Dr. John Brown’s pleasant story has become well known, of the countryman who, being asked to account for the gravity of his dog, replied, ‘Oh, sir! life is full of sairiousness to him—he can just never get eneugh o’ fechtin’.’ Something of the spirit of this saddened dog seems lately to have entered into the very people who ought to be freest from it—our men of letters. They are all very serious and very quarrelsome. To some of them it is dangerous even to allude. Many are wedded to a theory or period, and are the most uxorious of husbands—ever ready to resent an affront to their lady. This devotion makes them very grave, and possibly very happy after a pedantic fashion. One remembers what Hazlitt, who was neither happy nor pedantic, has said about pedantry:
‘The power of attaching an interest to the most trifling or painful pursuits is one of thegreatest happinesses of our nature. The common soldier mounts the breach with joy, the miser deliberately starves himself to death, the mathematician sets about extracting the cube-root with a feeling of enthusiasm, and the lawyer sheds tears of delight overCoke upon Lyttleton. He who is not in some measure a pedant, though he may be a wise, cannot be a very happy man.’
‘The power of attaching an interest to the most trifling or painful pursuits is one of thegreatest happinesses of our nature. The common soldier mounts the breach with joy, the miser deliberately starves himself to death, the mathematician sets about extracting the cube-root with a feeling of enthusiasm, and the lawyer sheds tears of delight overCoke upon Lyttleton. He who is not in some measure a pedant, though he may be a wise, cannot be a very happy man.’
Possibly not; but then we are surely not content that our authors should be pedants in order that they may be happy and devoted. As one of the great class for whose sole use and behalf literature exists—the class of readers—I protest that it is to me a matter of indifference whether an author is happy or not. I want him to make me happy. That is his office. Let him discharge it.
I recognise in this connection the corresponding truth of what Sydney Smith makes his Peter Plymley say about the private virtues of Mr. Perceval, the Prime Minister:
‘You spend a great deal of ink about the character of the present Prime Minister. Grant all that you write—I say, I fear that he will ruin Ireland, and pursue a line of policy destructive to the true interests of his country;and then you tell me that he is faithful to Mrs. Perceval, and kind to the Master Percevals. I should prefer that he whipped his boys and saved his country.’
‘You spend a great deal of ink about the character of the present Prime Minister. Grant all that you write—I say, I fear that he will ruin Ireland, and pursue a line of policy destructive to the true interests of his country;and then you tell me that he is faithful to Mrs. Perceval, and kind to the Master Percevals. I should prefer that he whipped his boys and saved his country.’
We should never confuse functions or apply wrong tests. What can books do for us? Dr. Johnson, the least pedantic of men, put the whole matter into a nutshell (a cocoanut shell, if you will—Heaven forbid that I should seek to compress the great Doctor within any narrower limits than my metaphor requires!), when he wrote that a book should teach us either to enjoy life or endure it. ‘Give us enjoyment!’ ‘Teach us endurance!’ Hearken to the ceaseless demand and the perpetual prayer of an ever unsatisfied and always suffering humanity!
How is a book to answer the ceaseless demand?
Self-forgetfulness is of the essence of enjoyment, and the author who would confer pleasure must possess the art, or know the trick, of destroying for the time the reader’s own personality. Undoubtedly the easiest way of doing this is by the creation of a host of rival personalities—hence the number and the popularity of novels. Whenever a novelist fails hisbook is said to flag; that is, the reader suddenly (as in skating) comes bump down upon his own personality, and curses the unskilful author. No lack of characters and continual motion is the easiest recipe for a novel, which, like a beggar, should always be kept ‘moving on.’ Nobody knew this better than Fielding, whose novels, like most good ones, are full of inns.
When those who are addicted to what is called ‘improving reading’ inquire of you petulantly why you cannot find change of company and scene in books of travel, you should answer cautiously that when books of travel are full of inns, atmosphere, and motion, they are as good as any novel; nor is there any reason in the nature of things why they should not always be so, though experience proves the contrary.
The truth or falsehood of a book is immaterial. George Borrow’sBible in Spainis, I suppose, true; though now that I come to think of it, in what is to me a new light, one remembers that it contains some odd things. But was not Borrow the accredited agent of the British and Foreign Bible Society? Did he not travel (and he had a free hand) at their charges? Was he not befriended by our minister atMadrid, Mr. Villiers, subsequently Earl of Clarendon in the peerage of England? It must be true; and yet at this moment I would as lief read a chapter of theBible in Spainas I wouldGil Blas; nay, I positively would give the preference to Don Jorge.
