LONGFELLOW

The ocean as confidant, a Laertes that can neither avoid his Hamlets nor bid them hold their peace, is a modern invention. Byron and Shelley discovered it; Heine took it into his confidence, and told it the story of his loves; Wordsworth made it a moral influence; Browning loved it in his way, but his way was not often the poet’s; to Matthew Arnold it was the voice of destiny, and its message was a message of despair; Hugo conferred with it as with an humble friend, and uttered such lofty things over it as are rarely heard upon the lips of man. And so with living lyrists each after his kind. Lord Tennyson listens and looks until it strikes him out an undying note of passion, or yearning, or regret—

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

Mr. Swinburne maddens with the wind and the sounds and the scents of it, until there passes into his verse a something of its vastness and its vehemency, the rapture of its inspiration, the palpitating, many-twinkling miracle of its light; Mr. William Morris has been taken with the manner of its melancholy; while to Whitman ithas been ‘the great Camerado’ indeed, for it gave him that song of the brown bird bereft of his mate in whose absence the half of him had not been told to us.

But to Longfellow alone was it given to see that stately galley which Count Arnaldos saw; his only to hear the steersman singing that wild and wondrous song which none that hears it can resist, and none that has heard it may forget. Then did he learn the old monster’s secret—the word of his charm, the core of his mystery, the human note in his music, the quality of his influence upon the heart and the mind of man; and then did he win himself a place apart among sea poets. With the most of them it is a case ofEgo et rex meus: It is I and the sea, and my egoism is as valiant and as vocal as the other’s. But Longfellow is the spokesman of a confraternity; what thrills him to utterance is the spirit of that strange and beautiful freemasonry established as long ago as when the first sailor steered the first keel out into the unknown, irresistible water-world, and so established the foundations of the eternal brotherhood of man with ocean. To him the sea is a place of mariners and ships. In his verse the rigging creaks, the white sail fills and crackles, there are blown smellsof pine and hemp and tar; you catch the home wind on your cheeks; and old shipmen, their eyeballs white in their bronzed faces, with silver rings and gaudy handkerchiefs, come in and tell you moving stories of the immemorial, incommunicable deep. He abides in a port; he goes down to the docks, and loiters among the galiots and brigantines, he hears the melancholy song of the chanty-men; he sees the chips flying under the shipwright’s adze; he smells the pitch that smokes and bubbles in the caldron. And straightway he falls to singing his variations on the ballad of Count Arnaldos; and the world listens, for its heart beats in his song.

In Keats’sSt. Agnes’ Evenothing is white but the heroine. It is winter, and ‘bitter chill’; the hare ‘limps trembling through the frozen grass; the owl is a-cold for all his feathers; the beadsman’s fingers are numb, his breath is frosted; and at an instant of special and peculiar romance

‘The frost-wind blowsLike Love’s alarum, pattering the sharp sleetAgainst the window-panes.’

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

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

It is all coldly, miraculously stainless: as somebody has said, ‘la vraieSymphonie en Blanc Majeur.’

And at four-score the poet ofSt. Agnes’ Eveis still our greatest since the Wordsworth of certain sonnets and the two immortal odes: is still the one Englishman of whom it can be stated and believed that Elisha is not less than Elijah. His verse is far less smooth and less lustrous than in the well-filed times ofIn Memoriamand the Arthurian idylls. But it is also far more plangent and affecting; it shows a larger and more liberal mastery of form and therewith a finer, stronger, saner sentiment of material; in its display of breadth and freedom in union with particularity, of suggestiveness with precision, of swiftness of handling with completeness of effect, it reminds you of the later magic of Rembrandt and the looser and richer, the less artful-seeming but more ample and sumptuous, of the styles of Shakespeare. And the matter is worthy of the manner. Everywhere are greatness and a high imagination moving at ease in the goldarmour of an heroic style. There are passages inDemeter and Persephonethat will vie with the best inLucretius;Miriamis worth a wilderness ofAylmer’s Fields;Owd Roäis one of the best of the studies in dialect; inHappythere are stanzas that recall the passion ofRizpah; nothing in modern English so thrills and vibrates with the prophetic inspiration, the fury of the seer, asVastness; the versesTo Mary Boyle—(in the same stanza as Musset’sle Mie Prigioni)—are marked by such a natural grace of form and such a winning ‘affectionateness,’ to coin a word, of intention and accomplishment as Lord Tennyson has never surpassed nor very often equalled. InVastnessthe insight into essentials, the command of primordial matter, the capacity of vital suggestion, are gloriously in evidence from the first line to the last. Here is no touch of ingenuity, no trace of ‘originality,’ no single sign of cleverness; the rhymes are merely inevitable—there is no visible transformation of metaphor in deference to their suggestions; nothing is antic, peculiar, superfluous; but here in epic unity and completeness, here is a sublimation of experience expressed by means of a sublimation of style. It is unique in English, and for all that one can see it is like to remain unique this good while yet. The impression you take is one of singular loftiness of purpose and a rare nobility of mind. Looking upon life and time and the spirit of man from theheights of his eighty years, it has been given to the Master Poet to behold much that is hid to them in the plain or on the slopes beneath him, and beholding it to frame and utter a message so lofty in style and in significance so potent that it sounds as of this world indeed but from the confines of experience, the farthest kingdoms of mortality.

