation is akin tothat of a gallery of Greek marbles. 

His Failure. 

Other poets say anything--say everything that is in them. Browning livedto realise the myth of the Inexhaustible Bottle; Mr. William Morris isnothing: if not fluent and copious; Mr. Swinburne has a facility thatwould seem impossible if it were not a living fact; even the Laureate issometimes prodigal of unimportant details, of touches insignificant andsuperfluous, of words for words' sake, of cadences that have no reason ofbeing save themselves. Matthew Arnold alone says only what is worthsaying. In other words, he selects: from his matter whatever isimpertinent is eliminated and only what is vital is permitted to remain. Sometimes he goes a little astray, and his application of the principleon which Sophocles and Homer wrought results in failure. But in theseinstances it will always be found, I think, that the effect is due not tothe principle nor the poet's application of it but to the poet himself, who has exceeded his commission, and attempted more than is in him toaccomplish. The case is rare with Arnold, one of whose qualities--and byno means the least Hellenic of them--was a fine consciousness of hislimitations. But that he failed, and failed considerably, it were idleto deny. There is _Merope_ to bear witness to the fact; and of _Merope_what is there to say? Evidently it is an imitation Greek play: an essay, that is, in a form which ceased long since to have any active life, sothat the attempt to revive it--to create a soul under the ribs of verymusty death--is a blunder alike in sentiment and in art. As evidentlyArnold is no dramatist. Empedocles, the Strayed Reveller, even theForsaken Merman, all these are expressions of purely personal feeling--areso many metamorphoses of Arnold. In _Merope_ there is no such basis ofreality. The poet was never on a level with his argument. He knewlittle or nothing of his characters--of Merope or AEpytus or Polyphontes, of Arcas or Laias or even the Messenger; at every step the ground is seenshifting under his feet; he is comparatively void of matter, and hisapplication of the famous principle is labour lost. He is winnowing thewind; he is washing not gold but water. 

His Triumphs. 

It is other-guess work with _Empedocles_, the _Dejaneira_ fragment, _Sohrab and Rustum_, the _Philomela_, his better work in general, aboveall with the unique and unapproached _Balder Dead_. To me this laststands alone in modern art for simple majesty of conception, soberdirectness and potency of expression, sustained dignity of thought andsentiment and style, the complete presentation of whatever is essential, the stern avoidance of whatever is merely decorative: indeed for everyHomeric quality save rhythmical vitality and rapidity of movement. Here, for example, is something of that choice yet ample suggestiveness--theonly true realism because the only perfect ideal of realisation--forwhich the similitudes of the 'Ionian father of his race' arepre-eminently distinguished:--

 'And as a spray of honeysuckle flowers Brushes across a tired traveller's face Who shuffles through the deep dew-moistened dust On a May evening, in the darken'd lanes, And starts him, that he thinks a ghost went by-- So Hoder brushed by Hermod's side. '

Here is Homer's direct and moving because most human and comprehensivetouch in narrative:--

 'But from the hill of Lidskialf Odin rose, The throne, from which his eye surveys the world; And mounted Sleipner, and in darkness rode To Asgard. And the stars came out in heaven, High over Asgard, to light home the king. But fiercely Odin gallop'd, moved in heart; And swift to Asgard, to the gate, he came. And terribly the hoofs of Sleipner rang Along the flinty floor of Asgard streets, And the Gods trembled on their golden beds Hearing the wrathful Father coming home-- For dread, for like a whirlwind Odin came. And to Valhalla's gate he rode, and left Sleipner; and Sleipner went to his own stall; And in Valhalla Odin laid him down. '

And here--to have done with evidence of what is known to every one--hereis the Homeric mariner, large and majestic and impersonal, of recordingspeech:--

 'Bethink ye, Gods, is there no other way?-- Speak, were not this a way, a way for Gods? If I, if Odin, clad in radiant arms, Mounted on Sleipner, with the warrior Thor Drawn in his car beside me, and my sons, All the strong brood of Heaven, to swell my train, Should make irruption into Hela's realm, And set the fields of gloom ablaze with light, And bring in triumph Balder back to Heaven?'

One has but to contrast such living work as this with the 'moulderingrealm' of _Merope_ to feel the difference with a sense of pain;

 'For doleful are the ghosts, the troops of dead, Whom Hela with austere control presides';

while this in its plain, heroic completeness is touched with a statelylife that is a presage of immortality. It is evident, indeed, thatArnold wrote _Balder Dead_ in his most fortunate hour, and that _Merope_is his one serious mistake in literature. For a genius thus peculiar andintrospective drama--the presentation of character through action--isimpossible; to a method thus reticent and severe drama--the expression ofemotion in action--is improper. 'Not here, O Apollo!' It is writtenthat none shall bind his brows with the twin laurels of epos and drama. Shakespeare did not, nor could Homer; and how should Matthew Arnold?

His Prose. 

He has opinions and the courage of them; he has assurance and he hascharm; he writes with an engaging clearness. It is very possible todisagree with him; but it is difficult indeed to resist his many gracesof manner, and decline to be entertained and even interested by thevariety and quality of his matter. He was described as 'the mostun-English of Britons, ' the most cosmopolitan of islanders; and you feelas you read him that in truth his mind was French. He took pattern byGoethe, and was impressed by Leopardi; he was judiciously classic, buthis romanticism was neither hidebound nor inhuman; he apprehended Heineand Marcus Aurelius, Spinoza and Sainte-Beuve, Joubert and Maurice deGuerin, Wordsworth and Pascal, Rachel and Sarah Bernhardt, Burke andArthur Clough, Eliza Cook and Homer; he was an authority on education, poetry, civilisation, the _Song of Roland_, the love-letters of Keats, the Genius of Bottles, the significance of _eutrapelos_ and _eutrapelia_. In fact, we have every reason to be proud of him. For the present is anoisy and affected age; it is given overmuch to clamorous devotion andextravagant repudiation; there is an element of swagger in all its wordsand ways; it has a distressing and immoral turn for publicity. MatthewArnold's function was to protest against its fashions by his ownintellectual practice, and now and then to take it to task and to call itto order. He was not particularly original, but he had in an eminentdegree the formative capacity, the genius of shaping and developing, which is a chief quality of the French mind and which is not so commonamong us English as our kindest critics would have us believe. He wouldtake a handful of golden sentences--things wisely thought and finely saidby persons having authority--and spin them into an exquisite prelection;so that his work with all the finish of art retains a something of thefreshness of those elemental truths on which it was his humour to dilate. He was, that is to say, an artist in ethics as in speech, in culture asin ambition. 'Il est donne, ' says Sainte-Beuve, 'de nos jours, a un bienpetit nombre, meme parmi les plus delicats et ceux qui les apprecient lemieux, de recueillir, d'ordonner sa vie selon ses admirations et selonses gouts, avec suite, avec noblesse. ' That is true enough; but Arnoldwas one of the few, and might 'se vanter d'etre reste fidele a soi-meme, a son premier et a son plus beau passe. ' He was always a man of culturein the good sense of the word; he had many interests in life and art, andhis interests were sound and liberal; he was a good critic of both moralsand measures, both of society and of literature, because he was commonlyat the pains of understanding his matter before he began to speak aboutit. It is therefore not surprising that the part he played was one ofconsiderable importance or that his influence was healthy in the main. Hewas neither prophet nor pedagogue but a critic pure and simple. Too wellread to be violent, too nice in his discernment to be led astray beyondrecovery in any quest after strange gods, he told the age its faults andsuggested such remedies as the study of great men's work had suggested tohim. If his effect was little that was not his fault. He returned tothe charge with imperturbable good temper, and repeated his remarks--whichare often exasperating in effect--with a mixture of mischievousness andcharm, of superciliousness and sagacity, and a serene dexterity ofphrase, unique in modern letters. 

HOMER AND THEOCRITUS

The Odyssey. 

I think that of all recent books the two that have pleased me best andlongest are those delightful renderings into English prose of the Greekof Homer and Theocritus, which we owe, the one to Messrs. Henry Butcherand Andrew Lang and the other to Mr. Lang's unaided genius. To read this_Odyssey_ of theirs is to have a breath of the clear, serene airs thatblew through the antique Hellas; to catch a glimpse of the large, newmorning light that bathes the seas and highlands of the young heroicworld. In a space of shining and fragrant clarity you have a vision ofmarble columns and stately cities, of men august in single-heartednessand strength and women comely and simple and superb as goddesses; andwith a music of leaves and winds and waters, of plunging ships andclanging armours, of girls at song and kindly gods discoursing, the sunny-eyed heroic age is revealed in all its nobleness, in all its majesty, itscandour, and its charm. The air is yet plangent with echoes of theleaguer of Troy, and Odysseus the ready-at-need goes forth upon hiswanderings: into the cave of Polypheme, into the land of giants, into thevery regions of the dead: to hear among the olive trees the voice ofCirce, the sweet witch, singing her magic song as she fares to and frobefore her golden loom; to rest and pine in the islet of Calypso, thekind sea-goddess; to meet with Nausicaa, loveliest of mortal maids; toreach his Ithaca, and do battle with the Wooers, and age in peace andhonour by the side of the wise Penelope. The day is yet afar when, as hesailed out to the sunset and the mysterious west, Sol con un legno, e con quella compagna Picciola, dalla qual non fue deserto, the great wind rushed upon him from the new-discovered land, and so endedhis journeyings for ever; and all with him is energy and tact and valourand resource, as becomes the captain of an indomitable human soul. Hissociety is like old d'Artagnan's: it invigorates, renews, inspires. Ihad rather lack the friendship of the good Alonso Quijada himself thanthe brave example of these two. 

The Idylls. 

With certain differences it is the same with our Theocritus. From him, too, the mind is borne back to a 'happier age of gold, ' when the worldwas younger than now, and men were not so weary nor so jaded nor sohighly civilised as they choose to think themselves. Shepherds stillpiped, and maidens still listened to their piping. The old gods had notbeen discrowned and banished; and to fishers drawing their nets thecoasts yet kept a something of the trace of amorous Polypheme, the rockswere peopled with memories of his plaint to Galatea. Inland, among thedim and thymy woods, bee-haunted and populous with dreams of dryad andoread, there were rumours of Pan; and dwellers under thatch--the goatherdmending his sandals, the hind carving his new staff, the girls who buskedthem for the vintaging--were conscious, as the wind went by among thebeeches and the pines, and brought with it the sounds of a lonely andmysterious night, that hard by them in the starry darkness the divineHuntress was abroad, and about the base of AEtna she and her forest maidsdrove the chase with horn and hound. In the cities ladies sang the psalmof Adonis brought back from 'the stream eternal of Acheron. ' Under themystic moon love-lorn damsels did their magic rites, and knit up spellsof power to bring home the men they loved. Among the vines and under thegrey olives songs were singing of Daphnis all day long. There werejunketings and dancings and harvest-homes for ever toward; the youthswent by to the gymnasium, and the girls stood near to watch them as theywent; the cicalas sang, the air was fragrant with apples and musical withthe sound of flutes and running water; while the blue Sicilian skylaughed over all, and the soft Sicilian sea encircled the land and itslovers with a ring of sapphire and silver. To translate Theocritus, wrote Sainte-Beuve, is as if one sought to carry away in one's hand apatch of snow that has lain forgotten through the summer in a cranny ofthe rocks of AEtna:--'On a fait trois pas a peine, que cette neige dejaest fondue. On est heureux s'il en reste assez du moins pour donner levif sentiment de la fraicheur. ' But Mr. Lang has so rendered intoEnglish the graces of the loveliest of Dorian singers that he has earnedthe thanks of every lover of true literature. Every one should read hisbook, for it will bring him face to face with a very prince among poetsand with a very summer among centuries. That Theocritus was a rare andbeautiful master there is even in this English transcript an abundance ofevidence. Melancholy apart, he was the Watteau of the old Greek world--anexquisite artist, a rare poet, a true and kindly soul; and it is verygood to be with him. We have changed it all of course, and are asfortunate as we can expect. But it is good to be with Theocritus, for helets you live awhile in the happy age and under the happy heaven thatwere his. He gives you leave and opportunity to listen to the tunefulstrife of Lacon and Comatas; to witness the duel in song between Corydonand Battus; to talk of Galatea pelting with apples the barking dog of herlove-lorn Polypheme; under the whispering elms, to lie drinking withEucritus and Lycidas by the altar of Demeter, 'while she stands smilingby, with sheaves and poppies in her hand. '

Old Lamps and New. 

It is relief unspeakable to turn from the dust and din and chatter ofmodern life, with its growing trade in heroes and its poverty of men, itsinnumerable regrets and ambitions and desires, to this immensetranquillity, this candid and shining calm. They had no Irish Questionthen, you can reflect, nor was theology invented. Men were not afraid oflife nor ashamed of death; and you could be heroic without a dread ofclever editors, and hospitable without fear of rogues, and dutiful for nohope of illuminated scrolls. Odysseus disguised as Irus is stillOdysseus and august. How comes it that Mr. Gladstone in rags and singingballads would be only fit for a police-station? that Lord Salisburyhawking cocoa-nuts would instantly suggest the purlieus of PetticoatLane? Is the fault in ourselves? Can it be that we have deteriorated somuch as that? Nerves, nerves, nerves! . . . These many centuries theworld has had neuralgia; and what has come of it is that Robert Elsmereis an ideal, and the bleat of the sentimentalist might almost be mistakenfor the voice of living England. 

RABELAIS

His Essence. 

Rabelais is not precisely a book for bachelors and maids--at times, indeed, is not a book for grown men. There are passages not to be readwithout a blush and a sensation of sickness: the young giant which is theRenaissance being filthy and gross as Nature herself at her grossest andher most filthy. It is argued that this is all deliberate--is an effectof premeditation: that Rabelais had certain home-truths to deliver to hisgeneration, and delivered them in such terms as kept him from the fagotand the rope by bedaubing him with the renown of a common buffoon. Butthe argument is none of the soundest in itself, and may fairly be setaside as a piece of desperate special pleading, the work of counsel attheir wits' end for matter of defence. For Rabelais clean is notRabelais at all. His grossness is an essential component in his mentalfabric, an element in whose absence he would be not Rabelais but somebodyelse. It inspires his practice of art to the full as thoroughly as itinforms his theory of language. He not only employs it wherever it mightbe useful: he goes out of his way to find it, he shovels it in on any andevery occasion, he bemerds his readers and himself with a gusto thatassuredly is not a common characteristic of defensive operations. Inhim, indeed, the humour of Old France--the broad, rank, unsavoury _espritgaulois_--found its heroic expression; he made use of it because he must;and we can no more eliminate it from his work than we can remove thequality of imagination from Shakespeare's or those of art and intellectfrom Ben Jonson's. Other men are as foul or fouler; but in none isfoulness so inbred and so ingrained, from none is it so inseparable. Fewhave had so much genius, and in none else has genius been so curiouslyfeatured. 

His Secret. 

It is significant enough that with all this against him he should havebeen from the first a great moral and literary influence and the delightof the wisest and soundest minds the world has seen. Shakespeare readhim, and Jonson; Montaigne, a greater than himself, is in some sort hisdescendant; Swift, in Coleridge's enlightening phrase, is 'animaRabelaesii habitans in sicco'; to Sterne and Balzac and Moliere he was aconstant inspiration; unto this day his work is studied and his meaningsare sought with almost religious devoutness; while his phrases havepassed into the constitution of a dozen languages, and the great figureshe scrawled across the face of the Renaissance have survived the movementthat gave them being, and are ranked with the monuments of literature. Himself has given us the reasons in the prologue to the first book, wherehe tells of the likeness between Socrates and the boxes called Sileni, and discourses of the manifest resemblance of his own work with Socrates. 'Opening this box, ' which is Socrates, says he, 'you would have foundwithin it a heavenly and inestimable drug, a more than humanunderstanding, an admirable virtue, matchless learning, invinciblecourage, inimitable sobriety, certain contentment of mind, perfectassurance, and an incredible disregard of all that for which mencunningly do so much watch, run, sail, fight, travel, toil, and turmoilthemselves. ' In such wise must his book be opened, and the 'highconceptions' with which it is stuffed will presently be apparent. Nay, more: you are to do with it even as a dog with a marrowbone. 'If youhave seen him you might have remarked with what devotion andcircumspection he watches and wards it; with what care he keeps it; howfervently he holds it; how prudently he gobbets it; with what affectionhe breaks it; with what diligence he sucks it. ' And in the same way you'by a sedulous lecture and frequent meditation' shall break the bone andsuck out the marrow of these books. Since the advice was proffered, generation after generation of mighty wits have taken counsel with theMaster, and his wisdom has through them been passed out into the practiceof life, the evolution of society, the development of humanity. But the'prince de toute sapience et de toute comedie' has not yet uttered hislast word. He remains in the front of time as when he lived and wrote. The Abbey of Thelema and the education of Gargantua are still unrealisedideals; the Ringing Isle and the Isle of Papimany are in their essentialspretty much as he left them; Panurge, 'the pollarded man, the man withevery faculty except the reason, ' has bettered no whit for the threecenturies of improvement that have passed since he was flashed intobeing. We--even we--have much to learn from Master Alcofribas, and untilwe have learned it well enough to put it into practice his work remainshalf done and his book still one to study. 

SHAKESPEARE

A Parallel. 

Shakespeare and Rembrandt have in common the faculty of quickeningspeculation and compelling the minds of men to combat and discussion. About the English poet a literature of contention has been in process ofaccretion ever since he was discovered to be Shakespeare; and about theDutch painter and etcher there has gradually accumulated a literatureprecisely analogous in character and for the most part of equal quality. In such an age as this, when the creative faculty of the world is mainlyoccupied with commentary and criticism, the reason should not be far toseek. Both were giants; both were original and individual in the highestsense of the words; both were leagues ahead of their contemporaries, notmerely as regards the matter of their message but also in respect of theterms of its delivery; each, moreover--and here one comes upon a capitalpoint of contact and resemblance--each was at times prodigiously inferiorto himself. Shakespeare often writes so ill that you hesitate to believehe could ever write supremely well; or, if this way of putting it seemindecorous and abominable, he very often writes so well that you are lothto believe he could ever have written thus extremely ill. There arepassages in his work in which he reaches such heights of literary art assince his time no mortal has found accessible; and there are passageswhich few or none of us can read without a touch of that 'burning senseof shame' experienced in the presence of Mr. Poynter's _Diadumene_ by theBritish Matron of _The Times_ newspaper. Now, we have got to be socurious in ideals that we cannot away with the thought of imperfection. Our worship must have for its object something flawless, somethingutterly without spot or blemish. We can be satisfied with nothing lessthan an entire and perfect chrysolite; and we cannot taste ourShakespeare at his worst without experiencing not merely the burningsense of shame aforesaid but also a frenzy of longing to father hisfaults upon somebody else--Marlowe for instance, or Green, orFletcher--and a fury of proving that our divinity was absolutelyincapable of them. That Shakespeare varied--that the matchless prose andthe not particularly lordly verse of _As You Like It_ are by the samehand; that the master to whom we owe our Hamlet is also responsible forGertrude and King Claudius; that he who gave us the agony of Lear and theruin of Othello did likewise perpetrate the scene of Hector's murder, inmanner so poor and in spirit so cynical and vile--is beyond all beliefand patience; and we have argued the point to such an extent that we areall of us in Gotham, and a mooncalf like the ascription of whatever isgood in Shakespeare to Lord Bacon is no prodigy but a natural birth. 

