"'Twas, 'Sir, your law,' and 'Sir, your eloquence,''Yours Cowper's manner and yours Talbot's sense';Thus we dispose of all poetic merit:Yours Milton's genius and mine Homer's spirit.Walk with respect behind, while we at easeWeave laurel crowns and take what name we please.'My dear Tibullus!' if that will not do,Let me be Horace, and be Ovid you."
"'Twas, 'Sir, your law,' and 'Sir, your eloquence,''Yours Cowper's manner and yours Talbot's sense';Thus we dispose of all poetic merit:Yours Milton's genius and mine Homer's spirit.Walk with respect behind, while we at easeWeave laurel crowns and take what name we please.'My dear Tibullus!' if that will not do,Let me be Horace, and be Ovid you."
"'Twas, 'Sir, your law,' and 'Sir, your eloquence,'
'Yours Cowper's manner and yours Talbot's sense';
Thus we dispose of all poetic merit:
Yours Milton's genius and mine Homer's spirit.
Walk with respect behind, while we at ease
Weave laurel crowns and take what name we please.
'My dear Tibullus!' if that will not do,
Let me be Horace, and be Ovid you."
And there is this advantage. If a sufficient number of magicians can, or will, combine, these illusions may not only serve each magician for life, but become, for a time, simply indistinguishable from realities. Now, as we said before, we see no great harm in this. It is, to say the least, a very amiable and brotherly employment; and were it quite disinterested and honest, it would be closely allied with that virtue which St. Paul exalts above all virtues. But everything has or ought to have its limits. When Boswell attempted to defend certain Methodists who had been expelled from the University of Oxford, Johnson retorted that the University was perfectly right—"They were examined, and found to be mighty ignorant fellows." "But," said Boswell, "was it not hard to expel them? for I am told they were good beings." "I believe," replied the sage, "that they might be goodbeings, but they were not fit to be in the University of Oxford. A cow is a very good animal in the field, but we turn her out of a garden."
To our certain knowledge many of those who owe their reputation to the art to which we are referring are good beings, and we have little doubt that most of those who are least scrupulous in practising it are good beings also. Indeed it may be conceded at once that there is always a strong presumption that members of Mutual Admiration Societies belong to this class. On the reciprocity of essentially Christian virtues their very existence depends. Whatever may be thought of their heads, their hearts are pretty sure to be in the right place. They may, it is true, act more in the spirit of the precept that we should do unto others as we would they should do unto us than in that of the precept which pronounces that it is more blessed to give than to receive. This, however, is a trifle—one of those distinctions without differences which are so common in Christian ethics. But for ourselves we must, as we have said before, discriminate. To the cow in the field we have no objection; it is of the cow in the garden that we complain.
To drop metaphor: there are certain spheres of literary activity in which the circulation of mutual puffery by this clique or by that cliquecan do comparatively little harm to any one or to anything. There are some subjects on which every reader is not only perfectly competent to form his own judgment, but is pretty certain to do so. He may amuse himself by seeing what the critics have to say, and he may be induced by them in the first instance to turn to the book which is in question, but he is practically unaffected by any opinions unless they happen to coincide with his own. Such is the case with books of travel, with novels, and, as a rule, with poetry. Here the arts of the log-roller are as harmless as the frolics of whales with tubs. No one takes what he sees seriously except those who are engaged in the pastime. If Mr. A cannot give the general public what it appreciates, nothing that Mr. B can say will cajole that public into believing that it has what it has not. Mr. C and Mr. D may vociferate, till they are hoarse, that "Mr. E is the subtlest and most discriminating critic that the English-speaking world has ever known"; but if Mr. E's eulogies of Mr. C's verses and of Mr. D's novels are not corroborated by the general reader's independent judgment, the fame of Messrs. C and D will not extend beyond their clique. If in poetry or prose fiction trash succeeds, as it undoubtedly does, it succeeds not because of the skill with which it has been puffed, though this may be a factor in its success, but because it hits the populartaste. The public is seldom deceived except when it wishes to be deceived. Log-rolling has much to answer for: it loads our bookstalls with nonsense and rubbish, it impedes the production of sound literature, it degrades the standard of taste, it degrades the standard of aim and attainment, and indirectly it is in every way mischievous to literature. But we very much question whether in the case of publications which appeal directly to general readers, and are within the scope of their judgments, the fortune of a book is in any way affected by the arts of the log-roller. Amusement mingled with impatience is probably the prevailing sentiment when Mr. C and Mr. D are loud in each other's praises. We remember the amœbæan strains of Hayley and Miss Seward in Porson's epigram:—
Miss Seward: Tuneful poet, Britain's glory;Mr. Hayley, that is you.Mr. Hayley: Ma'am, you carry all before you;Trust me, Lichfield Swan, you do.Miss Seward: Ode, didactic, epic, sonnet;Mr. Hayley, you're divine.Mr. Hayley: Ma'am, I'll take my oath upon it,You yourself are all the nine.
Miss Seward: Tuneful poet, Britain's glory;Mr. Hayley, that is you.Mr. Hayley: Ma'am, you carry all before you;Trust me, Lichfield Swan, you do.Miss Seward: Ode, didactic, epic, sonnet;Mr. Hayley, you're divine.Mr. Hayley: Ma'am, I'll take my oath upon it,You yourself are all the nine.
