What is a Great Poet?

I hear faint bridal-sighs of brown and greenDying to silent hints of kisses keenAs far lights fringe into a pleasant sheen.

I hear faint bridal-sighs of brown and green

Dying to silent hints of kisses keen

As far lights fringe into a pleasant sheen.

This exemplifies the sort of English, the sort of imagination, the sort of style which are to make Keats and Shelley—who have found Bryant and Landor, Rossetti and Emerson, unworthy of their company—comfortable with a mate at last. If these vapid and eccentric lines were exceptional, if they were even supported by a minority of sane andoriginal verse, if Lanier were ever simple or genuine, I would seize on those exceptions and gladly forget the rest; but I find him on all occasions substituting vague, cloudy rhetoric for passion, and tortured fancy for imagination, always striving, against the grain, to say something prophetic and unparalleled, always grinding away with infinite labour and the sweat of his brow to get that expressed which a real poet murmurs, almost unconsciously, between a sigh and a whisper.

Wheresoe'er I turn my view,All is strange, yet nothing new;Endless labour all along,Endless labour to be wrong.

Wheresoe'er I turn my view,

All is strange, yet nothing new;

Endless labour all along,

Endless labour to be wrong.

Lanier must have been a charming man, and one who exercised a great fascination over those who knew him. But no reasonable critic can turn from what has been written about Lanier to what Lanier actually wrote, and still assert that he was the Great American Poet.

It is not likely to be seriously contended that there were in 1888 more than four of the deceased poets of America who need to have their claims discussed in connection with the highest honours in the art. These are Longfellow, Bryant, Emerson, Poe.There is one other name which, it may seem to some of my readers, ought to be added to this list. But originality was so entirely lacking in the composition of that versatile and mellifluous talent to which I allude, that I will not even mention here the fifth name. I ask permission rapidly to inquire whether Longfellow, Bryant, Emerson and Poe are worthy of a rank beside the greatest English twelve.

In the first place, what are we to say of Longfellow? I am very far from being one of those who reject the accomplished and delicate work of this highly-trained artist. If I may say so, no chapter of Mr. Stedman's book seems to me to surpass in skill that in which he deals with the works of Longfellow, and steers with infinite tact through the difficulties of the subject. In the face of those impatient youngsters who dare to speak of Longfellow and of Tupper in a breath, I assert that the former was, within his limitations, as true a poet as ever breathed. His skill in narrative was second only to that of Prior and of Lafontaine. His sonnets, the best of them, are among the most pleasing objective sonnets in the language. Although his early, and comparatively poor, work was exaggeratedly praised, his head was not turned, but, like a conscientious artist, he rose to better and betterthings, even at the risk of sacrificing his popularity. It is a pleasure to say this at the present day, when Longfellow's fame has unduly declined; but it is needless, of course, to dwell on the reverse of the medal, and disprove what nobody now advances, that he was a great or original poet. Originality and greatness were just the qualities he lacked. I have pointed out elsewhere that Longfellow was singularly under Swedish influences, and that his real place is in Swedish literature, chronologically between Tegnér and Runeberg. Doubtless he seemed at first to his own people more original than he was, through his habit of reproducing an exotic tone very exactly.

Bryant appears to me to be a poet of a less attractive but somewhat higher class than Longfellow. His versification is mannered, and his expressions are directly formed on European models, but his sense of style was so consistent that his careful work came to be recognisable. His poetry is a hybrid of two English stocks, closely related; he belongs partly to the Wordsworth ofTintern Abbey, partly to the Coleridge ofMont Blanc. The imaginative formula is Wordsworth's, the verse is the verse of Coleridge, and having in very early youth produced this dignified and novel flower,Bryant did not try to blossom into anything different, but went on cultivating the Coleridge-Wordsworth hybrid down to the days of Rossetti and of Villanelles. But Wordsworth and Coleridge had not stayed at theMont BlancandTintern Abbeypoint. They went on advancing, developing, altering, and declining to the end of their days. The consequence is that the specimens of the Bryant variety do not strike us as remarkably like the general work of Wordsworth or of Coleridge. As I have said, although he borrowed definitely and almost boldly, in the first instance, the very persistence of Bryant's style, the fact that he was influenced once by a very exquisite and noble kind of poetry, and then never any more, through a long life, by any other verse, combined with his splendid command of those restricted harmonies the secret of which he had conquered, made Bryant a very interesting and valuable poet. But in discussing his comparative position, it appears to me to be impossible to avoid seeing that his want of positive novelty—the derived character of his sentiment, his verse, and his description—is absolutely fatal to his claim to a place in the foremost rank. He is exquisitely polished, full of noble suavity and music, but his irreparable fault is to be secondary,to remind us always of his masters first, and only on reflection of himself. In this he contrasts to a disadvantage with one who is somewhat akin to him in temperament, Walter Savage Landor. We may admit that Byrant is more refined, more uniformly exquisite than Landor, but the latter has a flavour of his own, something quite original and Landorian, which makes him continue to live, while Byrant's reputation slowly fades away, like the stately crystal gables of an iceberg in summer. The "Water-Fowl" pursues its steady flight through the anthologies, but Bryant is not with the great masters of poetry.

We ascend, I think, into a sphere where neither Bryant nor Longfellow, with all their art, have power to wing their way, when we read such verses as

Musketaquit, a goblin strong,Of shard and flint makes jewels gay;They lose their grief who hear his song,And where he winds is the day of day.So forth and brighter fares my stream;Who drinks it shall not thirst again;No darkness stains its equal gleam,And ages drop in it like rain.