SIDNEY

His Expression of Life. 

Sidney's prime faults are affectation and conceit. His verses drip withfine love-honey; but it has been so clarified in meta-physics that muchof its flavour and sweetness has escaped. Very often, too, the conceitembodied is preposterously poor. You have as it were a casket of finestgold elaborately wrought and embellished, and the gem within is a merespangle of paste, a trumpery spikelet of crystal. No doubt there is aman's heart beating underneath; but so thick is the envelope of buckramand broidery and velvet through which it has to make itself audible thatits pulsations are sometimes hard to count, while to follow it throb bythrob is impossible. And if this be true of that _Astrophel and Stella_series in which the poet outpours the melodious heyday of his youth--inwhich he strives to embody a passion as rich and full as ever stirredman's blood--what shall be said of the _Arcadia_? In that 'coldpastoral' he is trying to give breath and substance to as thin and frigida fashion as has ever afflicted literature; and though he put a greatdeal of himself into the result, still every one has not the truecritical insight, and to most of us, I think, those glimpses of the loftynature of the writer which make the thing written a thing of worth in theeyes of the few are merely invisible. 

His Fame. 

In thinking of Sidney, Ophelia's lament for Hamlet springs to the lips, and the heart reverts to that closing scene at Zutphen with a blessedsadness of admiration and regret. But frankly, is it not a fact thatthat fine last speech of his has more availed to secure him immortalitythan all his verse? They call him the English Bayard, and the Frenchmanneed not be displeasured by the comparison. But when you come to readhis poetry you find that our Bayard had in him a strong dash of thepedant and a powerful leaven of the euphuist. Subtle, delicate, refined, with a keen and curious wit, a rare faculty of verse, a singular capacityof expression, an active but not always a true sense of form, he wrotefor the few, and (it may be) the few will always love him. But hisintellectual life, intense though it were, was lived among shadows andabstractions. He thought deeply, but he neither looked widely norlistened intently, and when all is said he remains no more than abrilliant amorist, too super-subtle for complete sincerity, whose fluencyand sweetness have not improved with years. 

TOURNEUR

His Style. 

Tourneur was a fierce and bitter spirit. The words in which he unpackedhis heart are vitalised with passion. He felt so keenly that oftentimeshis phrase is the offspring of the emotion, so terse and vigorous andapt, so vivid and so potent and eager, it appears. As an instance ofthis avidity of wrath and scorn finding expression in words the fittestand most forcible, leaving the well-known scenes embalmed in Elia'spraise, one might take the three or four single words in which Vindici(_The Revenger's Tragedy_), on as many several occasions, refers to thecaresses of Spurio and the wanton Duchess. Each is of such amazingpropriety, is so keenly discriminated, is so obviously the product of animagination burning with rage and hate, that it strikes you like anaffront: each is an incest taken in the fact and branded there and then. And this quality of verbal fitness, this power of so charging a phrasewith energy and colour as to make it convey the emotion of the writer atthe instant of inspiration, is perhaps the master quality of Tourneur'swork. 

His Matter. 

They that would have it are many; they that achieve their desire are few. For in the minor artist the passionate--the elemental quality--is notoften found: he being of his essence the ape or zany of his betters. Tourneur is not a great tragic. _The Atheist's Tragedy_ is butgrotesquely and extravagantly horrible; its personages are caricatures ofpassion; its comedy is inexpressibly sordid; its incidents are absurdwhen they are not simply abominable. But it is written in excellentdramatic verse and in a rich and brilliant diction, and it contains anumber of pregnant epithets and ringing lines and violent phrases. Andif you halve the blame and double the praise you will do something lessthan justice to that _Revenger's Tragedy_ which is Tourneur'simmortality. After all its companion is but a bastard of the loud, malignant, antic muse of Marston; the elegies are cold, elaborate, andvery tedious; the _Transformed Metamorphosis_ is better verse but harderreading than _Sordello_ itself. But the _Revenger's Tragedy_ has meritas a piece of art and therewith a rare interest as a window on theartist's mind. The effect is as of a volcanic landscape. An earthquakehas passed, and among grisly shapes and blasted aspects here lurks andwanders the genius of ruin. 

WALTON

The Compleat Angler. 

I am told that it is generally though silently admitted that, whileCharles Cotton came of a school of fishermen renowned for accomplishmenteven now, his master and friend was not in the modern or Cottonian sensea fisherman at all. There was in him, indeed, a vast deal of thephilosopher and the observer of nature and still more, perhaps, of theartist in English; but there was also not a little of the cockneysportsman. He never rose above the low-lived worm and quill; his preywas commonly those fish that are the scorn of the true angler, for heknew naught of trout and grayling, yet was deeply interested in such basecreatures (and such poor eating) as chub and roach and dace; and thatpart of his treatise which has still a certain authority--which may besaid, indeed, to have placed the mystery of fly-fishing upon something ofa scientific basis--was not his work but that of 'my most honouredfriend, Charles Cotton, Esq. ' Again, it is a characteristic of your trueas opposed to your cockney sportsman that, unless constrained thereto byhunger, he does not eat what he has killed; and it is a characteristic ofWalton--who in this particular at least may stand for the authentic typeof the cockney sportsman as opposed to the true one--that he delightednot much less in dining or supping on his catch than he did in the act ofmaking it: as witness some of the most charming parts in a book that fromone end to the other is charm and little besides. Indeed the truth--(withreverence be it spoken)--appears to be that the _Compleat Angler_ is anexpression in the terms of art of the cit's enjoyment of the country. 

Master Piscator. 

What Walton saw in angling was not that delight in the consciousness ofaccomplishment and intelligence which sends the true fisherman to theriver and keeps him there, rejoicing in his strength, whether he kill orgo empty away. It was rather the pretext--with a worm and perhaps a goodsupper at one end and a contemplative man at the other--of a day in thefields: where the skylark soared, and the earth smelled sweet, and thewater flashed and tinkled as it ran, while hard by some milk-maid, courteous yet innocent, sang as she plied her nimble fingers, and notvery far away the casement of the inn-parlour gleamed comfortablepromises of talk and food and rest. That was the Master Piscator who, being an excellent man of letters, went out to 'stretch his legs upTottenham Hill' in search of fish, and came home with immortal copy; andthat was the Izaak Walton who 'ventured to fill a part' of Cotton's'margin' with remarks not upon his theory of how to angle for trout orgrayling in a clear stream but 'by way of paraphrase for your reader'sclearer understanding both of the situation of your fishing house, andthe pleasantness of that you dwell in. ' He had the purest and the mostinnocent of minds, he was the master of a style as bright, as sweet, asrefreshing and delightful, as fine clean home-spun some time in lavender;he called himself an angler, and he believed in the description with acordial simplicity whose appeal is more persuasive now than ever. But hewas nothing if not the citizen afield--the cockney aweary of Bow Bellsand rejoicing in 'the sights and sounds of the open landscape. ' Afterall it is only your town-bred poet who knows anything of the country, oris moved to concern himself in anywise for the sensations and experiencesit yields. Milton was born in Bread Street, and Herrick in Cheapside. Yet Milton gave us the _Allegro_ and the _Penseroso_ and the scenery in_Comus_ and the epic; while as for Herrick--the _Night-Piece_, the lovelyand immortal verses _To Meadows_, the fresh yet sumptuous and noble _ToCorinna Going a-Maying_, these and a hundred more are there to answer for_him_. Here Walton is with Herrick and Milton and many 'dear sons ofMemory' besides; and that is why he not only loved the country but wasmoved to make art of it as well. 

HERRICK

His Muse. 

In Herrick the air is fragrant with new-mown hay; there is a morninglight upon all things; long shadows streak the grass, and on theeglantine swinging in the hedge the dew lies white and brilliant. Out ofthe happy distance comes a shrill and silvery sound of whetting scythes;and from the near brook-side rings the laughter of merry maids in circleto make cowslipballs and babble of their bachelors. As you walk you areconscious of 'the grace that morning meadows wear, ' and mayhap you meetAmaryllis going home to the farm with an apronful of flowers. Rounded isshe and buxom, cool-cheeked and vigorous and trim, smelling of rosemaryand thyme, with an appetite for curds and cream and a tongue of 'cleanlywantonness. ' For her singer has an eye in his head, and exquisite as arehis fancies he dwells in no land of shadows. The more clearly he sees athing the better he sings it; and provided that he do see it nothing isbeneath the caress of his muse. The bays and rosemary that wreath thehall at Yule, the log itself, the Candlemas box, the hock-cart and themaypole, nay, 'See'st thou that cloud as silver clear, Plump, soft, and swelling everywhere? Tis Julia's bed!'--

And not only does he listen to the 'clecking' of his hen and know what itmeans: he knows too that the egg she has laid is long and white; so thatere he enclose it in his verse, you can see him take it in his hand, andlook at it with a sort of boyish wonder and delight. This freshness ofspirit, this charming and innocent curiosity, he carries into all hedoes. He can turn a sugared compliment with the best, but when Amaryllispasses him by he is yet so eager and unsophisticate that he can note that'winning wave in the tempestuous petticoat' which has rippled to suchgood purpose through so many graceful speeches since. So that thoughJulia and Dianeme and Anthea have passed away, though Corinna herself ismerely 'a fable, song, a fleeting shade, ' he has saved enough of themfrom the ravin of Time for us to love and be grateful for eternally. Their gracious ghosts abide in a peculiar nook of the Elysium of Poesy. There 'in their habit as they lived' they dance in round, they fill theirlaps with flowers, they frolic and junket sweetly, they go for evermaying. Soft winds blow round them, and in their clear young voices theysing the verse of the rare artist who called them from the multitude andset them for ever where they are. 

His Moral. 

And Amaryllis herself will not, mayhap, be found so fair as thoseyounglings of the year she bears with her in 'wicker ark' or 'lawnycontinent. ' Herrick is pre-eminently the poet of flowers. He alone werecapable of bringing back

 'Le bouquet d'Ophelie De la rive inconnue ou les flots l'ont laisse. 

He knows and loves the dear blossoms all. He considers them with tenderand shining eyes, he culls them his sweetest fancies and his fondestmetaphors. Their idea is inseparable from that of his girls themselves, and it is by the means of the one set of mistresses that he is able sowell to understand the other. The flowers are maids to him, and themaids are flowers. In an ecstasy of tender contemplation he turns fromthose to these, exampling Julia from the rose and pitying the haplessviolets as though they were indeed not blooms insensitive but actually'poor girls neglected. ' His pages breathe their clean and innocentperfumes, and are beautiful with the chaste beauty of their colour, justas they carry with them something of the sweetness and simplicity ofmaidenhood itself. And from both he extracts the same pathetic littlemoral: both are lovely and both must die. And so, between his virginsthat are for love indeed and those that sit silent and delicious in the'flowery nunnery, ' the old singer finds life so good a thing that hedreads to lose it, and not all his piety can remove the passionate regretwith which he sees things hastening to their end. 

His Piety. 

That piety is equally removed from the erotic mysticism of RichardCrashaw and from the adoration, chastened and awful and pure, of Cowper. To find an analogue, you have to cross the borders of English into Spain. In his _Noble Numbers_ Herrick shows himself to be a near kinsman of suchmen as Valdivielso, Ocana, Lope de Ubeda; and there are versicles of histhat in their homely mixture of the sacred and the profane, in theirreverent familiarity with things divine, their pious and simplegallantry, may well be likened to the graceful and charming romances andvillancicos of these strangers. Their spirit is less Protestant thanCatholic, and is hardly English at all, so that it is scarce to bewondered at if they have remained unpopular. But their sincerity andearnestness are as far beyond doubt as their grace of line and inimitabledaintiness of surface. 

LOCKER

His Qualities. 

Mr. Locker's verse has charmed so wisely and so long that it hastravelled the full circle of compliment and exhausted one part of thelexicon of eulogy. As you turn his pages you feel as freshly as ever thesweet, old-world elegance, the courtly amiability, the mannerlyrestraint, the measured and accomplished ease. True, they arecolourless, and in these days we are deboshed with colour; but then theyare so luminously limpid and serene, they are so sprightly and gracefuland gay! In the gallantry they affect there is a something at onceexquisite and paternal. If they pun, 'tis with an air: even thus mightChesterfield have stooped to folly. And then, how clean the English, howlight yet vigorous the touch, the manner how elegant and how staid! Thereis wit in them, and that so genial and unassuming that as like as not itgets leave to beam on unperceived. There is humour too, but humour sopolite as to look half-unconscious, so dandified that it leaves you indoubt as to whether you should laugh or only smile. And withal there isa vein of well-bred wisdom never breathed but to the delight no less thanto the profit of the student. And for those of them that are touchedwith passion, as in _The Unrealized Ideal_ and that lovely odelet toMabel's pearls, why, these are, I think, the best and the leastapproachable of all. 

His Effect. 

For as English as she is, indeed, his muse is not to be touched off savein French. To think of her is to reflect that she is _delicate_, _spirituelle_, _semillante_--_une fine mouche_, _allez_! The _salon_ hasdisappeared, --'Iran, indeed, is gone, and all his rose'; but she was bornwith the trick of it. You make your bow to her in her Sheraton chair, abuckle shoe engagingly discovered; and she rallies you with anincomparable ease, a delicate malice, in a dialect itself a distinction;and when she smiles it is behind or above a fan that points while itdissembles, that assists effect as delightfully as it veils intention. Attimes she is sensitive and tender, but her graver mood has no more ofviolence or mawkishness than has her gallant roguery (or enchantingarchness) of viciousness or spite. Best of all, she is her poet's veryown. You may woo her and pursue her as you will; but the end isinvariable. 'I follow, follow still, but I shall never see her face. 'Even as in her master's finest song. 

BANVILLE

His Nature. 

The Muse of M. De Banville was born not naked but in the most elaborateand sumptuous evening wear that ever muse put on. To him, indeed, thereis no nature so natural as that depicted on the boards, no humanity halfso human as the actor puts on with his paint. For him the flowers growplucked and bound into nosegays; passion has no existence outside thePorte-Saint-Martin; the universe is a place of rhymes and rhythms, thehuman heart a supplement to the dictionary. He delights in babbling ofgreen fields, and Homer, and Shakespeare, and the Eumenides, and the'_rire enorme_' of the _Frogs_ and the _Lysistrata_. But it is suspectedthat he loves these things rather as words than as facts, and that in hisheart of hearts he is better pleased with Cassandra and Columbine thanwith Rosalind and Othello, with the studio Hellas of Gautier than withthe living Greece of Sophocles. Heroic objects are all very well intheir way of course: they suggest superb effects in verse, they are ofincomparable merit considered as colours and jewels for well-turnedsentences in prose. But their function is purely verbal; they are theraw material of the outward form of poesy, and they come into being toglorify a climax, to adorn a refrain, to sparkle and sound in odelets androndels and triolets, to twinkle and tinkle and chime all over the eight-and-twenty members of a fair ballade. 

His Art. 

It is natural enough that to a theory of art and life that can be thuswhimsically described we should be indebted for some of the best writingof modern years. Our poet has very little sympathy with fact, whetherheroic or the reverse, whether essential or accidental; but he is a rareartist in words and cadences. He writes of 'Pierrot, l'homme subtil, 'and Columbine, and 'le beau Leandre, ' and all the marionettes of thatpleasant puppet-show which he mistakes for the world, with the rhetoricalelegance and distinction, the verbal force and glow, the rhythmic beautyand propriety, of a rare poet; he models a group of flowers in wax aspassionately and cunningly, and with as perfect an interest in theprocess and as lofty and august a faith in the result, as if he werecarving the Venus of Milo, or scoring Beethoven's 'Fifth, ' or producing_King Lear_ or the _Ronde de Nuit_. He is profoundly artificial, but heis simple and even innocent in his artifice; so that he is ofteninteresting and even affecting. He knows so well what should be done andso well how to do it that he not seldom succeeds in doing something thatis actually and veritably art: something, that is, in which there issubstance as well as form, in which the matter is equal with the manner, in which the imagination is human as well as aesthetic and the inventionnot merely verbal but emotional and romantic also. The dramatic andpoetic value of such achievements in style as _Florise_ and _Diane auBois_ is open to question; but there can be no doubt that _Gringoire_ isa play. There is an abundance of 'epical ennui' in _le Sang de la Coupe_and _les Stalactites_; but the 'Nous n'irons plus au bois' and thecharming epigram in which the poet paints a processional frieze ofHellenic virgins are high-water marks of verse. But, indeed, if Pierrotand Columbine were all the race, and the footlights might only changeplaces with the sun, then were M. De Banville by way of being aShakespeare. 

DOBSON

Method and Effect. 

His style has distinction, elegance, urbanity, precision, an exquisiteclarity. Of its kind it is as nearly as possible perfect. You think ofHorace as you read; and you think of those among our own eighteenthcentury poets to whom Horace was an inspiration and an example. Theepithet is usually so just that it seems to have come into being with thenoun it qualifies; the metaphor is mostly so appropriate that it leavesyou in doubt as to whether it suggested the poem or the poem suggestedit; the verb is never in excess of the idea it would convey; the effectof it all is that 'something has here got itself uttered, ' and for good. Could anything, for instance, be better, or less laboriously said, thanthis poet's remonstrance _To an Intrusive Butterfly_? The thing isinstinct with delicate observation, so aptly and closely expressed as toseem natural and living as the facts observed:

 'I watch you through the garden walks, I watch you _float_ between The _avenues_ of dahlia stalks, And _flicker_ on the green; You _hover_ round the garden seat, You _mount_, you _waver_. . . 

 * * * * *

 Across the room _in loops of flight_ I watch you wayward go; * * * * * Before the bust you flaunt and flit-- * * * * * You _pause_, you _poise_, you _circle up_ Among my old Japan. '

And all the rest of it. The theme is but the vagaries of a wanderinginsect; but how just and true is the literary instinct, how perfect theliterary _savoir-faire_! The words I have italicised are the only words(it seems) in the language that are proper to the occasion; and yet howquietly they are produced, with what apparent unconsciousness they areset to do their work, how just and how sufficient is their effect! Inwriting of this sort there is a certain artistic good-breeding whose likeis not common in these days. We have lost the secret of it: we are tooeager to make the most of our little souls in art and too ignorant to dothe best by them; too egoistic and 'individual, ' too clever and skilfuland well informed, to be content with the completeness of simplicity. Even the Laureate was once addicted to glitter for glitter's sake; andwith him to keep them in countenance there is a thousand minor poetswhose 'little life' is merely a giving way to the necessities of what isafter all a condition of intellectual impotence but poorly redeemed by ahabit of artistic swagger. The singer of Dorothy and Beau Brocade is ofanother race. He is 'the co-mate and brother in exile' of Matthew Arnoldand the poet of _The Unknown Eros_. Alone among modern English bardsthey stand upon that ancient way which is the best: attentive to thepleadings of the Classic Muse, heedful always to give such thoughts asthey may breed no more than their due expression. 