It is to note, too, that the Laureate of to-day deals with language in a way that to the Tennyson of the beginning was—unhappily—impossible. In those early years he neither would nor could have been responsible for the magnificent and convincing rhythms ofVastness, the austere yet passionate shapeliness ofHappy, the effects of vigour and variety realised inParnassus. For in those early years he was rather Benvenuto than Michelangelo, he was more of a jeweller than a sculptor, the phrase was too much to him, the inspiration of the incorrect too little. All that is changed, and for the best. Most interesting is it to the artist to remark how impatient—(as the Milton of theAgonisteswas)—of rhyme and how confident in rhythm is the whilome poet ofOrianaandThe Lotus-EatersandThe Vision of Sin; and how this impatience and this confidence are revealed not merely in a piece of mysticism naked yet unashamed asThe Gleam—(whose movementwith its constancy in double endings and avoidance of triplets is perhaps a little tame)—but also in what should have been a popular piece: the ode, to wit,On the Jubilee of Queen Victoria. In eld, indeed, the craftsman inclines to play with his material: he is conscious of mastery; he is in the full enjoyment of his own; he indulges in experiments which to him are as a crown of glory and to them that come after him—to the noodles that would walk in his ways without first preparing themselves by prayer and study and a life of abnegation—are only the devil in disguise. The Rembrandt ofThe Syndics, the Shakespeare ofThe TempestandLear—what are these but pits for the feet of the Young Ass? and what else will be the Tennyson ofVastnessandThe Gleam? ‘Lord,’ quoth Dickens years ago in respect of theIdyllsor ofMaud, ‘what a pleasure it is to come across a man that canwrite!’ He also was an artist in words; and what he said then he would say now with greater emphasis and more assurance. From the first Lord Tennyson has been an exemplar; and now in these new utterances, his supremacy is completely revealed. There is no fear now that ‘All will grow the flower, For all have got the seed’; for then it was a mannerism that people took and imitated, and now—! Now it is art; it is the greater Shakespeare, the consummate Rembrandt, the unique Velasquez; and they may rise to it that can.

Dr. Hake is one of the most earnest and original of poets. He has taken nothing from his contemporaries, but has imagined a message for himself, and has chosen to deliver it in terms that are wholly his own. For him the accidents and trivialities of individualism, the transitory and changing facts that make up the external aspect of an age or a character, can hardly be said to exist. He only concerns himself with absolutes—the eternal elements of human life and the immutable tides of human destiny. It is of these that the stuff of his message is compacted; it is from these that its essence is distilled. His talk is not of Arthur and Guinevere, nor Chastelard and Atalanta, nor Paracelsus and Luria and Abt Vogler; of ‘the drawing-room and the deanery’ he has nothing to say; nothing of the tendencies of Strauss and Renan, nothing of the New Renaissance, nothing of Botticelli, nor the ballet, nor the text of Shakespeare, nor the joys of the book-hunter, nor the quaintness of Queen Anne, nor the morals of Helen of Troy. To these he prefers the mystery of death, the significance of life, the quality ofhuman and divine love; the hopes and fears and the joys and sorrows that are the perdurable stuff of existence, the inexhaustible and unchanging principles of activity in man. Now it is only to the few that reduced to their simplest expression the ‘eternal verities’ are engaging and impressive. To touch the many they must be conveyed in human terms; they must be presented not as impersonal abstractions, not as matter for the higher intelligence and the higher emotions, but as living, breathing, individual facts, vivid with the circumstance of terrene life, quick with the thoughts and ambitions of the hour, full charged with familiar and neighbourly associations. All this with Dr. Hake is by no means inevitable. He loves to symbolise; he does not always care that the symbol shall be appropriate and plain. He prefers to work in allegory and emblem; but he does not always see that, however representative to himself, his emblems and his allegories may not be altogether representative to the world. His imagination is at once quaint and far-reaching—at once peculiar and ambitious; and it is often guilty of what is recondite and remote. In his best work—inOld Souls, for instance, andOld Morality—the quaintness is merely decorative: the essentials are sound and human enough to be of lasting interest and to have a capacity of common application. Elsewhere his imagery is apt to become strange and unaffecting, his fancy to work in curious and desolateways, his message to sound abstruse and strange; and these effects too are deepened by the qualities and the merits of his style. It is peculiarly his own, but it is not always felicitous. There are times when it has the true epic touch—or at least as much of it as is possible in an age of detail and elaboration; there are times when it has a touch of the pathetic—when in homeliness of phrase and triviality of rhythm it is hardly to be surpassed; and there are times, as inThe Snake Charmerwhen, as in certain pages in the work of Richard Wagner, it is so studiously laboured and so heavily charged with ornament and colour as to be almost pedantic in infelicity, almost repellent by sheer force of superfluous and elaborate suggestiveness. Last of all, in an epoch trained upon the passionate and subtle cadences of the Laureate and the large-moulded, ample, irresistible melodies of Mr. Swinburne, Dr. Hake chooses to deal in rhythms of the utmost naïveté and in metrical forms that are simplicity itself.

To the many, Landor has always been more or less unapproachable, and has always seemed more or less shadowy and unreal. To begin with, he wrote for himself and a few others, and principally for himself. Then, he wrote waywardly and unequally as well as selfishly; he published pretty much at random; the bulk of his work is large; and the majority has passed him by for writers more accessible and work less freakish and more comprehensible. It is probable too that even among those who, inspired by natural temerity or the intemperate curiosity of the general reader, have essayed his conquest and set out upon what has been described as ‘the Adventure of the Seven Volumes which are Seven Valleys of Dry Bones,’ but few have returned victorious. Of course the Seven Volumes are a world. But (it is objected) the world is peculiar in pattern, abounding in antres vast and desarts idle, in gaps and precipices and ‘manifest solutions of continuity,’ and enveloped in an atmosphere which ordinary lungsfind now too rare and now too dense and too anodyne. Moreover, it is peopled chiefly with abstractions: bearing noble and suggestive names but all surprisingly alike in stature and feature, all more or less incapable of sustained emotion and even of logical argument, all inordinately addicted to superb generalities and a kind of monumental skittishness, all expressing themselves in a style whose principal characteristic is a magnificent monotony, and all apparently the outcome of a theory that to be wayward is to be creative, that human interest is a matter of apophthegms and oracular sentences, and that axiomatic and dramatic are identical qualities and convertible terms. This is the opinion of those adventurers in whom defeat has generated a sense of injury and an instinct of antagonism. Others less fortunate still have found Landor a continent of dulness and futility—have come to consider the Seven Volumes as so many aggregations of tedium. Such experiences are one-sided and partial no doubt; and considered from a certain point of view they seem worthless enough. But they exist, and they are in some sort justified. Landor, when all is said, remains a writers’ writer; and for my part I find it impossible not to feel a certain sympathy with them that hesitate to accept him for anything else.