Miss Seward: Tuneful poet, Britain's glory;
Mr. Hayley, that is you.
Mr. Hayley: Ma'am, you carry all before you;
Trust me, Lichfield Swan, you do.
Miss Seward: Ode, didactic, epic, sonnet;
Mr. Hayley, you're divine.
Mr. Hayley: Ma'am, I'll take my oath upon it,
You yourself are all the nine.
Or, in a less good-natured mood, we may perhaps recall with a certain satisfaction Pope's cruel but pathetic picture of the minor log-rollers of his day:—
Next plunged a feeble but a desperate pack,With each a sickly brother at his back.Sons of a day! just buoyant on the flood,Then numbered with the puppies in the mud.
Next plunged a feeble but a desperate pack,With each a sickly brother at his back.Sons of a day! just buoyant on the flood,Then numbered with the puppies in the mud.
Next plunged a feeble but a desperate pack,
With each a sickly brother at his back.
Sons of a day! just buoyant on the flood,
Then numbered with the puppies in the mud.
But there are certain subjects and certain spheres in which the arts of the log-roller, if equally contemptible, are not quite so harmless.
During the last fifteen years the Press has been teeming with books designed to circulate among readers who are seriously interested inbelles lettresand criticism. Some of them have appeared as volumes in a series, some as independent monographs and manuals, and some in the humbler forms of editorial introductions and notes. Among them may be found works of really distinguished scholars, and works in every way worthy of such scholars; and it is no doubt works like these which have given credit and authority generally to publications of this kind. The popularity of these productions has been extraordinary, and their manufacture has become one of the most lucrative of hackney employments. Nor is this all. Their professed purpose is the dissemination of serious instruction, is to become text-books in literary history and in literary criticism; and, as text-books on those subjects, they have made their way, or are making their way, not merely into our public libraries, but also into the libraries of nearlyevery educational institute in England. Indeed it would not be too much to say that if, among general readers, about eighty in every hundred derive almost all they know about English literature, both historically and critically, from these volumes, in our schools and colleges, the average number of those whose studies are and ought to be independent of them is yearly diminishing. It is of these text-books and of the responsibilities incurred by those who produce and circulate them that we wish to speak.
We have already commented on the distinction which must be drawn between what is best and what is inferior in the publications to which we have been referring; and, in truth, the difference is one not of degree but in kind. As our desire is, in Swift's phrase, to lash the vice but spare the name, we shall not specify the works which we have selected as typical of log-rolling in relation to education. Till we saw them we had no conception of the lengths to which this sort of thing has run. Ostensibly the works before us are critical and biographical monographs designed to become text-books for students of English literature; they may be more correctly described as complete epitomes of the art of puffery. The writers begin by assuming that the objects of their ludicrous adulation—who are, like themselves, contributorsof the average order to current periodicals, and the authors of monographs similar to their own—are by general consent critics of classical authority. The most deferential references are made to them in almost every page. Now it is "Goethe and Mr. So-and-so have observed," or "Coleridge has remarked, but Mr. So-and-so is inclined to think," etc. Sometimes it assumes the form of a sort of awful reverence, as "Mr. So-and-so is a little uncertain, but surely he more than hints," or "Mr. So-and-so, as we all know, was once of opinion, though he has recently found reason to alter," etc. We saw not long ago in the notes to a certain edition of a classical author: "Socrates and Mr. X——of Trinityhave observed," etc. Occasionally this homage expresses itself—and this is more serious—in the form of long extracts from Mr. So-and-so's writings. Nothing is more common in works like these than to find critics and writers of classical authority either completely ignored, or, if cited at all, cited only in the connection which we have indicated. That the gentlemen who are the subjects of this grotesque flattery either have paid or will pay their friends in kind may, of course, be taken for granted. Thus one factitious reputation builds up another, and one bad book ushers in twenty which are worse.
Macaulay has an amusing passage in which hehas collected the names of those who, according to Horace Walpole, were "the first writers" in England in 1753. It might have been expected that Hume, Fielding, Dr. Johnson, Richardson, Smollett, Collins, and Gray would at least have had a place among them. Not at all. They were Lord Bath, Mr. W. Whithed, Sir Charles Williams, Mr. Soame Jenyngs, Mr. Cambridge, and Mr. Coventry; in other words, a clique of politicians and men of fashion of the very titles of whose writings even a reader tolerably well read in the literature of those times might excusably be ignorant. We are not exaggerating when we say that this system of strenuous and well-directed mutual puffery is, in our own time, leading to similarly perverted conceptions about the relative position of those who owe their celebrity to these ignoble arts and those on whose fame Time's test has set its seal, not merely on the part of the general public, but on the part of those who are responsible for the books introduced into schools and educational institutes. We will give an illustration.
