WINMX Assorted Textfiles/Ebooks.tar/Text - Compilations - The Library - Volume 08 - L to Q - 254 fiction ebooks (PDF HTM(L) RTF TXT DOC).zip.zip/Lang, Andrew - Essays In Little.txt

Text File | 2001-10-08 | 346KB | 6,548 lines

The Project Gutenberg Etext of Essays in Little, by Andrew Lang
#11 in our series by Andrew Lang


Copyright laws are changing all over the world, be sure to check
the copyright laws for your country before posting these files!!

Please take a look at the important information in this header.
We encourage you to keep this file on your own disk, keeping an
electronic path open for the next readers.  Do not remove this.


**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**

**Etexts Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**

*These Etexts Prepared By Hundreds of Volunteers and Donations*

Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get Etexts, and
further information is included below.  We need your donations.


Essays in Little

by Andrew Lang

January, 1999  [Etext #1594]


The Project Gutenberg Etext of Essays in Little by Andrew Lang
******This file should be named esltt10.txt or esltt10.zip******

Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, esltt11.txt
VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, esltt10a.txt


This etext was prepared from the 1891 Henry and Co. edition
by David Price, email [e-mail]

Project Gutenberg Etexts are usually created from multiple editions,
all of which are in the Public Domain in the United States, unless a
copyright notice is included.  Therefore, we do NOT keep these books
in compliance with any particular paper edition, usually otherwise.


We are now trying to release all our books one month in advance
of the official release dates, for time for better editing.

Please note:  neither this list nor its contents are final till
midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
The official release date of all Project Gutenberg Etexts is at
Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
and editing by those who wish to do so.  To be sure you have an
up to date first edition [xxxxx10x.xxx] please check file sizes
in the first week of the next month.  Since our ftp program has
a bug in it that scrambles the date [tried to fix and failed] a
look at the file size will have to do, but we will try to see a
new copy has at least one byte more or less.


Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)

We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
fifty hours is one conservative estimate for how long it we take
to get any etext selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.  This
projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If our value
per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
million dollars per hour this year as we release thirty-two text
files per month, or 384 more Etexts in 1998 for a total of 1500+
If these reach just 10% of the computerized population, then the
total should reach over 150 billion Etexts given away.

The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away One Trillion Etext
Files by the December 31, 2001.  [10,000 x 100,000,000=Trillion]
This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
which is only 10% of the present number of computer users.  2001
should have at least twice as many computer users as that, so it
will require us reaching less than 5% of the users in 2001.


We need your donations more than ever!


All donations should be made to "Project Gutenberg/CMU": and are
tax deductible to the extent allowable by law.  (CMU = Carnegie-
Mellon University).

For these and other matters, please mail to:

Project Gutenberg
P. O. Box  2782
Champaign, IL 61825

When all other email fails try our Executive Director:
Michael S. Hart <[e-mail]>

We would prefer to send you this information by email
(Internet, Bitnet, Compuserve, ATTMAIL or MCImail).

******
If you have an FTP program (or emulator), please
FTP directly to the Project Gutenberg archives:
[Mac users, do NOT point and click. . .type]

ftp uiarchive.cso.uiuc.edu
login:  anonymous
password:  your@login
cd etext/etext90 through /etext96
or cd etext/articles [get suggest gut for more information]
dir [to see files]
get or mget [to get files. . .set bin for zip files]
GET INDEX?00.GUT
for a list of books
and
GET NEW GUT for general information
and
MGET GUT* for newsletters.

**Information prepared by the Project Gutenberg legal advisor**
(Three Pages)


***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS**START***
Why is this "Small Print!" statement here?  You know: lawyers.
They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
your copy of this etext, even if you got it for free from
someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
fault.  So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
disclaims most of our liability to you.  It also tells you how
you can distribute copies of this etext if you want to.

*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS ETEXT
By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
etext, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
this "Small Print!" statement.  If you do not, you can receive
a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this etext by
sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
you got it from.  If you received this etext on a physical
medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.

ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM ETEXTS
This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-
tm etexts, is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor
Michael S. Hart through the Project Gutenberg Association at
Carnegie-Mellon University (the "Project").  Among other
things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
distribute it in the United States without permission and
without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules, set forth
below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this etext
under the Project's "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.

To create these etexts, the Project expends considerable
efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
works.  Despite these efforts, the Project's etexts and any
medium they may be on may contain "Defects".  Among other
things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
disk or other etext medium, a computer virus, or computer
codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.

LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
[1] the Project (and any other party you may receive this
etext from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext) disclaims all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

If you discover a Defect in this etext within 90 days of
receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
time to the person you received it from.  If you received it
on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
copy.  If you received it electronically, such person may
choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
receive it electronically.

THIS ETEXT IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS".  NO OTHER
WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
TO THE ETEXT OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
may have other legal rights.

INDEMNITY
You will indemnify and hold the Project, its directors,
officers, members and agents harmless from all liability, cost
and expense, including legal fees, that arise directly or
indirectly from any of the following that you do or cause:
[1] distribution of this etext, [2] alteration, modification,
or addition to the etext, or [3] any Defect.

DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
You may distribute copies of this etext electronically, or by
disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
or:

[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
     etext or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
     if you wish, distribute this etext in machine readable
     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
     including any form resulting from conversion by word pro-
     cessing or hypertext software, but only so long as
     *EITHER*:

     [*]  The etext, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
          does *not* contain characters other than those
          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
          author, and additional characters may be used to
          indicate hypertext links; OR

     [*]  The etext may be readily converted by the reader at
          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
          form by the program that displays the etext (as is
          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
          OR

     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
          etext in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
          or other equivalent proprietary form).

[2]  Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this
     "Small Print!" statement.

[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Project of 20% of the
     net profits you derive calculated using the method you
     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
     payable to "Project Gutenberg Association/Carnegie-Mellon
     University" within the 60 days following each
     date you prepare (or were legally required to prepare)
     your annual (or equivalent periodic) tax return.

WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
The Project gratefully accepts contributions in money, time,
scanning machines, OCR software, public domain etexts, royalty
free copyright licenses, and every other sort of contribution
you can think of.  Money should be paid to "Project Gutenberg
Association / Carnegie-Mellon University".

*END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*





This etext was prepared from the 1891 Henry and Co. edition
by David Price, email [e-mail]





Essays in Little

by Andrew Lang




Contents:

Preface
Alexandre Dumas
Mr. Stevenson's works
Thomas Haynes Bayly
Theodore de Banville
Homer and the Study of Greek
The Last Fashionable Novel
Thackeray
Dickens
Adventures of Buccaneers
The Sagas
Charles Kingsley
Charles Lever:  His books, adventures and misfortunes
The poems of Sir Walter Scott
John Bunyan
To a Young Journalist
Mr. Kipling's stories




PREFACE


Of the following essays, five are new, and were written for this
volume.  They are the paper on Mr. R. L. Stevenson, the "Letter to a
Young Journalist," the study of Mr. Kipling, the note on Homer, and
"The Last Fashionable Novel."  The article on the author of "Oh, no!
we never mention Her," appeared in the New York Sun, and was
suggested by Mr. Dana, the editor of that journal.  The papers on
Thackeray and Dickens were published in Good Words, that on Dumas
appeared in Scribner's Magazine, that on M. Theodore de Banville in
The New Quarterly Review.  The other essays were originally written
for a newspaper "Syndicate."  They have been re-cast, augmented,
and, to a great extent, re-written.

A. L.




ALEXANDRE DUMAS



Alexandre Dumas is a writer, and his life is a topic, of which his
devotees never weary.  Indeed, one lifetime is not long enough
wherein to tire of them.  The long days and years of Hilpa and
Shalum, in Addison--the antediluvian age, when a picnic lasted for
half a century and a courtship for two hundred years, might have
sufficed for an exhaustive study of Dumas.  No such study have I to
offer, in the brief seasons of our perishable days.  I own that I
have not read, and do not, in the circumstances, expect to read, all
of Dumas, nor even the greater part of his thousand volumes.  We
only dip a cup in that sparkling spring, and drink, and go on,--we
cannot hope to exhaust the fountain, nor to carry away with us the
well itself.  It is but a word of gratitude and delight that we can
say to the heroic and indomitable master, only an ave of friendship
that we can call across the bourne to the shade of the Porthos of
fiction.  That his works (his best works) should be even still more
widely circulated than they are; that the young should read them,
and learn frankness, kindness, generosity--should esteem the tender
heart, and the gay, invincible wit; that the old should read them
again, and find forgetfulness of trouble, and taste the anodyne of
dreams, that is what we desire.

Dumas said of himself ("Memoires," v. 13) that when he was young he
tried several times to read forbidden books--books that are sold
sous le manteau.  But he never got farther than the tenth page, in
the


"scrofulous French novel
On gray paper with blunt type;"


he never made his way so far as


"the woful sixteenth print."


"I had, thank God, a natural sentiment of delicacy; and thus, out of
my six hundred volumes (in 1852) there are not four which the most
scrupulous mother may not give to her daughter."  Much later, in
1864, when the Censure threatened one of his plays, he wrote to the
Emperor:  "Of my twelve hundred volumes there is not one which a
girl in our most modest quarter, the Faubourg Saint-Germain, may not
be allowed to read."  The mothers of the Faubourg, and mothers in
general, may not take Dumas exactly at his word.  There is a
passage, for example, in the story of Miladi ("Les Trois
Mousquetaires") which a parent or guardian may well think
undesirable reading for youth.  But compare it with the original
passage in the "Memoires" of D'Artagnan!  It has passed through a
medium, as Dumas himself declared, of natural delicacy and good
taste.  His enormous popularity, the widest in the world of letters,
owes absolutely nothing to prurience or curiosity.  The air which he
breathes is a healthy air, is the open air; and that by his own
choice, for he had every temptation to seek another kind of vogue,
and every opportunity.

Two anecdotes are told of Dumas' books, one by M. Edmond About, the
other by his own son, which show, in brief space, why this novelist
is so beloved, and why he deserves our affection and esteem.  M.
Villaud, a railway engineer who had lived much in Italy, Russia, and
Spain, was the person whose enthusiasm finally secured a statue for
Dumas.  He felt so much gratitude to the unknown friend of lonely
nights in long exiles, that he could not be happy till his gratitude
found a permanent expression.  On returning to France he went to
consult M. Victor Borie, who told him this tale about George Sand.
M. Borie chanced to visit the famous novelist just before her death,
and found Dumas' novel, "Les Quarante Cinq" (one of the cycle about
the Valois kings) lying on her table.  He expressed his wonder that
she was reading it for the first time.

"For the first time!--why, this is the fifth or sixth time I have
read 'Les Quarante Cinq,' and the others.  When I am ill, anxious,
melancholy, tired, discouraged, nothing helps me against moral or
physical troubles like a book of Dumas."  Again, M. About says that
M. Sarcey was in the same class at school with a little Spanish boy.
The child was homesick; he could not eat, he could not sleep; he was
almost in a decline.

"You want to see your mother?" said young Sarcey.

"No:  she is dead."

"Your father, then?"

" No:  he used to beat me."

"Your brothers and sisters?"

"I have none."

"Then why are you so eager to be back in Spain?"

"To finish a book I began in the holidays."

"And what was its name?"

"'Los Tres Mosqueteros'!"

He was homesick for "The Three Musketeers," and they cured him
easily.

That is what Dumas does.  He gives courage and life to old age, he
charms away the half-conscious nostalgie, the Heimweh, of childhood.
We are all homesick, in the dark days and black towns, for the land
of blue skies and brave adventures in forests, and in lonely inns,
on the battle-field, in the prison, on the desert isle.  And then
Dumas comes, and, like Argive Helen, in Homer, he casts a drug into
the wine, the drug nepenthe, "that puts all evil out of mind."  Does
any one suppose that when George Sand was old and tired, and near
her death, she would have found this anodyne, and this stimulant, in
the novels of M. Tolstoi, M. Dostoiefsky, M. Zola, or any of the
"scientific" observers whom we are actually requested to hail as the
masters of a new art, the art of the future?  Would they make her
laugh, as Chicot does? make her forget, as Porthos, Athos, and
Aramis do? take her away from the heavy, familiar time, as the
enchanter Dumas takes us?  No; let it be enough for these new
authors to be industrious, keen, accurate, precieux, pitiful,
charitable, veracious; but give us high spirits now and then, a
light heart, a sharp sword, a fair wench, a good horse, or even that
old Gascon rouncy of D'Artagnan's.  Like the good Lord James
Douglas, we had liefer hear the lark sing over moor and down, with
Chicot, than listen to the starved-mouse squeak in the bouge of
Therese Raquin, with M. Zola.  Not that there is not a place and an
hour for him, and others like him; but they are not, if you please,
to have the whole world to themselves, and all the time, and all the
praise; they are not to turn the world into a dissecting-room, time
into tedium, and the laurels of Scott and Dumas into crowns of
nettles.

There is no complete life of Alexandre Dumas.  The age has not
produced the intellectual athlete who can gird himself up for that
labour.  One of the worst books that ever was written, if it can be
said to be written, is, I think, the English attempt at a biography
of Dumas.  Style, grammar, taste, feeling, are all bad.  The author
does not so much write a life as draw up an indictment.  The spirit
of his work is grudging, sneering, contemptuous, and pitifully
peddling.  The great charge is that Dumas was a humbug, that he was
not the author of his own books, that his books were written by
"collaborators"--above all, by M. Maquet.  There is no doubt that
Dumas had a regular system of collaboration, which he never
concealed.  But whereas Dumas could turn out books that live,
whoever his assistants were, could any of his assistants write books
that live, without Dumas?  One might as well call any barrister in
good practice a thief and an impostor because he has juniors to
"devil" for him, as make charges of this kind against Dumas.  He
once asked his son to help him; the younger Alexandre declined.  "It
is worth a thousand a year, and you have only to make objections,"
the sire urged; but the son was not to be tempted.  Some excellent
novelists of to-day would be much better if they employed a friend
to make objections.  But, as a rule, the collaborator did much more.
Dumas' method, apparently, was first to talk the subject over with
his aide-de-camp.  This is an excellent practice, as ideas are
knocked out, like sparks (an elderly illustration!), by the contact
of minds.  Then the young man probably made researches, put a rough
sketch on paper, and supplied Dumas, as it were, with his "brief."
Then Dumas took the "brief" and wrote the novel.  He gave it life,
he gave it the spark (l'etincelle); and the story lived and moved.