BERLIOZ

The Critic. 

One of the very few great musicians who have been able to write their ownlanguage with vigour and perspicuity, Berlioz was for many years amongthe kings of the feuilleton, among the most accomplished journalists ofthe best epoch of the Parisian press. He had an abundance of wit andhumour; his energy and spirit were inexhaustible; within certain limitshe was a master of expression and style; in criticism as in music he wasan artist to his finger-ends; and if he found writing hard work what hewrote is still uncommonly easy reading. He is one of the few--the veryfew--journalists the worth of whose achievement has been justified bycollection and republication. Louis Veuillot has been weighed in thisbalance, and found wanting; and so has Janin prince of critics. WithBerlioz it is otherwise. If you are no musician he appeals to you as astudent of life; if you are interested in life and music both he isirresistible. The _Memoires_ is one of the two or three essays inartistic biography which may claim equal honours with Benvenuto's storyof himself and his own doings; the two volumes of correspondence rankwith the most interesting epistolary matter of these times; in the_Grotesques_, the _A Travers Chants_, the _Soirees de l'Orchestre_ thereis enough of fun and earnest, of fine criticism and diabolical humour, ofwit and fancy and invention, to furnish forth a dozen ordinary critics, and leave a rich remainder when all's done. These books have beenpopular for years; they are popular still; and the reason is not far toseek. Berlioz was not only a great musician and a brilliant writer; hewas also a very interesting and original human being. His writings areone expression of an abnormal yet very natural individuality; and when hespeaks you are sure of something worth hearing and remembering. 

A Prototype. 

Apart from Cellini's ruffianism there are several points of contactbetween the two men. Berlioz made the roaring goldsmith the hero of anopera, and it is not doubtful that he was in complete sympathy with hissubject. In the Frenchman there is a full measure of the waywardness oftemper, the impatience of authority, the resolute and daring humour, thepassion of worship for what is great in art and of contempt for what islittle and bad, which entered so largely into the composition of theFlorentine. There is not much to choose between the Berlioz of the_Debats_, the author of the _Grotesques de la Musique_ and the _A TraversChants_, and the Benvenuto who, as Il Lasca writes of him, 'Senza alcun ritegno o barbazzale Delle cose malfatte dicea male. '

Benvenuto enlarges upon the joys of drawing from the life and expatiatesupon the greatness of Michelangelo in much the same spirit and with muchthe same fury of admiration with which Berlioz descants upon the raptureof conducting an orchestra and dilates upon the beauty of _Divinites duStyx_ or the adagio of the so-called _Moonlight Sonata_. It is writtenof Benvenuto, in connection with Vasari's attack upon that cupola ofSanta Maria del Fiore which himself was wont to call 'the marvel ofbeautiful things, ' that if he had lived to see the result, 'Certo non capirebbe nelle pelle; _E saltando_, _e correndo_, _e fulminando_, S' andrebbe querelando, E per tutto gridando ad alta voce _Giorgin d'Arezzo meterebbe in croce_, Oggi universalmente Odiato della gente _Quasi publico ladro e assassino_';

and you are reminded irresistibly of Berlioz betrampling Lachnith and theingenious Castil-Blaze and defending Beethoven against the destructivepedantry of Fetis. And, just as the _Vita_ is invaluable as a personalrecord of artist-life in the Italy of the Renaissance, so are the_Memoires_ invaluable as a personal record of the works and ways ofmusicians in the Paris of the Romantic revival. Berlioz is revealed inthem for one of the race of the giants. He is the musician of 1830, asDelacroix is the painter; and his work is as typical and as significantas the _Sardanapale_ and the _Faust_ lithographs. 

His Theory of Autobiography. 

To read the _Memoires_ is to feel that in writing them the great musiciandeliberately set himself to win the heart of posterity. He believed inhimself, and he believed in his music: he divined that one day or anotherhe would be legendary as well as immortal; and he took an infinite dealof pains to make certain that the ideal which was presently to representhim in men's minds should be an ideal of which he could thoroughlyapprove. It is fair to note that in this care for the good will and thegood word of the future he was not by any means alone. The_romantiques_, indeed, were keen--from Napoleon downwards--to make thevery best of themselves. The poet of the _Legende des Siecles_, forexample, went early to work to arrange the story of his life andcharacter at least as carefully as he composed the audiences of his_premieres_; and he did it with so light a hand, and with such a sense ofthe importance of secrecy, that it is even now by no means so well andwidely known as it should be that _Victor Hugo raconte par un Temoin desa Vie_ is the work of the hero's wife, and was not only inspired but mayalso have been revised and prepared for publication by the hero himself. Again, the dramatist of _Antony_ and the novelist of _Bragelonne_ wasnever so happy as when he was engaged upon the creation of what he hopedwould be the historical Dumas; he made volume after volume of delightfulreading out of his own impressions and adventures; he turned himself intocopy with a frankness, a grace, a gusto, a persistency of egoism, whichare merely enchanting. Berlioz, therefore, had good warrant for hiswork. It is more to the point, perhaps, that he would have taken it ifhe had not had it. And I hold that he would have done well; for (in anycase) a great man's notion of himself is, _ipso facto_, better and moreagreeable and convincing, especially as he presents it, than the idea ofhis inferiors and admirers, especially as presented by them. Berlioz, itis true, was prodigal in these _Memoires_ of his of wit and fun anddevilry, of fine humanity and noble art, of good things said and greatthings dreamed and done and suffered; but he was prodigal of inventionand suppression as well, and the result, while considerably lessveracious, is all the more fascinating, therefor. One feels that for onething he was too complete an artist to be merely literal and exact; thatfor another he saw and felt things for himself, as Milton did beforehim--Milton in the mind's eye of Milton the noblest of created things andto Mr. Saintsbury almost as unpleasing a spectacle as the gifted butabject Racine; and for a third that from his own point of view he wasright, and there is an end of it. 

GEORGE ELIOT

The Ideal. 

It was thought that with George Eliot the Novel-with-a-Purpose had reallycome to be an adequate instrument for the regeneration of humanity. Itwas understood that Passion only survived to point a moral or provide thematerials of an awful tale, while Duty, Kinship, Faith, were so farparamount as to govern Destiny and mould the world. A vague, decidedflavour of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity was felt to pervade themoral universe, a chill but seemly halo of Golden Age was seen to playsoberly about things in general. And it was with confidence anticipatedthat those perfect days were on the march when men and women wouldpropose--(from the austerest motives)--by the aid of scientificterminology. 

The Real. 

To the Sceptic--(an apostate, and an undoubted male)--another view waspreferable. He held that George Eliot had carried what he called the'Death's-Head Style' of art a trifle too far. He read her books in muchthe same spirit and to much the same purpose that he went to thegymnasium and diverted himself with parallel bars. He detested hertechnology; her sententiousness revolted while it amused him; and whenshe put away her puppets and talked of them learnedly and withunderstanding--instead of letting them explain themselves, as severalgreat novelists have been content to do--he recalled how Wisdom criethout in the street and no man regardeth her, and perceived that in thiscase the fault was Wisdom's own. He accepted with the humility ofignorance, and something of the learner's gratitude, her woman generally, from Romola down to Mrs. Pullet. But his sense of sex was strong enoughto make him deny the possibility in any stage of being of nearly all thegovernesses in revolt it pleased her to put forward as men; for with veryfew exceptions he knew they were heroes of the divided skirt. To himDeronda was an incarnation of woman's rights; Tito an 'improper female inbreeches'; Silas Marner a good, perplexed old maid, of the kind of whomit is said that they have 'had a disappointment. ' And Lydgate alone hadaught of the true male principle about him. 

Appreciations. 

Epigrams are at best half-truths that look like whole ones. Here is ahandful about George Eliot. It has been said of her books--('on severaloccasions')--that 'it is doubtful whether they are novels disguised astreatises, or treatises disguised as novels'; that, 'while less romanticthan Euclid's Elements, they are on the whole a great deal less improvingreading'; and that 'they seem to have been dictated to a plain woman ofgenius by the ghost of David Hume. ' Herself, too, has been variouslydescribed: as 'An Apotheosis of Pupil-Teachery'; as 'George Sand _plus_Science and _minus_ Sex'; as 'Pallas with prejudices and a corset'; as'the fruit of a caprice of Apollo for the Differential Calculus. ' Thecomparison of her admirable talent to 'not the imperial violin but thegrand ducal violoncello' seems suggestive and is not unkind. 

BORROW

His Vocation. 

Three hundred years since Borrow would have been a gentleman adventurer:he would have dropped quietly down the river, and steered for the SpanishMain, bent upon making carbonadoes of your Don. But he came too late forthat, and falling upon no sword and buckler age but one that wasinterested in Randal and Spring, he accepted that he found, and did hisbest to turn its conditions, into literature. As he had that admirableinstinct of making the best of things which marks the true adventurer, hewas on the whole exceeding happy. There was no more use in sailing forJavan and Gadire; but at home there were highways in abundance, and whatis your genuine tramp but a dry-land sailor? The Red Man is exhausted ofeverything but sordidness; but under that round-shouldered little tent atthe bend of the road, beside that fire artistically built beneath thatkettle of the comfortable odours, among those horses and colts at grazehard by, are men and women more mysterious and more alluring to theromantic mind than any Mingo or Comanch that ever traded a scalp. Whileas for your tricks of fence--your immortal _passado_, your _puntoreverso_--if that be no longer the right use for a gentleman, have notSpring and Langan fought their great battle on Worcester racecourse? andhas not Cribb of Gloucestershire--that renowned, heroic, irresistibleThomas--beaten Molyneux the negro artist in the presence of twentythousand roaring Britons? and shall the practice of an art which hasrejoiced in such a master as the illustrious Game Chicken, Hannibal ofthe Ring, be held degrading by an Englishman of sufficient inches who, albeit a Tory and a High Churchman, is at bottom as thoroughgoing aRepublican as ever took the word of command from Colonel Cromwell? Andif all this fail, if he get nobody to put on the gloves with him, if thetents of the Romany prove barren of interest, if the king's highway bevacant of adventure as Mayfair, he has still philology to fall back upon, he can still console himself with the study of strange tongues, he canstill exult in a peculiar superiority by quoting the great Ab Gwylimwhere the baser sort of persons is content with Shakespeare. So thatwhat with these and some kindred diversions--a little horse-whisperingand ale-drinking, the damnation of Popery, the study of the Bible--he canmanage not merely to live but to live so fully and richly as to be theenvy of some and the amazement of all. That, as life goes and as theworld wags, is given to few. Add to it the credit of having written asgood a book about Spain as ever was written in any language, thehappiness of having dreamed and partly lived that book ere it waswritten, the perfect joy of being roundly abused by everybody, and theconsciousness of being different from everybody and of giving at least asgood as ever you got at several things the world is silly enough to holdin worship--as the Toryism of Sir Walter, or the niceness of Popery, orthe pleasures of Society: and is it not plain that Borrow was a manuncommon fortunate, and that he enjoyed life as greatly as most men notsavages who have possessed the fruition of this terrestrial sphere?

Ideals and Achievements. 

He prepared his effects as studiously and almost as dexterously as Dumashimself. His instinct of the picturesque was rarely indeed at fault; hemarshalled his personages and arranged his scene with something of thatpassion for effect which entered so largely into the theory of M. LeComte de Monte-Cristo. However closely disguised, himself is always theheroic figure, and he is ever busy in arranging discovery and triumph. Tohis chance-mates he is but an eccentric person, an amateur tinker, aslack-baked gipsy, an unlettered hack; to his audience he is his own, strong, indifferent self: presently the rest will recognise him and hewill be disdainfully content. And recognise him they do. He throws offhis disguise; there is a gape, a stare, a general conviction thatLavengro is the greatest man in the world; and then--as the manner ofLesage commands--the adventure ends, the stars resume their wontedcourses, and the self-conscious Tinker-Quixote takes the road once moreand passes on to other achievements: a mad preacher to succour, a priestto baffle, some tramp to pound into a jelly of humility, an applewoman tomystify, a horse-chaunter to swindle, a pugilist to study and help andportray. But whatever it be, Lavengro emerges from the ordeal modestly, unobtrusively, quietly, most consciously magnificent. Circumstantial asDefoe, rich in combinations as Lesage, and with such an instinct of thepicturesque, both personal and local, as none of these possessed, thisstrange wild man holds on his strange wild way, and leads you captive tothe end. His dialogue is copious and appropriate: you feel that like BenJonson he is dictating rather than reporting, that he is less faithfuland exact than imaginative and determined; but you are none the lesspleased with it, and suspicious though you be that the voice isLavengro's and the hands are the hands of some one else, you are glad tosurrender to the illusion, and you regret when it is dispelled. Moreover, that all of it should be set down in racy, nervous, idiomatic English, with a kind of eloquence at once primitive and scholarly, precious buthomely--the speech of an artist in sods and turfs--if at first itsurprise and charm yet ends by seeming so natural and just that you go onto forget all about it and accept the whole thing as the genuine outcomeof a man's experience which it purports to be. Add that it is allentirely unsexual; that there is none with so poor an intelligence of theheart as woman moves it; that the book does not exist in which therelations between boy and girl are more miserably misrepresented than in_Lavengro_ and _The Romany Rye_; that that picaresque ideal of romancewhich, finding utterance in Hurtado de Mendoza, was presently to appealto such artists as Cervantes, Quevedo, Lesage, Smollett, the Dickens of_Pickwick_, finds such expression in _Lavengro_ and _The Romany Rye_ asnowhere else; and the tale of Borrow is complete enough. 

Himself. 

Despite or because of a habit of mystification which obliged him tojumble together the homely Real and a not less homely Ideal, Lavengrowill always, I think, be found worthy of companionship, if only as theone exemplary artist-tramp the race has yet achieved. The artist-tramp, the tinker who can write, the horse-coper with a twang of Hamlet and ahabit of Monte-Cristo--that is George Borrow. For them that love thesedifferences there is none in whom they are so cunningly and quaintlyblended as George Borrow; and they that love them not may keep the otherside of the road and fare in peace elsewhither. 

BALZAC

Under which King?

To Goethe it seemed that every one of Balzac's novels had been dug out ofa suffering woman's heart: but Goethe spoke not always wisely, and inthis exacting world there be some that not only have found fault withBalzac's method and results but have dared to declare his theory ofsociety the dream of a mind diseased. To these critics Balzac was lessobserver than creator: his views were false, his vision was distorted, and though he had 'incomparable power' he had not power enough to makethem accept his work. This theory is English, and in France they findBalzac possible enough. There is something of him in Pierre Dupont; hemade room for the work of Flaubert, Feydeau, the younger Dumas, Augierand Zola and the brothers Goncourt; and to him Charles Baudelaire is assome fat strange fungus to the wine-cask in whose leakings it springs. Sainte-Beuve refused to accept him, but his 'Pigault-Lebrun desduchesses' is only malicious: he resented the man's exuberant andinordinate personality, and made haste to apply to it some drops of thatsugared vitriol of which he had the secret. Taine is a fitter critic ofthe _Comedie humaine_ than Sainte-Beuve; and Taine has come to otherconclusions. Acute, coarse, methodical, exhaustive, he has recognisedthe greatness of one still more exhaustive, methodical, coarse, and acutethan himself. English critics fall foul of Balzac's women; but Tainefalls foul of English critics, and with the authority of a Parisian byprofession declares that the _Parisiennes_ of the _Comedie_ areeverything they ought to be--the true daughters of their 'bon groslibertin de pere. ' And while Taine, exulting in his Marneffe and hisCoralie, does solemnly and brilliantly show that he is right andeverybody else is wrong, a later writer--English of course--can find nobetter parallel of Balzac than Browning, and knows nothing in art so likethe Pauline of _la Peau de Chagrin_ as the Sistine Madonna. It iscurious, this clash of opinions; and it is plain that one or other partymust be wrong. Which is it? 'Qui trompe-t-on ici?' Is Taine a betterjudge than Mr. Leslie Stephen or Mr. Henry James? Or are Messrs. Jamesand Stephen better qualified to speak with authority than Taine? It maybe that none but a Frenchman can thoroughly and intimately apprehend inits inmost a thing so essentially French as the _Comedie_; it is a factthat Frenchmen of all sorts and sizes have accepted the _Comedie_ in itstotality; and that is reason good enough for any commonplace Englishmanwho is lacking in the vanity of originality to accept it also. 

The Fact. 

Balzac's ambition was to be omnipotent. He would be Michelangelesque, and that by sheer force of minuteness. He exaggerated scientifically, and made things gigantic by a microscopic fulness of detail. His Hulotwas to remain the Antony of modern romance, losing the world for the loveof woman, and content to lose it; his Marneffe, in whom is incarnated theinstinct and the science of sexual corruption, is Hulot's Cleopatra, andonly dies because 'elle va faire le bon Dieu'--as who should say 'to mashthe Old Man'; Frenhoeffer, Philippe Bridau, Vautrin, Marsay, Rastignac, Grandet, Balthazar Claes, Beatrix, Sarrazine, Lousteau, Esther, LucienChardon--the list is, I believe, some thousands strong! Also theargument is proved in advance: there is the _Comedie_ itself--'the newedition fifty volumes long. ' Bad or good, foul or fair, impossible oractual, a monstrous debauch of mind or a triumph of realisation, there isthe _Comedie_. It is forty years since Balzac squared and laid the laststones of it; and it exists--if a little the worse for wear: the bulk isenormous--if the materials be in some sort worm-eaten and crumbling. Truly, he had 'incomparable power. ' He was the least capable and themost self-conscious of artists; his observation was that of an inspiredand very careful auctioneer; he was a visionary and a fanatic; he wasgross, ignorant, morbid of mind, cruel in heart, vexed with a strain ofSadism that makes him on the whole corrupting and ignoble in effect. Buthe divined and invented prodigiously if he observed and recordedtediously, and his achievement remains a phantasmagoria of desperatesuggestions and strange, affecting situations and potent and inordinateeffects. He may be impossible; but there is French literature and Frenchsociety to show that he passed that way, and had 'incomparable power. 'The phrase is Mr. Henry James's, and it is hard to talk of Balzac andrefrain from it. 

LABICHE

Teniers or Daumier?