Nobody can sit down to read Borrow’s books without as completely forgetting himself as if he were a boy in the forest with Gurth and Wamba.
Borrow is provoking, and has his full share of faults, and, though the owner of a style, is capable of excruciating offences. His habitual use of the odious word ‘individual’ as a noun-substantive (seven times in three pages ofThe Romany Rye) elicits the frequent groan, and he is certainly once guilty of calling fish the ‘finny tribe.’ He believed himself to be animated by an intense hatred of the Church of Rome, and disfigures many of his pages by Lawrence-Boythorn-like tirades against that institution; but no Catholic of sense need on this account deny himself the pleasure of reading Borrow, whose one dominating passion wascamaraderie, and who hob-a-nobbed in the friendliest spirit with priest and gipsy in a fashion as far beyond praise as it is beyond description by any penother than his own. Hail to thee, George Borrow! Cervantes himself, Gil Blas, do not more effectually carry their readers into the land of the Cid than does this miraculous agent of the Bible Society, by favour of whose pleasantness we can, any hour of the week, enter Villafranca by night, or ride into Galicia on an Andalusian stallion (which proved to be a foolish thing to do), without costing anybody apeseta, and at no risk whatever to our necks—be they long or short.
Cooks, warriors, and authors must be judged by the effects they produce: toothsome dishes, glorious victories, pleasant books—these are our demands. We have nothing to do with ingredients, tactics, or methods. We have no desire to be admitted into the kitchen, the council, or the study. The cook may clean her saucepans how she pleases—the warrior place his men as he likes—the author handle his material or weave his plot as best he can—when the dish is served we only ask, Is it good? when the battle has been fought, Who won? when the book comes out, Does it read?
Authors ought not to be above being reminded that it is their first duty to write agreeably—some very disagreeable men have succeededin doing so, and there is therefore no need for anyone to despair. Every author, be he grave or gay, should try to make his book as ingratiating as possible. Reading is not a duty, and has consequently no business to be made disagreeable. Nobody is under any obligation to read any other man’s book.
Literature exists to please—to lighten the burden of men’s lives; to make them for a short while forget their sorrows and their sins, their silenced hearths, their disappointed hopes, their grim futures—and those men of letters are the best loved who have best performed literature’s truest office. Their name is happily legion, and I will conclude these disjointed remarks by quoting from one of them, as honest a parson as ever took tithe or voted for the Tory candidate, the Rev. George Crabbe. Hear him inThe Frank Courtship:—
‘“I must be loved;” said Sybil; “I must seeThe man in terrors, who aspires to me:At my forbidding frown his heart must ache,His tongue must falter, and his frame must shake;And if I grant him at my feet to kneel,What trembling fearful pleasure must he feel:Nay, such the raptures that my smiles inspire,That reason’s self must for a time retire.”“Alas! for good Josiah,” said the dame,“These wicked thoughts would fill his soul with shame;He kneel and tremble at a thing of dust!He cannot, child:”—the child replied, “He must.”’
‘“I must be loved;” said Sybil; “I must seeThe man in terrors, who aspires to me:At my forbidding frown his heart must ache,His tongue must falter, and his frame must shake;And if I grant him at my feet to kneel,What trembling fearful pleasure must he feel:Nay, such the raptures that my smiles inspire,That reason’s self must for a time retire.”
“Alas! for good Josiah,” said the dame,“These wicked thoughts would fill his soul with shame;He kneel and tremble at a thing of dust!He cannot, child:”—the child replied, “He must.”’
Were an office to be opened for the insurance of literary reputations, no critic at all likely to be in the society’s service would refuse the life of a poet who could write like Crabbe. Cardinal Newman, Mr. Leslie Stephen, Mr. Swinburne, are not always of the same way of thinking, but all three hold the one true faith about Crabbe.
But even were Crabbe now left unread, which is very far from being the case, his would be an enviable fame—for was he not one of the favourite poets of Walter Scott, and whenever the closing scene of the great magician’s life is read in the pages of Lockhart, must not Crabbe’s name be brought upon the reader’s quivering lip?
To soothe the sorrow of the soothers of sorrow, to bring tears to the eyes and smiles to the cheeks of the lords of human smiles and tears, is no mean ministry, and it is Crabbe’s.