Musketaquit, a goblin strong,Of shard and flint makes jewels gay;They lose their grief who hear his song,And where he winds is the day of day.

Musketaquit, a goblin strong,

Of shard and flint makes jewels gay;

They lose their grief who hear his song,

And where he winds is the day of day.

So forth and brighter fares my stream;Who drinks it shall not thirst again;No darkness stains its equal gleam,And ages drop in it like rain.

So forth and brighter fares my stream;

Who drinks it shall not thirst again;

No darkness stains its equal gleam,

And ages drop in it like rain.

If Emerson had been frequently sustained at the heights he was capable of reaching, he would unquestionably have been one of the sovereign poets of the world. At its very best his phrase is so new and so magical, includes in its easy felicity such a wealth of fresh suggestion and flashes with such a multitude of side-lights, that we cannot suppose that it will ever be superseded or will lose its charm. He seems to me like a very daring but purblind diver, who flings himself headlong into the ocean, and comes up bearing, as a rule, nothing but sand and common shells, yet who every now and then rises grasping some wonderful and unique treasure. In his prose, of course, Emerson was far more a master of the medium than in poetry. He never became an easy versifier; there seems to have been always a difficulty to him, although an irresistible attraction, in the conduct of a piece of work confined within rhyme and rhythm. He starts with a burst of inspiration; the wind drops and his sails flap the mast before he is out of port; a fresh puff of breeze carries him round the corner; for another page, the lyricalafflatuswholly gone, he labours with the oar of logic; when suddenly the wind springs up again, and he dances into a harbour. We are so pleased to find thevoyage successfully accomplished that we do not trouble to inquire whether or no this particular port was the goal he had before him at starting. I think there is hardly one of Emerson's octosyllabic poems of which this will not be found to be more or less an accurate allegorical description. This is not quite the manner of Milton or Shelley, although it may possess its incidental advantages.

It cannot be in candour denied that we obtain a very strange impression by turning from what has been written about Emerson to his own poetry. All his biographers and critics unite, and it is very sagacious of them to do so, in giving us little anthologies of his best lines and stanzas, just as writers onHudibrasextract miscellanies of the fragmentary wit of Butler. Judged by a chain of these selected jewels, Emerson gives us the impression of high imagination and great poetical splendour. But the volume of his verse, left to produce its own effect, does not fail to weaken this effect. I have before me at this moment his first collectedPoems, published, as he said, at "the solstice of the stars of his intellectual firmament." It holds the brilliant fragments that we know so well, but it holds them as a mass of dull quartz may sparkle with gold dust. It hasodes about Contocook and Agischook and the Over-God, long nebulous addresses to no one knows whom, about no one knows what; for pages upon pages it wanders away into mere cacophonous eccentricity. It is Emerson's misfortune as a poet that his technical shortcomings are for ever being more severely reproved by his own taste and censorship than we should dare to reprove them. To the author ofThe World-Soul, in shocking verses, we silently commend his own postulate in exquisite prose, that "Poetry requires that splendour of expression which carries with it the proof of great thoughts." Emerson, as a verse-writer, is so fragmentary and uncertain that we cannot place him among the great poets; and yet his best lines and stanzas seem as good as theirs. Perhaps we ought to consider him, in relation to Wordsworth and Shelley, as an asteroid among the planets.

It is understood that Edgar Allen Poe is still unforgiven in New England. "Those singularly valueless verses of Poe," was the now celebrateddictumof a Boston prophet. It is true that, if "that most beguiling of all little divinities, Miss Walters of theTranscript," is to be implicitly believed, Edgar Poe was very rude and naughty atthe Boston Lyceum in the spring of 1845. But surely bygones should be bygones, and Massachusetts might now pardon theAl Aaraafincident. It is not difficult to understand that there were many sides on which Poe was likely to be long distasteful to Boston, Cambridge, and Concord. The intellectual weight of the man, though unduly minimised in New England, was inconsiderable by the side of that of Emerson. But in poetry, as one has to be always insisting, the battle is not to the strong; and apart from all faults, weaknesses, and shortcomings of Poe, we feel more and more clearly, or we ought to feel, the perennial charm of his verses. The posy of his still fresh and fragrant poems is larger than that of any other deceased American writer, although Emerson may have one or two single blossoms to show which are more brilliant than any of his. If the range of the Baltimore poet had been wider, if Poe had not harped so persistently on his one theme of remorseful passion for the irrecoverable dead, if he had employed his extraordinary, his unparalleled gifts of melodious invention, with equal skill, in illustrating a variety of human themes, he must have been with the greatest poets. For in Poe, in pieces likeThe Haunted Palace,The Conqueror Worm,The City in the Sea, andFor Annie, we find two qualities which are as rare as they are invaluable, a new and haunting music, which constrains the hearer to follow and imitate, and a command of evolution in lyrical work so absolute that the poet is able to do what hardly any other lyrist has dared to attempt, namely, as inTo One in Paradise, to take a normal stanzaic form, and play with it as a great pianist plays with an air.

So far as the first of these attributes is concerned, Poe has proved himself to be the Piper of Hamelin to all later English poets. From Tennyson to Austin Dobson there is hardly one whose verse-music does not show traces of Poe's influence. To impress the stamp of one's personality on a succeeding generation of artists, to be an almost (although not wholly) flawless technical artist one's self, to charm within a narrow circle to a degree that shows no sign, after forty years, of lessening, is this to prove a claim to rank with the Great Poets? No, perhaps not quite; but at all events it is surely to have deserved great honour from the country of one's birthright.

1889.

WHAT IS A GREAT POET?