At a meeting held not long ago, for the purpose of prescribing books for a Reading Society, the choice lay between some of Johnson's Lives, Select Essays by Sainte Beuve, and Select Essays by Matthew Arnold on the one hand, and on the other certain books typical of the literature of which we have been speaking.The debate which ensued was very amusing. A member of the committee, a gentleman of conservative temper, strongly urged the claims of Johnson, Sainte Beuve, and Arnold, on the ground that it was the duty of the Society to encourage the study of what was excellent and of classical quality, especially in criticism; that it was not merely the information contained in a book which had to be considered, but the style, the tone, the touch; that the monographs proposed as an alternative could scarcely be regarded as of the first order, either in expression or in matter, for he had observed, though he had only glanced at them, several solecisms in grammar and several inaccuracies of statement; and he concluded by adding that other writings of these particular authors with which he happened to be more familiar had not prejudiced him in their favour. Upon that, another member of the council, who had been busily conning the Press notices inserted in the monographs in question, pleaded their claim to preference. "Dr. Johnson," he remarked, "was no doubt a great man in his day, but his day had long been over; no one read him now. Sainte Beuve and Matthew Arnold might be classical and all that, but they were not up to date." He could not talk as an expert on literary matters, and therefore he would not contradict what the former speaker had said,"but there could be no doubt that Messrs. So-and-so," the authors of the monographs in question, "were very big men—bigger men, I should think (glancing at the Press notices in his hand), than Sainte Beuve and Matthew Arnold. At any rate, everybody has heard of them; and," he continued, "listen to this." He then proceeded to read out some of the notices, adding that it was difficult, if he might say so without offence, to reconcile what his friend, the preceding speaker, had said with what was said in these notices. He was a little staggered—for, though a simple, he was a shrewd man—when the very remarkable similarity between Mr. A's eulogies of Mr. B and Mr. B's eulogies of Mr. A was pointed out to him, and when, in reference to anonymous testimony, he was reminded that one voice may have many echoes. It was generally felt, more especially as Mr. A or Mr. B had, we believe, more than one acquaintance among the committee, that the debate was taking rather an embarrassing turn. The question was then put to the vote, and the monographs were carried by a majority of three to one.
What occurred at this meeting is occurring every day, variously modified, wherever the choice of books is in question, whether in public libraries or in educational institutions. A literature, the sole credentials of which are derivedfrom those who produce and circulate it, is gradually superseding that of our classics. We seem in truth to be losing all sense of the essential distinction between the writings of the average man of letters and those of the masters.
[20]Books Worth Reading.A Plea for the Best and an Essay towards Selection, with Short Introductions. By Frank W. Raffety, London.
[20]Books Worth Reading.A Plea for the Best and an Essay towards Selection, with Short Introductions. By Frank W. Raffety, London.
Were it not for its melancholy significance, this would be one of the most amusing books which it has ever been our fortune to meet with. Of Mr. Frank W. Raffety we have not the honour to know anything, except what we have gathered from this little volume and from its title-page. But he must be a singularly interesting gentleman. His enthusiasm for books, his portentous ignorance of them; his strenuous desire to improve the popular taste by pleading for the best, his instinctive tendency to make in all cases for the worst; his sublime intolerance of everything in literature which falls short of excellence, his more than sublime indifference to the commonest rules of grammar and syntax in expressing that intolerance; thenaïveté, the frankness, the recklessness with which he displays his incompetence for the task which he has undertaken—in these qualificationsand accomplishments Mr. Raffety is not perhaps alone, but he has certainly no superior.
Mr. Raffety aspires to guide his readers through the chief literatures of the world. Now the task of a reviewer, who has a conscience, is not always a cheerful one, and we confess that, when we had generally surveyed Mr. Raffety's work, we resolved to amuse ourselves by trying to discover of which of the literatures, to which Mr. Raffety constitutes himself a guide, Mr. Raffety is probably most ignorant. It is a nice point. Let our readers judge. We will begin with Mr. Raffety and the Classics. Of Theognis, the most voluminous of the Greek Gnomic poets, it is said that "only a few sentences"—Mr. Raffety is presumably under the impression that Theognis wrote in prose—"quoted in the works of Plato and others survive." "The Greek Anthology," we are astounded to learn, "is by Lord Neaves" and "is one of the best volumes in the A.C.E.R. series." What Mr. Raffety no doubt means is, that Lord Neaves is the author of a monograph on the Greek anthology, as he certainly was. With regard to Herodotus, Mr. Raffety has evidently got some information not generally accessible. HisHistory, we are told, "is a great prose epic.... The second book is of the most interest. In other works are the histories of Crœsus, Cyrus," etc. It would be interesting to know what other works besides hisHistoryHerodotus has left. Of thePrometheus Boundof Æschylus Mr. Raffety gives the following interesting account. It contains, he says, "the story of Prometheus and his defiance of Jupiter, who condemned him to be bound to a rock, where he died rather than yield." We exhort Mr. Raffety, before his work passes into a second edition, to consult his Classical Dictionary.