It is now a complaint of quite respectably antiquity that the types in which humanity was originally set up by a humour-loving Providence are worn out and require recasting. The surface of society has become smooth. It ought to be a bas-relief—it is a plane. Even a Chaucer (so it is said) could make nothing of us as we wend our way to Brighton. We have tempers, it is true—bad ones for the most part; but no humours to be in or out of. We are all far too much alike; we do not group well; we only mix. All this, and more, is alleged against us. A cheerfully-disposed person might perhaps think that, assuming the prevailing type to be a good, plain, readable one, this uniformity need not necessarily be a bad thing; but had he the courage to give expression to this opinion he would most certainly be at once told, with that mixture of asperity and contempt soproperly reserved for those who take cheerful views of anything, that without well-defined types of character there can be neither national comedy nor whimsical novel; and as it is impossible to imagine any person sufficiently cheerful to carry the argument further by inquiring ingenuously, ‘And how would that matter?’ the position of things becomes serious, and demands a few minutes’ investigation.
As we said at the beginning, the complaint is an old one—most complaints are. When Montaigne was in Rome in 1580 he complained bitterly that he was always knocking up against his own countrymen, and might as well have been in Paris. And yet some people would have you believe that this curse of the Continent is quite new. More than seventy years ago that most quotable of English authors, Hazlitt, wrote as follows:
‘It is, indeed, the evident tendency of all literature to generalize and dissipate character by giving men the same artificial education and the same common stock of ideas; so that we see all objects from the same point of view, and through the same reflected medium; we learn to exist not in ourselves, but in books; all men become alike, mere readers—spectators,not actors in the scene and lose all proper personal identity. The templar—the wit—the man of pleasure and the man of fashion, the courtier and the citizen, the knight and the squire, the lover and the miser—Lovelace, Lothario, Will Honeycomb and Sir Roger de Coverley, Sparkish and Lord Foppington, Western and Tom Jones, my Father and my Uncle Toby, Millament and Sir Sampson Legend, Don Quixote and Sancho, Gil Blas and Guzman d’Alfarache, Count Fathom and Joseph Surface—have all met and exchanged commonplaces on the barren plains of thehaute littérature—toil slowly on to the Temple of Science, seen a long way off upon a level, and end in one dull compound of politics, criticism, chemistry, and metaphysics.’
‘It is, indeed, the evident tendency of all literature to generalize and dissipate character by giving men the same artificial education and the same common stock of ideas; so that we see all objects from the same point of view, and through the same reflected medium; we learn to exist not in ourselves, but in books; all men become alike, mere readers—spectators,not actors in the scene and lose all proper personal identity. The templar—the wit—the man of pleasure and the man of fashion, the courtier and the citizen, the knight and the squire, the lover and the miser—Lovelace, Lothario, Will Honeycomb and Sir Roger de Coverley, Sparkish and Lord Foppington, Western and Tom Jones, my Father and my Uncle Toby, Millament and Sir Sampson Legend, Don Quixote and Sancho, Gil Blas and Guzman d’Alfarache, Count Fathom and Joseph Surface—have all met and exchanged commonplaces on the barren plains of thehaute littérature—toil slowly on to the Temple of Science, seen a long way off upon a level, and end in one dull compound of politics, criticism, chemistry, and metaphysics.’
Very pretty writing, certainly;[244]nor can it be disputed that uniformity of surroundings puts a tax upon originality. To make bricks and find your own straw are terms of bondage. Moderncharacters, like modern houses, are possibly built too much on the same lines, Dickens’s description of Coketown is not easily forgotten:
‘All the public inscriptions in the town were painted alike, in severe characters of black and white. The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town hall might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction.’
‘All the public inscriptions in the town were painted alike, in severe characters of black and white. The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town hall might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction.’