It is true that he "took his own where he found it," like Molere and
that he took a good deal.  In the gallery of an old country-house,
on a wet day, I came once on the "Memoires" of D'Artagnan, where
they had lain since the family bought them in Queen Anne's time.
There were our old friends the Musketeers, and there were many of
their adventures, told at great length and breadth.  But how much
more vivacious they are in Dumas!   M. About repeats a story of
Dumas and his ways of work.  He met the great man at Marseilles,
where, indeed, Alexandre chanced to be "on with the new love" before
being completely "off with the old."  Dumas picked up M. About,
literally lifted him in his embrace, and carried him off to see a
play which he had written in three days.  The play was a success;
the supper was prolonged till three in the morning; M. About was
almost asleep as he walked home, but Dumas was as fresh as if he had
just got out of bed.  "Go to sleep, old man," he said:  "I, who am
only fifty-five, have three feuilletons to write, which must be
posted to-morrow.  If I have time I shall knock up a little piece
for Montigny--the idea is running in my head."  So next morning M.
About saw the three feuilletons made up for the post, and another
packet addressed to M. Montigny:  it was the play L'Invitation e la
Valse, a chef-d'oeuvre!  Well, the material had been prepared for
Dumas.  M. About saw one of his novels at Marseilles in the
chrysalis.  It was a stout copy-book full of paper, composed by a
practised hand, on the master's design.  Dumas copied out each
little leaf on a big leaf of paper, en y semant l'esprit e pleines
mains.  This was his method.  As a rule, in collaboration, one man
does the work while the other looks on.  Is it likely that Dumas
looked on?  That was not the manner of Dumas.  "Mirecourt and
others," M. About says, "have wept crocodile tears for the
collaborators, the victims of his glory and his talent.  But it is
difficult to lament over the survivors (1884).  The master neither
took their money--for they are rich, nor their fame--for they are
celebrated, nor their merit--for they had and still have plenty.
And they never bewailed their fate:  the reverse!  The proudest
congratulate themselves on having been at so good a school; and M.
Auguste Maquet, the chief of them, speaks with real reverence and
affection of his great friend."  And M. About writes "as one who had
taken the master red-handed, and in the act of collaboration."
Dumas has a curious note on collaboration in his "Souvenirs
Dramatiques."  Of the two men at work together, "one is always the
dupe, and HE is the man of talent."

There is no biography of Dumas, but the small change of a biography
exists in abundance.  There are the many volumes of his "Memoires,"
there are all the tomes he wrote on his travels and adventures in
Africa, Spain, Italy, Russia; the book he wrote on his beasts; the
romance of Ange Pitou, partly autobiographical; and there are plenty
of little studies by people who knew him.  As to his "Memoires," as
to all he wrote about himself, of course his imagination entered
into the narrative.  Like Scott, when he had a good story he liked
to dress it up with a cocked hat and a sword.  Did he perform all
those astonishing and innumerable feats of strength, skill, courage,
address, in revolutions, in voyages, in love, in war, in cookery?
The narrative need not be taken "at the foot of the letter"; great
as was his force and his courage, his fancy was greater still.
There is no room for a biography of him here.  His descent was noble
on one side, with or without the bend sinister, which he said he
would never have disclaimed, had it been his, but which he did not
happen to inherit.  On the other side he MAY have descended from
kings; but, as in the case of "The Fair Cuban," he must have added,
"African, unfortunately."  Did his father perform these mythical
feats of strength? did he lift up a horse between his legs while
clutching a rafter with his hands? did he throw his regiment before
him over a wall, as Guy Heavistone threw the mare which refused the
leap ("Memoires," i. 122)?  No doubt Dumas believed what he heard
about this ancestor--in whom, perhaps, one may see a hint of the
giant Porthos.  In the Revolution and in the wars his father won the
name of Monsieur de l'Humanite, because he made a bonfire of a
guillotine; and of Horatius Cocles, because he held a pass as
bravely as the Roman "in the brave days of old."

This was a father to be proud of; and pluck, tenderness, generosity,
strength, remained the favourite virtues of Dumas.  These he
preached and practised.  They say he was generous before he was
just; it is to be feared this was true, but he gave even more freely
than he received.  A regiment of seedy people sponged on him always;
he could not listen to a tale of misery but he gave what he had, and
sometimes left himself short of a dinner.  He could not even turn a
dog out of doors.  At his Abbotsford, "Monte Cristo," the gates were
open to everybody but bailiffs.  His dog asked other dogs to come
and stay:  twelve came, making thirteen in all.  The old butler
wanted to turn them adrift, and Dumas consented, and repented.

"Michel," he said, "there are some expenses which a man's social
position and the character which he has had the ill-luck to receive
from heaven force upon him.  I don't believe these dogs ruin me.
Let them bide!  But, in the interests of their own good luck, see
they are not thirteen, an unfortunate number!"

"Monsieur, I'll drive one of them away."

"No, no, Michel; let a fourteenth come.  These dogs cost me some
three pounds a month," said Dumas.  "A dinner to five or six friends
would cost thrice as much, and, when they went home, they would say
my wine was good, but certainly that my books were bad."  In this
fashion Dumas fared royally "to the dogs," and his Abbotsford ruined
him as certainly as that other unhappy palace ruined Sir Walter.
He, too, had his miscellaneous kennel; he, too, gave while he had
anything to give, and, when he had nothing else, gave the work of
his pen.  Dumas tells how his big dog, Mouton once flew at him and
bit one of his hands, while the other held the throat of the brute.
"Luckily my hand, though small, is powerful; what it once holds it
holds long--money excepted."  He could not "haud a guid grip o' the
gear."  Neither Scott nor Dumas could shut his ears to a prayer or
his pockets to a beggar, or his doors on whoever knocked at them.

"I might at least have asked him to dinner," Scott was heard
murmuring, when some insufferable bore at last left Abbotsford,
after wasting his time and nearly wearing out his patience.  Neither
man PREACHED socialism; both practised it on the Aristotelian
principle:  the goods of friends are common, and men are our
friends.


The death of Dumas' father, while the son was a child, left Madame
Dumas in great poverty at Villers Cotterets.  Dumas' education was
sadly to seek.  Like most children destined to be bookish, he taught
himself to read very young:  in Buffon, the Bible, and books of
mythology.  He knew all about Jupiter--like David Copperfield's  Tom
Jones, "a child's Jupiter, an innocent creature"--all about every
god, goddess, fawn, dryad, nymph--and he never forgot this useful
information.  Dear Lempriere, thou art superseded; but how much more
delightful thou art than the fastidious Smith or the learned
Preller!  Dumas had one volume of the "Arabian Nights," with
Aladdin's lamp therein, the sacred lamp which he was to keep burning
with a flame so brilliant and so steady.  It is pleasant to know
that, in his boyhood, this great romancer loved Virgil.  "Little as
is my Latin, I have ever adored Virgil:  his tenderness for exiles,
his melancholy vision of death, his foreboding of an unknown God,
have always moved me; the melody of his verses charmed me most, and
they lull me still between asleep and awake."  School days did not
last long:  Madame Dumas got a little post--a licence to sell
tobacco--and at fifteen Dumas entered a notary's office, like his
great Scotch forerunner.  He was ignorant of his vocation for the
stage--Racine and Corneille fatigued him prodigiously--till he saw
Hamlet:  Hamlet diluted by Ducis.  He had never heard of
Shakespeare, but here was something he could appreciate.  Here was
"a profound impression, full of inexplicable emotion, vague desires,
fleeting lights, that, so far, lit up only a chaos."

Oddly enough, his earliest literary essay was the translation of
Burger's "Lenore."  Here, again, he encounters Scott; but Scott
translated the ballad, and Dumas failed.  Les mortes vont vite! the
same refrain woke poetry in both the Frenchman and the Scotchman.


"Ha! ha! the Dead can ride with speed:
Dost fear to ride with me?"


So Dumas' literary career began with a defeat, but it was always a
beginning.  He had just failed with "Lenore," when Leuven asked him
to collaborate in a play.  He was utterly ignorant, he says; he had
not succeeded in gallant efforts to read through "Gil Blas" and "Don
Quixote."  "To my shame," he writes, "the man has not been more
fortunate with those masterpieces than the boy."  He had not yet
heard of Scott, Cooper, Goethe; he had heard of Shakespeare only as
a barbarian.  Other plays the boy wrote--failures, of course--and
then Dumas poached his way to Paris, shooting partridges on the
road, and paying the hotel expenses by his success in the chase.  He
was introduced to the great Talma:  what a moment for Talma, had he
known it!  He saw the theatres.  He went home, but returned to
Paris, drew a small prize in a lottery, and sat next a gentleman at
the play, a gentleman who read the rarest of Elzevirs, "Le
Pastissier Francais," and gave him a little lecture on Elzevirs in
general.  Soon this gentleman began to hiss the piece, and was
turned out.  He was Charles Nodier, and one of the anonymous authors
of the play he was hissing!  I own that this amusing chapter lacks
verisimilitude.  It reads as if Dumas had chanced to "get up" the
subject of Elzevirs, and had fashioned his new knowledge into a
little story.  He could make a story out of anything--he "turned all
to favour and to prettiness."  Could I translate the whole passage,
and print it here, it would be longer than this article; but, ah,
how much more entertaining!  For whatever Dumas did he did with such
life, spirit, wit, he told it with such vivacity, that his whole
career is one long romance of the highest quality.  Lassagne told
him he must read--must read Goethe, Scott, Cooper, Froissart,
Joinville, Brantome.  He read them to some purpose.  He entered the
service of the Duc d'Orleans as a clerk, for he wrote a clear hand,
and, happily, wrote at astonishing speed.  He is said to have
written a short play in a cottage where he went to rest for an hour
or two after shooting all the morning.  The practice in a notary's
office stood him, as it stood Scott, in good stead.  When a dog bit
his hand he managed to write a volume without using his thumb.  I
have tried it, but forbear--in mercy to the printers.  He performed
wild feats of rapid caligraphy when a clerk under the Duc d'Orleans,
and he wrote his plays in one "hand," his novels in another.  The
"hand" used in his dramas he acquired when, in days of poverty, he
used to write in bed.  To this habit he also attributed the
brutalite of his earlier pieces, but there seems to be no good
reason why a man should write like a brute because it is in bed that
he writes.

In those days of small things he fought his first duel, and made a
study of Fear and Courage.  His earliest impulse was to rush at
danger; if he had to wait, he felt his courage oozing out at the
tips of his fingers, like Bob Acres, but in the moment of peril he
was himself again.  In dreams he was a coward, because, as he
argues, the natural man IS a poltroon, and conscience, honour, all
the spiritual and commanding part of our nature, goes to sleep in
dreams.  The animal terror asserts itself unchecked.  It is a theory
not without exceptions.  In dreams one has plenty of conscience (at
least that is my experience), though it usually takes the form of
remorse.  And in dreams one often affronts dangers which, in waking
hours, one might probably avoid if one could.


Dumas' first play, an unimportant vaudeville, was acted in 1825.
His first novels were also published then; he took part of the risk,
and only four copies were sold.  He afterward used the ideas in more
mature works, as Mr. Sheridan Le Fanu employed three or four times
(with perfect candour and fairness) the most curious incident in
"Uncle Silas."  Like Mr. Arthur Pendennis, Dumas at this time wrote
poetry "up to" pictures and illustrations.  It is easy, but seldom
lucrative work.  He translated a play of Schiller's into French
verse, chiefly to gain command of that vehicle, for his heart was
fixed on dramatic success.  Then came the visit of Kean and other
English actors to Paris.  He saw the true Hamlet, and, for the first
time on any stage, "the play of real passions."  Emulation woke in
him:  a casual work of art led him to the story of Christina of
Sweden, he wrote his play Christine (afterward reconstructed); he
read it to Baron Taylor, who applauded; the Comedie Francaise
accepted it, but a series of intrigues disappointed him, after all.
His energy at this moment was extraordinary, for he was very poor,
his mother had a stroke of paralysis, his bureau was always bullying
and interfering with him.  But nothing could snub this "force of
nature," and he immediately produced his Henri Trois, the first
romantic drama of France.  This had an instant and noisy success,
and the first night of the play he spent at the theatre, and at the
bedside of his unconscious mother.  The poor lady could not even
understand whence the flowers came that he laid on her couch, the
flowers thrown to the young man--yesterday unknown, and to-day the
most famous of contemporary names.  All this tale of triumph,
checkered by enmities and diversified by duels, Dumas tells with the
vigour and wit of his novels.  He is his own hero, and loses nothing
in the process; but the other characters--Taylor, Nodier, the Duc
d'Orleans, the spiteful press-men, the crabbed old officials--all
live like the best of the persons in his tales.  They call Dumas
vain:  he had reason to be vain, and no candid or generous reader
will be shocked by his pleasant, frank, and artless enjoyment of
himself and of his adventures.  Oddly enough, they are small-minded
and small-hearted people who are most shocked by what they call
"vanity" in the great.  Dumas' delight in himself and his doings is
only the flower of his vigorous existence, and in his "Memoires," at
least, it is as happy and encouraging as his laugh, or the laugh of
Porthos; it is a kind of radiance, in which others, too, may bask
and enjoy themselves.  And yet it is resented by tiny scribblers,
frozen in their own chill self-conceit.

There is nothing incredible (if modern researches are accurate) in
the stories he tells of his own success in Hypnotism, as it is
called now, Mesmerism or Magnetism as it was called then.  Who was
likely to possess these powers, if not this good-humoured natural
force?  "I believe that, by aid of magnetism, a bad man might do
much mischief.  I doubt whether, by help of magnetism, a good man
can do the slightest good," he says, probably with perfect justice.
His dramatic success fired Victor Hugo, and very pleasant it is to
read Dumas' warm-hearted praise of that great poet.  Dumas had no
jealousy--no more than Scott.  As he believed in no success without
talent, so he disbelieved in genius which wins no success.  "Je ne
crois pas au talent ignore, au genie inconnu, moi."  Genius he
saluted wherever he met it, but was incredulous about invisible and
inaudible genius; and I own to sharing his scepticism.  People who
complain of Dumas' vanity may be requested to observe that he seems
just as "vain" of Hugo's successes, or of Scribe's, as of his own,
and just as much delighted by them.

He was now struck, as he walked on the boulevard one day, by the
first idea of Antony--an idea which, to be fair, seems rather absurd
than tragic, to some tastes.  "A lover, caught with a married woman,
kills her to save her character, and dies on the scaffold."  Here is
indeed a part to tear a cat in!


The performances of M. Dumas during the Revolution of 1830, are they
not written in the Book of the Chronicles of Alexandre the Great?
But they were not literary excellences which he then displayed, and
we may leave this king-maker to hover, "like an eagle, above the
storms of anarchy."