The answer to the question, "Has America produced a Poet?" which was published in theForum, called forth a surprising amount of attention from the press in England as well as in America. It was quite impossible, and I did not expect, that such an expression of personal opinion would pass without being challenged. In America, particularly, it could not but disturb some traditions and wound some prejudices. But in the present instance, as always before, it has been my particular fortune to find that where criticism—by which I mean, not censure, but analysis—is candid and sincere, it meets in America with sincere and candid readers. In parenthesis, I may add, that when literary criticism of this kind is ill received in America, the fault usually lies with that unhappy system of newspaper reverberation by which "scraps" or"items," removed from their context and slightly altered at each fresh removal, go the round of the press, and are presently commented upon by journalists who have never seen what the critic originally wrote. In reading some of the principal articles which my essay called forth, I find one point dwelt upon, in various ways, in almost all of them. I find a fresh query started as to the standard which we are to take as a measurement for imaginative writers; and it seems to me that it may be interesting to carry our original inquiry a step further back, and to ask, What is a great poet?

If we are to limit the number of the most illustrious and commanding names, as I attempted to do, it is plain that we must also confine the historical range of our inquiry. Some of my reviewers objected to my selection being made among English poets only, and several of them attempted lists which included the poets of Europe or of the world. Yet, without exception, those critics displayed their national bias by the large proportion of Anglo-Saxon worthies whom they could not bring themselves to exclude from their dozen. Shakespeare must be there, and Milton, Chaucer, Wordsworth, and Shelley;already a third of the majestic company is English. One reviewer, who had been lately studying the Anthology, could not persuade himself to omit several of those dying dolphins of Byzantine song that drew the shallop of Agathias up into the Golden Horn; and this when the whole tale of bards was not to exceed fifteen at most. One reviewer went to Iceland for a name, and another to Persia—charming excursions both of them, but calculated to exhaust our resources prematurely. The least reflection will remind us that the complexity and excessive fulness of modern interests have invaded literature also, and the history of literature; to select from all time a dozen greatest names is a task of doubtful propriety, and certainly not to be lightly undertaken. It was all very well, in the morning of time, for the ancient critics to regulate their body-guards of Apollo by the numbers of the Muses or the Graces. Nothing could be pleasanter than that tale of the great lyrical poets of the world which we find so often repeated in slightly varying form:

"The mighty voice of Pindar has thundered out of Thebes. The lyre of Simonides modulates a song of delicate melody. What brilliancy inIbycus and Stesichorus! What sweetness in Alcman! From the mouth of Bacchylides there breathe delicious accents. Persuasion exhales from the lips of Anacreon. In the Æolian voice of Alcæus we hear once more the Lesbian swan; and as for Sappho, that ninth great lyric poet, is not her place, rather, tenth among the Muses?"

If we are contributing lists of a dozen great poets, here are three-fourths of the company already summoned; yet splendid as are these names, and doubtless of irreproachable genius, the roll is, for modern purposes, awkwardly overweighted. Even if for those whose works Time has overwhelmed, we substitute the Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Theocritus, whom he has spared, the list is still impracticable and one-sided. Yet who shall say that these were not great poets in every possible sense of the word? From each of several modern European nations, from Italy and from France at least, a magnificent list of twelve could be selected, not one of whom their compatriots could afford to lose. Nay, even Sweden or Holland would present us with a list of twelve which should seem indisputably great to a Dutchman or a Swede. It is not possibleto spread the net so wide as to catch whales from all the ancient and all the modern languages at once. Let us restrain our ambition and see what criterion we have for measuring those of our own tongue and race.

Passing in review, then, the whole five centuries which divide us from the youth of Chaucer, we would seek to discover what qualities have raised a limited number of the poetical writers of those successive ages of English thought to a station permanently and splendidly exalted. Among the almost innumerable genuine poets of those five hundred years, are there ten or twelve who are manifestly greater than the rest, and if so, in what does their greatness consist?

We are not here occupied with the old threadbare question, "What is a poet"? but we may reply to it so far as to insist that when we are speaking and thinking in English the term excludes all writers, however pathetic and fanciful, who do not employ the metrical form. In many modern languages the word poet,dichter, includes novelists and all other authors of prose fiction. I once learned this to my cost, for having published a short summary of the writings of the living "poets" of a certain continental country,one of the leading (if not the leading) novelist of that country, exclusively a writer in prose, indignantly upbraided me for the obviously personal slight I had shown him in leaving him entirely unmentioned. In English we possess and should carefully maintain the advantage which accrues from having a word so distinct in its meaning; and we may recollect that there is no trick in literary criticism more lax and silly than that of talking about "prose poetry" (a contradiction in terms), or about such men as Carlyle, Mr. Ruskin, or Jefferies as "poets." The greatness we are discussing to-day is a quality wholly confined to those who have made it their chief duty to speak to us in verse.

On these lines, perhaps, the main elements of poetical greatness will be found to be originality in the treatment of themes, perennial charm, exquisite finish in execution, and distinction of individual manner. The great poet, in other words, will be seen, through the perspectives of history, to have been fresher, stronger, more skilful, and more personal than his unsuccessful or less successful rival. When the latter begins to recede into obscurity it will be because prejudices that blinded criticism are being removed, and because thecandidate for immortality is being found to be lacking in one or all of these peculiar qualities. And here, of course, comes in the disputed question of the existence of genius. I confess that that controversy seems to me to rest on a mere metaphysical quibble. Robert McTavish is a plough-boy, and ends at the plough's tail. Robert Burns is a plough-boy, and ends by being set up, like Berenice's hair, as a glory and a portent in the intellectual zenith of all time. Are they the same to start with? Is it merely a question of taking pains, of a happy accident—of luck, in short? A fiddlestick's end for such a theory! Just as well might we say that a young vine that is to produce, in its season, a bottle of corton, is the same as a similar stick that will issue in a wretched draught ofvin bleu. That which, from its very cotyledons, has distinguished the corton plant from its base brother, that is genius.