And the inhabitants of Coketown are exposed to the same objection as their buildings. Every one sinks all traces of what he vulgarly calls ‘the shop’ (that is, his lawful calling), and busily pretends to be nothing. Distinctions of dress are found irksome. A barrister of feeling hates to be seen in his robes save when actually engaged in a case. An officer wears his uniform only when obliged. Doctors have long since shed all outward signs of their healing art. Court dress excites a smile. A countess in her jewels is reckoned indecent by the British workman, who, all unemployed, puffs his tobacco smoke against the window-pane of the carriage that is conveying her ladyship to a drawing-room; and a West-end clergyman is with difficultyrestrained from telling his congregation what he had been told the British workman said on that occasion. Had he but had the courage to repeat those stirring words, his hearers (so he said) could hardly have failed to have felt their force—so unusual in such a place; but he had not the courage, and that sermon of the pavement remains unpreached. The toe of the peasant is indeed kibing the heel of the courtier. The passion for equality in externals cannot be denied. We are all woven strangely in the same piece, and so it comes about that, though our modern society has invented new callings, those callings have not created new types. Stockbrokers, directors, official liquidators, philanthropists, secretaries—not of State, but of companies—speculative builders, are a new kind of people known to many—indeed, playing a great part among us—but who, for all that, have not enriched the stage with a single character. Were they to disappear to-morrow, to be blown dancing away like the leaves before Shelley’s west wind, where in reading or playgoing would posterity encounter them? Alone amongst the children of men, the pale student of the law, burning the midnight oil in some one of the ‘high lonely towers’recently built by the Benchers of the Middle Temple (in the Italian taste), would, whilst losing his youth over that interminable series,The Law Reports, every now and again strike across the old track, once so noisy with the bayings of the well-paid hounds of justice, and, pushing his way along it, trace the history of the bogus company, from the acclamations attendant upon its illegitimate birth to the hour of disgrace when it dies by strangulation at the hands of the professional wrecker. The pale student will not be a wholly unsympathetic reader. Great swindles have ere now made great reputations, and lawyers may surely be permitted to take a pensive interest in such matters.
‘Not one except the Attorney was amused—He, like Achilles, faithful to the tomb,So there were quarrels, cared not for the cause,Knowing they must be settled by the laws.’
‘Not one except the Attorney was amused—He, like Achilles, faithful to the tomb,So there were quarrels, cared not for the cause,Knowing they must be settled by the laws.’
But our elder dramatists would not have let any of these characters swim out of their ken. A glance over Ben Jonson, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher, is enough to reveal their frank and easy method. Their characters, like an apothecary’s drugs, wear labels round their necks. Mr. Justice Clement and Mr.Justice Greedy; Master Matthew, the town gull; Sir Giles Overreach, Sir Epicure Mammon, Mr. Plenty, Sir John Frugal, need no explanatory context. Are our dramatists to blame for withholding from us the heroes of our modern society? Ought we to have—
‘Sir Moses, Sir Aaron, Sir Jamramagee,Two stock-jobbing Jews, and a shuffling Parsee’?
‘Sir Moses, Sir Aaron, Sir Jamramagee,Two stock-jobbing Jews, and a shuffling Parsee’?
Baron Contango, the Hon. Mr. Guinea-Pig, poor Miss Impulsia Allottee, Mr. Jeremiah Builder—Rare Old Ben, who was fond of the city, would have given us them all and many more; but though we may well wish he were here to do it, we ought, I think, to confess that the humour of these typical persons who so swell thedramatis personæ; of an Elizabethan is, to say the least of it, far to seek. There is a certain warm-hearted tradition about their very names which makes disrespect painful. It seems a churl’s part not to laugh, as did our fathers before us, at the humours of the conventional parasite or impossible serving-man; but we laugh because we will, and not because we must.
Genuine comedy—the true tickling scene, exquisite absurdity, soul-rejoicing incongruity—has really nothing to do with types, prevailing fashions, and such-like vulgarities. Sir Andrew Aguecheek is not a typical fool; heisa fool, seised in fee simple of his folly.
Humour lies not in generalizations, but in the individual; not in his hat nor in his hose, even though the latter be ‘cross-gartered’; but in the deep heart of him, in his high-flying vanities, his low-lying oddities—what we call his ‘ways’—nay, in the very motions of his back as he crosses the road. These stir our laughter whilst he lives and our tears when he dies, for in mourning over him we know full well we are taking part in our own obsequies. ‘But indeed,’ wrote Charles Lamb, ‘we die many deaths before we die, and I am almost sick when I think that such a hold as I had of you is gone.’
Literature is but the reflex of life, and the humour of it lies in the portrayal of the individual, not the type; and though the young man inLocksley Hallno doubt observes that the ‘individual withers,’ we have but to take down George Meredith’s novels to find the fact is otherwise, and that we have still one amongst us who takes notes, and against the battery of whose quick wits even the costly raiment of Poole is no protection. We are forced as weread to exclaim with Petruchio: ‘Thou hast hit it; come sit on me.’ No doubt the task of the modern humorist is not so easy as it was. The surface ore has been mostly picked up. In order to win the precious metal you must now work with in-stroke and out-stroke after the most approved methods. Sometimes one would enjoy it a little more if we did not hear quite so distinctly the snorting of the engine, and the groaning and the creaking of the gear as it painfully winds up its prize: but what would you? Methods, no less than men, must have the defects of their qualities.