Of the translations recommended by Mr. Raffety we should very much like to get a sight of the translation of Pindar by Calverley, of the joint translation of the same classic by Messrs. E. Myers and A. Lang, and of the joint translation of Thucydides "by Jowett and Rev. H. Dale, 2 vols." Of Herodotus, of Æschylus, of Sophocles, of Pindar, of Polybius, of Demosthenes, what are, by general consent, esteemed the best translations are not so much as mentioned. Latin literature fares even worse in the hands of our guide. Mr. Raffety appears to know no more about Catullus than that he was a writer of epigrams. Such trifles as theAttis, thePeleus and Thetis, the Julia and Manlius marriage song, theComa Berenices, the love lyrics and threnodies he does not condescend to notice. In "guiding" his readers to translations of Lucretius and Juvenal, Munro's version of the first in prose and Gifford's version of the second in verse—which Conington pronounced to be the best version of any Roman classic in our language—are not so much asreferred to. Nor, again, in the case of Plautus and Terence, are the excellent versions of Thornton and Coleman noticed. Tacitus, who is oddly described as "the foremost man of the day," an estimate which might have pleased but which would certainly have surprised him, chronicled, we are told, "the foundation of the Christian religion." Mr. Raffety's assurance on this point will probably disappoint inquisitive readers. Equally surprising are the portions of the work dealing with the modern literatures. In the course of these we learn that "theNibelungen Liedis the oldest drama in Europe"; that theAreopagiticaand theDefence of the People of Englandare Milton's best prose writings—Mr. Raffety apparently not being aware that the second work is in Latin, and that if he means the firstDefence, it is anything but one of the best of Milton's writings. We are also informed that Dryden was most valuable as a translator from the Greek and Latin; Dryden's versions from the Greek begin and end with paraphrases of four Idylls of Theocritus, the first book of theIliadand the parting of Hector and Andromache from the sixth, and are notoriously the very worst things he ever did.
Sometimes Mr. Raffety fairly takes our breath away, as when he informs us that Gray's tomb can be seen in the little churchyard of Stoke Pogis "with theElegywritten upon it." Can Mr.Raffety be acquainted with the length of theElegyand with the proportions of a tombstone? Chaucer, we are informed, wrote some poems in Italian. We should very much like to see them, and so probably would Professor Skeat, for they appear to have escaped the notice of all Chaucer's editors. Swift'sTale of a Tubwas written, we are told, "against the teaching of Hobbes!"
It is indeed impossible to open this book anywhere without alighting on some most discreditable blunder or absurdity. Thus we are informed that Macaulay's essay on Burleigh treats of the time of James I.—Burleigh, as we need hardly say, dying nearly five years before James came to the throne, and Macaulay's essay having no reference at all to James I.'s time. "There is," says Mr. Raffety, "no more stirring lyric thanThe Cotter's Saturday Night," a remark which shows that Mr. Raffety does not know what a lyric poem is. But to look for blunders in Mr. Raffety's pages would be to look for leaves in a summer forest. His critical remarks and biographical notes are truly delightful. We wish we had space to quote some of them. Of their general quality the following profound remark is a fair specimen:—"Dante requires study, and an endeavour after appreciation." Mr. Raffety is always anxious to conduct his readers by short cuts and to save them trouble. Macaulay'sEssays, for example, should be read before hisHistory; "they will be more easily tackled," he says, "than theHistoryin the first instance." But on the subject of Gibbon Mr. Raffety is adamant, being fully of the late Professor Freeman's opinion—"Whatever else is read, Gibbon must be read." How Gibbon is to be read, or why Gibbon is to be read, or in what edition he should be read, Mr. Raffety does not explain.
Now, what possible end can be served by books like these, except to misguide and misinform? Here is a writer, who certainly leaves us with the impression that he cannot read the Greek and Latin classics in the original, setting up as a director of classical study, and pronouncingex cathedrâon the merits of translations of these classics. His knowledge of the modern literature is, as is abundantly manifest, though we have neither space nor patience to illustrate, equally insufficient and unsubstantial, and yet he undertakes to initiate and guide the inexperienced in these studies. This book is presented to the public in a most attractive form, being excellently printed on excellent paper, and will naturally be taken seriously by those to whom it appeals. It is for this reason that we also have felt it our duty to take it seriously. And, as we believe that every bad book stands in the way of a good one, we can promise Mr. Raffety, and writers like Mr. Raffety, that we shall continue to take them seriously.
[21]Retrospective Reviews.A Literary Log. By Richard Le Gallienne. 2 vols.
[21]Retrospective Reviews.A Literary Log. By Richard Le Gallienne. 2 vols.
Nearly two thousand years ago Horace observed that, though every calling presupposed some qualification in those who followed it, and a man who knew nothing of marine affairs would not undertake to manage a ship, or a man who knew nothing of drugs to compound prescriptions, yet everybody fancied himself competent to commence poet. Qualified or unqualified, at it we all go, he complains, and scribble verses. But times have changed, and those who in Horace's day were the pests of poetry, with which they could amuse themselves without mischief, have now become the pests of another kind of literature in which their diversions are not quite so harmless. Where the poetaster once stood the criticaster now stands. The transformation of the one pest into the other, where they do not, as they often do, become both, is easily accounted for, and as Dr. Johnson has so excellently explained it, wecannot do better than transcribe his words. "Criticism," says the Doctor, "is a study by which men grow important and formidable at a very small expense. The power of invention has been conferred by nature upon few, and the labour of learning those sciences which may by mere labour be attained is too great to be willingly endured; but every man can exert such judgment as he has upon the works of others, and he whom nature has made weak and idleness keeps ignorant may yet support his vanity by the name of critic." But criticasters and their patrons have improved on this—for "he whom nature has made weak and idleness keeps ignorant" may, in our time, not merely support his vanity, but support himself.