Even to sketch his later biography is beyond our province.  In 1830
he had forty years to run, and he filled the cup of the Hours to the
brim with activity and adventure.  His career was one of
unparalleled production, punctuated by revolutions, voyages, exiles,
and other intervals of repose.  The tales he tells of his prowess in
1830, and with Garibaldi, seem credible to me, and are borne out, so
far, by the narrative of M. Maxime Ducamp, who met him at Naples, in
the Garibaldian camp.  Like Mr. Jingle, in "Pickwick," he "banged
the field-piece, twanged the lyre," and was potting at the foes of
the republic with a double-barrelled gun, when he was not composing
plays, romances, memoirs, criticisms.  He has told the tale of his
adventures with the Comedie Francaise, where the actors laughed at
his Antony, and where Madame Mars and he quarrelled and made it up
again.  His plays often won an extravagant success; his novels--his
great novels, that is--made all Europe his friend.  He gained large
sums of money, which flowed out of his fingers, though it is said by
some that his Abbotsford, Monte Cristo, was no more a palace than
the villa which a retired tradesman builds to shelter his old age.
But the money disappeared as fast as if Monte Cristo had really been
palatial, and worthy of the fantasy of a Nero.  He got into debt,
fled to Belgium, returned, founded the Mousquetaire, a literary
paper of the strangest and most shiftless kind.  In "Alexandre Dumas
e la Maison d'Or," M. Philibert Audebrand tells the tale of this
Micawber of newspapers.  Everything went into it, good or bad, and
the name of Dumas was expected to make all current coin.  For Dumas,
unluckily, was as prodigal of his name as of his gold, and no
reputation could bear the drafts he made on his celebrity.  His son
says, in the preface to Le Fils Naturel:  "Tragedy, dramas, history,
romance, comedy, travel, you cast all of them in the furnace and the
mould of your brain, and you peopled the world of fiction with new
creations.  The newspaper, the book, the theatre, burst asunder, too
narrow for your puissant shoulders; you fed France, Europe, America
with your works; you made the wealth of publishers, translators,
plagiarists; printers and copyists toiled after you in vain.  In the
fever of production you did not always try and prove the metal which
you employed, and sometimes you tossed into the furnace whatever
came to your hand.  The fire made the selection:  what was your own
is bronze, what was not yours vanished in smoke."

The simile is noble and worthy of the Cyclopean craftsman, Dumas.
His great works endured; the plays which renewed the youth of the
French stage, the novels which Thackeray loved to praise, these
remain, and we trust they may always remain, to the delight of
mankind and for the sorrow of prigs.


So much has been written of Dumas' novels that criticism can hardly
hope to say more that is both new and true about them.  It is
acknowledged that, in such a character as Henri III., Dumas made
history live, as magically as Scott revived the past in his Louis
XI., or Balfour of Burley.  It is admitted that Dumas' good tales
are told with a vigour and life which rejoice the heart; that his
narrative is never dull, never stands still, but moves with a
freedom of adventure which perhaps has no parallel.  He may fall
short of the humour, the kindly wisdom, the genial greatness of Sir
Walter at his best, and he has not that supernatural touch, that
tragic grandeur, which Scott inherits from Homer and from
Shakespeare.  In another Homeric quality, [Greek text], as Homer
himself calls it, in the "delight of battle" and the spirit of the
fray, Scott and Dumas are alike masters.  Their fights and the
fights in the Icelandic sagas are the best that have ever been drawn
by mortal man.  When swords are aloft, in siege or on the
greensward, or in the midnight chamber where an ambush is laid,
Scott and Dumas are indeed themselves.  The steel rings, the
bucklers clash, the parry and lunge pass and answer too swift for
the sight.  If Dumas has not, as he certainly has not, the noble
philosophy and kindly knowledge of the heart which are Scott's, he
is far more swift, more witty, more diverting.  He is not prolix,
his style is not involved, his dialogue is as rapid and keen as an
assault at arms.  His favourite virtues and graces, we repeat it,
are loyalty, friendship, gaiety, generosity, courage, beauty, and
strength.  He is himself the friend of the big, stupid, excellent
Porthos; of Athos, the noble and melancholy swordsman of sorrow; of
D'Artagnan, the indomitable, the trusty, the inexhaustible in
resource; but his heart is never on the side of the shifty Aramis,
with all his beauty, dexterity, bravery, and brilliance.  The brave
Bussy, and the chivalrous, the doomed La Mole, are more dear to him;
and if he embellishes their characters, giving them charms and
virtues that never were theirs, history loses nothing, and romance
and we are the gainers.  In all he does, at his best, as in the
"Chevalier d'Harmenthal," he has movement, kindness, courage, and
gaiety.  His philosophy of life is that old philosophy of the sagas
and of Homer.  Let us enjoy the movement of the fray, the faces of
fair women, the taste of good wine; let us welcome life like a
mistress, let us welcome death like a friend, and with a jest--if
death comes with honour.

Dumas is no pessimist.  "Heaven has made but one drama for man--the
world," he writes, "and during these three thousand years mankind
has been hissing it."  It is certain that, if a moral censorship
could have prevented it, this great drama of mortal passions would
never have been licensed, at all, never performed.  But Dumas, for
one, will not hiss it, but applauds with all his might--a charmed
spectator, a fortunate actor in the eternal piece, where all the men
and women are only players.  You hear his manly laughter, you hear
his mighty hands approving, you see the tears he sheds when he had
"slain Porthos"--great tears like those of Pantagruel.


His may not be the best, nor the ultimate philosophy, but it IS a
philosophy, and one of which we may some day feel the want.  I read
the stilted criticisms, the pedantic carpings of some modern men who
cannot write their own language, and I gather that Dumas is out of
date.  There is a new philosophy of doubts and delicacies, of
dallyings and refinements, of half-hearted lookers-on, desiring and
fearing some new order of the world.  Dumas does not dally nor
doubt:  he takes his side, he rushes into the smoke, he strikes his
foe; but there is never an unkind word on his lip, nor a grudging
thought in his heart.

It may be said that Dumas is not a master of words and phrases, that
he is not a raffine of expression, nor a jeweller of style.  When I
read the maunderings, the stilted and staggering sentences, the
hesitating phrases, the far-sought and dear-bought and worthless
word-juggles; the sham scientific verbiage, the native pedantries of
many modern so-called "stylists," I rejoice that Dumas was not one
of these.  He told a plain tale, in the language suited to a plain
tale, with abundance of wit and gaiety, as in the reflections of his
Chicot, as in all his dialogues.  But he did not gnaw the end of his
pen in search of some word that nobody had ever used in this or that
connection before.  The right word came to him, the simple
straightforward phrase.  Epithet-hunting may be a pretty sport, and
the bag of the epithet-hunter may contain some agreeable epigrams
and rare specimens of style; but a plain tale of adventure, of love
and war, needs none of this industry, and is even spoiled by
inopportune diligence.  Speed, directness, lucidity are the
characteristics of Dumas' style, and they are exactly the
characteristics which his novels required.  Scott often failed, his
most loyal admirers may admit, in these essentials; but it is rarely
that Dumas fails, when he is himself and at his best.

In spite of his heedless education, Dumas had true critical
qualities, and most admired the best things.  We have already seen
how he writes about Shakespeare, Virgil, Goethe, Scott.  But it may
be less familiarly known that this burly man-of-all-work, ignorant
as he was of Greek, had a true and keen appreciation of Homer.
Dumas declares that he only thrice criticised his contemporaries in
an unfavourable sense, and as one wishful to find fault.  The
victims were Casimir Delavigne, Scribe, and Ponsard.  On each
occasion Dumas declares that, after reflecting, he saw that he was
moved by a little personal pique, not by a disinterested love of
art.  He makes his confession with a rare nobility of candour; and
yet his review of Ponsard is worthy of him.  M. Ponsard, who, like
Dumas, was no scholar, wrote a play styled Ulysse, and borrowed from
the Odyssey.  Dumas follows Ponsard, Odyssey in hand, and while he
proves that the dramatist failed to understand Homer, proves that he
himself was, in essentials, a capable Homeric critic.  Dumas
understands that far-off heroic age.  He lives in its life and
sympathises with its temper.  Homer and he are congenial; across the
great gulf of time they exchange smiles and a salute.

"Oh! ancient Homer, dear and good and noble, I am minded now and
again to leave all and translate thee--I, who have never a word of
Greek--so empty and so dismal are the versions men make of thee, in
verse or in prose."

How Dumas came to divine Homer, as it were, through a language he
knew not, who shall say?  He DID divine him by a natural sympathy of
excellence, and his chapters on the "Ulysse" of Ponsard are worth a
wilderness of notes by learned and most un-Homeric men.  For,
indeed, who can be less like the heroic minstrel than the academic
philologist?

This universality deserves note.  The Homeric student who takes up a
volume of Dumas at random finds that he is not only Homeric
naturally, but that he really knows his Homer.  What did he nor
know?  His rapidity in reading must have been as remarkable as his
pace with the pen.  As M. Blaze de Bury says:  "Instinct,
experience, memory were all his; he sees at a glance, he compares in
a flash, he understands without conscious effort, he forgets nothing
that he has read."  The past and present are photographed
imperishably on his brain, he knows the manners of all ages and all
countries, the names of all the arms that men have used, all the
garments they have worn, all the dishes they have tasted, all the
terms of all professions, from swordsmanship to coach-building.
Other authors have to wait, and hunt for facts; nothing stops Dumas:
he knows and remembers everything.  Hence his rapidity, his
facility, his positive delight in labour:  hence it came that he
might be heard, like Dickens, laughing while he worked.


This is rather a eulogy than a criticism of Dumas.  His faults are
on the surface, visible to all men.  He was not only rapid, he was
hasty, he was inconsistent; his need of money as well as his love of
work made him put his hand to dozens of perishable things.  A
beginner, entering the forest of Dumas' books, may fail to see the
trees for the wood.  He may be counselled to select first the cycle
of d'Artagnan--the "Musketeers," "Twenty Years After," and the
"Vicomte de Bragelonne."  Mr. Stevenson's delightful essay on the
last may have sent many readers to it; I confess to preferring the
youth of the "Musketeers" to their old age.  Then there is the cycle
of the Valois, whereof the "Dame de Monsereau" is the best--perhaps
the best thing Dumas ever wrote.  The "Tulipe Noire" is a novel
girls may read, as Thackeray said, with confidence.  The "Chevalier
d'Harmenthal" is nearly (not quite) as good as "Quentin Durward."
"Monte Cristo" has the best beginning--and loses itself in the
sands.  The novels on the Revolution are not among the most
alluring:  the famed device "L. P. D." (lilia pedibus destrue) has
the bad luck to suggest "London Parcels Delivery."  That is an
accident, but the Revolution is in itself too terrible and pitiful,
and too near us (on both sides!) for fiction.

On Dumas' faults it has been no pleasure to dwell.  In a recent work
I find the Jesuit Le Moyne quoted, saying about Charles V.:  "What
need that future ages should be made acquainted so religious an
Emperor was not always chaste!"  The same reticence allures one in
regard to so delightful an author as Dumas.  He who had enriched so
many died poor; he who had told of conquering France, died during
the Terrible Year.  But he could forgive, could appreciate, the
valour of an enemy.  Of the Scotch at Waterloo he writes:  "It was
not enough to kill them:  we had to push them down."  Dead, they
still stood "shoulder to shoulder."  In the same generous temper an
English cavalry officer wrote home, after Waterloo, that he would
gladly have given the rest of his life to have served, on that day,
in our infantry or in the French cavalry.  These are the spirits
that warm the heart, that make us all friends; and to the great, the
brave, the generous Dumas we cry, across the years and across the
tomb, our Ave atque vale!



MR. STEVENSON'S WORKS



Perhaps the first quality in Mr. Stevenson's works, now so many and
so various, which strikes a reader, is the buoyancy, the survival of
the child in him.  He has told the world often, in prose and verse,
how vivid are his memories of his own infancy.  This retention of
childish recollections he shares, no doubt, with other people of
genius:  for example, with George Sand, whose legend of her own
infancy is much more entertaining, and perhaps will endure longer,
than her novels.  Her youth, like Scott's and like Mr. Stevenson's,
was passed all in fantasy:  in playing at being some one else, in
the invention of imaginary characters, who were living to her, in
the fabrication of endless unwritten romances.  Many persons, who do
not astonish the world by their genius, have lived thus in their
earliest youth.  But, at a given moment, the fancy dies out of them:
this often befalls imaginative boys in their first year at school.
"Many are called, few chosen"; but it may be said with probable
truth, that there has never been a man of genius in letters, whose
boyhood was not thus fantastic, "an isle of dreams."  We know how
Scott and De Quincey inhabited airy castles; and Gillies tells us,
though Lockhart does not, that Scott, in manhood, was occasionally
so lost in thought, that he knew not where he was nor what he was
doing.

The peculiarity of Mr. Stevenson is not only to have been a
fantastic child, and to retain, in maturity, that fantasy ripened
into imagination:  he has also kept up the habit of dramatising
everything, of playing, half consciously, many parts, of making the
world "an unsubstantial fairy place."  This turn of mind it is that
causes his work occasionally to seem somewhat freakish.  Thus, in
the fogs and horrors of London, he plays at being an Arabian tale-
teller, and his "New Arabian Nights" are a new kind of romanticism--
Oriental, freakish, like the work of a changeling.  Indeed, this
curious genius, springing from a family of Scottish engineers,
resembles nothing so much as one of the fairy children, whom the
ladies of Queen Proserpina's court used to leave in the cradles of
Border keeps or of peasants' cottages.  Of the Scot he has little
but the power of touching us with a sense of the supernatural, and a
decided habit of moralising; for no Scot of genius has been more
austere with Robert Burns.  On the other hand, one element of Mr.
Stevenson's ethical disquisitions is derived from his dramatic
habit.  His optimism, his gay courage, his habit of accepting the
world as very well worth living in and looking at, persuaded one of
his critics that he was a hard-hearted young athlete of iron frame.
Now, of the athlete he has nothing but his love of the open air:  it
is the eternal child that drives him to seek adventures and to
sojourn among beach-combers and savages.  Thus, an admiring but far
from optimistic critic may doubt whether Mr. Stevenson's content
with the world is not "only his fun," as Lamb said of Coleridge's
preaching; whether he is but playing at being the happy warrior in
life; whether he is not acting that part, himself to himself.  At
least, it is a part fortunately conceived and admirably sustained:
a difficult part too, whereas that of the pessimist is as easy as
whining.