But even thus the discussion is vain and empty. What we have to deal with is the work and not the man. So long as we all feel that there is some quality of charm, vigour, and brightness which exists in Pope and is absent in Eusden, is discoverable in a tragedy of Shakespeare and is wanting in a transpontine melodrama, so long,whether we call this quality by the good old name of genius, or explain it away in the jargon of some new-fangled sociography, we shall have basis enough for the conduct of our particular inquiry.

Perhaps I may now be permitted to recapitulate the list of a dozen English poets whom I ventured to quote as the manifest immortals of our British Parnassus. They are Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Gray, Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats. It will be noticed that there are thirteen names here, and my reviewers have not failed to remind me that it is notoriously difficult to count the stars. The fact is that Gray, the real thirteenth, was an after-thought; and I will admit that, although Gray is the author of what is perhaps the most imposing single short poem in the language, and although he has charm, skill, and distinction to a marvellous degree, his originality, his force of production, were so rigidly limited that he may scarcely be admitted to the first rank. When he published his collected poems Gray confessed himself "but a shrimp of an author," and conjectured that the book would be mistaken for "the works of a flea or a pismire." No doubt the explosive force which eggs a verygreat writer on to constant expression was lacking in the case of Gray, and I yield him—a tender babe, and the only one of my interesting family which I will consent to throw to the wolves. The rest are inviolable, and I will defend them to the last; but I can only put a lance in rest here for two of them.

The absence of a truly catholic taste, and the survival of an exclusive devotion to the romantic ideals of the early part of the present century, must, I suppose, be the cause of a tendency, on the part of some of those who have replied to me, to question the right of Dryden and Pope to appear on my list of great poets. It appears that Dryden is very poorly thought of at Crawfordsville, Indiana, and even at busier centres of American taste he is reported as being not much of a power. "Dryden is not read in America," says one of my critics, with jaunty confidence. They say that we in England are sometimes harsh in our estimates of America; but I confess I do not know the Englishman bold enough to have charged America with the shocking want of taste which these children of her own have so lightly volunteered to attribute to her. Dryden not read in America! It makes one wonder what is read. Probably Miss Amélie Rives?

But to be serious, I can conceive nothing more sinister for the future of English literature than that to any great extent, or among any influential circle of reading and writing men, the majesty and sinewy force of the most masculine of all the English poets should be despised and rejected. Something of a temper less hurried than that of the man who runs and reads is no doubt required for the appreciation of that somewhat heavy-footed and sombre giant of tragic and of narrative song, John Dryden, warring with dunces, marching with sunken head—"a down look," as Pope described it—through the unappreciative flat places of our second Charles and James. Prosaic at times he is, slow, fatigued, unstimulating; but, at his best, how full of the true sublime, how uplifted by the wind of tragic passion, how stirred to the depths by the noblest intellectual and moral enthusiasm! For my own part, there are moments and moods in which nothing satisfies my ear and my brain as do the great accents of Dryden, while he marches down the page, with his elephants and his standards and his kettledrums, "in the full vintage of his flowing honours."

There must be something effeminate and feeble in the nervous system of a generation which cannot bear this grandiose music, this virile tramp ofDryden's soldiers and camp-followers; something singularly dull and timid in a spirit that rejects this robust intellectual companion. And, with all his russet suit of homespun, Dryden is imbued to the core with the truest and richest blood of poetry. His vehemence is positively Homeric; we would not giveMac Flecknoein exchange even for the lostMargites. He possesses in a high degree all the qualities which we have marked as needed for the attribution of greatness. He is original to that extent that mainly by his efforts the entire stream of English poetry was diverted for a century and a half into an unfamiliar channel; he has an executive skill eminently his own, and is able to amaze us to-day after so many subsequent triumphs of verse-power; he has distinction such as an emperor might envy; and after all the poets of the eighteenth century have, as Mr. Lowell says, had their hands in his pockets, his best lines are as fresh and as magical as ever.

Pope I will not defend so warmly, and yet Pope also was a great poet. Two of my American critics, bent on refuting me, have severally availed themselves of a somewhat unexpected weapon. Each of them reminds me that Mr. Lang, in some recent number of a magazine, has said that Pope isnot a poet at all. Research might prove that this heresy is not entirely unparalleled, yet I am unconvinced. I yield to no one in respect and affection for Mr. Lang, but in criticising that with which he feels no personal sympathy, he is merely a "young light-hearted master of the oar" of temperament. When Mr. Lang blesses, the object is blest; when he curses, he may bless to-morrow. Some day he will find himself alone in a country-house with a Horace; old chords will be touched, the mystery of Pope will reveal itself to him, and we shall have a panegyric that will make Lady Mary writhe in her grave. Let no transatlantic, or cisatlantic, infidel of letters be profane at the expense of a classic by way of pleasing Mr. Lang; his next emotion is likely to be "un sentiment obscur d'avoir embrassé la Chimère."