To the maker of Poirier and Fabrice, of Seraphine and Giboyer, of Olympeand the Marquis d'Auberive, there were analogies between the genius ofLabiche and the genius of Teniers. 'C'est au premier abord, ' says he, 'le meme aspect de caricature; c'est, en y regardant de plus pres, lameme finesse de tons, la meme justesse d'expression, la meme vivacite demouvement. ' For myself, I like to think of Labiche as in some sort akinto Honore Daumier. Earnestness and accomplishment apart, he has much incommon with that king of caricaturists. The lusty frankness, the jovialingenuity, the keen sense of the ridiculous, the insatiable instinct ofobservation, of the draughtsman are a great part of the equipment of theplaywright. Augier notes that truth is everywhere in Labiche's work, andAugier is right. He is before everything a dramatist: an artist, thatis, whose function is to tell a story in action and by the mouths of itspersonages; and whimsical and absurd as he loves to be, he is nevereither the one or the other at the expense of nature. He is oftencareless and futile: he will squander--(as in _Vingt-neuf Degres al'Ombre_ and _l'Avare en Gants_ _Jaunes_)--an idea that rightly belongsto the domain of pure comedy on the presentation of a most uproariousfarce. But he is never any falser to his vocation than this. Now andthen, as in _Moi_ and _le Voyage de M. Perrichon_, he is an excellentcomic poet, dealing with comedy seriously as comedy should be dealt with, and incarnating a vice or an affectation in a certain character withimpeccable justness and assurance. Now and then, as in _les PetitsOiseaux_ and _les Vivacites du Capitaine Tic_, he is content to tell acharming story as pleasantly as possible. Sometimes, as in _Celimare leBien-Aime_ (held by M. Sarcey to be the high-water mark of the modern_vaudeville_), _le Plus Heureux des Trois_, and _le Prix Martin_, hefights again from a humouristic point of view that triangular duelbetween the wife, the husband, and the lover which fills so large a placein the literature of France; and then he shows the reverse of the medalof adultery--with the husband at his ease, the seducer haunted by theghosts of old sins, the erring wife the slave of her unsuspecting lord. Or again, he takes to turning the world upside down, and--as in the_Cagnotte_, the _Chapeau de Paille_, and the _Trente Millions_--toproducing a scheme of morals and society that seems to have been dictatedfrom an Olympus demoralised by champagne and lobster. But at his wildesthe never forgets that men and women are themselves. His dialogue isalways right and appropriate, however extravagant it be. His vivid andvaried knowledge of life and character supplies him with touches enoughof nature and truth to make the fortune of a dozen ordinary dramatists;and withal you feel as you read that he is writing, as Augier says ofhim, to amuse himself merely, and that he could an if he would be solemnand didactic with all the impressiveness that a perfect acquaintance withmen and things and an admirable dramatic aptitude can bestow. The factthat he is always in a good temper has done him some wrong in that it hasled him to be to all appearances amusing only, where he might well haveposed as a severe and serious artist. But he is none the less true forhaving elected to be funny, and there is certainly more genuine humannature and human feeling in such drolleries as the _Chapeau de Paille_and _le Plus Heureux des Trois_ than in all the serious dramas of Ponsard(say) and Hugo put together. 

Labiche. 

Perhaps the most characteristic and individual part of his work is thatin which he has given his invention full swing, and allowed his humour toplay its maddest pranks at will. _Moi_ is an admirable comedy, and De laPorcheraie is almost hideously egoistic; the _Voyage de M. Perrichon_ isdelightful reading, and Perrichon is as pompous an ass as I know; but the_Chapeau de Paille_, the _Cagnotte_, the _Trente Millions_, the_Sensitive_, the _Deux Merles Blancs_, the _Doit-On le Dire_, and theircompeers--with them it is other-guess work altogether. In thesewhimsical phantasmagorias men and women move and speak as at the biddingof destinies drunk with laughing-gas. Time and chance have gonedemented, fate has turned comic poet, society has become its own parody, everybody is the irrepressible caricature of himself. You are in a topsy-turvy world, enveloped in an atmosphere instinct with gaiety and folly, where burlesque is natural and only the extravagant is normal; where yourChimaera has grown frolic, your Nightmare is first Cousin to the CheshireCat, and your Sphinxes are all upon the spree; and where you have aslittle concern for what is real as you have in that hemisphere of thegreat globe of Moliere--that has Scapin and Sganarelle for itsbreed-bates, and Pourceaugnac for its butt, and Pancrace and Marphuriusfor its scientific men, and Lelie and Agnes for its incarnations of loveand beauty. That the creator of such a world as this should have aspiredto the Academy's spare arm-chair--that one above all others but justvacated by the respectable M. De Sacy--was a fact that roused the _Revuedes Deux Mondes_ even to satire. But if the arm-chair brought honourwith it, then no man better deserved the privilege than Eugene Labiche, for he had amused and kept awake the public for nearly forty years--foralmost as long, that is, as the _Revue_ had been sending it to sleep. There are times and seasons when a good laugh makes more for edificationthan whole folios of good counsel. 'I regarded him not, ' quoth Sir Johnof one that would have moved him to sapience, 'and yet he talked wisely. 'Now Sir John, whatever his opinion of the _Revue_, would never have saidall that--the second part of it he might--of anything signed 'EugeneLabiche, ' nor--so I love to believe--would his august creator either. Foris not his work so full of quick, fiery, and delectable shapes as to beperpetual sherris? And when time and season fit, what more can the heartof man desire?

CHAMPFLEURY

The Man. 

Champfleury--novelist, dramatist, archaeologist, humourist, and literaryhistorian--belonged to a later generation than that of Petrus Borel andPhilothee O'Neddy; but he could remember the production of _lesBurgraves_, and was able of his own personal knowledge to laugh at themelancholy speech of poor Celestin Nanteuil--the famous 'Il n'y a plus dejeunesse' of a man grown old and incredulous and apathetic before histime: the lament over a yesterday already a hundred years behind. He hadlived in the Latin quarter; he had dined with Flicoteaux, and listened tothe orchestras of Habeneck and Musard; he had heard the chimes atmidnight with Baudelaire and Murger, hissed the tragedies of Ponsard, applauded Deburau and Rouviere, and seen the rise and fall of Courbet andDupont. If he was not of the giants he was of their immediatesuccessors, and he had seen them actually at work. He had hacked forBalzac, and read romantic prose at Victor Hugo's; he had lived so nearthe red waistcoat of Theophile Gautier as to dare to go up and down inParis (under the inspiration of the artist of _la Femme qui taille laSoupe_) in 'un habit en bouracan vert avec col a la Marat, un gilet decouleur bachique, et une culotte en drap d'un jaune assez malseant, 'together with 'une triomphante cravate de soie jaune'--a vice ofBaudelaire's inventing--and 'un feutre ras dans le gout de la coiffure deCamille Desmoulins. ' And having seen for himself, he could judge forhimself as well. From first to last he showed himself to be out ofsympathy with the ambitions and effects of romanticism. He was born ahumourist and an observer, and he became a 'realist' as soon as he beganto write. 

The Writer. 

His work is an antipodes not only of _Hernani_ and _Notre-Dame_ but of_Sarrazine_ and _la Cousine Bette_ and _Beatrix_ as well. For thecommonplace types and incidents, the everyday passions and fortunes, ofthe _Aventures de Mariette_ and the _Mascarade de la Vie Parisienne_represent a reaction not alone against the sublimities and theextravagance of Hugo but against the heroic aggrandisement of thingstrivial of Balzac as well. True, they deal with kindred subjects, andthey purport to be a record of life as it is and not of life as it oughtto be. But the pupil's point of view is poles apart from the master's;his intention, his ambition, his inspiration, belong to another order ofideas. He contents himself with observing and noting and reflecting;with making prose prosaic and adding sobriety and plainness to a plainand sober story; with being merely curious and intelligent; with usingexperience not as an intoxicant but as a staple of diet; with consideringfact not as the raw material of inspiration but as inspiration itself. Between an artist of this sort--pedestrian, good-tempered, touched withmalice, a little cynical--and the noble desperadoes of 1830 there couldbe little sympathy; and there seems no reason why the one should be theothers' historian, and none why, if their historian he should be, hishistory should be other than partial and narrow--than at best anachievement in special pleading. But Champfleury's was a personalityapart. His master quality was curiosity; he was interested ineverything, and he was above all things interested in men and women; hehad a liberal mind and no prejudices; he had the scientific spirit andthe scientific intelligence, if he sometimes spoke with the voice of thehumourist and in the terms of the artist in words; and his studies inromanticism are far better literature than his experiments in fiction. 

LONGFELLOW

Sea Poets. 

The ocean as confidant, a Laertes that can neither avoid his Hamlets norbid them hold their peace, is a modern invention. Byron and Shelleydiscovered it; Heine took it into his confidence, and told it the storyof his loves; Wordsworth made it a moral influence; Browning loved it inhis way, but his way was not often the poet's; to Matthew Arnold it wasthe voice of destiny, and its message was a message of despair; Hugoconferred with it as with an humble friend, and uttered such lofty thingsover it as are rarely heard upon the lips of man. And so with livinglyrists each after his kind. Lord Tennyson listens and looks until itstrikes him out an undying note of passion, or yearning, or regret--

 'Sunset and evening star, And one clear call for me';

Mr. Swinburne maddens with the wind and the sounds and the scents of it, until there passes into his verse a something of its vastness and itsvehemency, the rapture of its inspiration, the palpitating, many-twinkling miracle of its light; Mr. William Morris has been takenwith the manner of its melancholy; while to Whitman it has been 'thegreat Camerado' indeed, for it gave him that song of the brown birdbereft of his mate in whose absence the half of him had not been told tous. 

Longfellow. 

But to Longfellow alone was it given to see that stately galley whichCount Arnaldos saw; his only to hear the steersman singing that wild andwondrous song which none that hears it can resist, and none that hasheard it may forget. Then did he learn the old monster's secret--theword of his charm, the core of his mystery, the human note in his music, the quality of his influence upon the heart and the mind of man; and thendid he win himself a place apart among sea poets. With the most of themit is a case of _Ego et rex meus_: It is I and the sea, and my egoism isas valiant and as vocal as the other's. But Longfellow is the spokesmanof a confraternity; what thrills him to utterance is the spirit of thatstrange and beautiful freemasonry established as long ago as when thefirst sailor steered the first keel out into the unknown, irresistiblewater-world, and so established the foundations of the eternalbrotherhood of man with ocean. To him the sea is a place of mariners andships. In his verse the rigging creaks, the white sail fills andcrackles, there are blown smells of pine and hemp and tar; you catch thehome wind on your cheeks; and old shipmen, their eyeballs white in theirbronzed faces, with silver rings and gaudy handkerchiefs, come in andtell you moving stories of the immemorial, incommunicable deep. Heabides in a port; he goes down to the docks, and loiters among thegaliots and brigantines, he hears the melancholy song of the chanty-men;he sees the chips flying under the shipwright's adze; he smells the pitchthat smokes and bubbles in the caldron. And straightway he falls tosinging his variations on the ballad of Count Arnaldos; and the worldlistens, for its heart beats in his song. 

TENNYSON

St. Agnes' Eve. 

In Keats's _St. Agnes' Eve_ nothing is white but the heroine. It iswinter, and 'bitter chill'; the hare 'limps trembling through the frozengrass; the owl is a-cold for all his feathers; the beadsman's fingers arenumb, his breath is frosted; and at an instant of special and peculiarromance

 'The frost-wind blows Like Love's alarum, pattering the sharp sleet Against the window-panes. '

But there is no snow. The picture is pure colour: it blushes with bloodof queens and kings; it glows with 'splendid dyes, ' like the'tiger-moth's deep-damasked wings'--with 'rose bloom, ' and warm gules, 'and 'soft amethyst'; it is loud with music and luxurious with 'spiceddainties, ' with lucent syrops tinct with cinnamon, ' with 'manna anddates, ' the fruitage of Fez and 'cedared Lebanon' and 'silken Samarcand. 'Now, the Laureate's _St. Agnes' Eve_ is an ecstasy of colourlessperfection. The snows sparkle on the convent roof; the 'first snowdrop'vies with St. Agnes' virgin bosom; the moon shines an 'argent round' inthe 'frosty skies'; and in a transport of purity the lady prays:

 'Break up thy heavens, O Lord! and far, Through all the starlight keen, Draw me thy bride, a glittering star, In raiment white and clean. '

It is all coldly, miraculously stainless: as somebody has said, 'la vraie_Symphonie en Blanc Majeur_. '

Indian Summer. 

And at four-score the poet of _St. Agnes' Eve_ is still our greatestsince the Wordsworth of certain sonnets and the two immortal odes: isstill the one Englishman of whom it can be stated and believed thatElisha is not less than Elijah. His verse is far less smooth and lesslustrous than in the well-filed times of _In Memoriam_ and the Arthurianidylls. But it is also far more plangent and affecting; it shows alarger and more liberal mastery of form and therewith a finer, stronger, saner sentiment of material; in its display of breadth and freedom inunion with particularity, of suggestiveness with precision, of swiftnessof handling with completeness of effect, it reminds you of the latermagic of Rembrandt and the looser and richer, the less artful-seeming butmore ample and sumptuous, of the styles of Shakespeare. And the matteris worthy of the manner. Everywhere are greatness and a high imaginationmoving at ease in the gold armour of an heroic style. There are passagesin _Demeter and Persephone_ that will vie with the best in _Lucretius_;_Miriam_ is worth a wilderness of _Aylmer's Fields_; _Owd Roa_ is one ofthe best of the studies in dialect; in _Happy_ there are stanzas thatrecall the passion of _Rizpah_; nothing in modern English so thrills andvibrates with the prophetic inspiration, the fury of the seer, as_Vastness_; the verses _To Mary Boyle_--(in the same stanza as Musset's_le Mie Prigioni_)--are marked by such a natural grace of form and such awinning 'affectionateness, ' to coin a word, of intention andaccomplishment as Lord Tennyson has never surpassed nor very oftenequalled. In _Vastness_ the insight into essentials, the command ofprimordial matter, the capacity of vital suggestion, are gloriously inevidence from the first line to the last. Here is no touch of ingenuity, no trace of 'originality, ' no single sign of cleverness; the rhymes aremerely inevitable--there is no visible transformation of metaphor indeference to their suggestions; nothing is antic, peculiar, superfluous;but here in epic unity and completeness, here is a sublimation ofexperience expressed by means of a sublimation of style. It is unique inEnglish, and for all that one can see it is like to remain unique thisgood while yet. The impression you take is one of singular loftiness ofpurpose and a rare nobility of mind. Looking upon life and time and thespirit of man from the heights of his eighty years, it has been given tothe Master Poet to behold much that is hid to them in the plain or on theslopes beneath him, and beholding it to frame and utter a message solofty in style and in significance so potent that it sounds as of thisworld indeed but from the confines of experience, the farthest kingdomsof mortality. 

His Mastership. 

It is to note, too, that the Laureate of to-day deals with language in away that to the Tennyson of the beginning was--unhappily--impossible. Inthose early years he neither would nor could have been responsible forthe magnificent and convincing rhythms of _Vastness_, the austere yetpassionate shapeliness of _Happy_, the effects of vigour and varietyrealised in _Parnassus_. For in those early years he was ratherBenvenuto than Michelangelo, he was more of a jeweller than a sculptor, the phrase was too much to him, the inspiration of the incorrect toolittle. All that is changed, and for the best. Most interesting is itto the artist to remark how impatient--(as the Milton of the _Agonistes_was)--of rhyme and how confident in rhythm is the whilome poet of_Oriana_ and _The Lotus-Eaters_ and _The Vision of Sin_; and how thisimpatience and this confidence are revealed not merely in a piece ofmysticism naked yet unashamed as _The Gleam_--(whose movement with itsconstancy in double endings and avoidance of triplets is perhaps a littletame)--but also in what should have been a popular piece: the ode, towit, _On the Jubilee of Queen Victoria_. In eld, indeed, the craftsmaninclines to play with his material: he is conscious of mastery; he is inthe full enjoyment of his own; he indulges in experiments which to himare as a crown of glory and to them that come after him--to the noodlesthat would walk in his ways without first preparing themselves by prayerand study and a life of abnegation--are only the devil in disguise. TheRembrandt of _The Syndics_, the Shakespeare of _The Tempest_ and_Lear_--what are these but pits for the feet of the Young Ass? and whatelse will be the Tennyson of _Vastness_ and _The Gleam_? 'Lord, ' quothDickens years ago in respect of the _Idylls_ or of _Maud_, 'what apleasure it is to come across a man that can _write_!' He also was anartist in words; and what he said then he would say now with greateremphasis and more assurance. From the first Lord Tennyson has been anexemplar; and now in these new utterances, his supremacy is completelyrevealed. There is no fear now that 'All will grow the flower, For allhave got the seed'; for then it was a mannerism that people took andimitated, and now--! Now it is art; it is the greater Shakespeare, theconsummate Rembrandt, the unique Velasquez; and they may rise to it thatcan. 

GORDON HAKE

Aim and Equipment. 

Dr. Hake is one of the most earnest and original of poets. He has takennothing from his contemporaries, but has imagined a message for himself, and has chosen to deliver it in terms that are wholly his own. For himthe accidents and trivialities of individualism, the transitory andchanging facts that make up the external aspect of an age or a character, can hardly be said to exist. He only concerns himself with absolutes--theeternal elements of human life and the immutable tides of human destiny. It is of these that the stuff of his message is compacted; it is fromthese that its essence is distilled. His talk is not of Arthur andGuinevere, nor Chastelard and Atalanta, nor Paracelsus and Luria and AbtVogler; of 'the drawing-room and the deanery' he has nothing to say;nothing of the tendencies of Strauss and Renan, nothing of the NewRenaissance, nothing of Botticelli, nor the ballet, nor the text ofShakespeare, nor the joys of the book-hunter, nor the quaintness of QueenAnne, nor the morals of Helen of Troy. To these he prefers the mysteryof death, the significance of life, the quality of human and divine love;the hopes and fears and the joys and sorrows that are the perdurablestuff of existence, the inexhaustible and unchanging principles ofactivity in man. Now it is only to the few that reduced to theirsimplest expression the 'eternal verities' are engaging and impressive. To touch the many they must be conveyed in human terms; they must bepresented not as impersonal abstractions, not as matter for the higherintelligence and the higher emotions, but as living, breathing, individual facts, vivid with the circumstance of terrene life, quick withthe thoughts and ambitions of the hour, full charged with familiar andneighbourly associations. All this with Dr. Hake is by no meansinevitable. He loves to symbolise; he does not always care that thesymbol shall be appropriate and plain. He prefers to work in allegoryand emblem; but he does not always see that, however representative tohimself, his emblems and his allegories may not be altogetherrepresentative to the world. His imagination is at once quaint and far-reaching--at once peculiar and ambitious; and it is often guilty of whatis recondite and remote. In his best work--in _Old Souls_, for instance, and _Old Morality_--the quaintness is merely decorative: the essentialsare sound and human enough to be of lasting interest and to have acapacity of common application. Elsewhere his imagery is apt to becomestrange and unaffecting, his fancy to work in curious and desolate ways, his message to sound abstruse and strange; and these effects too aredeepened by the qualities and the merits of his style. It is peculiarlyhis own, but it is not always felicitous. There are times when it hasthe true epic touch--or at least as much of it as is possible in an ageof detail and elaboration; there are times when it has a touch of thepathetic--when in homeliness of phrase and triviality of rhythm it ishardly to be surpassed; and there are times, as in _The Snake Charmer_when, as in certain pages in the work of Richard Wagner, it is sostudiously laboured and so heavily charged with ornament and colour as tobe almost pedantic in infelicity, almost repellent by sheer force ofsuperfluous and elaborate suggestiveness. Last of all, in an epochtrained upon the passionate and subtle cadences of the Laureate and thelarge-moulded, ample, irresistible melodies of Mr. Swinburne, Dr. Hakechooses to deal in rhythms of the utmost naivete and in metrical formsthat are simplicity itself. 