Till we inspected the volumes before us, we had really no conception of the pass to which things have now come in so-called criticism. The writer sits in judgment on most of the authors who have, during recent years, been before the public. He passes sentence not merely on current novelists, poets, and essayists, but on some of our classics, and on books like the late Mr. Pater'sLectures on Plato and Platonismand Dr. Wharton's edition ofSappho. To any acquaintance with the principles of criticism, to any conception of criticism in relation to principles, to any learning, to any scholarship, to any knowledge of the history of literature and of the masterpieces of literature,either in our own language or in other languages, he has not the smallest pretension. Nor does he allow this to be gathered simply from the work itself, where it is, needless to say, abundantly apparent, but with anaïvetéand impudence which are at once ludicrous and exasperating he glories in his ignorance. Literature and its interpretation are to him what the Bible and its interpretation were to the ranting sectaries of Dryden's satire. In its explanation knowledge and learning were folly, nothing was needed but "grace."
"No measure ta'en from knowledge, all from grace,Study and pains were now no more their care,Texts were explained by fasting and by prayer."
"No measure ta'en from knowledge, all from grace,Study and pains were now no more their care,Texts were explained by fasting and by prayer."
"No measure ta'en from knowledge, all from grace,
Study and pains were now no more their care,
Texts were explained by fasting and by prayer."
So to our critic knowledge and learning are of equal unimportance—nay, equally contemptible—and all that is needed to take the measure of Plato and Wordsworth is, in his own words, "the capacity for appreciation." With this very slender outfit he sits down to the work of criticism, to enlighten the worldde omni scibiliin literature, from the lyrics ofSappho, "the singer, a single petal of whose rose is more than the whole rose-garden of later women singers," to "the statesmanlike reach and grasp" of Mr. E. Gosse's essays.
To discuss seriously the opinions or impressions of a writer of this kind would be as absurd as to attempt to fight gnats with a sword, andwe shall merely content ourselves with transcribing, without comment, a few of the aphorisms with which these volumes are studded. "Criticism is the art of praise." "Shakespeare is the greatest English poet, not because he created Hamlet and Lear, but because he could write that speech about Perdita's flowers and Claudio's speech on death inMeasure for Measure." "The perfection of prose is the essay, of poetry the lyric, and the most beautiful book is that which contains the most beautiful words." These specimens will probably suffice. Mr. Le Gallienne is also of opinion that "culture is mainly a matter of temperament"—that "a man is born cultured," that mere education and study are to such a one not simply superfluities, but impertinences. "What matters it," he eloquently asks, "that one does not remember or even has never read great writers? Our one concern is to possess an organization open to great and refined impressions." A paltry scholar, for example, may be able to construe Sappho, but it is only "an organization open to great and refined impressions" which can discern (in a crib) "the pathos of eternity in some twenty words" of "this passionate singer of Lesbos." Plato may be studied by poor pedants, but to an organization of this kind the binding of a volume is sufficient enlightenment; "to merely hold in the hand and turn over its pages is a counsel in style," for do not "the temperate beauty, thedry beauty beloved of Plato, find expression in the sweet and stately volume itself" [he is "reviewing" the late Mr. Pater's lectures on Plato], "with its smooth night-blue binding, its rose-leaf yellow pages, its soft and yet grave type"? The value of Mr. Le Gallienne's judgments, of his praise, and of his censure, which, ludicrous to relate, are quoted by some publishers as recommendations, or "opinions of the press," may be estimated by these dicta, and by this theory of a critical education.
Macaulay somewhere speaks of a certain nondescript broth which, in some Continental inns, was kept constantly boiling, and copiously poured, without distinction, on every dish as it came up to table. The writer of these essays appears, metaphorically speaking, to be provided with a similar abomination. Whatever be his theme, poem, essay, novel, picture, he contrives to serve it up with the same condiment, a sickly and nauseous compound of preciosity and sentimentalism.
The melancholy thing about all this is the profound unconsciousness on the part of the author of these volumes that he is exciting ridicule; that he is, in Shakespeare's phrase, making himself a motley to the view. But there are considerations more melancholy still. We should not have noticed these volumes had they not been representative and typical of a school of so-called critics which is becomingmore and more prominent. Incredible as it may seem, there are certain sections of literary society and of the general public which take Mr. Le Gallienne and his dicta quite seriously, and to which the prodigious nonsense in these volumes does not present itself as absurdity, but as the articles of a creed. These essays have, moreover, appeared in publications the names of some of which carry authority. It is, therefore, high time that some stand should be made, some protest entered against writings which cannot fail to corrupt popular taste and to degrade the standard of popular literature. Of one thing we are very certain, that no self-respecting literary journal which undertook to review these volumes could allow them to pass without denunciation.