To justify one's confidence in the great poetic importance of Pope is somewhat difficult. It needs a fuller commentary and a longer series of references than can be given here. But let us recollect that the nature-worship and nature-study of to-day may grow to seem a complete fallacy, a sheer persistence in affectation, and that then, to readers of new tastes and passions, Wordsworth and Shelley will be as Pope is now, that is to say,supported entirely by their individual merits. At this moment, to the crowd, he is doubtless less attractive than they are; he is on the shady side, they on the sunny side of fashion. But the author of the end of the second book ofThe Rape of the Lock, of the close ofThe New Dunciad, of the Sporus portrait, and of theThird Moral Essay, has qualities of imagination, applied to human character, and of distinction, applied to a formal and delicately-elaborated style, which are unsurpassed, even perhaps by Horace himself. Satirist after satirist has chirped like a wren from the head of Pope; where are they now? Where is the great, the terrific, the cloud-compelling Churchill? Meanwhile, in the midst of a generation persistently turned away from all his ideas and all his models, the clear voice of Pope still rings from the arena of Queen Anne.

After all, this is mere assertion, and what am I that I should pretend to lay down the law? If we seek, on the authority of whomsoever, to raise an infallible standard of taste, and to arrange the poets in classes, like schoolboys, then our inquiry is futile indeed, and worse than futile. But the interest which this controversy has undoubtedly called forth seems to prove that there is a side onwhich such questions as have been started are not unwelcome nor unworthy of careful study. It is not useless, I fancy, to remind ourselves now and then of the very high standard which literature has a right to demand from its more earnest votaries. In the hurry of life, in the glare of passing interests, we are apt to lose breadth of sympathy, and to make our own personal and temporary enjoyment of a book the criterion of its value. I may take up Selden'sTitles of Honour, turn over a page or two, and lay it down in favour of the new number ofPunch. I must not for this reason pledge myself to placing the comic paper of to-day in a niche above the best work of a great Elizabethan prose writer. But when a modern American says that he finds better poetry in Longfellow than in Chaucer, he is doing, to a less exaggerated degree, precisely this very thing. He feels his contemporary sympathies and limited experience soothed and entertained by the facile numbers ofEvangeline, and he does not extract an equal amount of amusement and pleasure fromThe Knight's Tale.

From one point of view it is very natural that this should be so, and a critic would be priggish indeed who should gravely reprove such apreference. The result would be, not to force the reader to Chaucer, but to drive him away from poetry altogether. The ordinary man reads what he finds gives him the pure and wholesome stimulus he needs. But if such a reader, in the pride of his heart, should take upon himself to dogmatise, and to tell us that Longfellow's poetry is better than Chaucer's, we should be obliged to remind him that there are several factors to be taken into account before he can carry us away with him on the neck of such a theory. He has to consider how long the charm of Chaucer has endured, and how short a time the world has had to make up its mind about Longfellow; he has to appreciate the relation of Chaucer to his own contemporaries, the boldness of his invasion into realms until his day unconquered, the inevitable influence of time in fretting, wasting, and blanching the surface of the masterpieces of the past. To be just, he has to consider the whirligig of literature, and to ask himself whether, in the year 2289, after successive revolutions of taste and repetitions of performance, the works of Longfellow are reasonably likely to possess the positive value which scholars, at all events, still find in those of Chaucer. Not until all these, and still more, irregularities of relativeposition are taken into account, can the value of the elder and the later poet be lightly laid in opposite balances.

There has been no great disposition to produce English candidates for the places of any of my original dozen. TheSaturday Reviewthinks that I ought to have included Walter Scott, and theSt. James's Gazettesuggests Marlowe. There is much to be said for the claims of each of these poets, and I am surprised that no one has put in a plea for Herrick or Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Of Marlowe, indeed, we can to this day write nothing better than Michael Drayton wrote:

Marlowe, bathed in the Thespian springs,Had in him those brave translunary thingsThat our first poets had; his raptures wereAll air and fire, which made his verses clear;For that fine madness still he did retain,Which rightly should possess a poet's brain.

Marlowe, bathed in the Thespian springs,

Had in him those brave translunary things

That our first poets had; his raptures were

All air and fire, which made his verses clear;

For that fine madness still he did retain,

Which rightly should possess a poet's brain.

He had the freshness and splendour of Heosphoros, the bearer of light, the kindler of morning; as the dawn-star of our drama, he ascended the heavens, in the auroral flush of youth, to announce the approaching majesty of Shakespeare. But his early death, and the unexampled character of thegenius who superseded him, have for centuries obscured the name of Marlowe, which scintillated half-extinguished in the blaze ofHamletandOthello. His reputation has, however, increased during the last generation with greater rapidity than that of any other of our elder poets, and a time may yet come when we shall have popularly isolated him from Shakespeare to such a degree as to enforce a recognition of his individual greatness. At the present moment to give him a place among the twelve might savour of affectation.

In the case of Scott, I must still be firm in positively excluding him, although his name is one of the most beloved in literature. TheWaverley Novelsform Scott's great claim to our reverence, and, save for the songs scattered through them, have nothing to say to us here. Scott's long narrative poems are really Waverley Novels told in easy, ambling verse, and to a great measure, I must confess, spoiled, I think, by such telling. For old memory's sake we enjoy them still,

Full sore amaz'd at the wondrous change,And frighten'd as a child might beAt the wild yell and visage strange,And the dark words of gramarye;

Full sore amaz'd at the wondrous change,

And frighten'd as a child might be

At the wild yell and visage strange,

And the dark words of gramarye;

but the stuff is rather threadbare, surely. The bestpassages are those in which, with skill not less than that of Milton, Scott marshals heroic lists of Highland proper names. Scott was a very genuine poet "within his own limitations," as has been said of another favourite, whose name I will not here repeat. His lyrics, of very unequal merit, are occasionally of wondrous beauty. I think it will be found, upon very careful study of his writings, that he published eight absolutely perfect lyrical pieces, and about as many more that were very good indeed. This is much, and to how few can so high a tribute be paid! Yet this is not quite sufficient claim to a place on the summits of English song. Scott was essentially a great prose-writer, with a singular facility in verse.