Again, to some of us Lander’s imagination is not only inferior in kind but poverty-stricken in degree; his creative faculty is limited by the reflection that its one achievement is Landor; his claim to consideration as a dramatic writer is negatived by the fact that, poignant as are the situations with which he loved to deal, he was apparently incapable of perceiving their capacities: inasmuch as he has failed completely and logically to develop a single one of them; inasmuch, too, as he has never once succeeded in conceiving, much less in picturing, such a train of conflicting emotions as any one of the complications from which he starts might be supposed to generate. To many there is nothing Greek about his dramatic work except the absence of stage directions; and to these that quality of ‘Landorian abruptness’ which seems to Mr. Sidney Colvin to excuse so many of its shortcomings is identical with a certain sort of what in men of lesser mould is called stupidity.

Hood wrote much for bread, and he wrote much under pressure of all manner of difficulties—want of health and want of money, the hardship of exile and the bitterness of comparative failure; and not a little of what he produced is the merest journalism, here to-day and gone to-morrow. At his highest he is very high, but it was not given to him to enjoy the conditions under which great work is produced: he had neither peace of body nor health of mind, his life from first to last was a struggle with sickness and misfortune. How is it possible to maintain an interest in all he wrote, when two-thirds of it was produced with duns at the door and a nurse in the other room and the printer’s-devil waiting in the hall? Of his admirable courage, his fine temper, his unfailing goodness of heart, his incorruptible honesty, it were hard to speak too highly; for one has but to read the story of his life to wonder that he should have written anything at all. At his happiest he had the gift of laughter; at his deepest and truest the more precious gift of tears. But for him there were innumerable hours when the best he couldaffect was the hireling’s motley; when his fun and his pathos alike ran strained and thin; when the unique poet and wit became a mere comic rhymester. Is it just to his memory that it should be burdened with such a mass of what is already antiquated? But one answer is possible. The immortal part of Hood might be expressed into a single tiny volume.

Thackeray preferred Hood’s passion to his fun; and Thackeray knew. Hood had an abundance of a certain sort of wit, the wit of odd analogies, of remote yet familiar resemblances, of quaint conceits and humourous and unexpected quirks. He made not epigrams but jokes, sometimes purely intellectual but nearly always with the verbal quality as well. The wonderful jingle calledMiss Kilmansegg—hard and cold and glittering as the gold that gleams in it—abounds in capital types of both. But for an example of both here is a stanza taken at random from theOde to the Great Unknown:—

‘ThouScottish Barmecide, feeding the hungerOf curiosity with airy gammon;Thou mystery-monger,Dealing it out like middle cut of salmonThat people buy and can’t make head or tail of it,’

and so forth, and so forth: the first a specimenof oddness of analogy—the joke intellectual; the second a jest in which the intellectual quality is complicated with the verbal. Of rarer merit are that conceit of the door which was shut with such a slam ‘it sounded like a wooden d---n,’ and that mad description of the demented mariner,—

‘His head wasturned, and so hechewedHis pigtailtill he died,’—

which is a pun as unexpected and imaginative as any that exists, not excepting even Lamb’s renowned achievement, the immortal ‘I say, Porter, is that your own Hare or a Wig?’ But as a punster Hood is merely unsurpassable. The simplest and the most complex, the wildest and the most obvious, the straightest and the most perverse, all puns came alike to him. The form was his natural method of expression. His prose extravaganzas—even to the delightfulFriend in Need—are pretty well forgotten; his one novel is very hard to read; there is far less inUp the Rhinethan inHumphry Clinkerafter all; we have been spoiled forLycus the CentaurandThe Plea of the Midsummer Fairiesby the rich and passionate verse of the Laureate, the distinction, and the measure of Arnold, the sumptuous diction and the varied and enchanting music ofAtalantaandHesperiaandErechtheus. We care little for the old-fashioned whimsicality of theOdes, and little for such an inimitable farrago of vulgarisms, such areductio ad absurdumof sentiment and style, asThe Lost Child. But the best of Hood’s puns are amusing after forty years. They are the classics of verbal extravagance, and they are a thousand times better known thanThe Last Man, though that is a work of genius, and almost as popular as theSong of the Shirt, theBridge of Sighs, theDream of Eugene Aramthemselves. By an odd chance, too, the rhymes in which they are set have all a tragic theme. ‘Tout ce qui touche à la mort,’ says Champfleury, ‘est d’une gaieté folle.’ Hood found out that much for himself before Champfleury had begun to write. His most riotous ballads are ballads of death and the grave. Tim Turpin does murder and is hanged

‘On Horsham drop, and none can sayHe took a drop too much’;

Ben Battle entwines a rope about his melancholy neck, and for the second time in lifeenlists him in the line; Young Ben expires of grief for the falsehood of Sally Brown: Lieutenant Luff drinks himself into his grave; John Day the amorous coachman,

‘With back too broad to be conceivedBy any narrow mind,’