Mr. Stevenson's work has been very much written about, as it has
engaged and delighted readers of every age, station, and character.
Boys, of course, have been specially addressed in the books of
adventure, children in "A Child's Garden of Verse," young men and
maidens in "Virginibus Puerisque,"--all ages in all the curiously
varied series of volumes.  "Kidnapped" was one of the last books
which the late Lord Iddesleigh read; and I trust there is no harm in
mentioning the pleasure which Mr. Matthew Arnold took in the same
story.  Critics of every sort have been kind to Mr. Stevenson, in
spite of the fact that the few who first became acquainted with his
genius praised it with all the warmth of which they were masters.
Thus he has become a kind of classic in his own day, for an
undisputed reputation makes a classic while it lasts.  But was ever
so much fame won by writings which might be called scrappy and
desultory by the advocatus diaboli?  It is a most miscellaneous
literary baggage that Mr. Stevenson carries.  First, a few magazine
articles; then two little books of sentimental journeyings, which
convince the reader that Mr. Stevenson is as good company to himself
as his books are to others.  Then came a volume or two of essays,
literary and social, on books and life.  By this time there could be
no doubt that Mr. Stevenson had a style of his own, modelled to some
extent on the essayists of the last century, but with touches of
Thackeray; with original breaks and turns, with a delicate
freakishness, in short, and a determined love of saying things as
the newspapers do not say them.  All this work undoubtedly smelt a
trifle of the lamp, and was therefore dear to some, and an offence
to others.  For my part, I had delighted in the essays, from the
first that appeared in Macmillan's Magazine, shortly after the
Franco-German war.  In this little study, "Ordered South," Mr.
Stevenson was employing himself in extracting all the melancholy
pleasure which the Riviera can give to a wearied body and a mind
resisting the clouds of early malady,


"Alas, the worn and broken board,
How can it bear the painter's dye!
The harp of strained and tuneless chord,
How to the minstrel's skill reply!
To aching eyes each landscape lowers,
To feverish pulse each gale blows chill,
And Araby's or Eden's bowers
Were barren as this moorland hill," -


wrote Scott, in an hour of malady and depression.  But this was not
the spirit of "Ordered South":  the younger soul rose against the
tyranny of the body; and that familiar glamour which, in illness,
robs Tintoretto of his glow, did not spoil the midland sea to Mr.
Stevenson.  His gallant and cheery stoicism were already with him;
and so perfect, if a trifle overstudied, was his style, that one
already foresaw a new and charming essayist.

But none of those early works, nor the delightful book on Edinburgh,
prophesied of the story teller.  Mr. Stevenson's first published
tales, the "New Arabian Nights," originally appeared in a quaintly
edited weekly paper, which nobody read, or nobody but the writers in
its columns.  They welcomed the strange romances with rejoicings:
but perhaps there was only one of them who foresaw that Mr.
Stevenson's forte was to be fiction, not essay writing; that he was
to appeal with success to the large public, and not to the tiny
circle who surround the essayist.  It did not seem likely that our
incalculable public would make themselves at home in those fantastic
purlieus which Mr. Stevenson's fancy discovered near the Strand.
The impossible Young Man with the Cream Tarts, the ghastly revels of
the Suicide Club, the Oriental caprices of the Hansom Cabs--who
could foresee that the public would taste them!  It is true that Mr.
Stevenson's imagination made the President of the Club, and the
cowardly member, Mr. Malthus, as real as they were terrible.  His
romance always goes hand in hand with reality; and Mr. Malthus is as
much an actual man of skin and bone, as Silas Lapham is a man of
flesh and blood.  The world saw this, and applauded the "Noctes of
Prince Floristan," in a fairy London.

Yet, excellent and unique as these things were, Mr. Stevenson had
not yet "found himself."  It would be more true to say that he had
only discovered outlying skirts of his dominions.  Has he ever hit
on the road to the capital yet? and will he ever enter it laurelled,
and in triumph?  That is precisely what one may doubt, not as
without hope.  He is always making discoveries in his realm; it is
less certain that he will enter its chief city in state.  His next
work was rather in the nature of annexation and invasion than a
settling of his own realms.  "Prince Otto" is not, to my mind, a
ruler in his proper soil.  The provinces of George Sand and of Mr.
George Meredith have been taken captive.  "Prince Otto" is fantastic
indeed, but neither the fantasy nor the style is quite Mr.
Stevenson's.  There are excellent passages, and the Scotch soldier
of fortune is welcome, and the ladies abound in subtlety and wit.
But the book, at least to myself, seems an extremely elaborate and
skilful pastiche.  I cannot believe in the persons.  I vaguely smell
a moral allegory (as in "Will of the Mill").  I do not clearly
understand what it is all about.  The scene is fairyland; but it is
not the fairyland of Perrault.  The ladies are beautiful and witty;
but they are escaped from a novel of Mr. Meredith's, and have no
business here.  The book is no more Mr. Stevenson's than "The Tale
of Two Cities" was Mr. Dickens's.

It was probably by way of mere diversion and child's play that Mr.
Stevenson began "Treasure Island."  He is an amateur of boyish
pleasures of masterpieces at a penny plain and twopence coloured.
Probably he had looked at the stories of adventure in penny papers
which only boys read, and he determined sportively to compete with
their unknown authors.  "Treasure Island" came out in such a
periodical, with the emphatic woodcuts which adorn them.  It is said
that the puerile public was not greatly stirred.  A story is a
story, and they rather preferred the regular purveyors.  The very
faint archaism of the style may have alienated them.  But, when
"Treasure Island" appeared as a real book, then every one who had a
smack of youth left was a boy again for some happy hours.  Mr.
Stevenson had entered into another province of his realm:  the king
had come to his own again.

They say the seamanship is inaccurate; I care no more than I do for
the year 30.  They say too many people are killed.  They all died in
fair fight, except a victim of John Silver's.  The conclusion is a
little too like part of Poe's most celebrated tale, but nobody has
bellowed "Plagiarist!"  Some people may not look over a fence:  Mr.
Stevenson, if he liked, might steal a horse,--the animal in this
case is only a skeleton.  A very sober student might add that the
hero is impossibly clever; but, then, the hero is a boy, and this is
a boy's book.  For the rest, the characters live.  Only genius could
have invented John Silver, that terribly smooth-spoken mariner.
Nothing but genius could have drawn that simple yokel on the island,
with his craving for cheese as a Christian dainty.  The blustering
Billy Bones is a little masterpiece:  the blind Pew, with his
tapping stick (there are three such blind tappers in Mr. Stevenson's
books), strikes terror into the boldest.  Then, the treasure is
thoroughly satisfactory in kind, and there is plenty of it.  The
landscape, as in the feverish, fog-smothered flat, is gallantly
painted.  And there are no interfering petticoats in the story.

As for the "Black Arrow," I confess to sharing the disabilities of
the "Critic on the Hearth," to whom it is dedicated.  "Kidnapped" is
less a story than a fragment; but it is a noble fragment.  Setting
aside the wicked old uncle, who in his later behaviour is of the
house of Ralph Nickleby, "Kidnapped" is all excellent--perhaps Mr.
Stevenson's masterpiece.  Perhaps, too, only a Scotchman knows how
good it is, and only a Lowland Scot knows how admirable a character
is the dour, brave, conceited David Balfour.  It is like being in
Scotland again to come on "the green drive-road running wide through
the heather," where David "took his last look of Kirk Essendean, the
trees about the manse, and the big rowans in the kirkyard, where his
father and mother lay."  Perfectly Scotch, too, is the mouldering,
empty house of the Miser, with the stamped leather on the walls.
And the Miser is as good as a Scotch Trapbois, till he becomes
homicidal, and then one fails to recognise him unless he is a little
mad, like that other frantic uncle in "The Merry Men."  The scenes
on the ship, with the boy who is murdered, are better--I think more
real--than the scenes of piratical life in "The Master of
Ballantrae."  The fight in the Round House, even if it were
exaggerated, would be redeemed by the "Song of the Sword of Alan."
As to Alan Breck himself, with his valour and vanity, his good
heart, his good conceit of himself, his fantastic loyalty, he is
absolutely worthy of the hand that drew Callum Bey and the Dougal
creature.  It is just possible that we see, in "Kidnapped," more
signs of determined labour, more evidence of touches and retouches,
than in "Rob Roy."  In nothing else which it attempts is it
inferior; in mastery of landscape, as in the scene of the lonely
rock in a dry and thirsty land, it is unsurpassed.  If there are
signs of laboured handling on Alan, there are none in the sketches
of Cluny and of Rob Roy's son, the piper.  What a generous artist is
Alan!  "Robin Oig," he said, when it was done, "ye are a great
piper.  I am not fit to blow in the same kingdom with you.  Body of
me! ye have mair music in your sporran than I have in my head."

"Kidnapped," we said, is a fragment.  It ends anywhere, or nowhere,
as if the pen had dropped from a weary hand.  Thus, and for other
reasons, one cannot pretend to set what is not really a whole
against such a rounded whole as "Rob Roy," or against "The Legend of
Montrose."  Again, "Kidnapped" is a novel without a woman in it:
not here is Di Vernon, not here is Helen McGregor.  David Balfour is
the pragmatic Lowlander; he does not bear comparison, excellent as
he is, with Baillie Nicol Jarvie, the humorous Lowlander:  he does
not live in the memory like the immortal Baillie.  It is as a series
of scenes and sketches that "Kidnapped" is unmatched among Mr.
Stevenson's works.

In "The Master of Ballantrae" Mr. Stevenson makes a gallant effort
to enter what I have ventured to call the capital of his kingdom.
He does introduce a woman, and confronts the problems of love as
well as of fraternal hatred.  The "Master" is studied, is polished
ad unguem; it is a whole in itself, it is a remarkably daring
attempt to write the tragedy, as, in "Waverley," Scott wrote the
romance, of Scotland about the time of the Forty-Five.  With such a
predecessor and rival, Mr. Stevenson wisely leaves the pomps and
battles of the Forty-Five, its chivalry and gallantry, alone.  He
shows us the seamy side:  the intrigues, domestic and political; the
needy Irish adventurer with the Prince, a person whom Scott had not
studied.  The book, if completely successful, would be Mr.
Stevenson's "Bride of Lammermoor."  To be frank, I do not think it
completely successful--a victory all along the line.  The obvious
weak point is Secundra Dass, that Indian of unknown nationality; for
surely his name marks him as no Hindoo.  The Master could not have
brought him, shivering like Jos Sedley's black servant, to Scotland.
As in America, this alien would have found it "too dam cold."  My
power of belief (which verges on credulity) is staggered by the
ghastly attempt to reanimate the buried Master.  Here, at least to
my taste, the freakish changeling has got the better of Mr.
Stevenson, and has brought in an element out of keeping with the
steady lurid tragedy of fraternal hatred.  For all the rest, it were
a hard judge that had anything but praise.  The brilliant
blackguardism of the Master; his touch of sentiment as he leaves
Durisdeer for the last time, with a sad old song on his lips; his
fascination; his ruthlessness; his irony;--all are perfect.  It is
not very easy to understand the Chevalier Bourke, that Barry Lyndon,
with no head and with a good heart, that creature of a bewildered
kindly conscience; but it is easy to like him.  How admirable is his
undeflected belief in and affection for the Master!  How excellent
and how Irish he is, when he buffoons himself out of his perils with
the pirates!  The scenes are brilliant and living, as when the
Master throws the guinea through the Hall window, or as in the
darkling duel in the garden.  It needed an austere artistic
conscience to make Henry, the younger brother, so unlovable with all
his excellence, and to keep the lady so true, yet so much in shadow.
This is the best woman among Mr. Stevenson's few women; but even she
is almost always reserved, veiled as it were.

The old Lord, again, is a portrait as lifelike as Scott could have
drawn, and more delicately touched than Scott would have cared to
draw it:  a French companion picture to the Baron Bradwardine.  The
whole piece reads as if Mr. Stevenson had engaged in a struggle with
himself as he wrote.  The sky is never blue, the sun never shines:
we weary for a "westland wind."  There is something "thrawn," as the
Scotch say, about the story; there is often a touch of this sinister
kind in the author's work.  The language is extraordinarily artful,
as in the mad lord's words, "I have felt the hilt dirl on his
breast-bone."  And yet, one is hardly thrilled as one expects to be,
when, as Mackellar says, "the week-old corpse looked me for a moment
in the face."

Probably none of Mr. Stevenson's many books has made his name so
familiar as "Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde."  I read it first in
manuscript, alone, at night; and, when the Butler and Mr. Urmson
came to the Doctor's door, I confess that I threw it down, and went
hastily to bed.  It is the most gruesome of all his writings, and so
perfect that one can complain only of the slightly too obvious
moral; and, again, that really Mr. Hyde was more of a gentleman than
the unctuous Dr. Jekyll, with his "bedside manner."

So here, not to speak of some admirable short stories like "Thrawn
Janet," is a brief catalogue--little more--of Mr. Stevenson's
literary baggage.  It is all good, though variously good; yet the
wise world asks for the masterpiece.  It is said that Mr. Stevenson
has not ventured on the delicate and dangerous ground of the novel,
because he has not written a modern love story.  But who has?  There
are love affairs in Dickens, but do we remember or care for them?
Is it the love affairs that we remember in Scott?  Thackeray may
touch us with Clive's and Jack Belsize's misfortunes, with Esmond's
melancholy passion, and amuse us with Pen in so many toils, and
interest us in the little heroine of the "Shabby Genteel Story."
But it is not by virtue of those episodes that Thackeray is so
great.  Love stories are best done by women, as in "Mr. Gilfil's
Love Story"; and, perhaps, in an ordinary way, by writers like
Trollope.  One may defy critics to name a great English author in
fiction whose chief and distinguishing merit is in his pictures of
the passion of Love.  Still, they all give Love his due stroke in
the battle, and perhaps Mr. Stevenson will do so some day.  But I
confess that, if he ever excels himself, I do not expect it to be in
a love story.

Possibly it may be in a play.  If he again attempt the drama, he has
this in his favour, that he will not deal in supernumeraries.  In
his tales his minor characters are as carefully drawn as his chief
personages.  Consider, for example, the minister, Henderland, the
man who is so fond of snuff, in "Kidnapped," and, in the "Master of
Ballantrae," Sir William Johnson, the English Governor.  They are
the work of a mind as attentive to details, as ready to subordinate
or obliterate details which are unessential.  Thus Mr. Stevenson's
writings breathe equally of work in the study and of inspiration
from adventure in the open air, and thus he wins every vote, and
pleases every class of reader.