If this amiable controversy, started in the first instance at the request of the Editor of theForum, has led us to examine a little more closely the basis of our literary convictions, and, above all, if it has led any of us to turn again to the fountain-heads of English literature, it has not been without its importance. One danger which I have long foreseen from the spread of the democratic sentiment, is that of the traditions of literary taste, the canons of literature, being reversed with success by a popular vote. Up to the present time, in all parts of theworld, the masses of uneducated or semi-educated persons, who form the vast majority of readers, though they cannot and do not appreciate the classics of their race, have been content to acknowledge their traditional supremacy. Of late there have seemed to me to be certain signs, especially in America, of a revolt of the mob against our literary masters. In the less distinguished American newspapers which reach me, I am sometimes startled by the boldness with which a great name, like Wordsworth's or Dryden's, will be treated with indignity. If literature is to be judged by aplébisciteand if theplebsrecognises its power, it will certainly by degrees cease to support reputations which give it no pleasure and which it cannot comprehend. The revolution against taste, once begun, will land us in irreparable chaos. It is, therefore, high time that those who recognise that there is no help for us in literature outside the ancient laws and precepts of our profession, should vigorously support the fame of those fountains of inspiration, the impeccable masters of English.

1889.

MAKING A NAME IN LITERATURE

An American editor has asked me to say how a literary reputation is formed. It is like asking one how wood is turned into gold, or how real diamonds can be manufactured. If I knew the answer, it is not in the pages of a review that I should print it. I should bury myself in a cottage in the woods, exercise my secret arts, and wait for Fame to turn her trumpet into a hunting-horn, and wake the forest-echoes with my praises. In one of Mr. Stockton's stories a princess sets all the wise men of her dominions searching for the lost secret of what root-beer should be made of. The philosophers fail to discover it, and the magicians exhaust their arts in vain. Not the slightest light is thrown on the abstruse problem, until at last an old woman is persuaded to reveal that it ought to be made of roots. In the same way, the only quiteobvious answer to the query, How should a literary reputation be formed? is to reply, By thinking nothing at all about reputation, but by writing earnestly and carefully on the subjects and in the style most congenial to your habits of mind. But this is too obvious, and leads to no further result. Besides, I see that the question is not, how should be, but how is, a literary reputation formed. I will endeavour, then, to give expression to such observations as I may have formed on this latter subject.

A literary reputation, as here intended, is obviously not the eternal fame of a Shakespeare, which appears likely to last for ever, nor even that of a Dickens, which must endure till there comes a complete revolution of taste, but the inferior form of repute which is enjoyed by some dozens of literary people in each generation, and makes a centre for the admiration or envy of the more enthusiastic or idler portion of their contemporaries. There is as much cant in denying the attractiveness of such temporary glory as there is in exaggerating its weight and importance. To stimulate the minds of those who surround him, to captivate their attention and excite their curiosity, is pleasing to the natural man. Welook with suspicion on the author who protests too loudly that he does not care whether he is admired or not. We shrewdly surmise that inwardly he cares very much indeed. This instinctive wish for reputation is one of the great incentives to literary exertion.

Fame and money—these are the two chief spurs which drive the author on. The statement may sound ignoble, and the writers of every generation persist in avowing that they write only to amuse themselves and to do good in their generation. The noble lady inLothairwished that she might never eat, or if at all, only a little fruit by moonlight on a bank. She, nevertheless, was always punctual at her dinner; and the author who protests his utter indifference to money and reputation is commonly excessively sensitive when an attack is made on his claims in either direction. Literary reputation is relative, of course. There may be a village fame which does not burn very brightly in the country town, and provincial stars that look very pale in a great city. The circumstances, however, under which all the various degrees of fame are reached, are, I think, closely analogous, and what is true of the local celebrity is true, relatively, of a Victor Hugo or of aTennyson. The importance of the reputation is shown by the expanse of the area it covers, not by the curve of its advance. The circle of a great man's fame is extremely wide, but it only repeats on a vast scale the phenomena attending on the fame of a small man.

The three principal ways in which a literary reputation is formed appear to be these: reviews, private conversation among the leaders of opinion, and the instinctive attraction which leads the general public to discover for itself what is calculated to give it pleasure. I will briefly indicate the manner in which these three seem to act at the present moment on the formation of notoriety and its attendant success, in the case of English authors. First of all, it is not unworthy of note that reputation, or fame, and monetary success, are not identical, although the latter is frequently the satellite of the former. One extraordinary example of their occasional remoteness, which may be mentioned without impertinence on the authority of the author himself, is the position of Mr. Herbert Spencer. In any list of living Englishmen eminently distinguished for the originality and importance of their books, Mr. Spencer cannot fail to be ranked high. Yet, asevery student of his later work knows, he stated in the preface of one of those bald and inexpensive volumes in which he enshrines his thought, that up to a comparatively recent date the sale of his books did not cover the cost of their publication. This was the case of a man famous, it is not too much to say, in every civilised country in the globe.