If, therefore, it be the fact that our national comedy is in decline, we must look for some other reasons for it than those suggested by Hazlitt in 1817. When Mr. Chadband inquired, ‘Why can we not fly, my friends?’ Mr. Snagsby ventured to observe, ‘in a cheerful and rather knowing tone, “No wings!”’ but he was immediately frowned down by Mrs. Snagsby. We lack courage to suggest that the somewhat heavy-footed movements of our recent dramatists are in any way due to their not being provided with those twin adjuncts indispensable for the genius who would soar.
Why all the English poets, with a barely decent number of exceptions, have been Cambridge men, has always struck me, as did the abstinence of the Greeks from malt Mr. Calverley, ‘as extremely curious.’ But in this age of detail, one must, however reluctantly, submit to prove one’s facts, and I, therefore, propose to institute a ‘Modest Inquiry’ into this subject. Imaginatively, I shall don proctorial robes, and armed with a duster, saunter up and down the library, putting to each poet as I meet him the once dreaded question, ‘Sir, are you a member of this University?’
But whilst I am arranging myself for this function, let me utilize the time by making two preliminary observations—the first one being that, as to-day is Sunday, only such free libraries are open as may happen to be attached to public-houses, and I am consequently confinedto my own poor shelves, and must be forgiven even though I make some palpable omissions. The second is that I exclude from my survey living authors. I must do so; their very names would excite controversy about a subject which, when wisely handled, admits of none.
I now pursue my inquiry. That Chaucer was a Cambridge man cannot be proved. It is the better opinion that he was (how else should he have known anything about the Trumpington Road?), but it is only an opinion, and as no one has ever been found reckless enough to assert that he was an Oxford man, he must be content to ‘sit out’ this inquiry along with Shakspeare, Webster, Ford, Pope, Cowper, Burns, and Keats, no one of whom ever kept his terms at either University. Spenser is, of course, the glory of the Cambridge Pembroke, though were the fellowships of that college made to depend upon passing a yearly examination in theFaerie Queen, to be conducted by Dean Church, there would be wailing and lamentation within her rubicund walls. Sir Thomas Wyatt was at St. John’s, Fulke Greville Lord Brooke at Jesus, Giles and Phineas Fletcher were at King’s, Herrick was first at St. John’s, but migrated to the Hall,where he is still reckoned very pretty reading, even by boating men. Cowley, most precocious of poets, and Suckling were at Trinity, Waller at King’s, Francis Quarles was of Christ’s. The Herbert family were divided, some going to Oxford and some to Cambridge, George, of course, falling to the lot of Cambridge. John Milton’s name alone would deify the University where he pursued his almost sacred studies. Andrew Marvell, a pleasant poet and savage satirist, was of Trinity. The author ofHudibrasis frequently attributed to Cambridge, but, on being interrogated, he declined to name his college—always a suspicious circumstance.
I must not forget Richard Crashaw, of Peterhouse. Willingly would I relieve the intolerable tedium of this dry inquiry by transcribing the few lines of his now beneath my eye. But I forbear, and ‘steer right on.’
Of dramatists we find Marlowe (untimelier death than his was never any) at Corpus; Greene (I do not lay much stress on Greene) was both at St. John’s and Clare. Ben Jonson was at St. John’s, so was Nash. John Fletcher (whose claims to be considered the senior partner in his well-known firm are simplyparamount) was at Corpus. James Shirley, the author ofThe Maid’s Revengeand of the beautiful lyric beginning ‘The glories of our birth and state,’ in the innocence of his heart first went to St. John’s College, Oxford, from whence he was speedily sent down, for reasons which the delightful author ofAthenæ Oxoniensesmust really be allowed to state for himself. ‘At the same time (1612) Dr. William Laud presiding at that house, he had a very great affection for Shirley, especially for the pregnant parts that were visible in him, but then, having a broad or large mole upon his left cheek, which some esteemed a deformity, that worthy doctor would often tell him that he was an unfit person to take the sacred function upon him, and should never have his consent to do so.’ Thus treated, Shirley left Oxford, that ‘home of lost causes,’ but not apparently of large moles, and came to Cambridge, and entered at St. Catharine’s Hall, where, either because the authorities were not amongst those who esteemed a broad or large mole upon the left cheek to be a deformity, or because a mole, more or less, made no sort of difference in the personal appearance of the college, or for other good and sufficient reasons, poor Shirley wasallowed, without, I trust, being often told of his mole, to proceed to his degree and to Holy Orders.