THOMAS HAYNES BAYLY



I cannot sing the old songs, nor indeed any others, but I can read
them, in the neglected works of Thomas Haynes Bayly.  The name of
Bayly may be unfamiliar, but every one almost has heard his ditties
chanted--every one much over forty, at all events.  "I'll hang my
Harp on a Willow Tree," and "I'd be a Butterfly," and "Oh, no! we
never mention Her," are dimly dear to every friend of Mr. Richard
Swiveller.  If to be sung everywhere, to hear your verses uttered in
harmony with all pianos and quoted by the world at large, be fame,
Bayly had it.  He was an unaffected poet.  He wrote words to airs,
and he is almost absolutely forgotten.  To read him is to be carried
back on the wings of music to the bowers of youth; and to the bowers
of youth I have been wafted, and to the old booksellers.  You do not
find on every stall the poems of Bayly; but a copy in two volumes
has been discovered, edited by Mr. Bayly's widow (Bentley, 1844).
They saw the light in the same year as the present critic, and
perhaps they ceased to be very popular before he was breeched.  Mr.
Bayly, according to Mrs. Bayly, "ably penetrated the sources of the
human heart," like Shakespeare and Mr. Howells.  He also "gave to
minstrelsy the attributes of intellect and wit," and "reclaimed even
festive song from vulgarity," in which, since the age of Anacreon,
festive song has notoriously wallowed.  The poet who did all this
was born at Bath in Oct. 1797.  His father was a genteel solicitor,
and his great-grandmother was sister to Lord Delamere, while he had
a remote baronet on the mother's side.  To trace the ancestral
source of his genius was difficult, as in the case of Gifted
Hopkins; but it was believed to flow from his maternal grandfather,
Mr. Freeman, whom his friend, Lord Lavington, regarded as "one of
the finest poets of his age."  Bayly was at school at Winchester,
where he conducted a weekly college newspaper.  His father, like
Scott's, would have made him a lawyer; but "the youth took a great
dislike to it, for his ideas loved to dwell in the regions of
fancy," which are closed to attorneys.  So he thought of being a
clergyman, and was sent to St. Mary's Hall, Oxford.  There "he did
not apply himself to the pursuit of academical honours," but fell in
love with a young lady whose brother he had tended in a fatal
illness.  But "they were both too wise to think of living upon love,
and, after mutual tears and sighs, they parted never to meet again.
The lady, though grieved, was not heartbroken, and soon became the
wife of another."  They usually do.  Mr. Bayly's regret was more
profound, and expressed itself in the touching ditty:


"Oh, no, we never mention her,
Her name is never heard,
My lips are now forbid to speak
That once familiar word;
From sport to sport they hurry me
To banish my regret,
And when they only worry me -

[I beg Mr. Bayly's pardon]

"And when they win a smile from me,
They fancy I forget.

"They bid me seek in change of scene
The charms that others see,
But were I in a foreign land
They'd find no change in me.
'Tis true that I behold no more
The valley where we met;
I do not see the hawthorn tree,
But how can I forget?"

* * *

"They tell me she is happy now,

[And so she was, in fact.]

The gayest of the gay;
They hint that she's forgotten me;
But heed not what they say.
Like me, perhaps, she struggles with
Each feeling of regret:
'Tis true she's married Mr. Smith,
But, ah, does she forget!"


The temptation to parody is really too strong; the last lines,
actually and in an authentic text, are:


"But if she loves as I have loved,
She never can forget."


Bayly had now struck the note, the sweet, sentimental note, of the
early, innocent, Victorian age.  Jeames imitated him:


"R. Hangeline, R. Lady mine,
Dost thou remember Jeames!"


We should do the trick quite differently now, more like this:


"Love spake to me and said:
'Oh, lips, be mute;
Let that one name be dead,
That memory flown and fled,
Untouched that lute!
Go forth,' said Love, 'with willow in thy hand,
And in thy hair
Dead blossoms wear,
Blown from the sunless land.

"'Go forth,' said Love; 'thou never more shalt see
Her shadow glimmer by the trysting tree;
But SHE is glad,
With roses crowned and clad,
Who hath forgotten thee!'
But I made answer:  'Love!
Tell me no more thereof,
For she has drunk of that same cup as I.
Yea, though her eyes be dry,
She garners there for me
Tears salter than the sea,
Even till the day she die.'
So gave I Love the lie."


I declare I nearly weep over these lines; for, though they are only
Bayly's sentiment hastily recast in a modern manner, there is
something so very affecting, mouldy, and unwholesome about them,
that they sound as if they had been "written up to" a sketch by a
disciple of Mr. Rossetti's.

In a mood much more manly and moral, Mr. Bayly wrote another poem to
the young lady:


"May thy lot in life be happy, undisturbed by thoughts of me,
The God who shelters innocence thy guard and guide will be.
Thy heart will lose the chilling sense of hopeless love at last,
And the sunshine of the future chase the shadows of the past."


It is as easy as prose to sing in this manner.  For example:


"In fact, we need not be concerned; 'at last' comes very soon, and
our Emilia quite forgets the memory of the moon, the moon that shone
on her and us, the woods that heard our vows, the moaning of the
waters, and the murmur of the boughs.  She is happy with another,
and by her we're quite forgot; she never lets a thought of us bring
shadow on her lot; and if we meet at dinner she's too clever to
repine, and mentions us to Mr. Smith as 'An old flame of mine.'  And
shall I grieve that it is thus? and would I have her weep, and lose
her healthy appetite and break her healthy sleep?  Not so, she's not
poetical, though ne'er shall I forget the fairy of my fancy whom I
once thought I had met.  The fairy of my fancy!  It was fancy, most
things are; her emotions were not steadfast as the shining of a
star; but, ah, I love her image yet, as once it shone on me, and
swayed me as the low moon sways the surging of the sea."


Among other sports his anxious friends hurried the lovelorn Bayly to
Scotland, where he wrote much verse, and then to Dublin, which
completed his cure.  "He seemed in the midst of the crowd the gayest
of all, his laughter rang merry and loud at banquet and hall."  He
thought no more of studying for the Church, but went back to Bath,
met a Miss Hayes, was fascinated by Miss Hayes, "came, saw, but did
NOT conquer at once," says Mrs. Haynes Bayly (nee Hayes) with
widow's pride.  Her lovely name was Helena; and I deeply regret to
add that, after an education at Oxford, Mr. Bayly, in his poems,
accentuated the penultimate, which, of course, is short.


"Oh, think not, Helena, of leaving us yet,"


he carolled, when it would have been just as easy, and a hundred
times more correct, to sing -


"Oh, Helena, think not of leaving us yet."


Miss Hayes had lands in Ireland, alas! and Mr. Bayly insinuated
that, like King Easter and King Wester in the ballad, her lovers
courted her for her lands and her fee; but he, like King Honour,


"For her bonny face
And for her fair bodie."


In 1825 (after being elected to the Athenaeum) Mr. Bayly "at last
found favour in the eyes of Miss Hayes."  He presented her with a
little ruby heart, which she accepted, and they were married, and at
first were well-to-do, Miss Hayes being the heiress of Benjamin
Hayes, Esq., of Marble Hill, in county Cork.  A friend of Mr.
Bayly's described him thus:


"I never have met on this chilling earth
So merry, so kind, so frank a youth,
In moments of pleasure a smile all mirth,
In moments of sorrow a heart of truth.
I have heard thee praised, I have seen thee led
By Fashion along her gay career;
While beautiful lips have often shed
Their flattering poison in thine ear."


Yet he says that the poet was unspoiled.  On his honeymoon, at Lord
Ashdown's, Mr. Bayly, flying from some fair sirens, retreated to a
bower, and there wrote his world-famous "I'd be a Butterfly."


"I'd be a butterfly, living a rover,
Dying when fair things are fading away."


The place in which the deathless strains welled from the singer's
heart was henceforth known as "Butterfly Bower."  He now wrote a
novel, "The Aylmers," which has gone where the old moons go, and he
became rather a literary lion, and made the acquaintance of Theodore
Hook.  The loss of a son caused him to write some devotional verses,
which were not what he did best; and now he began to try comedies.
One of them, Sold for a Song, succeeded very well.  In the stage-
coach between Wycombe Abbey and London he wrote a successful little
lever de rideau called Perfection; and it was lucky that he opened
this vein, for his wife's Irish property got into an Irish bog of
dishonesty and difficulty.  Thirty-five pieces were contributed by
him to the British stage.  After a long illness, he died on April
22nd, 1829.  He did not live, this butterfly minstrel, into the
winter of human age.

Of his poems the inevitable criticism must be that he was a Tom
Moore of much lower accomplishments.  His business was to carol of
the most vapid and obvious sentiment, and to string flowers, fruits,
trees, breeze, sorrow, to-morrow, knights, coal-black steeds,
regret, deception, and so forth, into fervid anapaestics.  Perhaps
his success lay in knowing exactly how little sense in poetry
composers will endure and singers will accept.  Why, "words for
music" are almost invariably trash now, though the words of
Elizabethan songs are better than any music, is a gloomy and
difficult question.  Like most poets, I myself detest the sister
art, and don't know anything about it.  But any one can see that
words like Bayly's are and have long been much more popular with
musical people than words like Shelley's, Keats's, Shakespeare's,
Fletcher's, Lovelace's, or Carew's.  The natural explanation is not
flattering to musical people:  at all events, the singing world
doted on Bayly.


"She never blamed him--never,
But received him when he came
With a welcome sort of shiver,
And she tried to look the same.

"But vainly she dissembled,
For whene'er she tried to smile,
A tear unbidden trembled
In her blue eye all the while."


This was pleasant for "him"; but the point is that these are lines
to an Indian air.  Shelley, also, about the same time, wrote Lines
to an Indian air; but we may "swear, and save our oath," that the
singers preferred Bayly's.  Tennyson and Coleridge could never equal
the popularity of what follows.  I shall ask the persevering reader
to tell me where Bayly ends, and where parody begins:


"When the eye of beauty closes,
When the weary are at rest,
When the shade the sunset throws is
But a vapour in the west;
When the moonlight tips the billow
With a wreath of silver foam,
And the whisper of the willow
Breaks the slumber of the gnome, -
Night may come, but sleep will linger,
When the spirit, all forlorn,
Shuts its ear against the singer,
And the rustle of the corn
Round the sad old mansion sobbing
Bids the wakeful maid recall
Who it was that caused the throbbing
Of her bosom at the ball."


Will this not do to sing just as well as the original? and is it not
true that "almost any man you please could reel it off for days
together"?  Anything will do that speaks of forgetting people, and
of being forsaken, and about the sunset, and the ivy, and the rose.


"Tell me no more that the tide of thine anguish
Is red as the heart's blood and salt as the sea;
That the stars in their courses command thee to languish,
That the hand of enjoyment is loosened from thee!

"Tell me no more that, forgotten, forsaken,
Thou roamest the wild wood, thou sigh'st on the shore.
Nay, rent is the pledge that of old we had taken,
And the words that have bound me, they bind thee no more!

"Ere the sun had gone down on thy sorrow, the maidens
Were wreathing the orange's bud in thy hair,
And the trumpets were tuning the musical cadence
That gave thee, a bride, to the baronet's heir.

"Farewell, may no thought pierce thy breast of thy treason;
Farewell, and be happy in Hubert's embrace.
Be the belle of the ball, be the bride of the season,
With diamonds bedizened and languid in lace."


This is mine, and I say, with modest pride, that it is quite as good
as -


"Go, may'st thou be happy,
Though sadly we part,
In life's early summer
Grief breaks not the heart.

"The ills that assail us
As speedily pass
As shades o'er a mirror,
Which stain not the glass."


Anybody could do it, we say, in what Edgar Poe calls "the mad pride
of intellectuality," and it certainly looks as if it could be done
by anybody.  For example, take Bayly as a moralist.  His ideas are
out of the centre.  This is about his standard:


"CRUELTY.

"'Break not the thread the spider
Is labouring to weave.'
I said, nor as I eyed her
Could dream she would deceive.

"Her brow was pure and candid,
Her tender eyes above;
And I, if ever man did,
Fell hopelessly in love.

"For who could deem that cruel
So fair a face might be?
That eyes so like a jewel
Were only paste for me?

"I wove my thread, aspiring
Within her heart to climb;
I wove with zeal untiring
For ever such a time!

"But, ah! that thread was broken
All by her fingers fair,
The vows and prayers I've spoken
Are vanished into air!"


Did Bayly write that ditty or did I?  Upon my word, I can hardly
tell.  I am being hypnotised by Bayly.  I lisp in numbers, and the
numbers come like mad.  I can hardly ask for a light without
abounding in his artless vein.  Easy, easy it seems; and yet it was
Bayly after all, not you nor I, who wrote the classic -


"I'll hang my harp on a willow tree,
And I'll go to the war again,
For a peaceful home has no charm for me,
A battlefield no pain;
The lady I love will soon be a bride,
With a diadem on her brow.
Ah, why did she flatter my boyish pride?
She is going to leave me now!"


It is like listening, in the sad yellow evening, to the strains of a
barrel organ, faint and sweet, and far away.  A world of memories
come jigging back--foolish fancies, dreams, desires, all beckoning
and bobbing to the old tune:


"Oh had I but loved with a boyish love,
It would have been well for me."


How does Bayly manage it?  What is the trick of it, the obvious,
simple, meretricious trick, which somehow, after all, let us mock as
we will, Bayly could do, and we cannot?  He really had a slim,
serviceable, smirking, and sighing little talent of his own; and--
well, we have not even that.  Nobody forgets


"The lady I love will soon be a bride."


Nobody remembers our cultivated epics and esoteric sonnets, oh
brother minor poet, mon semblable, mon frere!  Nor can we rival,
though we publish our books on the largest paper, the buried
popularity of


"Gaily the troubadour
Touched his guitar
When he was hastening
Home from the war,
Singing, "From Palestine
Hither I come,
Lady love!  Lady love!
Welcome me home!"


Of course this is, historically, a very incorrect rendering of a
Languedoc crusader; and the impression is not mediaeval, but of the
comic opera.  Any one of us could get in more local colour for the
money, and give the crusader a cithern or citole instead of a
guitar.  This is how we should do "Gaily the Troubadour" nowadays:-


"Sir Ralph he is hardy and mickle of might,
Ha, la belle blanche aubepine!
Soldans seven hath he slain in fight,
Honneur e la belle Isoline!

"Sir Ralph he rideth in riven mail,
Ha, la belle blanche aubepine!
Beneath his nasal is his dark face pale,
Honneur e la belle Isoline!

"His eyes they blaze as the burning coal,
Ha, la belle blanche aubepine!
He smiteth a stave on his gold citole,
Honneur e la belle Isoline!