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

Was Thackeray right, then, in resenting the waste of Hood’s genius upon mere comicalities? I think he was; but only to a certain point. Hood was a true poet: but it was not until after years of proof and endeavour that he discovered the use to which his powers could best be put and the material on which they could best be employed. He worked hard and with but partial success at poetry all his life long. He passed his life in punning and making comic assaults on the Queen’s English; but he was author all the while ofThe Plea of the Midsummer Fairies, theOde to Melancholy,Hero and Leander,Lycus the Centaur, and a score and more of lovable and moving ballads; and he had won himself a name with two such capital examples of melodrama asThe Last Man(1826) andThe Dream of Eugene Aram(1829). But as a poet he profited little. The public preferred him as a buffoon; and not until his last years (and then anonymously) was he able to utter his highest word. All was made ready against his coming—the age, the subject, the public mind, the public capacity of emotion; and inThe Song of the Shirthe approved himself a greatsinger. In the days ofLycus the Centaurand theMidsummer Fairieshe could no more have written it than the public could have heeded had he written. But times were changed—Dickens had come, and the humanitarian epoch—and the great song went like fire. So, a year or two after, didThe Bridge of Sighs. That, says Thackeray, ‘was his Corunna, his Heights of Abraham—sickly, weak, wounded, he fell in the full blaze and fame of that great victory.’ Could he have repeated it had he lived? Who knows? In both these irresistible appeals to the heart of man the material is of equal value and importance with the form; and in poetry such material is rare. A brace of such songs is possible to a poet; ten couples are not. It is Hood’s immortality that he sang these two. Almost in the uttering they went the round of the world; and it is not too much to say of them that they will only pass with the language.

The story of Lever’s life and adventures only wants telling to be as irresistibly attractive as Lorrequer’s or O’Malley’s own. Born in Dublin, of an English father and an Irish mother, he lived to be essentially cosmopolitan and aviveurof the first magnitude. At eight he was master of his schoolmaster—a gentleman given to flogging but not learned in Greek, and therefore a proper subject for a certain sort of blackmailing. He was not an industrious boy; but he was apt and ready with his tongue, he was an expert in fencing and the dance, he was good at improvising and telling stories, it is on record that he pleaded and won the cause of himself and certain of his schoolmates accused before a magistrate of riot and outrage. At college he found work for his high spirits in wild fun and the perpetration of practical jokes. He and his chum Ottiwell, the original of Frank Webber, behaved to their governors, teachers, and companions very much as Charles O’Malley and the redoubtable Frank behave to theirs. Lever was excellent at a street-ballad, and made and sang them in the rags of Rhoudlim, justas Frank Webber does; and he personated Cusack the surgeon to Cusack’s class, just as Frank Webber personates the dean tohisclass. On the whole, indeed, he must have been as gamesome and volatile a nuisance as even Dublin has endured. On leaving college he took charge of an emigrant ship bound for Quebec. Arrived in Canada, he plunged into the backwoods, was affiliated to a tribe of Indians, and had to escape like Bagenal Daly at the risk of his life. Then he went to Germany, became a student at Göttingen under Blumenbach, was heart and soul a Bursch, and had the honour of seeing Goethe at Weimar. His diploma gained, he went to Clare to do battle with the cholera and gather materials forHarry Lorrequer. After this he was for some time dispensary doctor at Portstewart, where he met Prebendary Maxwell, the wild parson who wroteCaptain Blake: so that here and now it is natural to find him leaping turf-carts and running away from his creditors. At Brussels, where he physicked the British Embassy and the British tourist, he knew all sorts of people—among them Commissioner Meade, the original of Major Monsoon, and Cardinal Pecci, the original of Leoxiii.—and saw all sorts of life, and ran into all sorts of extravagance: until of a sudden, he is back again in the capital, editing theDublin University Magazine. Of course he was the maddest editorever seen. For him cards, horses, and high living were not luxuries but necessaries of life; yet all the while he believed devoutly in medicine, and with his family indulged with freedom in the use of calomel and such agents. Presently he abandoned Ireland for the Continent. He took his horses with him, and astonished Europe with a four-in-hand of his own. Carlsruhe knew him well, as Belgium and the Rhine had known him. He only left the Reider Schloss at Bregenz to conquer Italy; and at Florence, Spezzia, and finally Trieste, he shone like himself.

He was a bornposeur. His vanity made him one of the worst—the most excessive—of talkers; go where he would and do what he might, he was unhappy if the first place were another’s. In all he did he was greedy to excel, and to excel incontestably. Like his own Bagenal Daly he would have taken the big jump with the reins in his mouth and his hands tied, ‘just to show the English Lord-Lieutenant how an Irish gentleman rides.’ He was all his life long confounding an English Lord-Lieutenant of some sort; for without display he would have pined away and died. At Templeoguehe lived at the rate of £3,000 a year on an income of £1,200; at Brussels he kept open house on little or nothing for all the wandering grandees of Europe; at Florence they used to liken the cavalcade from his house to a procession from Franconi’s; he found living in a castle and spending £10 a day on his horses the finest fun in the world. He existed but to bewilder and dazzle, and had he not been a brilliant and distinguished novelist he would have been a brilliant and distinguished something else. As he kept open house everywhere, as he was fond of every sort of luxury, as he loved not less to lend money to his intimates than to lose it to them at cards, and as he got but poor prices for his novels and was not well paid for his consular services, it is not easy to see how he managed to make ends meet.