Starting off again, we find John Dryden, whose very name is a tower of strength (were he to come to life again he would, like Mr. Brown of Calaveras, ‘clean out half the town’), at Trinity. In this poet’s later life he said he liked Oxford better. His lines on this subject are well known:
‘Oxford to him a dearer name shall beThan his own Mother-University.Thebes did his rude, unknowing youth engage,He chooses Athens in his riper age.’
‘Oxford to him a dearer name shall beThan his own Mother-University.Thebes did his rude, unknowing youth engage,He chooses Athens in his riper age.’
But idle preferences of this sort are beyond the scope of my present inquiry. After Dryden we find Garth at Peterhouse and charming Matthew Prior at John’s. Then comes the great name of Gray. Perhaps I ought not to mention poor Christopher Smart, who was a Fellow of Pembroke; and yet the author ofDavid, under happier circumstances, might have conferred additional poetic lustre even upon the college of Spenser.[255]
In the present century, we find Byron and his bear at Trinity, Coleridge at Jesus, and Wordsworth at St. John’s. The last-named poet was fully alive to the honour of belonging to the same University as Milton. In language not unworthy of Mr. Trumbull, the well-known auctioneer inMiddlemarch, he has recorded as follows:
‘Among the band of my compeers was oneWhom chance had stationed in the very roomHonoured by Milton’s name. O temperate Bard,Be it confest that for the first time seatedWithin thy innocent lodge and oratory,One of a festive circle, I poured outLibations, to thy memory drank, till prideAnd gratitude grew dizzy in a brainNever excited by the fumes of wineBefore that hour or since.’[256]
‘Among the band of my compeers was oneWhom chance had stationed in the very roomHonoured by Milton’s name. O temperate Bard,Be it confest that for the first time seatedWithin thy innocent lodge and oratory,One of a festive circle, I poured outLibations, to thy memory drank, till prideAnd gratitude grew dizzy in a brainNever excited by the fumes of wineBefore that hour or since.’[256]
I know of no more amiable trait in the character of Cambridge men than their willingness to admit having been drunkonce.
After the great name of Wordsworth any other must seem small, but I must, before concluding, place on record Praed, Macaulay, Kingsley, and Calverley.
A glorious Roll-call indeed!
‘Earth shows to Heaven the names by thousands toldThat crown her fame.’
‘Earth shows to Heaven the names by thousands toldThat crown her fame.’
So may Cambridge.
Oxford leads off with one I could find it in my heart to grudge her, beautiful as she is—Sir Philip Sidney. Why, I wonder, did he not accompany his friend and future biographer, Fulke Greville, to Cambridge? As Dr. Johnson once said to Boswell, ‘Sir, youmaywonder!’ Sidney most indisputably was at Christchurch. Old George Chapman, who I suppose was young once, was (I believe) at Oxford, though I have known Cambridge to claim him. Lodge and Peele were at Oxford, so were Francis Beaumont and his brother Sir John. Philip Massinger, Shakerley Marmion, and John Marston are of Oxford, also Watson and Warner. Henry Vaughan the Silurist, Sir John Davies, George Sandys, Samuel Daniel, Dr. Donne, Lovelace, and Wither belong to the sister University, so did Dr. Brady—but Oxford must not claim all the merit of the metrical version of the Psalms, for Brady’s colleague, Dr. Nahum Tate, was a Dublin man. Otway and Collins, Young, Johnson, Charles Wesley, Southey, Landor, Hartley Coleridge, Beddoes, Keble, Isaac Williams, Faber, and Clough are names ofwhich their University may well be proud. But surely, when compared with the Cambridge list, a falling-off must be admitted.
A poet indeed once came into residence at University College, whose single name—for, after all, poets must be weighed and not counted—would have gone far to right the balance, but is Oxford bold enough to claim Shelley as her own? She sent him down, not for riotous living, for no purer soul than his ever haunted her courts, but for wanting to discuss with those whose business it was to teach him questions of high philosophy. Had Shelley only gone to Trinity in 1810, I feel sure wise and witty old Dr. Mansel would never have sent him down. Spenser, Milton, and Shelley! What a triad of immortal fames they would have made. As it is, we expect Oxford, with her accustomed composure, will insist upon adding Shelley to her score—but even when she has been allowed to do so, she must own herself beaten both in men and metal.
But this being so—why was it so? It is now my turn to own myself defeated. I cannot for the life of me tell how it happened.