"From her mangonel she looketh forth,
Ha, la belle blanche aubepine!
'Who is he spurreth so late to the north?'
Honneur e la belle Isoline!

"Hark! for he speaketh a knightly name,
Ha, la belle blanche aubepine!
And her wan cheek glows as a burning flame,
Honneur e la belle Isoline!

"For Sir Ralph he is hardy and mickle of might,
Ha, la belle blanche aubepine!
And his love shall ungirdle his sword to-night,
Honneur e la belle Isoline!"

Such is the romantic, esoteric, old French way of saying -


"Hark, 'tis the troubadour
Breathing her name
Under the battlement
Softly he came,
Singing, "From Palestine
Hither I come.
Lady love!  Lady love!
Welcome me home!"


The moral of all this is that minor poetry has its fashions, and
that the butterfly Bayly could versify very successfully in the
fashion of a time simpler and less pedantic than our own.  On the
whole, minor poetry for minor poetry, this artless singer, piping
his native drawing-room notes, gave a great deal of perfectly
harmless, if highly uncultivated, enjoyment.

It must not be fancied that Mr. Bayly had only one string to his
bow--or, rather, to his lyre.  He wrote a great deal, to be sure,
about the passion of love, which Count Tolstoi thinks we make too
much of.  He did not dream that the affairs of the heart should be
regulated by the State--by the Permanent Secretary of the Marriage
Office.  That is what we are coming to, of course, unless the
enthusiasts of "free love" and "go away as you please" failed with
their little programme.  No doubt there would be poetry if the State
regulated or left wholly unregulated the affections of the future.
Mr. Bayly, living in other times, among other manners, piped of the
hard tyranny of a mother:


"We met, 'twas in a crowd, and I thought he would shun me.
He came, I could not breathe, for his eye was upon me.
He spoke, his words were cold, and his smile was unaltered,
I knew how much he felt, for his deep-toned voice faltered.
I wore my bridal robe, and I rivalled its whiteness;
Bright gems were in my hair,--how I hated their brightness!
He called me by my name as the bride of another.
Oh, thou hast been the cause of this anguish, my mother!"


In future, when the reformers of marriage have had their way, we
shall read:


"The world may think me gay, for I bow to my fate;
But thou hast been the cause of my anguish, O State!"


For even when true love is regulated by the County Council or the
village community, it will still persist in not running smooth.

Of these passions, then, Mr. Bayly could chant; but let us remember
that he could also dally with old romance, that he wrote:


"The mistletoe hung in the castle hall,
The holly branch shone on the old oak wall."


When the bride unluckily got into the ancient chest,


"It closed with a spring.  And, dreadful doom,
The bride lay clasped in her living tomb,"


so that her lover "mourned for his fairy bride," and never found out
her premature casket.  This was true romance as understood when Peel
was consul.  Mr. Bayly was rarely political; but he commemorated the
heroes of Waterloo, our last victory worth mentioning:


"Yet mourn not for them, for in future tradition
Their fame shall abide as our tutelar star,
To instil by example the glorious ambition
Of falling, like them, in a glorious war.
Though tears may be seen in the bright eyes of beauty,
One consolation must ever remain:
Undaunted they trod in the pathway of duty,
Which led them to glory on Waterloo's plain."


Could there be a more simple Tyrtaeus? and who that reads him will
not be ambitious of falling in a glorious war?  Bayly, indeed, is
always simple.  He is "simple, sensuous, and passionate," and Milton
asked no more from a poet.


"A wreath of orange blossoms,
When next we met, she wore.
The expression of her features
Was more thoughtful than before."


On his own principles Wordsworth should have admired this unaffected
statement; but Wordsworth rarely praised his contemporaries, and
said that "Guy Mannering" was a respectable effort in the style of
Mrs. Radcliffe.  Nor did he even extol, though it is more in his own
line,


"Of what is the old man thinking,
As he leans on his oaken staff?"


My own favourite among Mr. Bayly's effusions is not a sentimental
ode, but the following gush of true natural feeling:-


"Oh, give me new faces, new faces, new faces,
I've seen those around me a fortnight and more.
Some people grow weary of things or of places,
But persons to me are a much greater bore.
I care not for features, I'm sure to discover
Some exquisite trait in the first that you send.
My fondness falls off when the novelty's over;
I want a new face for an intimate friend."


This is perfectly candid:  we should all prefer a new face, if
pretty, every fortnight:


"Come, I pray you, and tell me this,
All good fellows whose beards are grey,
Did not the fairest of the fair
Common grow and wearisome ere
Ever a month had passed away?"


For once Mr. Bayly uttered in his "New Faces" a sentiment not
usually expressed, but universally felt; and now he suffers, as a
poet, because he is no longer a new face, because we have welcomed
his juniors.  To Bayly we shall not return; but he has one rare
merit,--he is always perfectly plain-spoken and intelligible.


"Farewell to my Bayly, farewell to the singer
Whose tender effusions my aunts used to sing;
Farewell, for the fame of the bard does not linger,
My favourite minstrel's no longer the thing.
But though on his temples has faded the laurel,
Though broken the lute, and though veiled is the crest,
My Bayly, at worst, is uncommonly moral,
Which is more than some new poets are, at their best."


Farewell to our Bayly, about whose songs we may say, with Mr.
Thackeray in "Vanity Fair," that "they contain numberless good-
natured, simple appeals to the affections."  We are no longer
affectionate, good-natured, simple.  We are cleverer than Bayly's
audience; but are we better fellows?



THEODORE DE BANVILLE



There are literary reputations in France and England which seem,
like the fairies, to be unable to cross running water.  Dean Swift,
according to M. Paul de Saint-Victor, is a great man at Dover, a
pigmy at Calais--"Son talent, qui enthousiasme l'Angleterre,
n'inspire ailleurs qu'un morne etonnement."  M. Paul De Saint-Victor
was a fair example of the French critic, and what he says about
Swift was possibly true,--for him.  There is not much resemblance
between the Dean and M. Theodore de Banville, except that the latter
too is a poet who has little honour out of his own country.  He is a
charming singer at Calais; at Dover he inspires un morne etonnement
(a bleak perplexity).  One has never seen an English attempt to
describe or estimate his genius.  His unpopularity in England is
illustrated by the fact that the London Library, that respectable
institution, does not, or did not, possess a single copy of any one
of his books.  He is but feebly represented even in the collection
of the British Museum.  It is not hard to account for our
indifference to M. De Banville.  He is a poet not only intensely
French, but intensely Parisian.  He is careful of form, rather than
abundant in manner.  He has no story to tell, and his sketches in
prose, his attempts at criticism, are not very weighty or
instructive.  With all his limitations, however, he represents, in
company with M. Leconte de Lisle, the second of the three
generations of poets over whom Victor Hugo reigned.

M. De Banville has been called, by people who do not like, and who
apparently have not read him, un saltimbanque litteraire (a literary
rope-dancer).  Other critics, who do like him, but who have limited
their study to a certain portion of his books, compare him to a
worker in gold, who carefully chases or embosses dainty processions
of fauns and maenads.  He is, in point of fact, something more
estimable than a literary rope-dancer, something more serious than a
working jeweller in rhymes.  He calls himself un raffine; but he is
not, like many persons who are proud of that title, un indifferent
in matters of human fortune.  His earlier poems, of course, are much
concerned with the matter of most early poems--with Lydia and
Cynthia and their light loves.  The verses of his second period
often deal with the most evanescent subjects, and they now retain
but a slight petulance and sparkle, as of champagne that has been
too long drawn.  In a prefatory plea for M. De Banville's poetry one
may add that he "has loved our people," and that no poet, no critic,
has honoured Shakespeare with brighter words of praise.

Theodore de Banville was born at Moulin, on March 14th 1823, and he
is therefore three years younger than the dictionaries of biography
would make the world believe.  He is the son of a naval officer,
and, according to M. Charles Baudelaire, a descendant of the
Crusaders.  He came much too late into the world to distinguish
himself in the noisy exploits of 1830, and the chief event of his
youth was the publication of "Les Cariatides" in 1842.  This first
volume contained a selection from the countless verses which the
poet produced between his sixteenth and his nineteenth year.
Whatever other merits the songs of minors may possess, they have
seldom that of permitting themselves to be read.  "Les Cariatides"
are exceptional here.  They are, above all things, readable.  "On
peut les lire e peu de frais," M. De Banville says himself.  He
admits that his lighter works, the poems called (in England) vers de
societe, are a sort of intellectual cigarette.  M. Emile de Girardin
said, in the later days of the Empire, that there were too many
cigarettes in the air.  Their stale perfume clings to the literature
of that time, as the odour of pastilles yet hangs about the verse of
Dorat, the designs of Eisen, the work of the Pompadour period.
There is more than smoke in M. De Banville's ruling inspiration, his
lifelong devotion to letters and to great men of letters--
Shakespeare, Moliere, Homer, Victor Hugo.  These are his gods; the
memory of them is his muse.  His enthusiasm is worthy of one who,
though born too late to see and know the noble wildness of 1830, yet
lives on the recollections, and is strengthened by the example, of
that revival of letters.  Whatever one may say of the renouveau, of
romanticism, with its affectations, the young men of 1830 were
sincere in their devotion to liberty, to poetry, to knowledge.  One
can hardly find a more brilliant and touching belief in these great
causes than that of Edgar Quinet, as displayed in the letters of his
youth.  De Banville fell on more evil times.

When "Les Cariatides" was published poets had begun to keep an eye
on the Bourse, and artists dabbled in finance.  The new volume of
song in the sordid age was a November primrose, and not unlike the
flower of Spring.  There was a singular freshness and hopefulness in
the verse, a wonderful "certitude dans l'expression lyrique," as
Sainte-Beuve said.  The mastery of musical speech and of various
forms of song was already to be recognised as the basis and the note
of the talent of De Banville.  He had style, without which a man may
write very nice verses about heaven and hell and other matters, and
may please thousands of excellent people, but will write poetry--
never.  Comparing De Banville's boy's work with the boy's work of
Mr. Tennyson, one observes in each--"Les Cariatides" as in "The
Hesperides"--the timbre of a new voice.  Poetry so fresh seems to
make us aware of some want which we had hardly recognised, but now
are sensible of, at the moment we find it satisfied.

It is hardly necessary to say that this gratifying and welcome
strangeness, this lyric originality, is nearly all that M. De
Banville has in common with the English poet whose two priceless
volumes were published in the same year as "Les Cariatides?"  The
melody of Mr. Tennyson's lines, the cloudy palaces of his
imagination, rose


"As Ilion, like a mist rose into towers,"


when Apollo sang.  The architecture was floating at first, and
confused; while the little theatre of M. De Banville's poetry, where
he sat piping to a dance of nixies, was brilliantly lit and elegant
with fresh paint and gilding.  "The Cariatides" support the pediment
and roof of a theatre or temple in the Graeco-French style.  The
poet proposed to himself


"A cote de Venus et du fils de Latone
Peindre la fee et la peri."


The longest poem in the book, and the most serious, "La Voie
Lactee," reminds one of the "Palace of Art," written before the
after-thought, before the "white-eyed corpses" were found lurking in
corners.  Beginning with Homer, "the Ionian father of the rest," -


"Ce dieu, pere des dieux qu'adore Ionie," -


the poet glorifies all the chief names of song.  There is a long
procession of illustrious shadows before Shakespeare comes--
Shakespeare, whose genius includes them all.


"Toute creation e laquelle on aspire,
Tout reve, toute chose, emanent de Shakespeare."


His mind has lent colour to the flowers and the sky, to


"La fleur qui brode un point sur les manteau des plaines,
Les nenuphars penches, et les pales roseaux
Qui disent leur chant sombre au murmure des eaux."


One recognises more sincerity in this hymn to all poets, from
Orpheus to Heine, than in "Les Baisers de Pierre"--a clever
imitation of De Musset's stories in verse.  Love of art and of the
masters of art, a passion for the figures of old mythology, which
had returned again after their exile in 1830, gaiety, and a revival
of the dexterity of Villon and Marot,--these things are the
characteristics of M. De Banville's genius, and all these were
displayed in "Les Cariatides."  Already, too, his preoccupation with
the lighter and more fantastic sort of theatrical amusements shows
itself in lines like these:


"De son lit e baldaquin
Le soleil de son beau globe
Avait l'air d'un arlequin
Etalant sa garde-robe;

"Et sa soeur au front changeant
Mademoiselle la Lune
Avec ses grands yeux d'argent
Regardait la terre brune."


The verse about "the sun in bed," unconsciously Miltonic, is in a
vein of bad taste which has always had seductions for M. De
Banville.  He mars a fine later poem on Roncevaux and Roland by a
similar absurdity.  The angel Michael is made to stride down the
steps of heaven four at a time, and M. De Banville fancies that this
sort of thing is like the simplicity of the ages of faith.

In "Les Cariatides," especially in the poems styled "En Habit
Zinzolin," M. De Banville revived old measures--the rondeau and the
"poor little triolet."  These are forms of verse which it is easy to
write badly, and hard indeed to write well.  They have knocked at
the door of the English muse's garden--a runaway knock.  In "Les
Cariatides" they took a subordinate place, and played their pranks
in the shadow of the grave figures of mythology, or at the close of
the procession of Dionysus and his Maenads.  De Banville often
recalls Keats in his choice of classical themes.  "Les Exiles," a
poem of his maturity, is a French "Hyperion."  "Le Triomphe de
Bacchus" reminds one of the song of the Bassarids in "Endymion" -


"So many, and so many, and so gay."


There is a pretty touch of the pedant (who exists, says M. De
Banville, in the heart of the poet) in this verse:


"Il reve e Cama, l'amour aux cinq fleches fleuries,
Qui, lorsque soupire au milieu des roses prairies
La douce Vasanta, parmi les bosquets de santal,
Envoie aux cinq sens les fleches du carquois fatal."


The Bacchus of Titian has none of this Oriental languor, no memories
of perfumed places where "the throne of Indian Cama slowly sails."
One cannot help admiring the fancy which saw the conquering god
still steeped in Asiatic ease, still unawakened to more vigorous
passion by the fresh wind blowing from Thrace.  Of all the
Olympians, Diana has been most often hymned by M. De Banville:  his
imagination is haunted by the figure of the goddess.  Now she is
manifest in her Hellenic aspect, as Homer beheld her, "taking her
pastime in the chase of boars and swift deer; and with her the wild
wood-nymphs are sporting the daughters of Zeus; and Leto is glad at
heart, for her child towers over them all, and is easy to be known
where all are fair" (Odyssey, vi.).  Again, Artemis appears more
thoughtful, as in the sculpture of Jean Goujon, touched with the
sadness of moonlight.  Yet again, she is the weary and exiled spirit
that haunts the forest of Fontainebleau, and is a stranger among the
woodland folk, the fades and nixies.  To this goddess, "being triple
in her divided deity," M. De Banville has written his hymn in the
characteristic form of the old French ballade.  The translator may
borrow Chaucer's apology -


"And eke to me it is a grete penaunce,
Syth rhyme in English hath such scarsete
To folowe, word by word, the curiosite
Of Banville, flower of them that make in France."