Nor is it easy to see how he contrived to produce his novels. He was too passionately addicted to society and the enjoyment of life to spare an instant from them if he could help it; and the wonder is not that he should have written so well but that he should have written at all. Fortunately or the other thing, his books cost him no effort.He wrote or dictated at a gallop and, his copy once produced, had finished his work. He abhorred revision, and while keenly sensitive to blame and greedy of praise he ceased to care for his books as soon as they had left his desk. That he was not in scarce any sense an artist is but too clear. He never worked on a definite plan nor was at any pains to contrive a plot; he depended on the morning’s impressions for the evening’s task, and wroteCon Creganunder the immediate influence of a travelled Austrian, who used to talk to him every night ere he sat down to his story. But he was a wonderful improvisatore. He had imagination—(even romantic imagination: as the episode of Menelaus Crick inCon Creganwill show)—a keen, sure eye for character, incomparable facility in composition, an inexhaustible fund of shrewdness, whimsicality, high spirits, an admirable knack of dialogue; and as consul at Spezzia and at Trieste, as a fashionable practitioner at Brussels, as dispensary doctor on the wild Ulster coast, he was excellently placed for the kind of literature it was in him to produce. Writing at random and always under the spur of necessity, he managed to inform his work with extraordinary vitality and charm. His books were only made to sell, but it is like enough that they will also live, for they are yet well nigh as readable as at first, and Nina and Kate O’Donoghue—(for instance)—seem destined to godown to posterity as typical and representative. Had their author taken art seriously, and devoted all his energy to its practice, he could scarce have done more than this. Perhaps, indeed, he would not have done so much. It could never have been Lorrequer’s to ‘build the lofty rhyme.’ It was an honest as well as a brilliant creature; and I believe we should all have suffered if some avenging chance had borne it in upon him that to be really lofty your rhyme must of necessity be not blown upwards like a bubble but built in air like a cathedral. He would, I take it, have experimentalised in repentance to the extent of elaborating his creations and chastising his style; and, it may be, he would have contrived but to beggar his work of interest and correct himself of charm. A respectable ambition, no doubt; but how much better to be the rough-and-ready artist of Darby the Beast and Micky Free, the humane and charming rattlepate to whom we owe Paul Goslett and the excellent and pleasing Potts!

I love to think of Jefferies as a kind of literary Leatherstocking. His style, his mental qualities, the field he worked in, the chase he followed, were peculiar to himself, and as he was without a rival, so was he without a second. Reduced to its simplest expression, his was a mind compact of observation and of memory. He writes as one who watches always, who sees everything, who forgets nothing. As his lot was cast in country places, among wood and pasturage and corn, by coverts teeming with game and quick with insect life, and as withal he had the hunter’s patience and quick-sightedness, his faculty of looking and listening and of noting and remembering, his readiness of deduction and insistence of pursuit—there entered gradually into his mind a greater quantity of natural England, her leaves and flowers, her winds and skies, her wild things and tame, her beauties and humours and discomforts, than was ever, perhaps, the possession of writing Briton. This property he conveyed to his countrymen in a series of books of singular freshness and interest. The style is too formal and sober, the English seldom other than homely andsufficient; there is overmuch of the reporter and nothing like enough of the artist, the note of imagination, the right creative faculty. But they are remarkable books. It is not safe to try and be beforehand with posterity, but in the case of such works as theGamekeeperandWild Lifeand with such a precedent as that established by theNatural History of Selbornesuch anticipation seems more tempting and less hazardous than usual. One has only to think of some mediæval Jefferies attached to the staff of Robin Hood, and writing about Needwood and Charnwood as his descendant wrote about the South Downs, to imagine an historical document of priceless value and inexhaustible interest. And in years to be, when the whole island is one vast congeries of streets, and the fox has gone down to the bustard and the dodo, and outside museums of comparative anatomy the weasel is not and the badger has ceased from the face of the earth, it is not doubtful that theGamekeeperandWild Lifeand thePoacher—epitomising, as they will, the rural England of certain centuries before—will be serving as material and authority for historical descriptions, historical novels, historical epics, historical pictures, and will be honoured as the most useful stuff of their kind in being.

In those first books of his Jefferies compels attention by sheer freshness of matter; he is brimful of new facts and original and pertinent observation, and that every one is vaguely familiar with and interested in the objects he is handling and explaining serves but to heighten his attractiveness. There are so many who but know of hares disguised as soup, of ants as a people on whose houses it is not good to sit down, of partridges as a motive of bread sauce! And Jefferies, retailing in plain, useful English the thousand and one curious facts that make up life for these creatures and their kind—Jefferies walking the wood, or tracking the brook, or mapping out the big tree—is some one to be heeded with gratitude. He is the Scandalous Chronicler of the warren and the rookery, the newsmonger and intelligencer of creeping things, and things that fly, and things that run; and his confidences, unique in quality and type, have the novelty and force of personal revelations. In dealing with men and women, he surrendered most of his advantage and lost the best part of his charm. The theme is old, the matter well worn, the subject common to us all; and most of us care nothing for a few facts more or less unless they be romantically conveyed. Reality is but the beginning, the raw material, of art; and it is by the artist’s aid and countenance that we are used to make acquaintance with our fellows, be theygenerals in cocked hats or mechanics in fustian. Now Jefferies was not an artist, and so beside his stoats and hares, his pike, his rabbits, and his moles, his men and women are of little moment. You seem to have heard of them and to far better purpose from others; you have had their author’s facts presented elsewhere, and that in picturesque conjunction with the great eternal interests of passion and emotion. To be aware of such a difference is to resent it; and accordingly to read is to know that Jefferies would have done well to leave Hodge and Hodge’s masters alone and keep to his beasts and birds and fishes.

Is it not plain as the nose on your face that his admirers admire him injudiciously? It is true, for instance, that he is in a sense, ‘too full’ (the phrase is Mr. Besant’s) for the generality of readers. But it is also true that he is not nearly full enough: that they look for conclusions while he is bent upon giving them only details: that they clamour for a breath of inspiration while he is bent upon emptying his note-book in decent English; that they persist in demanding a motive, a leading idea, a justification, while he with knowledge crammed is fixed in his resolve to tell them no more than that there are milestones on the Dover Road, orthat there are so many nails of so many shapes and so many colours in the pig-sty at the back of Coate Farm. They prefer ‘their geraniums in the conservatory.’ They refuse, in any case, to call a ‘picture’ that which is only a long-drawn sequence of statements. They are naturally inartistic, but they have the tradition of a long and speaking series of artistic results, and instinctively they decline to recognise as art the work of one who was plainly the reverse of an artist. The artist is he who knows how to select and to inspire the results of his selection. Jefferies could do neither. He was a reporter of genius; and he never got beyond reporting. To the average reader he is wanting in the great essentials of excitement: he is prodigal of facts, and he contrives to set none down so as to make one believe in it for longer than the instant of perusal. From his work the passionate human quality is not less absent than the capacity of selection and the gift of inspiration, and all the enthusiasm of all the enthusiasts of an enthusiastic age will not make him and his work acceptable to the aforesaid average reader. In letters he is as the ideal British water-colourist in paint: the care of both is not art but facts, and again facts, and facts ever. You consider their work; you cannot see the wood for the trees; and you are fain to conclude that themselves were so much interested in the trees they did not even know the wood was there.