Of Mr. Le Gallienne we know nothing personally. He is, if we are rightly informed, still a young man, and we would in all kindness exhort him to turn the abilities which he undoubtedly possesses to better account. There is much in these essays which shows that he was intended for something better than to further the decadence. If, instead of sneering at scholars, affecting to despise learning and study, indulging in silly paradoxes, tinsel epigrams, and absurd generalisations, he would read and think, and endeavour to do justice to himself and to his opportunities, he might, we make no doubt, obtain an honourable reputation. There is muchwhich is attractive in his work, and in the personality reflected in it. He is not a charlatan, for though he is ignorant, he is honest. Genial and sympathetic, he has much real critical insight, and, in going through his volumes, we have noted many remarks which were both sound and fine. At its best his style is excellent,—clear, lively, and engaging. Let him cease to play the buffoon, which can only end in his gaining the applause of mere fools and the contempt of every one else.
The illustrious Barnum once observed that, if a man's capital consisted of a shilling, one penny of that shilling should be spent in purchasing something, and the remaining eleven-pence should be invested in advertising what was purchased. There was, perhaps, a touch of exaggeration in that great man's remark, but it was founded on a profound knowledge both of human nature and of the world. Intrinsically nothing is valuable; things are what we make or imagine them. Even the diamond, as a costly commodity, exists on suffrage. If a man cannot persuade his fellow-creatures that he has genius, talent, learning, "'twere all alike as if he had them not." What Persius asks with a sneer, "Scire tuum nihil est, nisi te scire hoc sciat alter?"—is your knowledge nothing, unless some one else know that you are knowing?—a wiser man would ask in all seriousness. Shakespeare was never nearer the truth than when he wrote—
"No man is the lord of anything,Though in and of him there be much consisting,Till he communicates his parts to others;Nor doth he of himself know them for aught,Till he behold them formed in the applauseWhere they are extended."
"No man is the lord of anything,Though in and of him there be much consisting,Till he communicates his parts to others;Nor doth he of himself know them for aught,Till he behold them formed in the applauseWhere they are extended."
"No man is the lord of anything,
Though in and of him there be much consisting,
Till he communicates his parts to others;
Nor doth he of himself know them for aught,
Till he behold them formed in the applause
Where they are extended."
And never was a man more mistaken than the old preacher who said to his congregation, "If you have a talent in your napkin, you should take care not to hide it; but if you have no talent, but only a napkin, you should not so flourish your napkin as to create the impression that it is full of talents." Why, this is just what nine men in ten who court fame have to do. Nature is kind, but seldom profuse. If she really endows a man with what, if trumpeted, would make him famous, the odds are she couples with her gifts pride, modesty, or self-respect, which, to say the least, heavily handicap him in the race for reputation. When she does not endow with the reality, she compensates by bestowing the power of acquiring the credit for it. She is, as a rule, much too thrifty to heap on the same man the keen pleasures of genuine enthusiasm and the sweets of popular applause. An impartial mother, she loves all her children, and divides her favours equally between shams and true men. This Churchill marks in his brutal way; speaking of a certain contemporary, he describes him as endowed with
"That low cunning which in fools supplies,And amply too, the place of being wise,Which Nature, kind, indulgent parent, gaveTo qualify the blockhead for a knave."
"That low cunning which in fools supplies,And amply too, the place of being wise,Which Nature, kind, indulgent parent, gaveTo qualify the blockhead for a knave."
"That low cunning which in fools supplies,
And amply too, the place of being wise,
Which Nature, kind, indulgent parent, gave
To qualify the blockhead for a knave."
But our business is not with knaves and blockheads, but with "gentler cattle," and the quotation demands an apology.
The importance of the art of self-advertisement, as must be abundantly clear from the preceding remarks, can scarcely be overestimated. Though it is perhaps still in its infancy, its progress during the last few years has been most encouraging. The old coarse methods so familiar to us in the past, and still successfully practised in the present—we mean mutual admiration cliques, log-rolling, and what is vulgarly known as "pulling the strings"—have been greatly improved upon and refined. Bentley's famous remark when, explaining how it was that he took to commentating, he said, that as he despaired of standing on his own legs in the Temple of Fame, he got on to the shoulders of the Ancients, appears to have suggested one of the most ingenious of modern expedients. This consists of "getting up" a memorial to some distinguished man—a statue, it may be, or modest bust. Some labour, some ability, and some learning are involved in the more cumbrous device of Bentley. But here all is simple and very easy. You are on the shoulders of your great man at a bound, and stand side by side with him in a trice. There is nothing which redounds to his credit whichdoes not redound to your own. As the Red Indian is under the impression that in possessing himself of a scalp he possesses himself of the virtues belonging to the former owner of the scalp, so this tribute of enthusiastic admiration quietly assumes, without trouble, all that enthusiastic admiration naturally implies. Is the object of your homage a poet, a critic, a scholar, the very fact that you pay him homage is, in itself, testimony of your own right to one or other of these honourable titles. If, moreover it should happen that you know very little about the writings of the author whom you have elected to honour, this is of no consequence; for of all the disguises which ignorance can assume, "enthusiasm" is the most effective. Nor are these the only advantages of this particular method of getting reputation. The collection of subscriptions and the formation of a committee bring you into contact, or may, if judiciously managed, bring you into contact with all your distinguished contemporaries; and we know what the proverb says—"Noscitur a sociis"—a man is what his companions are.