"BALLADE SUR LES HOTES MYSTERIEUX DE LA FORET

"Still sing the mocking fairies, as of old,
Beneath the shade of thorn and holly tree;
The west wind breathes upon them pure and cold,
And still wolves dread Diana roving free,
In secret woodland with her company.
Tis thought the peasants' hovels know her rite
When now the wolds are bathed in silver light,
And first the moonrise breaks the dusky grey,
Then down the dells, with blown soft hair and bright,
And through the dim wood Dian thrids her way.

"With water-weeds twined in their locks of gold
The strange cold forest-fairies dance in glee;
Sylphs over-timorous and over-bold
Haunt the dark hollows where the dwarf may be,
The wild red dwarf, the nixies' enemy;
Then, 'mid their mirth, and laughter, and affright,
The sudden goddess enters, tall and white,
With one long sigh for summers passed away;
The swift feet tear the ivy nets outright,
And through the dim wood Dian thrids her way.

"She gleans her sylvan trophies; down the wold
She hears the sobbing of the stags that flee,
Mixed with the music of the hunting rolled,
But her delight is all in archery,
And nought of ruth and pity wotteth she
More than the hounds that follow on the flight;
The tall nymph draws a golden bow of might,
And thick she rains the gentle shafts that slay,
She tosses loose her locks upon the night,
And Dian through the dim wood thrids her way.

ENVOI.

"Prince, let us leave the din, the dust, the spite,
The gloom and glare of towns, the plague, the blight;
Amid the forest leaves and fountain spray
There is the mystic home of our delight,
And through the dim wood Dian thrids her way."


The piece is characteristic of M. De Banville's genius.  Through his
throng of operatic nixies and sylphs of the ballet the cold Muse
sometimes passes, strange, but not unfriendly.  He, for his part,
has never degraded the beautiful forms of old religion to make the
laughing-stock of fools.  His little play, Diane au Bois, has grace,
and gravity, and tenderness like the tenderness of Keats, for the
failings of immortals.  "The gods are jealous exceedingly if any
goddess takes a mortal man to her paramour, as Demeter chose
Iasion."  The least that mortal poets can do is to show the
Olympians an example of toleration.

"Les Cariatides" have delayed us too long.  They are wonderfully
varied, vigorous, and rich, and full of promise in many ways.  The
promise has hardly been kept.  There is more seriousness in "Les
Stalactites" (1846), it is true, but then there is less daring.
There is one morsel that must be quoted,--a fragment fashioned on
the air and the simple words that used to waken the musings of
George Sand when she was a child, dancing with the peasant children:


"Nous n'irons plus an bois:  les lauries sont coupes,
Les amours des bassins, les naiades en groupe
Voient reluire au soleil, en cristaux decoupes
Les flots silencieux qui coulaient de leur coupe,
Les lauriers sont coupes et le cerf aux abois
Tressaille au son du cor:  nous n'irons plus au bois!
Ou des enfants joueurs riait la folle troupe
Parmi les lys d'argent aux pleurs du ciel trempes,
Voici l'herbe qu'on fauche et les lauriers qu'on coupe;
Nous n'irons plus au bois; les lauriers sont coupes."


In these days Banville, like Gerard de Nerval in earlier times,
RONSARDISED.  The poem 'A la Font Georges,' full of the memories of
childhood, sweet and rich with the air and the hour of sunset, is
written in a favourite metre of Ronsard's.  Thus Ronsard says in his
lyrical version of five famous lines of Homer -


"La gresle ni la neige
N'ont tels lieux pour leur siege
Ne la foudre oncques le
Ne devala."

(The snow, and wind, and hail
May never there prevail,
Nor thunderbolt doth fall,
Nor rain at all.)


De Banville chose this metre, rapid yet melancholy, with its sad
emphatic cadence in the fourth line, as the vehicle of his childish
memories:


"O champs pleins de silence,
Ou mon heureuse enfance
Avait des jours encor
Tout files d'or!"

O ma vieille Font Georges,
Vers qui les rouges-gorges
Et le doux rossignol
Prenaient leur vol!


So this poem of the fountain of youth begins, "tout file d'or," and
closes when the dusk is washed with silver -


"A l'heure ou sous leurs voiles
Les tremblantes etoiles
Brodent le ciel changeant
De fleurs d'argent."


The "Stalactites" might detain one long, but we must pass on after
noticing an unnamed poem which is the French counterpart of Keats'
"Ode to a Greek Urn":


"Qu'autour du vase pur, trop beau pour la Bacchante,
La verveine, melee e des feuilles d'acanthe,
Fleurisse, et que plus bas des vierges lentement
S'avancent deux e deux, d'un pas sur et charmant,
Les bras pendants le long de leurs tuniques droites
Et les cheyeux tresses sur leurs tetes etroites."


In the same volume of the definite series of poems come "Les
Odelettes," charming lyrics, one of which, addressed to Theophile
Gautier, was answered in the well-known verses called "L'Art."  If
there had been any rivalry between the writers, M. De Banville would
hardly have cared to print Gautier's "Odelette" beside his own.  The
tone of it is infinitely more manly:  one seems to hear a deep,
decisive voice replying to tones far less sweet and serious.  M. De
Banville revenged himself nobly in later verses addressed to
Gautier, verses which criticise the genius of that workman better,
we think, than anything else that has been written of him in prose
or rhyme.

The less serious poems of De Banville are, perhaps, the better known
in this country.  His feats of graceful metrical gymnastics have
been admired by every one who cares for skill pure and simple.  "Les
Odes Funambulesques" and "Les Occidentales" are like ornamental
skating.  The author moves in many circles and cuts a hundred
fantastic figures with a perfect ease and smoothness.  At the same
time, naturally, he does not advance nor carry his readers with him
in any direction.  "Les Odes Funambulesques" were at first unsigned.
They appeared in journals and magazines, and, as M. de Banville
applied the utmost lyrical skill to light topics of the moment, they
were the most popular of "Articles de Paris."  One must admit that
they bore the English reader, and by this time long scholia are
necessary for the enlightenment even of the Parisian student.  The
verses are, perhaps, the "bird-chorus" of French life, but they have
not the permanent truth and delightfulness of the "bird-chorus" in
Aristophanes.  One has easily too much of the Carnival, the masked
ball, the debardeurs, and the pierrots.  The people at whom M. De
Banville laughed are dead and forgotten.  There was a certain M.
Paul Limayrac of those days, who barked at the heels of Balzac, and
other great men, in the Revue des Deux Mondes.  In his honour De
Banville wrote a song which parodied all popular aspirations to be a
flower.  M. Limayrac was supposed to have become a blossom:


"Sur les coteaux et dans les landes
Voltigeant comme un oiseleur
Buloz en ferait des guirlandes
Si Limayrac devenait fleur!"


There is more of high spirits than of wit in the lyric, which became
as popular as our modern invocation of Jingo, the god of battles.
It chanced one night that M. Limayrac appeared at a masked ball in
the opera-house.  He was recognised by some one in the crowd.  The
turbulent waltz stood still, the music was silent, and the dancers
of every hue howled at the critic


"Si Paul Limayrac devenait fleur!"


Fancy a British reviewer, known as such to the British public, and
imagine that public taking a lively interest in the feuds of men of
letters!  Paris, to be sure, was more or less of a university town
thirty years ago, and the students were certain to be largely
represented at the ball.

The "Odes Funambulesques" contain many examples of M. De Banville's
skill in reviving old forms of verse--triolets, rondeaux, chants
royaux, and ballades.  Most of these were composed for the special
annoyance of M. Buloz, M. Limayrac, and a M. Jacquot who called
himself De Mirecourt.  The rondeaux are full of puns in the refrain:
"Houssaye ou c'est; lyre, l'ire, lire," and so on, not very
exhilarating.  The pantoum, where lines recur alternately, was
borrowed from the distant Malay; but primitive pantoum, in which the
last two lines of each stanza are the first two of the next, occur
in old French folk-song.  The popular trick of repetition, affording
a rest to the memory of the singer, is perhaps the origin of all
refrains.  De Banville's later satires are directed against
permanent objects of human indignation--the little French debauchee,
the hypocritical friend of reaction, the bloodthirsty chauviniste.
Tired of the flashy luxury of the Empire, his memory goes back to
his youth -

"Lorsque la levre de l'aurore
Baisait nos yeux souleves,
Et que nous n'etions pas encore
La France des petits creves."


The poem "Et Tartufe" prolongs the note of a satire always popular
in France--the satire of Scarron, Moliere, La Bruyere, against the
clerical curse of the nation.  The Roman Question was Tartufe's
stronghold at the moment.  "French interests" demanded that Italy
should be headless.


"Et Tartufe?  Il nous dit entre deux cremus
Que pour tout bon Francais l'empire est e Rome,
Et qu'ayant pour aieux Romulus et Remus
Nous tetterons la louve e jamais--le pauvre homme."


The new Tartufe worships St. Chassepot, who once, it will not be
forgotten, "wrought miracles"; but he has his doubts as to the
morality of explosive bullets.  The nymph of modern warfare is
addressed as she hovers above the Geneva Convention, -


"Quoi, nymphe du canon raye,
Tu montres ces pudeurs risibles
Et ce petit air effraye
Devant les balles exploisibles?"


De Banville was for long almost alone among poets in his freedom
from Weltschmerz, from regret and desire for worlds lost or
impossible.  In the later and stupider corruption of the Empire,
sadness and anger began to vex even his careless muse.  She had
piped in her time to much wild dancing, but could not sing to a
waltz of mushroom speculators and decorated capitalists.  "Le Sang
de la Coupe" contains a very powerful poem, "The Curse of Venus,"
pronounced on Paris, the city of pleasure, which has become the city
of greed.  This verse is appropriate to our own commercial
enterprise:


"Vends les bois ou dormaient Viviane et Merlin!
L'Aigle de mont n'est fait que pour ta gibeciere;
La neige vierge est le pour fournir ta glaciere;
Le torrent qui bondit sur le roc sybillin,
Et vole, diamant, neige, ecume et poussiere,
N'est plus bon qu'e tourner tes meules de moulin!"


In the burning indignation of this poem, M. De Banville reaches his
highest mark of attainment.  "Les Exiles" is scarcely less
impressive.  The outcast gods of Hellas, wandering in a forest of
ancient Gaul, remind one at once of the fallen deities of Heine, the
decrepit Olympians of Bruno, and the large utterance of Keats's
"Hyperion."  Among great exiles, Victor Hugo, "le pere le-bas dans
l'ile," is not forgotten:


"Et toi qui l'accueillis, sol libre et verdoyant,
Qui prodigues les fleurs sur tes coteaux fertiles,
Et qui sembles sourire e l'ocean bruyant,
Sois benie, ile verte, entre toutes les iles."


The hoarsest note of M. De Banville's lyre is that discordant one
struck in the "Idylles Prussiennes."  One would not linger over
poetry or prose composed during the siege, in hours of shame and
impotent scorn.  The poet sings how the sword, the flashing
Durendal, is rusted and broken, how victory is to him -


" . . . qui se cela
Dans un trou, sous la terre noire."


He can spare a tender lyric to the memory of a Prussian officer, a
lad of eighteen, shot dead through a volume of Pindar which he
carried in his tunic.

It is impossible to leave the poet of gaiety and good-humour in the
mood of the prisoner in besieged Paris.  His "Trente Six Ballades
Joyeuses" make a far more pleasant subject for a last word.  There
is scarcely a more delightful little volume in the French language
than this collection of verses in the most difficult of forms, which
pour forth, with absolute ease and fluency, notes of mirth, banter,
joy in the spring, in letters, art, and good-fellowship.


"L'oiselet retourne aux forets;
Je suis un poete lyrique," -


he cries, with a note like a bird's song.  Among the thirty-six
every one will have his favourites.  We venture to translate the
"Ballad de Banville":


"AUX ENFANTS PERDUS

"I know Cythera long is desolate;
I know the winds have stripped the garden green.
Alas, my friends! beneath the fierce sun's weight
A barren reef lies where Love's flowers have been,
Nor ever lover on that coast is seen!
So be it, for we seek a fabled shore,
To lull our vague desires with mystic lore,
To wander where Love's labyrinths, beguile;
There let us land, there dream for evermore:
'It may be we shall touch the happy isle.'

"The sea may be our sepulchre.  If Fate,
If tempests wreak their wrath on us, serene
We watch the bolt of Heaven, and scorn the hate
Of angry gods that smite us in their spleen.
Perchance the jealous mists are but the screen
That veils the fairy coast we would explore.
Come, though the sea be vexed, and breakers roar,
Come, for the breath of this old world is vile,
Haste we, and toil, and faint not at the oar;
'It may be we shall touch the happy isle.'

"Grey serpents trail in temples desecrate
Where Cypris smiled, the golden maid, the queen,
And ruined is the palace of our state;
But happy loves flit round the mast, and keen
The shrill wind sings the silken cords between.
Heroes are we, with wearied hearts and sore,
Whose flower is faded and whose locks are hoar.
Haste, ye light skiffs, where myrtle thickets smile;
Love's panthers sleep 'mid roses, as of yore:
'It may be we shall touch the happy isle.'

ENVOI.

"Sad eyes! the blue sea laughs, as heretofore.
All, singing birds, your happy music pour;
Ah, poets, leave the sordid earth awhile;
Flit to these ancient gods we still adore:
'It may be we shall touch the happy isle.'"


Alas! the mists that veil the shore of our Cythera are not the
summer haze of Watteau, but the smoke and steam of a commercial
time.

It is as a lyric poet that we have studied M. De Banville.  "Je ne
m'entends qu'e la meurique," he says in his ballad on himself; but
he can write prose when he pleases.