LANDOR

Anti-Landor. 

To the many, Landor has always been more or less unapproachable, and hasalways seemed more or less shadowy and unreal. To begin with, he wrotefor himself and a few others, and principally for himself. Then, hewrote waywardly and unequally as well as selfishly; he published prettymuch at random; the bulk of his work is large; and the majority haspassed him by for writers more accessible and work less freakish and morecomprehensible. It is probable too that even among those who, inspiredby natural temerity or the intemperate curiosity of the general reader, have essayed his conquest and set out upon what has been described as'the Adventure of the Seven Volumes which are Seven Valleys of DryBones, ' but few have returned victorious. Of course the Seven Volumesare a world. But (it is objected) the world is peculiar in pattern, abounding in antres vast and desarts idle, in gaps and precipices and'manifest solutions of continuity, ' and enveloped in an atmosphere whichordinary lungs find now too rare and now too dense and too anodyne. Moreover, it is peopled chiefly with abstractions: bearing noble andsuggestive names but all surprisingly alike in stature and feature, allmore or less incapable of sustained emotion and even of logical argument, all inordinately addicted to superb generalities and a kind of monumentalskittishness, all expressing themselves in a style whose principalcharacteristic is a magnificent monotony, and all apparently the outcomeof a theory that to be wayward is to be creative, that human interest isa matter of apophthegms and oracular sentences, and that axiomatic anddramatic are identical qualities and convertible terms. This is theopinion of those adventurers in whom defeat has generated a sense ofinjury and an instinct of antagonism. Others less fortunate still havefound Landor a continent of dulness and futility--have come to considerthe Seven Volumes as so many aggregations of tedium. Such experiencesare one-sided and partial no doubt; and considered from a certain pointof view they seem worthless enough. But they exist, and they are in somesort justified. Landor, when all is said, remains a writers' writer; andfor my part I find it impossible not to feel a certain sympathy with themthat hesitate to accept him for anything else. 

His Drama. 

Again, to some of us Lander's imagination is not only inferior in kindbut poverty-stricken in degree; his creative faculty is limited by thereflection that its one achievement is Landor; his claim to considerationas a dramatic writer is negatived by the fact that, poignant as are thesituations with which he loved to deal, he was apparently incapable ofperceiving their capacities: inasmuch as he has failed completely andlogically to develop a single one of them; inasmuch, too, as he has neveronce succeeded in conceiving, much less in picturing, such a train ofconflicting emotions as any one of the complications from which he startsmight be supposed to generate. To many there is nothing Greek about hisdramatic work except the absence of stage directions; and to these thatquality of 'Landorian abruptness' which seems to Mr. Sidney Colvin toexcuse so many of its shortcomings is identical with a certain sort ofwhat in men of lesser mould is called stupidity. 

HOOD

How Much of Him?

Hood wrote much for bread, and he wrote much under pressure of all mannerof difficulties--want of health and want of money, the hardship of exileand the bitterness of comparative failure; and not a little of what heproduced is the merest journalism, here to-day and gone to-morrow. Athis highest he is very high, but it was not given to him to enjoy theconditions under which great work is produced: he had neither peace ofbody nor health of mind, his life from first to last was a struggle withsickness and misfortune. How is it possible to maintain an interest inall he wrote, when two-thirds of it was produced with duns at the doorand a nurse in the other room and the printer's-devil waiting in thehall? Of his admirable courage, his fine temper, his unfailing goodnessof heart, his incorruptible honesty, it were hard to speak too highly;for one has but to read the story of his life to wonder that he shouldhave written anything at all. At his happiest he had the gift oflaughter; at his deepest and truest the more precious gift of tears. Butfor him there were innumerable hours when the best he could affect wasthe hireling's motley; when his fun and his pathos alike ran strained andthin; when the unique poet and wit became a mere comic rhymester. Is itjust to his memory that it should be burdened with such a mass of what isalready antiquated? But one answer is possible. The immortal part ofHood might be expressed into a single tiny volume. 

Death's Jest-Book. 

Thackeray preferred Hood's passion to his fun; and Thackeray knew. Hoodhad an abundance of a certain sort of wit, the wit of odd analogies, ofremote yet familiar resemblances, of quaint conceits and humourous andunexpected quirks. He made not epigrams but jokes, sometimes purelyintellectual but nearly always with the verbal quality as well. Thewonderful jingle called _Miss Kilmansegg_--hard and cold and glitteringas the gold that gleams in it--abounds in capital types of both. But foran example of both here is a stanza taken at random from the _Ode to theGreat Unknown_:--

 'Thou _Scottish Barmecide_, feeding the hunger Of curiosity with airy gammon; Thou mystery-monger, _Dealing it out like middle cut of salmon_ _That people buy and can't make head or tail of it_, '

and so forth, and so forth: the first a specimen of oddness ofanalogy--the joke intellectual; the second a jest in which theintellectual quality is complicated with the verbal. Of rarer merit arethat conceit of the door which was shut with such a slam 'it sounded likea wooden d---n, ' and that mad description of the demented mariner, --

 'His head was _turned_, and so he _chewed_ _His pigtail_ till he died, '--

which is a pun as unexpected and imaginative as any that exists, notexcepting even Lamb's renowned achievement, the immortal 'I say, Porter, is that your own Hare or a Wig?' But as a punster Hood is merelyunsurpassable. The simplest and the most complex, the wildest and themost obvious, the straightest and the most perverse, all puns came aliketo him. The form was his natural method of expression. His proseextravaganzas--even to the delightful _Friend in Need_--are pretty wellforgotten; his one novel is very hard to read; there is far less in _Upthe Rhine_ than in _Humphry Clinker_ after all; we have been spoiled for_Lycus the Centaur_ and _The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies_ by the richand passionate verse of the Laureate, the distinction, and the measure ofArnold, the sumptuous diction and the varied and enchanting music of_Atalanta_ and _Hesperia_ and _Erechtheus_. We care little for the old-fashioned whimsicality of the _Odes_, and little for such an inimitablefarrago of vulgarisms, such a _reductio ad absurdum_ of sentiment andstyle, as _The Lost Child_. But the best of Hood's puns are amusingafter forty years. They are the classics of verbal extravagance, andthey are a thousand times better known than _The Last Man_, though thatis a work of genius, and almost as popular as the _Song of the Shirt_, the _Bridge of Sighs_, the _Dream of Eugene Aram_ themselves. By an oddchance, too, the rhymes in which they are set have all a tragic theme. 'Tout ce qui touche a la mort, ' says Champfleury, 'est d'une gaietefolle. ' Hood found out that much for himself before Champfleury hadbegun to write. His most riotous ballads are ballads of death and thegrave. Tim Turpin does murder and is hanged

 'On Horsham drop, and none can say He took a drop too much';

Ben Battle entwines a rope about his melancholy neck, and for the secondtime in life _enlists him in the line_; Young Ben expires of grief forthe falsehood of Sally Brown: Lieutenant Luff drinks himself into hisgrave; John Day the amorous coachman, 'With back too broad to be conceived By any narrow mind, '

pines to nothingness, and is found heels uppermost in his cruelmistress's water-butt. To Hood, with his grim imagination and hisstrange fantastic humour, death was meat and drink. It is as though hesaw so much of the 'execrable Shape' that at last the pair grew friends, and grinned whenever they foregathered even in thought. 

His Immortal Part. 

Was Thackeray right, then, in resenting the waste of Hood's genius uponmere comicalities? I think he was; but only to a certain point. Hoodwas a true poet: but it was not until after years of proof and endeavourthat he discovered the use to which his powers could best be put and thematerial on which they could best be employed. He worked hard and withbut partial success at poetry all his life long. He passed his life inpunning and making comic assaults on the Queen's English; but he wasauthor all the while of _The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies_, the _Ode toMelancholy_, _Hero and Leander_, _Lycus the Centaur_, and a score andmore of lovable and moving ballads; and he had won himself a name withtwo such capital examples of melodrama as _The Last Man_ (1826) and _TheDream of Eugene Aram_ (1829). But as a poet he profited little. Thepublic preferred him as a buffoon; and not until his last years (and thenanonymously) was he able to utter his highest word. All was made readyagainst his coming--the age, the subject, the public mind, the publiccapacity of emotion; and in _The Song of the Shirt_ he approved himself agreat singer. In the days of _Lycus the Centaur_ and the _MidsummerFairies_ he could no more have written it than the public could haveheeded had he written. But times were changed--Dickens had come, and thehumanitarian epoch--and the great song went like fire. So, a year or twoafter, did _The Bridge of Sighs_. That, says Thackeray, 'was hisCorunna, his Heights of Abraham--sickly, weak, wounded, he fell in thefull blaze and fame of that great victory. ' Could he have repeated ithad he lived? Who knows? In both these irresistible appeals to theheart of man the material is of equal value and importance with the form;and in poetry such material is rare. A brace of such songs is possibleto a poet; ten couples are not. It is Hood's immortality that he sangthese two. Almost in the uttering they went the round of the world; andit is not too much to say of them that they will only pass with thelanguage. 

LEVER

How He Lived. 

The story of Lever's life and adventures only wants telling to be asirresistibly attractive as Lorrequer's or O'Malley's own. Born inDublin, of an English father and an Irish mother, he lived to beessentially cosmopolitan and a _viveur_ of the first magnitude. At eighthe was master of his schoolmaster--a gentleman given to flogging but notlearned in Greek, and therefore a proper subject for a certain sort ofblackmailing. He was not an industrious boy; but he was apt and readywith his tongue, he was an expert in fencing and the dance, he was goodat improvising and telling stories, it is on record that he pleaded andwon the cause of himself and certain of his schoolmates accused before amagistrate of riot and outrage. At college he found work for his highspirits in wild fun and the perpetration of practical jokes. He and hischum Ottiwell, the original of Frank Webber, behaved to their governors, teachers, and companions very much as Charles O'Malley and theredoubtable Frank behave to theirs. Lever was excellent at astreet-ballad, and made and sang them in the rags of Rhoudlim, just asFrank Webber does; and he personated Cusack the surgeon to Cusack'sclass, just as Frank Webber personates the dean to _his_ class. On thewhole, indeed, he must have been as gamesome and volatile a nuisance aseven Dublin has endured. On leaving college he took charge of anemigrant ship bound for Quebec. Arrived in Canada, he plunged into thebackwoods, was affiliated to a tribe of Indians, and had to escape likeBagenal Daly at the risk of his life. Then he went to Germany, became astudent at Gottingen under Blumenbach, was heart and soul a Bursch, andhad the honour of seeing Goethe at Weimar. His diploma gained, he wentto Clare to do battle with the cholera and gather materials for _HarryLorrequer_. After this he was for some time dispensary doctor atPortstewart, where he met Prebendary Maxwell, the wild parson who wrote_Captain Blake_: so that here and now it is natural to find him leapingturf-carts and running away from his creditors. At Brussels, where hephysicked the British Embassy and the British tourist, he knew all sortsof people--among them Commissioner Meade, the original of Major Monsoon, and Cardinal Pecci, the original of Leo XIII. --and saw all sorts of life, and ran into all sorts of extravagance: until of a sudden, he is backagain in the capital, editing the _Dublin University Magazine_. Ofcourse he was the maddest editor ever seen. For him cards, horses, andhigh living were not luxuries but necessaries of life; yet all the whilehe believed devoutly in medicine, and with his family indulged withfreedom in the use of calomel and such agents. Presently he abandonedIreland for the Continent. He took his horses with him, and astonishedEurope with a four-in-hand of his own. Carlsruhe knew him well, asBelgium and the Rhine had known him. He only left the Reider Schloss atBregenz to conquer Italy; and at Florence, Spezzia, and finally Trieste, he shone like himself. 

What He Was. 

He was a born _poseur_. His vanity made him one of the worst--the mostexcessive--of talkers; go where he would and do what he might, he wasunhappy if the first place were another's. In all he did he was greedyto excel, and to excel incontestably. Like his own Bagenal Daly he wouldhave taken the big jump with the reins in his mouth and his hands tied, 'just to show the English Lord-Lieutenant how an Irish gentleman rides. 'He was all his life long confounding an English Lord-Lieutenant of somesort; for without display he would have pined away and died. AtTempleogue he lived at the rate of 3, 000 pounds a year on an income of1, 200 pounds; at Brussels he kept open house on little or nothing for allthe wandering grandees of Europe; at Florence they used to liken thecavalcade from his house to a procession from Franconi's; he found livingin a castle and spending 10 pounds a day on his horses the finest fun inthe world. He existed but to bewilder and dazzle, and had he not been abrilliant and distinguished novelist he would have been a brilliant anddistinguished something else. As he kept open house everywhere, as hewas fond of every sort of luxury, as he loved not less to lend money tohis intimates than to lose it to them at cards, and as he got but poorprices for his novels and was not well paid for his consular services, itis not easy to see how he managed to make ends meet. 

How He Wrote. 

Nor is it easy to see how he contrived to produce his novels. He was toopassionately addicted to society and the enjoyment of life to spare aninstant from them if he could help it; and the wonder is not that heshould have written so well but that he should have written at all. Fortunately or the other thing, his books cost him no effort. He wroteor dictated at a gallop and, his copy once produced, had finished hiswork. He abhorred revision, and while keenly sensitive to blame andgreedy of praise he ceased to care for his books as soon as they had lefthis desk. That he was not in scarce any sense an artist is but tooclear. He never worked on a definite plan nor was at any pains tocontrive a plot; he depended on the morning's impressions for theevening's task, and wrote _Con Cregan_ under the immediate influence of atravelled Austrian, who used to talk to him every night ere he sat downto his story. But he was a wonderful improvisatore. He hadimagination--(even romantic imagination: as the episode of Menelaus Crickin _Con Cregan_ will show)--a keen, sure eye for character, incomparablefacility in composition, an inexhaustible fund of shrewdness, whimsicality, high spirits, an admirable knack of dialogue; and as consulat Spezzia and at Trieste, as a fashionable practitioner at Brussels, asdispensary doctor on the wild Ulster coast, he was excellently placed forthe kind of literature it was in him to produce. Writing at random andalways under the spur of necessity, he managed to inform his work withextraordinary vitality and charm. His books were only made to sell, butit is like enough that they will also live, for they are yet well nigh asreadable as at first, and Nina and Kate O'Donoghue--(for instance)--seemdestined to go down to posterity as typical and representative. Hadtheir author taken art seriously, and devoted all his energy to itspractice, he could scarce have done more than this. Perhaps, indeed, hewould not have done so much. It could never have been Lorrequer's to'build the lofty rhyme. ' It was an honest as well as a brilliantcreature; and I believe we should all have suffered if some avengingchance had borne it in upon him that to be really lofty your rhyme mustof necessity be not blown upwards like a bubble but built in air like acathedral. He would, I take it, have experimentalised in repentance tothe extent of elaborating his creations and chastising his style; and, itmay be, he would have contrived but to beggar his work of interest andcorrect himself of charm. A respectable ambition, no doubt; but how muchbetter to be the rough-and-ready artist of Darby the Beast and MickyFree, the humane and charming rattlepate to whom we owe Paul Goslett andthe excellent and pleasing Potts!

JEFFERIES

His Virtue. 

I love to think of Jefferies as a kind of literary Leatherstocking. Hisstyle, his mental qualities, the field he worked in, the chase hefollowed, were peculiar to himself, and as he was without a rival, so washe without a second. Reduced to its simplest expression, his was a mindcompact of observation and of memory. He writes as one who watchesalways, who sees everything, who forgets nothing. As his lot was cast incountry places, among wood and pasturage and corn, by coverts teemingwith game and quick with insect life, and as withal he had the hunter'spatience and quick-sightedness, his faculty of looking and listening andof noting and remembering, his readiness of deduction and insistence ofpursuit--there entered gradually into his mind a greater quantity ofnatural England, her leaves and flowers, her winds and skies, her wildthings and tame, her beauties and humours and discomforts, than was ever, perhaps, the possession of writing Briton. This property he conveyed tohis countrymen in a series of books of singular freshness and interest. The style is too formal and sober, the English seldom other than homelyand sufficient; there is overmuch of the reporter and nothing like enoughof the artist, the note of imagination, the right creative faculty. Butthey are remarkable books. It is not safe to try and be beforehand withposterity, but in the case of such works as the _Gamekeeper_ and _WildLife_ and with such a precedent as that established by the _NaturalHistory of Selborne_ such anticipation seems more tempting and lesshazardous than usual. One has only to think of some mediaeval Jefferiesattached to the staff of Robin Hood, and writing about Needwood andCharnwood as his descendant wrote about the South Downs, to imagine anhistorical document of priceless value and inexhaustible interest. Andin 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 outsidemuseums of comparative anatomy the weasel is not and the badger hasceased from the face of the earth, it is not doubtful that the_Gamekeeper_ and _Wild Life_ and the _Poacher_--epitomising, as theywill, the rural England of certain centuries before--will be serving asmaterial and authority for historical descriptions, historical novels, historical epics, historical pictures, and will be honoured as the mostuseful stuff of their kind in being. 

His Limitation. 

In those first books of his Jefferies compels attention by sheerfreshness of matter; he is brimful of new facts and original andpertinent observation, and that every one is vaguely familiar with andinterested in the objects he is handling and explaining serves but toheighten his attractiveness. There are so many who but know of haresdisguised as soup, of ants as a people on whose houses it is not good tosit down, of partridges as a motive of bread sauce! And Jefferies, retailing in plain, useful English the thousand and one curious factsthat make up life for these creatures and their kind--Jefferies walkingthe wood, or tracking the brook, or mapping out the big tree--is some oneto be heeded with gratitude. He is the Scandalous Chronicler of thewarren and the rookery, the newsmonger and intelligencer of creepingthings, and things that fly, and things that run; and his confidences, unique in quality and type, have the novelty and force of personalrevelations. In dealing with men and women, he surrendered most of hisadvantage and lost the best part of his charm. The theme is old, thematter well worn, the subject common to us all; and most of us carenothing for a few facts more or less unless they be romanticallyconveyed. Reality is but the beginning, the raw material, of art; and itis by the artist's aid and countenance that we are used to makeacquaintance with our fellows, be they generals in cocked hats ormechanics in fustian. Now Jefferies was not an artist, and so beside hisstoats and hares, his pike, his rabbits, and his moles, his men and womenare of little moment. You seem to have heard of them and to far betterpurpose from others; you have had their author's facts presentedelsewhere, and that in picturesque conjunction with the great eternalinterests of passion and emotion. To be aware of such a difference is toresent it; and accordingly to read is to know that Jefferies would havedone well to leave Hodge and Hodge's masters alone and keep to his beastsand birds and fishes. 