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

Gay the fabulist is only interesting in a certain sense and to a small extent. The morality of theFablesis commonplace; their workmanship is only facile and agreeable; as literature—as achievements in a certain order of art—they have a poor enough kind of existence. In comparison to the work of La Fontaine they are the merest journalism. The simplicity, the wit, the wisdom, the humanity, the dramatic imagination, the capacity of dramatic expression, the exquisite union of sense and manner, the faultless balance of matter and style, are qualities for which in the Englishman you look in vain. You read, and you read not only without enthusiasm but without interest. The verse is merely brisk and fluent; the invention is common; the wit is not very witty; the humour is artificial; the wisdom, the morality, the knowledge of life, the science of character—if they exist at all it is but as anatomical preparations or plants in ahortus siccus. Worse than anything, theFablesare monotonous. The manner is consistently uniform; the invention has the level sameness of a Lincolnshire landscape; the narrative moves with the equalpace of boats on a Dutch canal. The effect is that of a host of flower-pots, the columns in a ledger, a tragedy by the Rev. Mr. Home; and it is heightened by the matchless triteness of the fabulist’s reflections and the uncommon tameness of his drama. It is hard to believe that this is indeed the Gay ofPollyandThe Beggars’ Opera. True, the dialects of his Peachum and his Lockit are in some sort one; his gentlemen of the road and his ladies of the kennel rejoice in a common flippancy of expression; there is little to choose between the speech of Polly and the speech of Lucy. But in respect of the essentials of drama the dialogue of theBeggars’ Operais on the whole sufficient. The personages are puppets; but they are individual, and they are fairly consistent in their individuality. Miss Lockit does not think and feel like Miss Diver; Macheath is distinguishable from Peachum; none is exactly alive, but of stage life ail have their share. The reverse of this is the case with the personages of theFables. They think the thoughts and speak the speech of Mr. Gay. The elephant has the voice of the sparrow; the monkey is one with the organ on which he sits; there is but a difference of name between the eagle and the hog; the talk of Death has exactly the manner and weight and cadence of the Woodman’s; a change of label would enable the lion to change places with the spaniel, would suffice to cage the wolf as a bird and set free the parrot as a beast ofprey. All are equally pert, brisk, and dapper in expression; all are equally sententious and smart in aim; all are absolutely identical in function and effect. The whole gathering is stuffed with the same straw, prepared with the same dressing, ticketed in the same handwriting, and painted with the same colours. Any one who remembers the infinite variety of La Fontaine will feel that Gay the fabulist is a writer whose work the world has let die very willingly indeed.

And Gay is not a whit less inefficient as a moralist. He is a kindly soul, and in his easygoing way he has learnt something of the tricks of the world and something of the hearts of men. He writes as an unsuccessful courtier; and in that capacity he has remarks to offer which are not always valueless, and in which there is sometimes a certain shrewdness. But the unsuccessful courtier is on the whole a creature of the past. Such interest as he has is rather historical than actual; and neither in the nursery nor in the schoolroom is he likely to create any excitement or be received with any enthusiasm. To the world he can only recommend himself as one anxious tomake it known on the smallest provocation and on any occasion or none that Queen Anne is dead. Open him where you will, and you find him full of this important news and determined on imparting it. Thus, inThe Scold and the Parrot:

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

that is to say, Queen Anne is dead. Thus, too, inThe Persian,the Sun,and the Cloud:

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

inThe Goat without a Beard:

‘Coxcombs distinguished from the restTo all but coxcombs are a jest’;

inThe Shepherd’s Dog and the Wolf:

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

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

How long is it that the wise and good have ceased to say (striking their pensive bosoms), ‘HereliesGay’? It is—how long? But for all that Gay is yet a figure in English letters. As a song-writer he has still a claim on us, and is still able to touch the heart and charm the ear. The lyrics inAcis and Galateaare not unworthy their association with Handel’s immortal melodies, the songs inThe Beggars’ Operahave a part in the life and fame of the sweet old tunes from which they can never be divided. I like to believe that in the operas and theTriviaandThe Shepherd’s Weekis buried the material of a pleasant little book.

It is our misfortune that of good essayists there should be but few. Men there have been who have done the essayist’s part so well as to have earned an immortality in the doing; but we have had not many of them, and they make but a poor figure on our shelves. It is a pity that things should be thus with us, for a good essayist is the pleasantest companion imaginable. There are folk in plenty who have never read Montaigne at all; but there are few indeed who have read but a page of him, and that page but once. And the same may be said of Addison and Fielding, of Lamb and Hazlitt, of Sterne and Bacon and Ben Jonson, and all the members of their goodly fellowship. To sit down with any one of them is to sit down in the company of one of the ‘mighty wits, our elders and our betters,’ who have done much to make literature a good thing, having written books that are eternally readable. If of all them that have tried to write essays and succeeded after a fashion a twentieth part so much could be said the world would have a conversational literature of inexhaustible interest. But indeed there isnothing of the sort. Beside the ‘rare and radiant’ masters of the art there are the apprentices, and these are many and dull.