The most distinguished of living Englishmen, who, great as he is in many directions, is perhaps inherently more a man of letters than anything else, has been overheard mournfully to declare that there were more booksellers’ shops in his native town sixty years ago, when he was a boy in it, than are to-day to be found within its boundaries. And yet the place ‘all unabashed’ now boasts its bookless self a city!
Mr. Gladstone was, of course, referring to second-hand bookshops. Neither he nor any other sensible man puts himself out about new books. When a new book is published, read an old one, was the advice of a sound though surly critic. It is one of the boasts of letters to have glorified the term ‘second-hand,’ which other crafts have ‘soiled to all ignoble use.’ But why it has been able to do this is obvious. All the best books are necessarily second-hand.The writers of to-day need not grumble. Let them ‘bide a wee.’ If their books are worth anything, they, too, one day will be second-hand. If their books are not worth anything there are ancient trades still in full operation amongst us—the pastrycooks and the trunkmakers—who must have paper.
But is there any substance in the plaint that nobody now buys books, meaning thereby second-hand books? The late Mark Pattison, who had 16,000 volumes, and whose lightest word has therefore weight, once stated that he had been informed, and verily believed, that there were men of his own University of Oxford who, being in uncontrolled possession of annual incomes of not less than £500, thought they were doing the thing handsomely if they expended £50 a year upon their libraries. But we are not bound to believe this unless we like. There was a touch of morosity about the late Rector of Lincoln which led him to take gloomy views of men, particularly Oxford men.
No doubt argumentsà priorimay readily be found to support the contention that the habit of book-buying is on the decline. I confess to knowing one or two men, not Oxford meneither, but Cambridge men (and the passion of Cambridge for literature is a by-word), who, on the plea of being pressed with business, or because they were going to a funeral, have passed a bookshop in a strange town without so much as stepping inside ‘just to see whether the fellow had anything.’ But painful as facts of this sort necessarily are, any damaging inference we might feel disposed to draw from them is dispelled by a comparison of price-lists. Compare a bookseller’s catalogue of 1862 with one of the present year, and your pessimism is washed away by the tears which unrestrainedly flow as you see whatbonnes fortunesyou have lost. A young book-buyer might well turn out upon Primrose Hill and bemoan his youth, after comparing old catalogues with new.
Nothing but American competition, grumble some old stagers.
Well! why not? This new battle for the books is a free fight, not a private one, and Columbia has ‘joined in.’ Lower prices are not to be looked for. The book-buyer of 1900 will be glad to buy at to-day’s prices. I take pleasure in thinking he will not be able to do so. Good finds grow scarcer and scarcer.True it is that but a few short weeks ago I picked up (such is the happy phrase, most apt to describe what was indeed a ‘street casualty’) a copy of the original edition ofEndymion(Keats’s poem—O subscriber to Mudie’s!—not Lord Beaconsfield’s novel) for the easy equivalent of half-a-crown—but then that was one of my lucky days. The enormous increase of booksellers’ catalogues and their wide circulation amongst the trade has already produced a hateful uniformity of prices. Go where you will it is all the same to the odd sixpence. Time was when you could map out the country for yourself with some hopefulness of plunder. There were districts where the Elizabethan dramatists were but slenderly protected. A raid into the ‘bonnie North Countrie’ sent you home again cheered with chap-books and weighted with old pamphlets of curious interests; whilst the West of England seldom failed to yield a crop of novels. I remember getting a complete set of the Brontë books in the original issues at Torquay, I may say, for nothing. Those days are over. Your country bookseller is, in fact, more likely, such tales does he hear of London auctions, and suchcatalogues does he receive by every post, to exaggerate the value of his wares than to part with them pleasantly, and as a country bookseller should, ‘just to clear my shelves, you know, and give me a bit of room.’ The only compensation for this is the catalogues themselves. You getthem, at least, for nothing, and it cannot be denied that they make mighty pretty reading.
These high prices tell their own tale, and force upon us the conviction that there never were so many private libraries in course of growth as there are to-day.
Libraries are not made; they grow. Your first two thousand volumes present no difficulty, and cost astonishingly little money. Given £400 and five years, and an ordinary man can in the ordinary course, without undue haste or putting any pressure upon his taste, surround himself with this number of books, all in his own language, and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy. But pride is still out of the question. To be proud of having two thousand books would be absurd. You might as well be proud of having two top coats. After your first twothousand difficulty begins, but until you have ten thousand volumes the less you say about your library the better.Thenyou may begin to speak.