The General. 

Is it not plain as the nose on your face that his admirers admire himinjudiciously? It is true, for instance, that he is in a sense, 'toofull' (the phrase is Mr. Besant's) for the generality of readers. But itis also true that he is not nearly full enough: that they look forconclusions while he is bent upon giving them only details: that theyclamour for a breath of inspiration while he is bent upon emptying hisnote-book in decent English; that they persist in demanding a motive, aleading idea, a justification, while he with knowledge crammed is fixedin his resolve to tell them no more than that there are milestones on theDover Road, or that there are so many nails of so many shapes and so manycolours in the pig-sty at the back of Coate Farm. They prefer 'theirgeraniums in the conservatory. ' They refuse, in any case, to call a'picture' that which is only a long-drawn sequence of statements. Theyare naturally inartistic, but they have the tradition of a long andspeaking series of artistic results, and instinctively they decline torecognise as art the work of one who was plainly the reverse of anartist. The artist is he who knows how to select and to inspire theresults of his selection. Jefferies could do neither. He was a reporterof genius; and he never got beyond reporting. To the average reader heis wanting in the great essentials of excitement: he is prodigal offacts, and he contrives to set none down so as to make one believe in itfor longer than the instant of perusal. From his work the passionatehuman quality is not less absent than the capacity of selection and thegift of inspiration, and all the enthusiasm of all the enthusiasts of anenthusiastic age will not make him and his work acceptable to theaforesaid average reader. In letters he is as the ideal British water-colourist in paint: the care of both is not art but facts, and againfacts, and facts ever. You consider their work; you cannot see the woodfor the trees; and you are fain to conclude that themselves were so muchinterested in the trees they did not even know the wood was there. 

Last Words. 

To come to an end with the man:--his range was very limited, and withinthat range his activity was excessive; yet the consequences of hisenormous effort were--and are--a trifle disappointing. He thought, poorfellow! that he had the world in his hand and the public at his feet;whereas, the truth to tell, he had only the empire of a kind of backgarden and the lordship of (as Mr. Besant has told us) some fortythousand out of a hundred millions of readers. You know that he sufferedgreatly; you know too that to the last he worked and battled on as becamean honest, much-enduring, self-admiring man: as you know that in death hesnatched a kind of victory, and departed this life with dignity as one'good at many things, ' who had at last 'attained to be at rest. ' Youknow, in a word, that he took his part in the general struggle forexistence, and manfully did his best; and it is with something like apang that you find his biographer insisting on the merits of the feat, and quoting approvingly the sentimentalists who gathered about his death-bed. To make eloquence about heroism is not the way to breed heroes; andit may be that Jefferies, had his last environment been less fluent andsonorous, would now seem something more heroic than he does. 

GAY

The Fabulist. 

Gay the fabulist is only interesting in a certain sense and to a smallextent. The morality of the _Fables_ is commonplace; their workmanshipis only facile and agreeable; as literature--as achievements in a certainorder of art--they have a poor enough kind of existence. In comparisonto the work of La Fontaine they are the merest journalism. Thesimplicity, the wit, the wisdom, the humanity, the dramatic imagination, the capacity of dramatic expression, the exquisite union of sense andmanner, the faultless balance of matter and style, are qualities forwhich in the Englishman you look in vain. You read, and you read notonly without enthusiasm but without interest. The verse is merely briskand fluent; the invention is common; the wit is not very witty; thehumour is artificial; the wisdom, the morality, the knowledge of life, the science of character--if they exist at all it is but as anatomicalpreparations or plants in a _hortus siccus_. Worse than anything, the_Fables_ are monotonous. The manner is consistently uniform; theinvention has the level sameness of a Lincolnshire landscape; thenarrative moves with the equal pace of boats on a Dutch canal. Theeffect is that of a host of flower-pots, the columns in a ledger, atragedy by the Rev. Mr. Home; and it is heightened by the matchlesstriteness of the fabulist's reflections and the uncommon tameness of hisdrama. It is hard to believe that this is indeed the Gay of _Polly_ and_The Beggars' Opera_. True, the dialects of his Peachum and his Lockitare in some sort one; his gentlemen of the road and his ladies of thekennel rejoice in a common flippancy of expression; there is little tochoose between the speech of Polly and the speech of Lucy. But inrespect of the essentials of drama the dialogue of the _Beggars' Opera_is on the whole sufficient. The personages are puppets; but they areindividual, and they are fairly consistent in their individuality. MissLockit does not think and feel like Miss Diver; Macheath isdistinguishable from Peachum; none is exactly alive, but of stage lifeail have their share. The reverse of this is the case with thepersonages of the _Fables_. They think the thoughts and speak the speechof Mr. Gay. The elephant has the voice of the sparrow; the monkey is onewith the organ on which he sits; there is but a difference of namebetween the eagle and the hog; the talk of Death has exactly the mannerand weight and cadence of the Woodman's; a change of label would enablethe lion to change places with the spaniel, would suffice to cage thewolf as a bird and set free the parrot as a beast of prey. All areequally pert, brisk, and dapper in expression; all are equallysententious and smart in aim; all are absolutely identical in functionand effect. The whole gathering is stuffed with the same straw, preparedwith the same dressing, ticketed in the same handwriting, and paintedwith the same colours. Any one who remembers the infinite variety of LaFontaine will feel that Gay the fabulist is a writer whose work the worldhas let die very willingly indeed. 

The Moralist. 

And Gay is not a whit less inefficient as a moralist. He is a kindlysoul, and in his easygoing way he has learnt something of the tricks ofthe world and something of the hearts of men. He writes as anunsuccessful courtier; and in that capacity he has remarks to offer whichare not always valueless, and in which there is sometimes a certainshrewdness. But the unsuccessful courtier is on the whole a creature ofthe past. Such interest as he has is rather historical than actual; andneither in the nursery nor in the schoolroom is he likely to create anyexcitement or be received with any enthusiasm. To the world he can onlyrecommend himself as one anxious to make it known on the smallestprovocation and on any occasion or none that Queen Anne is dead. Openhim where you will, and you find him full of this important news anddetermined on imparting it. Thus, in _The Scold and the Parrot_:

 'One slander must ten thousand get, The world with int'rest pays the debt';

that is to say, Queen Anne is dead. Thus, too, in _The Persian_, _theSun_, _and the Cloud_:

 'The gale arose; the vapour tost (The sport of winds) in air was lost; The glorious orb the day refines. Thus envy breaks, thus merit shines';

in _The Goat without a Beard_:

 'Coxcombs distinguished from the rest To all but coxcombs are a jest';

in _The Shepherd's Dog and the Wolf_:

 'An open foe may prove a curse, But a pretended friend is worse';

and so to the end of the chapter. The theme is not absorbing, and thevariations are proper to the theme. 

After All. 

How long is it that the wise and good have ceased to say (striking theirpensive bosoms), '_Here_ lies Gay'? It is--how long? But for all thatGay is yet a figure in English letters. As a song-writer he has still aclaim on us, and is still able to touch the heart and charm the ear. Thelyrics in _Acis and Galatea_ are not unworthy their association withHandel's immortal melodies, the songs in _The Beggars' Opera_ have a partin the life and fame of the sweet old tunes from which they can never bedivided. I like to believe that in the operas and the _Trivia_ and _TheShepherd's Week_ is buried the material of a pleasant little book. 

ESSAYS AND ESSAYISTS

The Good of Them. 

It is our misfortune that of good essayists there should be but few. Menthere have been who have done the essayist's part so well as to haveearned an immortality in the doing; but we have had not many of them, andthey make but a poor figure on our shelves. It is a pity that thingsshould be thus with us, for a good essayist is the pleasantest companionimaginable. There are folk in plenty who have never read Montaigne atall; but there are few indeed who have read but a page of him, and thatpage but once. And the same may be said of Addison and Fielding, of Lamband Hazlitt, of Sterne and Bacon and Ben Jonson, and all the members oftheir goodly fellowship. To sit down with any one of them is to sit downin the company of one of the 'mighty wits, our elders and our betters, 'who have done much to make literature a good thing, having written booksthat are eternally readable. If of all them that have tried to writeessays and succeeded after a fashion a twentieth part so much could besaid the world would have a conversational literature of inexhaustibleinterest. But indeed there is nothing of the sort. Beside the 'rare andradiant' masters of the art there are the apprentices, and these are manyand dull. 

Generalities. 

Essayists, like poets, are born and not made, and for one worthremembering the world is confronted with a hundred not worth reading. Your true essayist is in a literary sense the friend of everybody. Asone of the brotherhood has phrased it, it is his function 'to speak withease and opportunity to all men. ' He must be personal, or his hearerscan feel no manner of interest in him. He must be candid and sincere, orhis readers presently see through him. He must have learned to think forhimself and to consider his surroundings with an eye that is both kindlyand observant, or they straightway find his company unprofitable. Heshould have fancy, or his starveling propositions will perish for lack ofmetaphor and the tropes and figures needed to vitalise a truism. He doeswell to have humour, for humour makes men brothers, and is perhaps moreinfluential in an essay than in most places else. He will find a littlewit both serviceable to himself and comfortable to his readers. Forwisdom, it is not absolutely necessary that he have it, but in its way itis as good a property as any: used with judgment, indeed, it does more tokeep an essay sweet and fresh than almost any other quality. And indefault of wisdom--which, to be sure, it is not given to every man, muchless to every essayist, to entertain--he need have no scruples aboutusing whatever common sense is his; for common sense is a highlyrespectable commodity, and never fails of a wide and eager circle ofbuyers. A knowledge of men and of books is also to be desired; for it isa writer's best reason of being, and without it he does well to hold histongue. Blessed with these attributes he is an essayist to some purpose. Give him leisure and occasion, and his discourse may well become aspopular as Montaigne's own. 

In Particular. 

For the British essayists, they are more talked about than known. It isto be suspected that from the first their reputation has greatly exceededtheir popularity; and of late years, in spite of the declamation ofMacaulay and the very literary enthusiasm of the artist of _Esmond_ and_The Virginians_, they have fallen further into the background, and areless than ever studied with regard. In theory the age of Anne is stillthe Augustan age to us; but in theory only, and only to a certain extent. What attracts us is its outside. We are in love with its houses and itschina and its costumes. We are not enamoured of it as it was but as itseems to Mr. Caldecott and Mr. Dobson and Miss Kate Greenaway. We carelittle for its comedy and nothing at all for its tragedy. Its verse isall that our own is not, and the same may be said of its prose andours--of the prose of Mr. Swinburne and Mr. George Meredith and the proseof Addison and Swift. Mr. Gladstone is not a bit like Bolingbroke, andbetween _The Times_ and _The Tatler_, between _The Spectator_ (Mr. Addison's), and _The Fortnightly Review_, there is a difference of closeupon two centuries and of a dozen revolutions--political, social, scientific, and aesthetic. We may babble as we please about the'sweetness' of Steele and the 'humour' of Sir Roger de Coverley, but inour hearts we care for them a great deal less than we ought, and in factMr. Mudie's subscribers do not hesitate to prefer the 'sweetness' of Mr. Black and the 'humour' of Mr. James Payn. Our love is not for theessentials of the time but only its accidents and oddities; and weexpress it in pictures and poems and fantasies in architecture, and thecanonisation (in figures) of Chippendale and Sheraton. But it isquestionable if we might not with advantage increase our interest, andcarry imitation a little deeper. The Essayists, for instance, are oftendull, but they write like scholars and gentlemen. They refrain frompersonalities; they let scandal alone, nor ever condescend toeavesdropping; they never go out of their way in search of affectation orprurience or melancholy, but are content to be merely wise and cheerfuland humane. Above all, they do their work as well as they can. Theyseem to write not for bread nor for a place in society but for thepleasure of writing, and of writing well. In these hysterical times lifeis so full, so much is asked and so much has to be given, that tranquilwriting and careful workmanship are impossible. A certain poet hasbewailed the change in a charming rondeau:--

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

It must be owned that his melancholy is anything but groundless. Thetrick of amenity and good breeding is lost; the graces of an excellencethat is unobtrusive are graces no more. We write as men paint for theexhibitions: with the consciousness that we must pass without notice ifwe do not exceed in colour and subject and tone. The need exists, andthe world bows to it. Mr. Austin Dobson's little sheaf of _EighteenthCentury Essays_ might be regarded as a protest against the necessity andthe submission. It proves that 'tis possible to be eloquent withoutadjectives and elegant without affectation; that to be brilliant you neednot necessarily be extravagant and conceited; that without being maudlinand sentimental it is not beyond mortal capacity to be pathetic; and thatonce upon a time a writer could prove himself a humourist without feelingit incumbent upon him to be also a jack-pudding. 

BOSWELL

His Destiny. 

It has been Boswell's fate to be universally read and almost asuniversally despised. What he suffered at the hands of Croker andMacaulay is typical of his fortune. In character, in politics, inattainments, in capacity, the two were poles apart; but they were agreedin this: that Boswell must be castigated and contemned, and that theywere the men to do it. Croker's achievement, consider it how you will, remains the most preposterous in literary history. He could see nothingin the _Life_ but a highly entertaining compilation greatly in need ofannotation and correction. Accordingly he took up Boswell's text andinterlarded it with scraps of his own and other people's; he pegged intoit a sophisticated version of the _Tour_; and he overwhelmed his amazingcompound with notes and commentaries in which he took occasion to snub, scold, 'improve, ' and insult his author at every turn. What came of itone knows. Macaulay, in the combined interests of Whiggism and goodliterature, made Boswell's quarrel his own, and the expiation was asbitter as the offence was wanton and scandalous. 

His Critic. 

But Macaulay, if he did Jeddart justice on Croker, took care not toforget that Johnson was a Tory hero, and that Boswell was Johnson'sbiographer. He was too fond of good reading not to esteem the _Life_ forone of the best of books. But he was also a master of the art ofbrilliant and picturesque misrepresentation; and he did not neglect toprove that the _Life_ is only admirable because Boswell was contemptible. It was, he argued, only by virtue of being at once daft and drunken, selfish and silly, an eavesdropper and a talebearer, a kind of inspiredFaddle, a combination of butt and lackey and snob, that Boswell contrivedto achieve his wretched immortality. And in the same way Boswell's herowas after all but a sort of Grub Street Cyclops, respectable enough byhis intelligence--(but even so ridiculous in comparison to giftedWhigs)--yet more or less despicable in his manners, his English, and hispolitics. Now, Macaulay was the genius of special pleading. Admirableman of letters as he was, he was politician first and man of lettersafterwards: his judgments are no more final than his antitheses are dull, and his method for all its brilliance is the reverse of sound. When youbegin to inquire how much he really knew about Boswell, and how far youmay accept his own estimate of his own pretentions, he becomes amusing inspite of himself: much as, according to him, Boswell was an artist. Inhis review of Croker he is keen enough about dates and facts andsolecisms; on questions of this sort he bestows his fiercest energies;for such lapses he visits his Tory opposite with his most savage andsplendid insolence, his heartiest contempt, his most scathing rhetoric. But on the great question of all--the corruption of Boswell's text--he isnot nearly so implacable, and concerning the foisting on the _Life_ ofthe whole bulk of the _Tour_ he is not more than lukewarm. 'We greatlydoubt, ' he says, 'whether _even_ the _Tour to the Hebrides_ should havebeen inserted in the midst of the _Life_. There is one markeddistinction between the two works. Most of the _Tour_ was seen byJohnson in manuscript. It does not appear that he ever saw any part ofthe _Life_. ' This is to say that Croker's action is reprehensible notbecause it is an offence against art but because Johnson on private andpersonal grounds might not have been disposed to accept the _Life_ asrepresentative and just, and might have refused to sanction itsappearance on an equal footing with the _Tour_, which on private andpersonal grounds he _had_ accepted. In the face of such an argument whocan help suspecting Macaulay's artistic faculty? 'The _Life ofJohnson_, ' he says, 'is assuredly a great, a very great, book. Homer isnot more decidedly the first of heroic poets, Shakespeare is not moredecidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly thefirst of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers . . . Eclipseis first, and the rest nowhere. ' That is hearty and exact enough. But, as I have hinted, Macaulay, furious with Croker's carelessness, is almosttolerant of Croker's impudence. For Croker as a scholar and an historianhe is merely pitiless; to Croker ruining the _Life_ by the insertion ofthe _Tour_--a feat which would scarce be surpassed by the interpolationof the Falstaff scenes of the _Merry Wives_ in one or other of the partsof _Henry IV. _--he is lenient enough, and lenient on grounds which arenot artistic but purely moral. Did he recognise to the full the fact ofBoswell's pre-eminence as an artist? Was he really conscious that the_Life_ is an admirable work of art as well as the most readable andcompanionable of books? As, not content with committing himself thusfar, he goes on to prove that Boswell was great because he was little, that he wrote a great book because he was an ass, and that if he had notbeen an ass his book would probably have been at least a small one, incredulity on these points becomes respectable. 

Himself. 