Essayists, like poets, are born and not made, and for one worth remembering the world is confronted with a hundred not worth reading. Your true essayist is in a literary sense the friend of everybody. As one of the brotherhood has phrased it, it is his function ‘to speak with ease and opportunity to all men.’ He must be personal, or his hearers can feel no manner of interest in him. He must be candid and sincere, or his readers presently see through him. He must have learned to think for himself and to consider his surroundings with an eye that is both kindly and observant, or they straightway find his company unprofitable. He should have fancy, or his starveling propositions will perish for lack of metaphor and the tropes and figures needed to vitalise a truism. He does well to have humour, for humour makes men brothers, and is perhaps more influential in an essay than in most places else. He will find a little wit both serviceable to himself and comfortable to his readers. For wisdom, it is not absolutelynecessary that he have it, but in its way it is as good a property as any: used with judgment, indeed, it does more to keep an essay sweet and fresh than almost any other quality. And in default of wisdom—which, to be sure, it is not given to every man, much less to every essayist, to entertain—he need have no scruples about using whatever common sense is his; for common sense is a highly respectable commodity, and never fails of a wide and eager circle of buyers. A knowledge of men and of books is also to be desired; for it is a writer’s best reason of being, and without it he does well to hold his tongue. Blessed with these attributes he is an essayist to some purpose. Give him leisure and occasion, and his discourse may well become as popular as Montaigne’s own.

For the British essayists, they are more talked about than known. It is to be suspected that from the first their reputation has greatly exceeded their popularity; and of late years, in spite of the declamation of Macaulay and the very literary enthusiasm of the artist ofEsmondandThe Virginians, they have fallen further into the background, and are lessthan ever studied with regard. In theory the age of Anne is still the Augustan age to us; but in theory only, and only to a certain extent. What attracts us is its outside. We are in love with its houses and its china and its costumes. We are not enamoured of it as it was but as it seems to Mr. Caldecott and Mr. Dobson and Miss Kate Greenaway. We care little for its comedy and nothing at all for its tragedy. Its verse is all that our own is not, and the same may be said of its prose and ours—of the prose of Mr. Swinburne and Mr. George Meredith and the prose of Addison and Swift. Mr. Gladstone is not a bit like Bolingbroke, and betweenThe TimesandThe Tatler, betweenThe Spectator(Mr. Addison’s), andThe Fortnightly Review, there is a difference of close upon two centuries and of a dozen revolutions—political, social, scientific, and æsthetic. We may babble as we please about the ‘sweetness’ of Steele and the ‘humour’ of Sir Roger de Coverley, but in our hearts we care for them a great deal less than we ought, and in fact Mr. Mudie’s subscribers do not hesitate to prefer the ‘sweetness’ of Mr. Black and the ‘humour’ of Mr. James Payn. Our love is not for the essentials of the time but only its accidents and oddities; and we express it in pictures and poems and fantasies in architecture, and the canonisation (in figures) of Chippendale and Sheraton. But it is questionable if we might not with advantage increaseour interest, and carry imitation a little deeper. The Essayists, for instance, are often dull, but they write like scholars and gentlemen. They refrain from personalities; they let scandal alone, nor ever condescend to eavesdropping; they never go out of their way in search of affectation or prurience or melancholy, but are content to be merely wise and cheerful and humane. Above all, they do their work as well as they can. They seem to write not for bread nor for a place in society but for the pleasure of writing, and of writing well. In these hysterical times life is so full, so much is asked and so much has to be given, that tranquil writing and careful workmanship are impossible. A certain poet has bewailed the change in a charming rondeau:—

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

It must be owned that his melancholy is anything but groundless. The trick of amenity and good breeding is lost; the graces of an excellence that is unobtrusive are graces no more. We write as men paint for the exhibitions: with the consciousness that we must pass without notice if we do not exceed in colour and subject and tone. The need exists, and the world bows to it. Mr. Austin Dobson’s little sheaf ofEighteenth Century Essaysmightbe regarded as a protest against the necessity and the submission. It proves that ’tis possible to be eloquent without adjectives and elegant without affectation; that to be brilliant you need not necessarily be extravagant and conceited; that without being maudlin and sentimental it is not beyond mortal capacity to be pathetic; and that once upon a time a writer could prove himself a humourist without feeling it incumbent upon him to be also a jack-pudding.

It has been Boswell’s fate to be universally read and almost as universally despised. What he suffered at the hands of Croker and Macaulay is typical of his fortune. In character, in politics, in attainments, in capacity, the two were poles apart; but they were agreed in this: that Boswell must be castigated and contemned, and that they were the men to do it. Croker’s achievement, consider it how you will, remains the most preposterous in literary history. He could see nothing in theLifebut a highly entertaining compilation greatly in need of annotation and correction. Accordingly he took up Boswell’s text and interlarded it with scraps of his own and other people’s; he pegged into it a sophisticated version of theTour; and he overwhelmed his amazing compound with notes and commentaries in which he took occasion to snub, scold, ‘improve,’ and insult his author at every turn. What came of it one knows. Macaulay, in the combined interests of Whiggism and good literature, made Boswell’s quarrel his own, and the expiation was as bitter as the offence was wanton and scandalous.