It is no doubt a pleasant thing to have a library left you. The present writer will disclaim no such legacy, but hereby undertakes to accept it, however dusty. But good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one. Each volume then, however lightly a stranger’s eye may roam from shelf to shelf, has its own individuality, a history of its own. You remember where you got it, and how much you gave for it; and your word may safely be taken for the first of these facts, but not for the second.
The man who has a library of his own collection is able to contemplate himself objectively, and is justified in believing in his own existence. No other man but he would have made precisely such a combination as his. Had he been in any single respect different from what he is, his library, as it exists, never would have existed. Therefore, surely he may exclaim, as in the gloaming he contemplates the backs of his loved ones, ‘They are mine, and I am theirs.’
But the eternal note of sadness will find its way even through the keyhole of a library. You turn some familiar page, of Shakspeare it may be, and his ‘infinite variety,’ his ‘multitudinous mind,’ suggests some new thought, and as you are wondering over it you think of Lycidas, your friend, and promise yourself the pleasure of having his opinion of your discovery the very next time when by the fire you two ‘help waste a sullen day.’ Or it is, perhaps, some quainter, tenderer fancy that engages your solitary attention, something in Sir Philip Sydney or Henry Vaughan, and then you turn to look for Phyllis, ever the best interpreter of love, human or divine. Alas! the printed page grows hazy beneath a filmy eye as you suddenly remember that Lycidas is dead—‘dead ere his prime’—and that the pale cheek of Phyllis will never again be relumined by the white light of her pure enthusiasm. And then you fall to thinking of the inevitable, and perhaps, in your present mood, not unwelcome hour, when the ‘ancient peace’ of your old friends will be disturbed, when rude hands will dislodge them from their accustomed nooks and break up their goodly company.
‘Death bursts amongst them like a shell,And strews them over half the town.’
‘Death bursts amongst them like a shell,And strews them over half the town.’
They will form new combinations, lighten other men’s toil, and soothe another’s sorrow. Fool that I was to call anythingmine!
Elliot Stock,Paternoster Row,London.
[27]See note to Mitford’sMilton, vol. i., clii.
[59]Not Horace Walpole’s opinion. ‘Sir Joshua Reynolds has lent me Dr. Johnson’sLife of Pope, which Sir Joshua holds to be achef d’œuvre. It is a most trumpery performance, and stuffed with all his crabbed phrases and vulgarisms, and much trash as anecdotes.’—Letters, vol. viii., p. 26.
[65]Howell’sState Trials, vol. xvii., p. 159.
[76]InOxford Essaysfor 1858.
[79]Lectures and Essays on University Subjects: Lecture on Literature.
[101]“The late Mr. Carlyle was a brute and a boor.”—The World, October 29th, 1884.
[102]In the first edition, by a strange and distressing freak of the imagination, I took the ‘old struggler’ out of Lockhart and put her into Boswell.
[117]Anyone who does not wish this story to be true, will find good reasons for disbelieving it stated in Mr. Napier’s edition of Boswell, vol. iv., p. 385.
[159]All the difficulties connected with this subject will be found collected, and somewhat unkindly considered, in Mr. Dilke’sPapers of a Critic, vol. ii. The equity draughtsman will be indisposed to attach importance to statements made in a Bill of Complaint filed in Chancery by Lord Verney against Burke fourteen years after the transaction to which it had reference, in a suit which was abandoned after answer put in. But, in justice to a deceased plaintiff, it should be remembered that in those days a defendant could not be cross-examined upon his sworn answer.
[178]Critical Miscellanies, vol. iii., p. 9.
[189]‘I will answer you by quoting what I have read somewhere or other, in Dionysius Halicarnassensis I think, that history is philosophy teaching by examples.’ See Lord Bolingbroke’sSecond Letter on the Study and Use of History.
[204]The Works of Charles Lamb. Edited, with notes and introduction, by the Rev. Alfred Ainger. Three volumes. London: 1883-5.
[218]SeeLife of Emerson, by O. W. Holmes.
[221]The institution referred to was the Eucharist.
[244]Yet in his essayOn Londoners and Country Peoplewe find Hazlitt writing: ‘London is the only place in which the child grows completely up into the man. I have known characters of this kind, which, in the way of childish ignorance and self-pleasing delusion, exceeded anything to be met with in Shakespeare or Ben Jonson, or the Old Comedy.’
[255]This passage was written before Mr. Browning’s ‘Parleyings’ had appeared. Christopher is now ‘a person of importance,’ and needs no apology.
[256]The Prelude, p. 55.