In pure literature there is probably no second existing instance so flagrant as this. But, to take only a few of the most illustrious Englishmen of letters, it is matter of common notoriety that the sale of the books of, say, Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Leslie Stephen, the Bishop of Oxford (Dr. Stubbs) and Mr. Lecky, considerable as it may now have become, for a long time by no means responded to the lofty rank which each of these authors has taken in the esteem of educated people throughout the Anglo-Saxon world. The reverse is still more curious and unaccountable. Why is it that there are writers of no merit at all, who sell their books in thousands where people of genius sell theirs in scores, yet without ever making a reputation? At the time when Tupper was far more popular than Tennyson, and Eliza Cook enjoyed ten timesthe commercial success of Browning, even the votaries of these poetasters did not claim a higher place for them, or even a high place at all. They bought their books because they liked them, but the buyers evidently did not imagine that purchase gave their temporary favourites any rank in the hierarchy of fame. These things are a mystery, but the distinction between commercial success and fame is one which must be drawn. We are speaking here of reputation, whether attended by vast sales or only by barren honour.

Reviews have no longer the power which they enjoyed seventy years ago, of making or even of marring the fortunes of a book. When there existed hundreds of private book clubs throughout the country, each one of which proceeded to buy a copy of whatever theEdinburghrecommended, then the reviewer was a great personage in the land. We may see in Lockhart'sLife of Scottthat Sir Walter, even at the height of his success, and when, as Ellis said, he was "the greatest elephant in the world" except himself, was seriously agitated by Jeffrey's cold review ofMarmion, not through irritable peevishness, which was wholly foreign to Scott's magnanimous nature, but because a slighting review was enough tocripple a book, and a slashing review to destroy it. There is nothing of this kind now. No newspaper exists in Great Britain which is able to sell an edition of a book by praising it. I doubt if any review, under the most favourable circumstances and coming from the most influential quarter, causes two hundred copies of a book to be bought. A signed article by Mr. Gladstone is, of course, an exception; yet some have doubted of late whether a book may not be found so inept and so heavy as not to stir even at the summons of that voice.

The reviews in the professional literary papers are still understood to be useful in the case of unknown writers. A young author without a friend, if he has merit, and above all if he has striking originality, is almost sure to attract the notice of some beneficent reviewer, and be praised in the columns of one or other of the leading weeklies. These are the circumstances under which the native kindliness of the irritable race is displayed most freely. The envy which sees merit in a new man and determines to crush it with silence or malignant attack, is inhuman, and practically, I fancy, scarcely exists. The entirely unheard-of writer wounds no susceptibilities,awakens no suspicions, and even excites a pleasurable warmth of patronage. It is a little later on, when the new man is quite new no longer, but is becoming a formidable rival, that evil passions are aroused, or sometimes seem to have been aroused, in pure literary bosoms. The most sincere reviews are often those which treat the works of unknown writers, and this is perhaps the reason why the shrewd public still permits itself to be moved by these when they are strongly favourable. At any rate, every new-comer must be introduced to our crowded public to be observed at all, and to new-comers the review is still the indispensable master of the ceremonies.

But the power of reviews to create this form of literary reputation has of late been greatly circumscribed. The public grows less and less the dupe of an anonymous judgment, expressed in the columns of one of the too-numerous organs of public opinion. A morenaïvegeneration than ours was overawed by the nameless authority which moved behind a review. Ours, on the contrary, is apt to go too far, and pay no notice, because it does not know the name of a writer. The author who writhed under the humiliation of attack in afamous paper, little suspected that his critic was one Snooks, an inglorious creature whose acquaintance with the matter under discussion was mainly taken from the book he was reviewing. But, on the other hand, there is that story of the writer of some compendium of Greek history severely handled anonymously by theAthenæum, whose scorn of the nameless critic gave way to horror and shame when he discovered him to have been no other than Mr. Grote. On the whole, when we consider the careful, learned, and judicial reviews which are still to be found, like grains of salt, in the vast body of insipid criticism in the newspapers, it may be held that the public pays less attention to the reviews than it should. The fact seems to remain that, except in the case of entirely unknown writers, periodical criticism possesses an ever-dwindling power of recommendation.

It is in conversation that the fame of the best books is made. There are certain men and women in London who are on the outlook for new merit, who are supposed to be hard to please, and whose praise is like rubies. It is those people who, in the smoking-room of the club, or across the dinner-table, create the fame of writers and the success of new books. "SeenPolyanthus?" says one ofthese peripatetic oracles. "No," you answer; "I am afraid I don't know whatPolyanthusis." "Well, it's not half bad; it's this new realistic romance." "Indeed! By whom is it written?" "Oh! a fellow called—called Binks, I think—Binks or Bunks; quite a new man. You ought to see it, don't you know." Some one far down the table ventures to say, "Oh! I think it was thePalladiumsaid on Saturday that it wasn't a good book at all, awfully abnormal, or something of that kind." "Well, you look at it; I think you'll agree with me that it's not half bad." Such a conversation as this, if held in a fructifying spot among the best people, doesPolyanthusmore good than a favourable review. It excites curiosity, and echoes of the praise ("not half bad" is at the present moment the most fulsome of existing expressions of London enthusiasm) reverberate and reverberate until the fortune of the book is made. At the same time, be it for ever remembered, there must be inPolyanthusthe genuine force and merit which appeal to an impartial judge and convert reader after reader, or else vainly does the friendly oracle try to raise the wind. He betrays himself, most likely, by using the expression, "a very fine book," or "beautifully written." These phrases have afalsetto air, and lack the persuasive sincerity of the true modern eulogium, "not half bad."