But Macaulay, if he did Jeddart justice on Croker, took care not to forget that Johnson was a Tory hero, and that Boswell was Johnson’s biographer. He was too fond of good reading not to esteem theLifefor one of the best of books. But he was also a master of the art of brilliant and picturesque misrepresentation; and he did not neglect to prove that theLifeis only admirable because Boswell was contemptible. It was, he argued, only by virtue of being at once daft and drunken, selfish and silly, an eavesdropper and a talebearer, a kind of inspired Faddle, a combination of butt and lackey and snob, that Boswell contrived to achieve his wretched immortality. And in the same way Boswell’s hero was after all but a sort of Grub Street Cyclops, respectable enough by his intelligence—(but even so ridiculous in comparison to gifted Whigs)—yet more or less despicable in his manners, his English, and his politics. Now, Macaulay was the genius of special pleading. Admirable man of letters as he was, he was politician first and man of letters afterwards: his judgments are no more final than his antitheses are dull, and his method for all its brilliance is the reverse of sound. When you begin to inquire how much he really knew about Boswell, and how far you may accept his own estimate of his own pretentions, he becomes amusing in spite of himself: much as, accordingto him, Boswell was an artist. In his review of Croker he is keen enough about dates and facts and solecisms; on questions of this sort he bestows his fiercest energies; for such lapses he visits his Tory opposite with his most savage and splendid insolence, his heartiest contempt, his most scathing rhetoric. But on the great question of all—the corruption of Boswell’s text—he is not nearly so implacable, and concerning the foisting on theLifeof the whole bulk of theTourhe is not more than lukewarm. ‘We greatly doubt,’ he says, ‘whethereventheTour to the Hebridesshould have been inserted in the midst of theLife. There is one marked distinction between the two works. Most of theTourwas seen by Johnson in manuscript. It does not appear that he ever saw any part of theLife.’ This is to say that Croker’s action is reprehensible not because it is an offence against art but because Johnson on private and personal grounds might not have been disposed to accept theLifeas representative and just, and might have refused to sanction its appearance on an equal footing with theTour, which on private and personal grounds hehadaccepted. In the face of such an argument who can help suspecting Macaulay’s artistic faculty? ‘TheLife of Johnson,’ he says, ‘is assuredly a great, a very great, book. Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets, Shakespeare is not more decidedly thefirst of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers . . . Eclipse is first, and the rest nowhere.’ That is hearty and exact enough. But, as I have hinted, Macaulay, furious with Croker’s carelessness, is almost tolerant of Croker’s impudence. For Croker as a scholar and an historian he is merely pitiless; to Croker ruining theLifeby the insertion of theTour—a feat which would scarce be surpassed by the interpolation of the Falstaff scenes of theMerry Wivesin one or other of the parts ofHenry IV.—he is lenient enough, and lenient on grounds which are not artistic but purely moral. Did he recognise to the full the fact of Boswell’s pre-eminence as an artist? Was he really conscious that theLifeis an admirable work of art as well as the most readable and companionable of books? As, not content with committing himself thus far, he goes on to prove that Boswell was great because he was little, that he wrote a great book because he was an ass, and that if he had not been an ass his book would probably have been at least a small one, incredulity on these points becomes respectable.

Boswell knew better. A true Scotsman and a true artist, he could play the fool on occasion, and he could profit by his folly. In his dedication to the first and greatest President the Royal Academy has had he anticipates a good many of Macaulay’s objections to his character and deportment, and proves conclusively that if he chose to seem ridiculous he did so not unwittingly but with a complete apprehension of the effect he designed and the means he adopted. In theTour, says he, from his ‘eagerness to display the wonderful fertility and readiness of Johnson’s wit,’ he ‘freely showed to the world its dexterity, even when I was myself the object of it.’ He was under the impression that he would be ‘liberally understood,’ as ‘knowing very well what I was about.’ But, he adds, ‘it seems I judged too well of the world’; and he points his moral with a story of ‘the great Dr. Clarke,’ who, ‘unbending himself with a few friends in the most playful and frolicsome manner,’ saw Beau Nash in the distance, and was instantly sobered. ‘My boys,’ quoth he, ‘let us be grave—here comes a fool.’ Macaulay was not exactly Beau Nash, nor was Boswell ‘the great Dr. Clarke’; but, as Macaulay, working on Wolcot’s lines, was presently to show, Boswell did right to describe the world as ‘a great fool,’ and to regret in respect of his own silliness that in theTourhe had been ‘arrogantenough to suppose that the tenour of the rest of the book would sufficiently guard against such a strange imputation.’ In the same way he showed himself fully alive to the enduring merits of his achievement. ‘I will venture to say,’ he writes, ‘that he (Johnson) will be seen in this work more completely than any man who has ever lived.’ He had his own idea of biography; he had demonstrated its value triumphantly in theTourwhich, though organically complete, is plainly not a record of travel but a biographical essay. In theTour, that is, he had approved himself an original master of selection, composition, and design; of the art of working a large number of essential details into a uniform and living whole; and of that most difficult and telling of accomplishments, the reproduction of talk. In theLifehe repeated the proof on a larger scale and with a finer mastery of construction and effect; and in what his best editor describes as ‘the task of correcting, amending, and adding to his darling work’ he spent his few remaining years. That he drifted into greatness, produced his two masterpieces unconsciously, and developed a genius for biography as one develops a disease, is ‘a ridiculous conception,’ as Mr. Napier rightly says. In proof of it we have Boswell’s own words, and we have the books themselves. Such testimony is not to be overborne by any number of paradoxes, however ingenious, nor by anysuperflux of rhetoric, however plausible and persuasive. That Boswell was a gossip, a busybody, and something of a sot, and that many did and still do call him fool, is certain; but that is no reason why he should not have been an artist, and none why he should be credited with the fame of having devoted the best part of his life to the production of a couple of masterpieces—as M. Jourdain talked prose—without knowing what he was doing. Turner chose to go a-masquerading as ‘Puggy Booth’; but as yet nobody has put forward the assertion that Turner was unconscious of the romance and splendour of hisUlysses and Polyphemus, or that he painted hisRain,Speed,and Steamin absolute ignorance of the impression it would produce and the idea it should convey. Goldsmith reminded Miss Reynolds of ‘a low mechanic, particularly . . . a journey-man tailor’; but that he was unconsciously the most elegant and natural writer of his age is a position which has not yet been advanced. And surely it is high time that Boswell should take that place in art which is his by right of conquest, and that Macaulay’s paradox—which is only the opinion brilliantly put of an ignorant and unthinking world—(‘Il avait mieux que personne l’esprit de tout le monde’)—should go the way of all its kind.

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