Boswell knew better. A true Scotsman and a true artist, he could playthe fool on occasion, and he could profit by his folly. In hisdedication to the first and greatest President the Royal Academy has hadhe anticipates a good many of Macaulay's objections to his character anddeportment, and proves conclusively that if he chose to seem ridiculoushe did so not unwittingly but with a complete apprehension of the effecthe designed and the means he adopted. In the _Tour_, says he, from his'eagerness to display the wonderful fertility and readiness of Johnson'swit, ' he 'freely showed to the world its dexterity, even when I wasmyself the object of it. ' He was under the impression that he would be'liberally understood, ' as 'knowing very well what I was about. ' But, headds, 'it seems I judged too well of the world'; and he points his moralwith a story of 'the great Dr. Clarke, ' who, 'unbending himself with afew friends in the most playful and frolicsome manner, ' saw Beau Nash inthe distance, and was instantly sobered. 'My boys, ' quoth he, 'let us begrave--here comes a fool. ' Macaulay was not exactly Beau Nash, nor wasBoswell 'the great Dr. Clarke'; but, as Macaulay, working on Wolcot'slines, was presently to show, Boswell did right to describe the world as'a great fool, ' and to regret in respect of his own silliness that in the_Tour_ he had been 'arrogant enough to suppose that the tenour of therest of the book would sufficiently guard against such a strangeimputation. ' In the same way he showed himself fully alive to theenduring merits of his achievement. 'I will venture to say, ' he writes, 'that he (Johnson) will be seen in this work more completely than any manwho has ever lived. ' He had his own idea of biography; he haddemonstrated its value triumphantly in the _Tour_ which, thoughorganically complete, is plainly not a record of travel but abiographical essay. In the _Tour_, that is, he had approved himself anoriginal master of selection, composition, and design; of the art ofworking a large number of essential details into a uniform and livingwhole; and of that most difficult and telling of accomplishments, thereproduction of talk. In the _Life_ he repeated the proof on a largerscale and with a finer mastery of construction and effect; and in whathis best editor describes as 'the task of correcting, amending, andadding to his darling work' he spent his few remaining years. That hedrifted into greatness, produced his two masterpieces unconsciously, anddeveloped a genius for biography as one develops a disease, is 'aridiculous conception, ' as Mr. Napier rightly says. In proof of it wehave Boswell's own words, and we have the books themselves. Suchtestimony is not to be overborne by any number of paradoxes, howeveringenious, nor by any superflux of rhetoric, however plausible andpersuasive. That Boswell was a gossip, a busybody, and something of asot, and that many did and still do call him fool, is certain; but thatis no reason why he should not have been an artist, and none why heshould be credited with the fame of having devoted the best part of hislife to the production of a couple of masterpieces--as M. Jourdain talkedprose--without knowing what he was doing. Turner chose to goa-masquerading as 'Puggy Booth'; but as yet nobody has put forward theassertion that Turner was unconscious of the romance and splendour of his_Ulysses and Polyphemus_, or that he painted his _Rain_, _Speed_, _andSteam_ in absolute ignorance of the impression it would produce and theidea it should convey. Goldsmith reminded Miss Reynolds of 'a lowmechanic, particularly . . . A journey-man tailor'; but that he wasunconsciously the most elegant and natural writer of his age is aposition which has not yet been advanced. And surely it is high timethat Boswell should take that place in art which is his by right ofconquest, and that Macaulay's paradox--which is only the opinionbrilliantly put of an ignorant and unthinking world--('Il avait mieux quepersonne l'esprit de tout le monde')--should go the way of all its kind. 

CONGREVE

His Biographers and Critics. 

An American literary journal once assured its readers that Congreve has a'niche in the Valhalla of Ben Jonson. ' The remark is injudicious, ofcourse, even for a literary American, and there is no apparent reason whyit should ever have got itself uttered. It is probably the unluckiestthing that ever was said of Congreve, who--with some unimportantexceptions--has been singularly fortunate in his critics and biographers. Dryden wrote of him with enthusiasm, and in doing so he may be said tohave set a fashion of admiration which is vigorous and captivating evenyet. Swift, Voltaire, Lamb, Hunt, Hazlitt, Thackeray, Macaulay, to namebut these, have dealt with him in their several ways; of late he has beenpraised by such masters of the art of writing as Mr. Swinburne and Mr. George Meredith; while Mr. Gosse, the last on the list, surpasses most ofhis predecessors in admiration and nearly all, I think, in knowledge. 

The Real Congreve. 

It is no fault of Mr. Gosse's that with all his diligence he should failto give a complete and striking portrait of his man, or to make more ofwhat he describes as his 'smiling, faultless rotundity. ' As he puts it:'There were no salient points about Congreve's character, ' so that 'novagaries, no escapades place him in a ludicrous or in a human light, ' and'he passes through the literary life of his time as if in felt slippers, noiseless, unupbraiding, without personal adventures. ' That, I take it, is absolutely true. It is known that Congreve was cheerful, serviceable, and witty; that he was a man of many friends; that Pope dedicated his_Iliad_ to him; that Dryden loved and admired him; that Collier attackedhis work, and that his rejoinder was equally spiritless and ill-bred;that he was attached to Mrs. Bracegirdle, and left all his money to theDuchess of Marlborough; that he was a creditable Government official; andthat at thirty, having written a certain number of plays, he suddenlylost his interest in life and art, and wrote no more. But that is aboutall. Thackeray's picture of him may be, and probably is, as unveraciousas his Fielding or his Dick Steele; but there is little or nothing toshow how far we can depend upon it. The character of the man escapes us, and we have either to refrain from trying to see him or to contentourselves with mere hypothesis. So abnormal is the mystery in which heis enshrouded that what in the case of others would be notorious remainsin his case dubious and obscure: so that we cannot tell whether he wasBracegirdle's lover or only her friend, and the secret of his relationswith the Duchess of Marlborough has yet to be discovered. Mr. Gossesucceeded no better than they that went before in plucking out the heartof Congreve's mystery. He was, and he remains, impersonal. At his mostsubstantial he is (as some one said of him) no more than 'vaguenesspersonified': at his most luminous only an appearance like the_Scin-Laeca_, the shining shadow adapted in a moment of peculiarinspiration by the late Lord Lytton. 

The Dramatist. 

But we have the plays, and who runs may read and admire. I say advisedlywho runs may read, and not who will may see. Congreve's plays are, onecan imagine, as dull in action as they are entertaining in print. Theyhave dropped out of the _repertoire_, and the truth is they merit nobetter fate. They are only plays to the critic of style; to the actorand the average spectator they are merely so much spoken weariness. Tobegin with, they are marked by such a deliberate and immitigable basenessof morality as makes them impossible to man. Wycherley has done morevilely; Vanbrugh soars to loftier altitudes of filthiness. But neitherWycherley nor Vanbrugh has any strain of the admirable intellectualquality of Congreve. Villainy comes natural to the one, and beastlinessdrops from the other as easily as honey from the comb; but in neither isthere evident that admirable effort of the intelligence which is adistinguishing characteristic of Congreve, and with neither is the resultat once so consummate and so tame. For both Wycherley and Vanbrugh areplaywrights, and Congreve is not. Congreve is only an artist in stylewriting for himself and half a dozen in the pit, while Wycherley andVanbrugh--and for that matter Etherege and Farquhar--are playwrightsproducing for the whole theatre. In fact Congreve's plays were onlysuccessful in proportion as they were less literary and 'Congrevean. ' Hisfirst comedy was the talk of the town; his last, _The Way of the World_, that monument of characterisation (of a kind) and fine English, was onlya 'success of esteem. ' The reason is not far to seek. Congreve's playswere too sordid in conception and too unamusing in effect for even theaudiences to which they were produced; they were excellent literature, but they were bad drama, and they were innately detestable to boot. Audiences are the same in all strata of time; and it is easy to see thatWycherley's Horner and Vanbrugh's Sir John and Lady Brute were amusing, when Lady Wishfort and Sir Sampson Legend and the illustrious andimpossible Maskwell were found 'old, cold, withered, and of intolerableentrails. ' An audience, whatever its epoch, wants action; and stillaction, and again and for the last time action; also it wants a point ofdeparture that shall be something tinctured with humanity, a touch of thehuman in the term of everything, and at least a 'sort of a kind of astrain' of humanity in the progress of events from the one point to theother. This it gets in Wycherley, brute as he is; with a far larger andmore vigorous comic sense it gets the same in Vanbrugh; it gets it with adifference in the light-hearted indecencies of Farquhar. From themagnificent prose of Congreve it is absent. His it was to sublimate allthat was most artificial in an artificial state of society: he was theconsummate artist of a phase that was merely transient, the laureate of ageneration that was only alive for half-an-hour in the course of all thetwenty-four. He is saved from oblivion by sheer strength of style. Itis a bad dramatic style, as we know; it leaves the Witwoulds and thePlyants as admirable as the Mirabels and Millamants and Angelicas; itmakes no distinction between the Mrs. Foresights and the Sir SampsonLegends; it presents an exemplar in Lady Wishfort and an exemplar inPetulant; it is uneasy, self-conscious, intrusive, even offensive, thevery reverse of dramatic; and in Congreve's hands it is irresistible, for, thanks to Congreve, it has been forced from the stage, and lives asliterature alone. 

The Writer. 

Congreve was essentially a man of letters; his style is that of a pupilnot of Moliere but of the full, the rich, the excessive, the pedanticJonson; his Legends, his Wishforts, his Foresights are the lawfulheirs--refined and sublimated but still of direct descent--of the Tuccasand the Bobadils and the Epicure Mammons of the great Elizabethan; theyare (that is) more literary than theatrical--they are excellent reading, but they have long since fled the stage and vanished into the night ofmere scholarship. To compare an author of this type and descent toShakespeare is a trifle unfair; to compare him to Moliere is tomisapprehend the differences between pure literature and literature thatis also drama. Congreve, as I have said, has disappeared from theboards, and is only tolerable or even intelligible to the true reader;while Shakespeare worked on so imperfect a convention that, though hekeeps the stage and is known indeed for the poet of the most popular playever written--(for that, I take it, _Hamlet_ is)--he is yet the prey ofevery twopenny actor, or actor-manager, or actor-manager-editor, who isdriven to deal with him. Now, Moliere wrote as one that was first of alla great actor; who dealt not so much with what is transient in human lifeas with what is eternal in human nature; who addressed himself much moreto an audience--(Fenelon who found fault with his style is witness to thefact)--than to a circle of readers. And the result is that Moliere notonly remains better reading than Congreve, but is played at this time inthe Rue de Richelieu line for line and word for word as he was played atthe Palais-Bourbon over two hundred years ago. 

ARABIAN NIGHTS ENTERTAINMENTS

Its Romance. 

He that has the book of the _Thousand Nights and a Night_ has Hachisch-made-words for life. Gallant, subtle, refined, intense, humourous, obscene, here is the Arab intelligence drunk with conception. It is avast extravaganza of passion in action and picarooning farce and materialsplendour run mad. The amorous instinct and the instinct of enjoyment, not tempered but heightened greatly by the strict ordinances of dogma, have leave to riot uncontrolled. It is the old immortal story of Youthand Beauty and their coming together, but it is coloured with the hardand brilliant hues of an imagination as sensuous in type and as gorgeousin ambition as humanity has known. The lovers must suffer, for sufferingintensifies the joy of fruition; so they are subjected to all such modesof travail and estrangement as a fancy careless of pain and indifferentto life can devise. But it is known that happy they are to be; and if bythe annihilation of time and space then are space and time annihilated. Adventures are to the adventurous all the world over; but they are sowith a difference in the East. It is only Sinbad that confesses himselfdevoured with the lust of travel. The grip of a humourous and fantasticfate is tight on all the other heroes of this epic-in-bits. They do notgo questing for accidents: their hour comes, and the finger of God urgesthem forth, and thrusts them on in the way of destiny. The air ishorrible with the gross and passionate figments of Islamite mythology. Afrits watch over or molest them; they are made captive of malignantGhouls; the Jinns take bodily form and woo them to their embraces. Thesea-horse ramps at them from the ocean floor; the great roc darkens earthabout them with the shadow of his wings; wise and goodly apes come forthand minister unto them; enchanted camels bear them over evil deserts withthe swiftness of the wind, or the magic horse outspreads his sail-broadvannes, and soars with them; or they are borne aloft by some servant ofthe Spell till the earth is as a bowl beneath them, and they hear theangels quiring at the foot of the Throne. So they fare to strange anddismal places: through cities of brass whose millions have perished bydivine decree; cities guilty of the cult of the Fire and the Lightwherein all life has been striken to stone; or on to the magneticmountain by whose horrible attraction the bolts are drawn from the ship, and they alone survive the inevitable wreck. And the end comes. Comesthe Castle of Burnished Copper, and its gates fly open before them: theforty damsels, each one fairer than the rest, troop out at theirapproach; they are bathed in odours, clothed in glittering apparel, fedwith enchanted meats, plunged fathoms deep in the delights of the flesh. There is contrived for them a private paradise of luxury and splendour, apractical Infinite of gold and silver stuffs and jewels and all thingsgorgeous and rare and costly; and therein do they abide for evermore. Youwould say of their poets that they contract immensity to the limits ofdesire; they exhaust the inexhaustible in their enormous effort; theystoop the universe to the slavery of a talisman, and bind the visible andinvisible worlds within the compass of a ring. 

Its Comedy. 

But there is another side to their imaginings. When the Magian has donebeating his copper drum--(how its mysterious murmur still haunts theechoes of memory!)--when Queen Lab has finished her tremendousconjurations, wonder gives place to laughter, the apotheosis of the fleshto the spirit of comedy. The enchanter turns harlequin; and what thelovers ask is not the annihilation of time and space but only that thefather be at his prayers, or the husband gone on a fool's errand, whilethey have leave to kiss each other's mouths, 'as a pigeon feedeth heryoung, ' to touch the lute, strip language naked, and 'repeat thefollowing verses' to a ring of laughing girls and amid all such comfitsand delicates as a hungry audience may rejoice to hear enumerated. Andthe intrigue begins, and therewith the presentment of character, theportraiture of manners. Merry ladies make love to their gallants withflowers, or scorn them with the huckle-bones of shame; the Mother Colesof Araby pursue the unwary stranger for their mistress' pleasure; damselsresembling the full moon carouse with genial merchants or inquiringcalenders. The beast of burden, even the porter, has his hour: he goesthe round at the heels of a veiled but beautiful lady, and lays her inthe materials of as liberal and sumptuous a carouse as is recorded inhistory. Happy lady, and O thrice-fortunate porter! enviable even to theterm of time! It is a voluptuous farce, a masque and anti-masque ofwantonness and stratagem, of wine-cups and jewels and fine raiment, ofgaudy nights and amorous days, of careless husbands and adventurouswives, of innocent fathers and rebel daughters and lovers happy orbefooled. And high over all, his heart contracted with the spleen of theEast, the tedium of supremacy, towers the great Caliph Haroun, the buxomand bloody tyrant, a Muslim Lord of Misrule. With Giafar, the finestgentleman and goodliest gallant of Eastern story, and Mesrour, the well-beloved, the immortal Eunuch, he goes forth upon his round in theenchanted streets of Bagdad, like Francois Premier in the maze of old-time Paris. The night is musical with happy laughter and the sound oflutes and voices; it is seductive with the clink of goblets and the odourof perfumes: not a shadow but has its secret, or jovial or amorous orterrible: here falls a head, and there you may note the contrapuntaleffect of the bastinado. But the blood is quickly hidden with flowers, the bruises are tired over with cloth-of-gold, and the jolly pageantsweeps on. Truly the comic essence is imperishable. What was fun tothem in Baghdad is fun to us in London after a thousand years. 

Sacer Vates. 

The prose of Mr. Payne's translation is always readable and oftenelegant; Sir Richard Burton's notes and 'terminal essays' are a mine ofcurious and diverting information; but for me the real author of _TheArabian Nights_ is called not Burton nor Payne but Antoine Galland. Heit was, in truth, who gave the world as much exactly as it needed of hispreposterous original: who eliminated its tediousness, purged it of itsbarbarous and sickening immorality, wiped it clean of cruelty andunnaturalness, selected its essentials of comedy and romance, and setthem clear and sharp against a light that western eyes can bear and in anatmosphere that western lungs can breathe. Of course the newtranslations are interesting--especially to ethnologists and the criticwith a theory that translated verse is inevitably abominable. But theyare not for the general nor the artist. They include too many pagesrevolting by reason of unutterable brutality of incident and point ofview--as also for the vileness of those lewd and dreadful puritans whoseexcesses against humanity and whose devotion to Islam they record--to beacceptable as literature or tolerable as reading. Now, in Galland I getthe best of them. He gave me whatever is worth remembering of Bedreddinand Camaralzaman and that enchanting Fairy Peri-Banou; he is the truepoet alike of Abou Hassan and the Young King of the Black Islands, of AliBaba and the Barber of the Brothers; to him I owe that memory--of Zobeidealone in the accursed city whose monstrous silence is broken by the voiceof the one man spared by the wrath of God as he repeats his solitaryprayer--which ranks with Crusoe's discovery of the footprint in thethrilling moments of my life; it was he who, by refraining from the useof pepper in his cream tarts, contrived to kitchen those confections withthe very essence of romance; it was he that clove asunder the Sultan'skitchen-wall for me, and took me to the pan, and bade me ask a certainquestion of the fish that fried therein, and made them answer me in termsmysterious and tremendous yet. Nay, that animating and delectablefeeling I cherish ever for such enchanted commodities as gold-dust andsandal-wood and sesame and cloth of gold and black slaves withscimitars--to whom do I owe it but this rare and delightful artist? 'Omes chers _Mille et une Nuits_!' says Fantasio, and he speaks in the nameof all them that have lived the life that Galland alone made possible. The damsels of the new style may 'laugh till they fall backwards, ' etc. , through forty volumes instead of ten, and I shall still go back to myGalland. I shall go back to him because his masterpiece is--not a bookof reference, nor a curiosity of literature, nor an achievement inpedantry, nor even a demonstration of the absolute failure of Islamism asan influence that makes for righteousness, but--an excellent piece ofart. 

RICHARDSON

His Fortune. 

It is many years since Richardson fell into desuetude; it is many yearssince he became the novelist not of the world at large but of thatinconsiderable section of the world which is interested in literature. His methods are those of a bygone epoch; his ideals, with one or twoexceptions, are old-fashioned enough to seem fantastic; his sentimentbelongs to ancient history; to a generation bred upon Ouida's romancesand the plays of Mr. W. S. Gilbert his morality appears not merelyquestionable but coarse and improper and repulsive. While he lived hewas adored: he moved and spoke and dwelt in an eternal mist of 'good, thick, strong, stupefying incense smoke'; he was the idol of femaleEngland, a master of virtue, a king of art, the wisest and best ofmankind. Johnson revered him--Johnson and Colley Gibber; Diderot rankedhim with Moses and Homer; to Balzac and Musset and George Sand he was thegreatest novelist of all time; Rousseau imitated him; Macaulay wrote andtalked of him with an enthusiasm that would have sat becomingly on LadyBradshaigh herself. But all that is over. Not even the emasculation towhich the late Mr. Dallas was pleased to subject his _Clarissa_ couldmake that _Clarissa_ at all popular; not all the allusions of all theleader-writers of a leader-writing age have been able to persuade thepublic to renew its interest in the works and ways of Grandison theaugust and the lovely and high-souled Harriet Byron. Richardson has tobe not skimmed but studied; not sucked like an orange, nor swallowed likea lollipop, but attacked _secundum artem_ like a dinner of many coursesand wines. Once inside the vast and solid labyrinth of his intrigue, youmust hold fast to the clue which you have caught up on entering, or theadventure proves impossible, and you emerge from his precincts defeatedand disgraced. And by us children of Mudie, to whom a novel must beeither a solemn brandy-and-soda or as it were a garrulous and vapidafternoon tea, adventures of that moment are not often attempted. 

Pamela. 