But there are reputations formed in other places than in London dining-rooms and the libraries of clubs. There are certain books which are not welcomed by the reviews, and which fail to please or even to meet the eye of experts in literature, which nevertheless, by some strange and unaccountable attraction, become known to the outer public, and are eagerly accepted by a very wide circle of readers. I am not aware that the late Mr. Roe was ever a favourite with the writing or speaking critics of America. He achieved his extraordinary success not by the aid, but in spite of the neglect and disapproval of the lettered classes. I have no close acquaintance with Mr. Roe's novels, but I know them well enough to despair of discovering why they were found to be so eminently welcome to thousands of readers. So far as I have examined them, they have appeared to me to be—if I may speak frankly—neither good enough nor bad enough to account for their popularity. It is not that I am such a prig as to disdain Mr. Roe's honourable industry; far from it. But his books are lukewarm; they have neither the heat of a rich insight into character, nor the deathly coldness of false orinsincere fiction. They are not ill-constructed, although they certainly are not well-constructed. It is their lack of salient character that makes me wonder what enabled them to float where scores and scores of works not appreciably worse or better than they have sunk.

Most countries possess at any given moment an author of this class. In England we have the lady who signs her eminently reputable novels by the pseudonym of "Edna Lyall." I do not propose to say what the lettered person thinks of the author ofDonovan; I would only point out that the organs of literary opinion do not recognise her existence. I cannot recollect ever noticing a prominent review of one of her books in any leading paper. I never heard them so much as mentioned by any critical reader. To find out something about "Edna Lyall" I have just consulted the latest edition ofMen of the Time, but she is unknown to that not excessively austere compendium. And now for the reverse of the medal. I lately requested the mistress of a girls' school, a friend of mine, to ask her elder classes to write down the name of the greatest English author. The universal answer was "Shakespeare." What could be more respectable? But the secondquestion was, "Who is your favourite English author?" And this time, by a large majority, Edna Lyall bore off the bell.

I think this amiable lady may be consoled for the slight whichMen of the Timeputs upon her. It seems plain that she is a very great personage indeed to all the girls of the time. But if you ask me how such a subterranean reputation as this is formed, what starts it, how it is supported, I can only say I have failed, after some not unindustrious search, to discover. I may but conjecture that, as I have suggested, the public instinctively feels the attraction of the article that satisfies its passing requirement. These illiterate successes—if I may use the word "illiterate" in its plain meaning and without offence—are exceedingly ephemeral, and sink into the ground as silently and rapidly as they rose from it. What has become of Mrs. Gore and Mrs. March? Who wroteEmilia Wyndham, and to what elegant pen did the girls who are now grandmothers oweEllen Middleton? Alas! it has taken only forty years to strew the poppy of oblivion over these once thrilling titles.

For we have to face the fact that reputations are lost as well as won. What destroys the fame of an accepted author? This, surely, is a questionnot less interesting than that with which we started, and a necessary corollary to it. Not unfavourable reviews, certainly. An unjust review may annoy and depress the author, it may cheer a certain number of his enemies and cool the ardour of a few of his friends, but in the long run it is sure to be innocuous in proportion to its injustice. I have in my mind the mode in which Mr. Browning's poems were treated in certain quarters twenty years ago. I remember more than one instance in which critics were permitted, in newspapers which ought to have known better, to exemplify that charge of needless obscurity which it was then the fashion to bring against the poet, by the quotation of mutilated fragments, and even by the introduction of absurd mistakes into the transcription of the text. Now, in this case, a few persons were possibly deterred from the further perusal of a writer who appeared, by these excerpts, to be a lunatic; but I think far more were roused into vehement sympathy for Mr. Browning by comparing the quotations with the originals, and so finding out that the reviewers had lied.

It rests with the author, not the critic, to destroy his own reputation. No one, as Bentley said, was ever written down except by himself, and the publicis quite shrewd enough to do a rough sort of justice to the critic who accuses as well as to the author who is arraigned. As Dangle observes, "it certainly does hurt an author of delicate feelings to see the liberties the reviews take" with his writings; but if he is worth his salt at all, he will comfort himself by thinking, with Sir Fretful, that "their abuse is, after all, the best panegyric." To an author who is smarting under a more than common infliction of this kind of peppering, one consolatory consideration may be hinted—namely, that not to be spoken about at all is even worse than being maligned.

One of the most insidious perils that waylay the modern literary life is an exaggerated success at the outset of a career. A very remarkable instance of this has been seen in our time. Thirteen years ago a satire was published, which, although essentially destructive, and therefore not truly promising, was set forth with so much novelty of execution, brightness of wit, and variety of knowledge that the world was taken by storm. The author of that work was received with plaudits of the most exaggerated kind, and his second book was looked forward to with unbounded anticipation. It came, and though fresh and witty, it hadless distinction, less vitality than the first. Book after book has marked ever a further step in steady decline, and now that once flattered and belaureled writer's name is one no more to conjure with. This, surely, is a pathetic fate. I can imagine no form of failure so desperately depressing as that which comes disguised in excessive juvenile success. In literature, at least as much as in other professions, the race is not to the swift, although the battle must eventually be to the strong. There is a blossoming, like that of forced annuals, which pays for its fulness and richness by a plague of early sterility.

What the young writer of wholesome ambition should pray for is, not to flash like a meteor on the astonished world of fashion, but by solid and admirable writing slowly to win a place which has a firm and wide basis. There is such a fate as to suffer through life from the top-heaviness of an initial success. Such a struggle as Thackeray's may be painful at the time, and may call for the exercise of a great deal of patience and good temper. It is, nevertheless, a better thing in the long run to serve a novitiate in Grub Street, than, like Samuel Warren, to be famous at thirty, and die almost forgotten atseventy. There is a deadly tendency in the mind which too easily has found others captivated by his effusions, to fancy that anything is good enough for the public. A precocious favourite conceives that he has only to whistle and the world will at any moment come back to him. The soldier who meets with no resistance throws aside his armour and relaxes his ambition. He forgets that, as Andrew Marvell says:

Back to Index Next