But nothing is more effectual, for purposes of self-advertisement, than a device which has lately been practised with signal success. This consists of scraping up an acquaintance with some person, whose name is not unknown to the public,—even a second-rate novelist will do—and waiting till he dies. As there is a tide in the affairsof men, so, as we all know, there is a moment at the demise of literary men when the voracity of public curiosity knows neither distinction nor satiety. This is the moment for the self-advertiser to nick; this is the time for him to float, with his defunct friend, on the lips of men. He will find readers for anything he may choose to print—that letter with its exquisite compliments, that conversation in which his poor attainments were so generously over-estimated, or the importance of his slight literary services so much exaggerated. Of course, the value of such advertisements will be in proportion to the eminence of the subject of the reminiscences—and happy, thrice happy, those who were able to turn men like Darwin, Tennyson, and Browning to this account; their reputation may be regarded as made. But it is not always necessary to wait till great men die, though it is an experiment too bold and perilous for most aspirants to make this sort of capital out of them while they are still alive. Stillaudentes fortuna juvat, and it has been done. A certain minor poet published in an American magazine, not many years ago, an article entitled "A Day with Lord Tennyson," in which he represented the Laureate as turning the conversation on his (the minor bard's) poetry. We are told how the great man, after fervently reiterating a stanza of that minor bard which pleased him, requested his son to take it down in writing; how that son,though the day was cold and blowy, took it down; how Tennyson grasped, at parting, his brother poet's hand, and begged in transport that he would "come again and come often." He came, we believe, no more. But what of that? He had accomplished a feat so simple and yet so original that it may fairly be questioned whether what Mr. Burnum used to call his masterpiece was in any way comparable to it. To interview a great man, even on an assumption of equality, is, as we all know, a comparatively easy matter, but to turn the conversation of the great man into a seasonable puff of yourself requires a combination of qualities not often united in a single person. The worst of feats like these is that they must have a tendency to make great men a little shy of encouraging the acquaintance of those to whom they can be so useful. But simplicity, as Thucydides remarks, is one of the chief ingredients of greatness, and it is a quality very difficult to wear out.
If Tennyson's interviewer has ever had a rival in the important art which has been discussed—for the benefit of youthful ambition—in this article, we are inclined to think that that rival was the Rev. Aris Willmott. This now almost forgotten writer was a very voluminous author both in verse and prose; but his merits were not appreciated by an ungrateful public so much as they ought to have been. He resorted, therefore,to the following exquisitely ingenious device. He published a handsome volume, which is now before us, entitledGems from English Literature, thus arranged: Bacon, Rev. Aris Willmott, Jeremy Taylor, Rev. Aris Willmott, Barrow, Rev. Aris Willmott, sandwiching himself regularly through the prose classics, and in the same way through the poets—Shakespeare, Rev. Aris Willmott, Milton, Rev. Aris, etc. As birthday books, press notices, interviews at home, portraits of distinguished authors in their studies, and the like are getting a little stale, we cordially recommend this rev. gentleman's expedient—it may be judiciously modified—to the notice of all who are unable to distinguish fame from notoriety.
[22]The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson to his Family and Friends.Selected and Edited with Notes and Introduction by Sidney Colvin. 2 vols.
[22]The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson to his Family and Friends.Selected and Edited with Notes and Introduction by Sidney Colvin. 2 vols.
The late Robert Louis Stevenson is a writer who has every title to commiseration, and the appearance of the volumes before us may be said to mark the climax of his misfortunes. Diseased and sickly from his birth, with his life frequently hanging on a thread, he probably never knew the sensation of perfect health. During the impressionable years of early youth his surroundings appear to have been most uncongenial; he was forced into a profession for which he had no taste and no aptitude. In constant straits for money, at times he was miserably poor; his apprenticeship to letters was long and arduous, for he was not one of Nature's favourites, and attained what he did attain by unsparing and severe labour. His wandering and restless life, bringing him as it did into contact with all phases of humanity and with all parts of the world, was of course inmany respects favourable to his work, but it had at the same time serious disadvantages. It gave him little time for reflection; it imported a certain feverishness into his energy, and rendered that concentration and steadiness, without which no really great work can be accomplished, impossible. That in these circumstances Stevenson should have produced so much, and so much which is of a high order of merit, is most creditable to him, and not a little surprising. "He stands," says his friend Professor Colvin, "as the writer who in the last quarter of the nineteenth century has handled with the most of freshness and inspiriting power the widest range of established literary forms—the moral, critical and personal essay, travels sentimental and other, parables and tales of mystery, boys' stories of adventure, memoirs; nor let lyrical and meditative verse both English and Scottish, and especially nursery verse, a new vein for genius to work in, be forgotten." With some reservation this may be conceded, and this is as far as eulogy can legitimately be stretched.