Again, when all is said in Richardson's favour it has to be admittedagainst him that in _Pamela_ he produced an essay in vulgarity--ofsentiment and morality alike--which has never been surpassed. In thesedays it is hardly less difficult to understand the popularity of thismasterpiece of specious immodesty than to speak or think of it withpatience. That it was once thought moral is as wonderful as that it wasonce found readable. What is more easily apprehended is the contempt ofHenry Fielding--is the justice of that ridicule he was moved to visit itwithal. To him, a scholar and a gentleman and a man of the world, _Pamela_ was a new-fangled blend of sentimental priggishness and prurientunreality. To him the pretensions to virtue and consideration of thevulgar little hussy whom Richardson selected for his heroine werecertainly not less preposterous than the titles to life and actuality ofthe wooden libertine whom Richardson put forth as his hero. He wasartist enough to know that the book was ignoble as literature andabsolutely false as fact; he was moralist enough to see that itsteachings were the reverse of elevating and improving; and he uttered hisconclusions _more suo_ in one of the best and healthiest books in Englishliterature. This, indeed, is the only merit of which the history of MissAndrews can well be accused: that it set Fielding thinking and provokedhim to the composition of the first of his three great novels. Pamela isonly remembered nowadays as Joseph's sister: the egregious Mr. B--- hashardly any existence save as Lady Booby's brother. 'Tis an ill wind thatblows good to nobody. There are few more tedious or more unpleasantexperiences than _Pamela_; _or_, _Virtue Rewarded_. But you have but toremember that without it the race might never have heard of Fanny andJoseph, of the fair Slipslop and the ingenuous Didapper, of ParsonTrulliber and immortal Abraham Adams, to be reconciled to its existenceand the fact of its old-world fame. Nay, more, to remember its ingeniousauthor with something of gratitude and esteem. 

Grandison. 

Nor is this the only charge that can be made and sustained against ourpoet. It is also to be noted in his disparagement that he is the authorof _Sir Charles Grandison_, and that _Sir Charles Grandison_, epic of thepolite virtues, is deadly dull. 'My dear, ' says somebody in one of Mr. Thackeray's books, 'your eternal blue velvet quite tires me. ' That isthe worst of _Sir Charles Grandison_: his eternal blue velvet--hisvirtue, that is, his honour, his propriety, his good fortune, his absurdcommand over the affections of the other sex, his swordsmanship, hismanliness, his patriotic sentiment, his noble piety--quite tires you. Heis an ideal, but so very, very tame that it is hard to justify hisexistence. He is too perfect to be of the slightest moral use toanybody. He has everything he wants, so that he has no temptation to bewicked; he is incapable of immorality, so that he is easily quit of allinducements to be vicious; he has no passions, so that he is superior toevery sort of spiritual contest; he is monstrous clever, so that he hasmade up his mind about everything knowable and unknowable; he isexcessively virtuous so that he has made it up in the right direction. Heis, as Mr. Leslie Stephen remarks, a tedious commentary on the truth ofMrs. Rawdon Crawley's acute reflection upon the moral effect of fivethousand a year. He is only a pattern creature, because he has neitherneed nor opportunity, neither longing nor capacity, to be anything else. In real life such faultless monsters are impossible: one does not like tothink what would happen if they were not. In fiction they are possibleenough, and--what is more to the purpose--they are of necessityextravagantly dull. This is what is the matter with Sir Charles. He isdull, and he effuses dulness. By dint of being uninteresting himself hemakes his surroundings uninteresting. In the record of his adventuresand experiences there is enough of wit and character and invention tomake the fortune of a score or more of such novels as the public of thesedegenerate days would hail with enthusiasm. But his function is tovitiate them all. He is a bore of the first magnitude, and of hiseminence in that capacity his history is at once the monument and theproof. 

Clarissa. 

But if _Grandison_ be dull and _Pamela_ contemptible _Clarissa_ remains;and _Clarissa_ is what Musset called it, 'le premier roman du monde. ' Ofcourse _Clarissa_ has its faults. Miss Harlowe, for instance, is notalways herself--is not always the complete creation she affects to be:there are touches of moral pedantry--anticipations of George Eliot--inher; the scenes in which she is brought to shame are scarcely real, living, moving, all the rest of it. But on the other hand is thereanything better than Lovelace in the whole range of fiction? TakeLovelace in all or any of his moods--suppliant, intriguing, repentant, triumphant, above all triumphant--and find his parallel if you can. Where, you ask, did the little printer of Salisbury Court--who suggeststo Mr. Stephen 'a plump white mouse in a wig'--where did Richardsondiscover so much gallantry and humanity, so much romance and so muchfact, such an abundance of the heroic qualities and the baser veracitiesof mortal nature? Lovelace is, if you except Don Quixote, the completesthero in fiction. He has wit, humour, grace, brilliance, charm; he is ascoundrel and a ruffian, and he is a gentleman and a man; of his kind andin his degree he has the right Shakespearean quality. Almost as perfectin her way is the enchanting Miss Howe--an incarnation of womanliness andwit and fun, after Lovelace the most brilliant of Richardson's creations. Or take the Harlowe family: the severe and stupid father, the angry andselfish uncles, the cub James, the vixen Arabella, a very fiend of envyand hatred and malice--what a gallery of portraits is here! And Solmesand Tomlinson, Belford and Brand and Hickman; and the infinite complexityof the intrigue; the wit, the pathos, the invention; the knowledge ofhuman nature; the faculty of dialogue--where save in _Clarissa_ shall wefind all these? As for Miss Harlowe herself, all incomplete as she isshe remains the Eve of fiction, the prototype of the modern heroine, thecommon mother of all the self-contained, self-suffering, self-satisfiedyoung persons whose delicacies and repugnances, whose independence ofmind and body, whose airs and ideas and imaginings, are the stuff of themodern novel. With her begins a new ideal of womanhood; from herproceeds a type unknown in fact and fiction until she came. When afteroutrage she declines to marry her destroyer, and prefers death to thecondonation of her dishonour, she strikes a note and assumes a positiontill then not merely unrecognised but absolutely undiscovered. It hasbeen said of her half in jest and half in earnest that she is 'theaboriginal Woman's Rights person'; and it is a fact that she and Helenaand Desdemona and Ophelia are practically a thousand years apart. Andthis is perhaps her finest virtue as it is certainly her greatest charm:that, until she set the example, woman in literature as a self-sufferingindividuality, as an existence endowed with equal rights toindependence--of choice, volition, action--with man, had not begun to be. That of itself would suffice to make _Clarissa_ memorable; and that isthe least of its merits. Consider it from which point you will, the bookremains a masterpiece, unique of its kind. It has been imitated but ithas never been equalled. It is Richardson's only title to fame; but itis enough. Not the Great Pyramid itself is more solidly built nor moreincapable of ruin. 

TOLSTOI

The Man and the Artist. 

There are two men in Tolstoi. He is a mystic and he is also a realist. He is addicted to the practice of a pietism that for all its sincerity isnothing if not vague and sentimental; and he is the most acute anddispassionate of observers, the most profound and earnest student ofcharacter and emotion. These antitheses are both represented in hisnovels. He has thought out the scheme of things for himself; hisinterpretation, while deeply tinctured with religion, is also largely andliberally human; he is one to the just and the unjust alike, and he is nomore angry with the wicked than he is partial to the good. He asks butone thing of his men and women--that they shall be natural; yet hehandles his humbugs and impostors with as cold a kindness and amagnanimity as equable as he displays in his treatment of theiropposites. Indeed his interest in humanity is inexhaustible, and hisunderstanding of it is well nigh formidable in its union of breadth withdelicacy. Himself an aristocrat and an official, he is able tosympathise with the Russian peasant as completely and to express hissentiments as perfectly as he is able to present the characters and giveutterance to the ambitions and the idiosyncrasies of the class to whichhe belongs and might be assumed to have studied best. It is to be noted, moreover, that he looks for his material at one or other pole of society. He is equally at home with officers and privates, with diplomats andcarpenters, with princes and ploughmen; but with the intermediary stratahe is out of touch, and he is careful to leave the task of presentingthem to others. It is arguable that only in the highest and lowestexpressions of society is unsophisticated nature to be found; and thatTolstoi, interested less in manners than in men and studious above all ofthe elemental qualities of character, has done right to avoid the middle-class and attach himself to the consideration and the representation ofthe highest and the lowest. Certain it is that here have been hissuccesses. The Prince Andrew of _War and Peace_--cultured, intelligent, earnest, true lover and true gentleman--is as noble a hero as modernfiction has achieved; but he is no more interesting as a human being andno more successful as art than the Marianna of _les Cosaques_, who is asavage pure and simple, or the Efim of _les Deux Vieillards_, who wouldseem to the haughty Radical no better than a common idiot. It is to benoted of all three--the prince, the savage, and the peasant--that none inhimself is sophisticate nor vile but that each is rich in the common, simple, elemental qualities of humanity. It is to these and themanifestations of these that Tolstoi turns for inspiration first of all. If he chose he could be as keen a satirist and as indefatigable a studentof the meannesses and the minor miseries of existence, the toothaches andthe pimples of experience, as Thackeray. But he does not choose. Theepic note sounds in his work. The eternal issues of life, thefundamental interests of character and conduct and emotion, are hismaterial. Love, valour, self-sacrifice, charity, the responsibilities ofbeing, these and their like are the only vital facts to him; theyconstitute the really important part of the scheme of things as he seesand comprehends it. In their analysis the artist and the mystic meet andtake hands; sometimes to each other's profit, more often, to each other'shurt. It is not without significance that no other novelist has lookedso closely and penetrated so far into the secret of death: that none hasdivined so much of it, nor presented his results with so complete andintimate a mastery and so persuasive and inspiring a belief. PlainlyTolstoi has learned 'la vraie signification de la vie'; his faith in itscapacities is immense, his acceptance of its consequences isunhesitating. He is the great optimist, and his work is wholesome andencouraging in direct ratio to the vastness of his talent and theperfection of his method. 

 Ivan Iliitch. 

Who does not know that extraordinary _Death of Ivan Iliitch_? It is anachievement in realism: not the realism of externals and trivialdetails--though of this there is enough for art if not for the commonZolaphyte--but the higher and better sort, the realism which deals withmental and spiritual conditions, the realism of _Othello_ and _Hamlet_. There are many deaths in literature, but there is none, I think, in whichthe gradual processes of dissolution are analysed and presented with suchknowledge, such force, such terrible directness, as here. The result isappalling, but the final impression is one of encouragement andconsolation. Here, as everywhere, Tolstoi appeals to the primitivenature of man, and the issue is what he wishes it to be. Not for him isthe barren pessimism of the latter-day French rhapsodist in fiction, andthe last word of his study, inexorable till then, is a word of hope andfaith. 

War and Peace. 

Incomparably his greatest book, however, is _War and Peace_. It is thetrue Russian epic; alike in the vastness of its scope and in thecompleteness of its execution. It tells the story of the great conflictbetween Koutouzoff and Russia and Napoleon and France, it begins someyears before Austerlitz, and it ends when Borodino and Moscow are alreadyancient history. The canvas is immense: the crowd of figures and theworld of incidents almost bewildering. It is not a complete success. Inmany places the mystic has got the better of the artist: he isresponsible for theories of the art of war which, advanced with thegreatest confidence, are disproved by the simple narrative of events; andhe has made a study of Napoleon in which, for the first and only time inall his work, he appears as an intemperate advocate. But when all issaid in blame so much remains to praise that one scarce knows where tobegin. Tolstoi's theory of war is mystical and untenable, no doubt; buthis pictures of warfare are incomparably good. None has felt andreproduced as he has done what may be called the intimacy of battle--thefeeling of the individual soldier, the passion and excitement, the terrorand the fury, that taken collectively make up the influence whichrepresents the advance or the retreat of an army in combat. But also, ina far greater degree, none has dealt so wonderfully with the vasterincidents, the more tremendous issues. His Austerlitz is magnificent;his Borodino is (there is no other word for it) epic; his studies of theRetreat are almost worthy of what has gone before. For the first timewhat has been called 'the peering modern touch' is here applied to greatevents, with the result that here is a book unique in literature. Of thecharacters--Natasha, Peter, Mary, Dennissoff, the Rostoffs, Helen, Dologhoff, Bagration, Bolkonsky, and the others; above all, Koutouzoffand Prince Andrew--Prince Andrew the heroic gentleman, Koutouzoff thegenius of Russia and the war--to meet them once is to take on a set offriends and enemies for life. 

FIELDING

Illusions. 

Fielding is one of the most striking figures in our literary history, andhe is one of the most popular as well. But it is questionable if manypeople know very much about him after all, or if the Fielding oflegend--the potwalloper of genius at whom we have smiled so often--hasmany things in common with the Fielding of fact, the indefatigablestudent, the vigorous magistrate, the great and serious artist. You hearbut little of him from himself; for with that mixture of intellectualegoism and moral unselfishness which is a characteristic of his large andliberal nature he was as careless of Henry Fielding's sayings and doingsand as indifferent to the fact of Henry Fielding's life and personalityas he was garrulous in respect of the good qualities of Henry Fielding'sfriends and truculently talkative about the vices of Henry Fielding'senemies. And what is exactly known people have somehow or othercontrived to misapprehend and misapply. They have preferred the evidenceof Horace Walpole to that of their own senses. They have suffered thebrilliant antitheses of Lady Mary to obscure and blur the man as theymight have found him in his work. Booth and Jones have been taken fordefinite and complete reflections of the author of their being: the partsfor the whole, that is--a light-minded captain of foot and a hot-headedand soft-hearted young man about town for adequate presentments of theartist of a new departure and the writer of three or four books ofsingular solidity and finish. Whichever way you turn, you are confrontedwith appearances each more distorted and more dubious than the other. Some have chosen to believe the foolish fancies of Murphy, and havepictured themselves a Fielding begrimed with snuff, heady with champagne, and smoking so ferociously that out of the wrappings of his tobacco hecould keep himself in paper for the manuscripts of his plays. For othersthe rancour of Smollett calls up a Fielding who divides his time andenergy between blowing a trumpet on a Smithfield show and playing CaptainBilkum to a flesh-and-blood Stormandra at the establishment of a living, breathing, working Mother Punchbowl. With Dr. Rimbault and ProfessorHenry Morley others yet evolve from their inner consciousness a Fieldingwith a booth in Smithfield, buffooning for the coppers of a Bartlemy Fairaudience. The accomplished lawyer has had as little place in men'sthoughts as the tender father, the admirable artist as little as thedevoted husband and the steadfast friend. Fielding has been so oftenpainted a hard drinker that few have thought of him as a hard reader; hehas been suspected of conjugal infidelity, so it has seemed impossiblethat he should be other than a violent Bohemian. In certain chapters of_Jonathan Wild the Great_ there is enough of sustained intellectualeffort to furnish forth a hundred modern novels; but you only think ofFielding reeling home from the Rose, and refuse to consider him except assitting down with his head in a wet towel to scribble immodest andruffianly trash for the players! A consequence of all these exercises insentiment and imagination has been that, while many have been ready todeal with Fielding as the text for a sermon or the subject of an essay, as the point of a moral or the adornment of a tale, few have cared tothink of him as worthy to dispute the palm with Cervantes and Sir Walteras the heroic man of letters. 

Facts. 

He is before all things else a writer to be studied. He wrote for theworld at large and to the end that he might be read eternally. Hismatter, his manner, the terms of his philosophy, the quality of hisideals, the nature of his achievement, proclaim him universal. LikeScott, like Cervantes, like Shakespeare, he claims not merely ouracquaintance but an intimate and abiding familiarity. He has no specialpublic, and to be only on nodding terms with him is to be practicallydead to his attraction and unworthy his society. He worked not for theboys and girls of an age but for the men and women of all time; and bothas artist and as thinker he commands unending attention and lifelongfriendship. He is a great inventor, an unrivalled craftsman, a perfectmaster of his material. His achievement is the result of a life-time ofvaried experience, of searching and sustained observation, of unwearyingintellectual endeavour. The sound and lusty types he created have anintellectual flavour peculiar to themselves. His novels teem with ripewisdom and generous conclusions and beneficent examples. As Mr. Stephentells you, 'he has the undeniable merit of representing certain aspectsof contemporary society with a force and accuracy not even rivalled byany other writer'; and it is a fact that not to have studied him 'is tobe without a knowledge of the most important documents of contemporaryhistory. ' More: to contrast those fair, large parchments in which he hasstated his results with those tattered and filthy papers which the latter-day literary rag-picker exists but to grope out from kennel and sewer isto know the difference between the artist in health and the artistpossessed by an idiosyncrasy as by a devil. 

The Worst of It. 

But the present is an age of sentiment: its ideals and ambitions aremainly emotional; what it chiefly loves is romance or the affectation ofromance, passion, self-conscious solemnity, and a certain straining afterpicturesque effects. In Fielding's time there was doubtless a good dealof sentimentalism, for his generation delighted not only in Western andTrunnion and Mrs. Slipslop but in Pamela and Clarissa and the pathetic LeFevre. But for all that it was--at all events in so far as it wasinteresting to Fielding and in so far as Fielding has pictured it--ageneration that knew nothing of romance but was keenly interested incommon sense, and took a vast deal of honest pleasure in humour and witand a rather truculent and full-blooded type of satire. It is plain thatsuch possibilities of sympathy and understanding as exist between a pastof this sort and such a present as our own must of necessity be few andsmall. Their importance, too, is greatly diminished when you reflect onthe nature and tendency of certain essential elements in Fielding's artand mind. The most vigorous and the most individual of these is probablyhis irony; the next is that abundant vein of purely intellectual comedyby whose presence his work is exalted to a place not greatly inferior tothat of the _Misantrope_ and the _Ecole des Femmes_. These rare andshining qualities are distinguishing features in the best and soundestpart of Fielding. Of irony he is probably the greatest English master;of pure comedy--the intellectual manipulation and transmutation into artof what is spiritually ridiculous in manners and society--he is both innarrative and in dialogue the greatest between Shakespeare and Mr. GeorgeMeredith. And with both our sympathy is imperfect. We have learned tobe sentimental and self-sufficient with Rousseau, to be romantic andchivalrous with Scott, to be emotional with Dickens, to take ourselvesseriously with Balzac and George Eliot; there are touches of feeling inour laughter, even though the feeling be but spite; we have acquired ahabit of politeness--a tradition of universal consideration and respect;and our theory of satire is rounded by the pleasing generalities of Mr. Du Maurier on the one hand and the malevolent respectability of Mr. W. S. Gilbert on the other. It is an age of easy writing and still easierreading: our authors produce for us much in the manner of thesilkworm--only their term of life is longer; we accept their results insomething of the spirit of them that are interested, and notcommercially, in the processes of silkworms. And M. Guy de Maupassantcan write but hath a devil, and we take him not because of his writingbut because of his devil; and Blank and Dash and So-and-So and the restcould no more than so many sheep develop a single symptom of possessionamong them, and we take them because a devil and they are incompatibles. And art is short and time is long; and we care nothing for art and almostas much for time; and there is little if any to choose between Mudie'slatest 'catch' and last year's 'sensation' at Burlington House. And toone of us it is 'poor Fielding'; and to another Fielding is merely gross, immoral, and dull; and to most the story of that last journey to Lisbonis unknown, and Thackeray's dream of Fielding--a novelist's presentmentof a purely fictitious character--is the Fielding who designed and builtand finished for eternity. Which is to be pitied? The artist of_Amelia_ and _Jonathan Wild_, the creator of the Westerns and ParsonAdams and Colonel Bath? or we the whippersnappers of sentiment--thecritics who can neither read nor understand?

THE END

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