But, unhappily, some of Stevenson's admirers have made themselves and their idol ridiculous, by raising him to a position his claims to which are preposterous. If he be measured with his contemporaries the comparison will generally be in his favour—he certainly did best what hundreds can do well. His essays have distinctionand excellence; his novels, travels, and short tales, though scarcely entitled to the praise of originality, as they strike no new notes and are mere variants of the work of Scott, Kingston, Ballantyne, De Quincey and Poe, bear the impress of genius as distinguished from mere talent, and reflect a very charming personality; his verse, too, is pleasing and skilful. But when we are told that he will stand the third in a trio with Burns and Scott, and when we have to listen to serious appeals to Edinburgh to raise a statue to him beside the author ofMarmionand the Waverley Novels, all who truly appreciate his work may well tremble for the reaction which is certain to succeed such extravagant overestimation. The truth is that poor Stevenson, himself one of the simplest, sincerest and most modest of men, got involved with a clique who may be described as manufacturers of factitious reputations,—the circulators of a false currency in criticism. In these days of appeals to the masses it is as easy to write up the sort of works which are addressed to them—popular essays, tales and novels—as it is to write up the commodities of quack doctors and the shares of bogus companies. The production of popular literature is now a trade, and in some cases this kind of puffery is the work of deliberate fraud, originating from various motives. In many cases it simply springs from ignorance and critical incompetence, current criticism being, to a considerableextent, in the hands of very young men who, having neither the requisite knowledge nor the proper training, are unable to judge a writer comparatively. In other cases it is to be attributed to good nature and the tendency in the genial appreciation of real merit to indulge in extravagant expression. But the result is the same. A reputation, so grotesquely out of proportion to what is really merited that sober people are inclined to suspect that all is imposture, is gradually inflated. Eulogy kindles eulogy; hyperbole is heaped on hyperbole; a ludicrous importance is attached to every trifle which falls, or which ever has fallen, from this Press-created Fetish. While he is alive he is encouraged, or rather importuned, to force his power of production to keep pace with the demand for everything bearing his signature; when he is dead the very refuse of his study finds eager publishers.
This kind of thing has obviously many advantages, which are by no means confined to the object of the idolatry itself. In the first place it means business; it is the creation of a goose which can lay golden eggs, and it is, in the second place, a creation which reflects no little glory on the creators. Is it nothing to be the satellites of so radiant a luminary? When the familiar correspondence of the great man is printed, will not what he was pleasedto say, with all the friendly license of private intercourse, in the way of compliment and eulogy, be proclaimed from the house-tops?
All this is exactly what has happened in the case of poor Stevenson. No man ever took more justly his own measure, or would have been more annoyed at the preposterous eulogies of which he has been made the subject, on the part of interested or ill-judging friends. We wonder what he would himself have said, could he have seen the letters before us described, as they were described in one of the current Reviews, as "the most exhaustive and distinguished literary correspondence which England has ever seen." We entirely absolve Professor Colvin from any suspicion of being actuated by unworthy motives in publishing them. It is abundantly clear that he has not published them to puff himself, that his labour has been a labour of love, and that he believed himself to be piously fulfilling a duty to his friend. But they ought never to have been given to the world. More than two-thirds have nothing whatever to justify their appearance in print, and merely show, what will surprise those who knew Stevenson by his literary writings, how vapid, vulgar and commonplace he could be. In their slangy familiarity and careless spontaneity they remind us of Byron's, but what a contrast do these trivialand too often insipid tattlings present to Byron's brilliance and point, his wit, his piquancy, his insight into life and men! Only here and there, in a touch of description, or in a casual reflection, do we find anything to distinguish them from the myriads of letters which are interchanged between young men every day in the year. Their one attraction lies in the glimpses they reveal of Stevenson's own charming personality, his kindliness, his sympathy, his great modesty, his manliness, his transparent truthfulness and honesty. It is amusing to watch him with one of his correspondents who was evidently endeavouring to establish a mutual exchange of flattery. The urbane skill with which this gentleman's persistently fulsome compliments are either fenced or waived aside, the ironical delicacy with which, when a return is extorted, they are repaid, in a measure strictly adjusted to desert and yet certain not to disappoint expectant vanity, are quite exquisite. "The suns go swiftly out," he writes to him, referring to the death of Tennyson and Browning and others, "and I see no suns to follow, nothing but a universal twilight of the demi-divinities, with parties like you and me beating on toy drums, and playing on penny whistles about glow-worms." The indignant letter to theNew York Tribune, in defence of James Payn, who had been accused of plagiarising from one of Stevenson's fictions, well deserves placing onpermanent record, as an illustration of his chivalrous loyalty to his friends.
We are sorry, we repeat, that these letters have been given to the world. So far as Stevenson's reputation is concerned they can only detract from it. When they illustrate him on his best side they merely emphasise what his works illustrate so abundantly that further illustration is a mere work of supererogation. When they present him, as for the most part they do, in dishabille, they exhibit him very greatly to his disadvantage. If Professor Colvin had printed about one-third of them, and retained his excellent elucidatory introductions, which form practically a biography of Stevenson, he would have produced a work for which all admirers of that most pleasing writer would have thanked him. As it is, he has been guilty, in our opinion, of a grave error of judgment.