It is in his drama of Gringoire acted at the Theatre Francais, and
familiar in the version of Messrs. Pollock and Besant, that M. De
Banville's prose shows to the best advantage.  Louis XI. is supping
with his bourgeois friends and with the terrible Olivier le Daim.
Two beautiful girls are of the company, friends of Pierre Gringoire,
the strolling poet.  Presently Gringoire himself appears.  He is
dying of hunger; he does not recognise the king, and he is promised
a good supper if he will recite the new satirical "Ballade des
Pendus," which he has made at the monarch's expense.  Hunger
overcomes his timidity, and, addressing himself especially to the
king, he enters on this goodly matter:


"Where wide the forest boughs are spread,
Where Flora wakes with sylph and fay,
Are crowns and garlands of men dead,
All golden in the morning gay;
Within this ancient garden grey
Are clusters such as no mail knows,
Where Moor and Soldan bear the sway:
This is King Louis' orchard close!

"These wretched folk wave overhead,
With such strange thoughts as none may say;
A moment still, then sudden sped,
They swing in a ring and waste away.
The morning smites them with her ray;
They toss with every breeze that blows,
They dance where fires of dawning play:
This is King Louis' orchard close!

"All hanged and dead, they've summoned
(With Hell to aid, that hears them pray)
New legions of an army dread,
Now down the blue sky flames the day;
The dew dies off; the foul array
Of obscene ravens gathers and goes,
With wings that flap and beaks that flay:
This is King Louis' orchard close!

ENVOI.

"Prince, where leaves murmur of the May,
A tree of bitter clusters grows;
The bodies of men dead are they!
This is King Louis' orchard close!


Poor Gringoire has no sooner committed himself, than he is made to
recognise the terrible king.  He pleads that, if he must join the
ghastly army of the dead, he ought, at least, to be allowed to
finish his supper.  This the king grants, and in the end, after
Gringoire has won the heart of the heroine, he receives his life and
a fair bride with a full dowry.

Gringoire is a play very different from M. De Banville's other
dramas, and it is not included in the pretty volume of "Comedies"
which closes the Lemerre series of his poems.  The poet has often
declared, with an iteration which has been parodied by M. Richepin,
that "comedy is the child of the ode," and that a drama without the
"lyric" element is scarcely a drama at all.  While comedy retains
either the choral ode in its strict form, or its representative in
the shape of lyric enthusiasm (le lyrisme), comedy is complete and
living.  Gringoire, to our mind, has plenty of lyric enthusiasm; but
M. De Banville seems to be of a different opinion.  His republished
"Comedies" are more remote from experience than Gringoire, his
characters are ideal creatures, familiar types of the stage, like
Scapin and "le beau Leandre," or ethereal persons, or figures of old
mythology, like Diana in Diane au Bois, and Deidamia in the piece
which shows Achilles among women.  M. De Banville's dramas have
scarcely prose enough in them to suit the modern taste.  They are
masques for the delicate diversion of an hour, and it is not in the
nature of things that they should rival the success of blatant
buffooneries.  His earliest pieces--Le Feuilleton d'Aristophane
(acted at the Odeon, Dec. 26th, 1852), and Le Cousin du Roi (Odeon,
April 4th, 1857)--were written in collaboration with Philoxene
Boyer, a generous but indiscreet patron of singers.


"Dans les salons de Philoxene
Nous etions quatre-vingt rimeurs,"


M. De Banville wrote, parodying the "quatre-vingt ramuers" of Victor
Hugo.  The memory of M. Boyer's enthusiasm for poetry and his
amiable hospitality are not unlikely to survive both his
compositions and those in which M. De Banville aided him.  The
latter poet began to walk alone as a playwright in Le Beau Leandre
(Vaudeville, 1856)--a piece with scarcely more substance than the
French scenes in the old Franco-Italian drama possess.  We are taken
into an impossible world of gay non-morality, where a wicked old
bourgeois, Orgon, his daughter Colombine, a pretty flirt, and her
lover Leandre, a light-hearted scamp, bustle through their little
hour.  Leandre, who has no notion of being married, says, "Le ciel
n'est pas plus pur que mes intentions."  And the artless Colombine
replies, "Alors marions-nous!"  To marry Colombine without a dowry
forms, as a modern novelist says, "no part of Leandre's profligate
scheme of pleasure."  There is a sort of treble intrigue.  Orgon
wants to give away Colombine dowerless, Leandre to escape from the
whole transaction, and Colombine to secure her dot and her husband.
The strength of the piece is the brisk action in the scene when
Leandre protests that he can't rob Orgon of his only daughter, and
Orgon insists that he can refuse nothing except his ducats to so
charming a son-in-law.  The play is redeemed from sordidness by the
costumes.  Leandre is dressed in the attire of Watteau's
"L'Indifferent" in the Louvre, and wears a diamond-hilted sword.
The lady who plays the part of Colombine may select (delightful
privilege!) the prettiest dress in Watteau's collection.

This love of the glitter of the stage is very characteristic of De
Banville.  In his Deidamie (Odeon, Nov. 18th, 1876) the players who
took the roles of Thetis, Achilles, Odysseus, Deidamia, and the
rest, were accoutred in semi-barbaric raiment and armour of the
period immediately preceding the Graeco-Phoenician (about the eighth
century B.C.).  Again we notice the touch of pedantry in the poet.
As for the play, the sombre thread in it is lent by the certainty of
Achilles' early death, the fate which drives him from Deidamie's
arms, and from the sea king's isle to the leagues under the fatal
walls of Ilion.  Of comic effect there is plenty, for the sisters of
Deidamie imitate all the acts by which Achilles is likely to betray
himself--grasp the sword among the insidious presents of Odysseus,
when he seizes the spear, and drink each one of them a huge beaker
of wine to the confusion of the Trojans. {1} On a Parisian audience
the imitations of the tone of the Odyssey must have been thrown
away.  For example, here is a passage which is as near being Homeric
as French verse can be.  Deidamie is speaking in a melancholy mood:

"Heureux les epoux rois assis dans leur maison,
Qui voient tranquillement s'enfuir chaque saison -
L'epoux tenant son sceptre, environne de gloire,
Et l'epouse filant sa quenouille d'ivoire!
Mais le jeune heros que, la glaive e son franc!
Court dans le noir combat, les mains teintes de sang,
Laisse sa femme en pleurs dans sa haute demeure."


With the accustomed pedantry, M. De Banville, in the scene of the
banquet, makes the cup-bearer go round dealing out a little wine,
with which libation is made, and then the feast goes on in proper
Homeric fashion.  These overwrought details are forgotten in the
parting scenes, where Deidamie takes what she knows to be her last
farewell of Achilles, and girds him with his sword:


"La lame de l'epee, en sa forme divine
Est pareille e la feuille austere du laurier!"


Let it be noted that each of M. De Banville's more serious plays
ends with the same scene, with slight differences.  In Florise
(never put on the stage) the wandering actress of Hardy's troupe
leaves her lover, the young noble, and the shelter of his castle, to
follow where art and her genius beckon her.  In Diane au Bois the
goddess "that leads the precise life" turns her back on Eros, who
has subdued even her, and passes from the scene as she waves her
hand in sign of a farewell ineffably mournful.  Nearer tragedy than
this M. De Banville does not care to go; and if there is any deeper
tragedy in scenes of blood and in stages strewn with corpses, from
that he abstains.  His Florise is perhaps too long, perhaps too
learned; and certainly we are asked to believe too much when a kind
of etherealised Consuelo is set before us as the prima donna of old
Hardy's troupe:


"Mais Florise n'est pas une femme.  Je suis
L'harmonieuse voix que berce vos ennuis;
Je suis la lyre aux sons divers que le poete
Fait resonner et qui sans lui serait muette -
Une comedienne enfin.  Je ne suis pas
Une femme."


An actress who was not a woman had little to do in the company of
Scarron's Angelique and Mademoiselle de l'Estoile.  Florise, in
short, is somewhat too allegorical and haughty a creature; while
Colombine and Nerine (Vaudeville, June 1864) are rather tricksy imps
than women of flesh and blood.  M. De Banville's stage, on the
whole, is one of glitter and fantasy; yet he is too much a Greek for
the age that appreciates "la belle Helene," too much a lyric
dramatist to please the contemporaries of Sardou; he lends too much
sentiment and dainty refinement to characters as flimsy as those of
Offenbach's drama.

Like other French poets, M. De Banville has occasionally deigned to
write feuilletons and criticisms.  Not many of these scattered
leaves are collected, but one volume, "La Mer de Nice" (Poulet-
Malassis et De Broise, Paris, 1861), may be read with pleasure even
by jealous admirers of Gautier's success as a chronicler of the
impressions made by southern scenery.

To De Banville (he does not conceal it) a journey to a place so far
from Paris as the Riviera was no slight labour.  Even from the
roses, the palms, the siren sea, the wells of water under the fronds
of maiden-hair fern, his mind travels back wistfully to the city of
his love.

"I am, I have always been, one of those devotees of Paris who visit
Greece only when they gaze on the face, so fair and so terrible, of
the twice-victorious Venus of the Louvre.  One of those obstinate
adorers of my town am I, who will never see Italy, save in the glass
that reflects the tawny hair of Titian's Violante, or in that dread
isle of Alcinous where Lionardo shows you the mountain peaks that
waver in the blue behind the mysterious Monna Lisa.  But the Faculty
of Physicians, which has, I own, the right to be sceptical, does not
believe that neuralgia can be healed by the high sun which Titian
and Veronese have fixed on the canvas.  To me the Faculty prescribes
the real sun of nature and of life; and here am I, condemned to
learn in suffering all that passes in the mind of a poet of Paris
exiled from that blessed place where he finds the Cyclades and the
islands blossoming, the vale of Avalon, and all the heavenly homes
of the fairies of experience and desire."

Nice is Tomi to this Ovid, but he makes the best of it, and sends to
the editor of the Moniteur letters much more diverting than the
"Tristia."  To tell the truth, he never overcomes his amazement at
being out of Paris streets, and in a glade of the lower Alps he
loves to be reminded of his dear city of pleasure.  Only under the
olives of Monaco, those solemn and ancient trees, he feels what
surely all men feel who walk at sunset through their shadow--the
memory of a mysterious twilight of agony in an olive garden.

"Et ceux-ci, les pales oliviers, n'est-ce pas de ces heures desolees
ou, comme torture supreme, le Sauveur acceptait en son ame
l'irreparable misere du doute, n'est-ce pas alors qu'il ont appris
de lui e courber le front sous le poids imperieux des souvenirs?"

The pages which M. De Banville consecrates to the Villa Sardou,
where Rachel died, may disenchant, perhaps, some readers of Mr.
Matthew Arnold's sonnet.  The scene of Rachel's death has been
spoiled by "improvements" in too theatrical taste.  All these notes,
however, were made many years ago; and visitors of the Riviera,
though they will find the little book charming where it speaks of
seas and hills, will learn that France has greatly changed the city
which she has annexed.  As a practical man and a Parisian, De
Banville has printed (pp. 179-81) a recipe for the concoction of the
Marseilles dish, bouillabaisse, the mess that Thackeray's ballad
made so famous.  It takes genius, however, to cook bouillabaisse;
and, to parody what De Banville says about his own recipe for making
a mechanical "ballade," "en employment ce moyen, on est sur de faire
une mauvaise, irremediablement mauvaise bouillabaisse."  The poet
adds the remark that "une bouillabaisse reussie vaut un sonnet sans
defaut."

There remains one field of M. De Banville's activity to be shortly
described.  Of his "Emaux Parisiens," short studies of celebrated
writers, we need say no more than that they are written in careful
prose.  M. De Banville is not only a poet, but in his "Petit Traite
de Poesie Francaise" (Bibliotheque de l'Echo de la Sorbonne, s.d.) a
teacher of the mechanical part of poetry.  He does not, of course,
advance a paradox like that of Baudelaire, "that poetry can be
taught in thirty lessons."  He merely instructs his pupil in the
material part--the scansion, metres, and so on--of French poetry.
In this little work he introduces these "traditional forms of
verse," which once caused some talk in England:  the rondel,
rondeau, ballade, villanelle, and chant royal.  It may be worth
while to quote his testimony as to the merit of these modes of
expression.  "This cluster of forms is one of our most precious
treasures, for each of them forms a rhythmic whole, complete and
perfect, while at the same time they all possess the fresh and
unconscious grace which marks the productions of primitive times."
Now, there is some truth in this criticism; for it is a mark of
man's early ingenuity, in many arts, to seek complexity (where you
would expect simplicity), and yet to lend to that complexity an
infantine naturalness.  One can see this phenomenon in early
decorative art, and in early law and custom, and even in the
complicated structure of primitive languages.  Now, just as early,
and even savage, races are our masters in the decorative use of
colour and of carving, so the nameless master-singers of ancient
France may be our teachers in decorative poetry, the poetry some
call vers de societe.  Whether it is possible to go beyond this, and
adapt the old French forms to serious modern poetry, it is not for
any one but time to decide.  In this matter, as in greater affairs,
securus judicat orbis terrarum.  For my own part I scarcely believe
that the revival would serve the nobler ends of English poetry.  Now
let us listen again to De Banville.

"In the rondel, as in the rondeau and the ballade, all the art is to
bring in the refrain without effort, naturally, gaily, and each time
with novel effect and with fresh light cast on the central idea."
Now, you can TEACH no one to do that, and M. De Banville never
pretends to give any recipes for cooking rondels or ballades worth
reading.  "Without poetic VISION all is mere marquetery and cabinet-
maker's work:  that is, so far as poetry is concerned--nothing."  It
is because he was a poet, not a mere craftsman, that Villon was and
remains the king, the absolute master, of ballad-land."  About the
rondeau, M. De Banville avers that it possesses "nimble movement,
speed, grace, lightness of touch, and, as it were, an ancient
fragrance of the soil, that must charm all who love our country and
our country's poetry, in its every age."  As for the villanelle, M.
De Banville declares that it is the fairest jewel in the casket of
the muse Erato; while the chant royal is a kind of fossil poem, a
relic of an age when kings and allegories flourished.  "The kings
and the gods are dead," like Pan; or at least we no longer find them
able, by touch royal or divine, to reanimate the magnificent chant
royal.

This is M. De Banville's apology in pro lyra sua, that light lyre of
many tones, in whose jingle the eternal note of modern sadness is
heard so rarely.  If he has a lesson to teach English versifiers,
surely it is a lesson of gaiety.  They are only too fond of rue and
rosemary, and now and then prefer the cypress to the bay.  M. De
Banville's muse is content to wear roses in her locks, and perhaps
may retain, for many years, a laurel leaf from the ancient laurel
tree which once sheltered the poet at Turbia.



HOMER AND THE STUDY OF GREEK



The Greek language is being ousted from education, here, in France,
and in America.  The speech of the earliest democracies is not
democratic enough for modern anarchy.  There is nothing to be
gained, it is said, by a knowledge of Greek.  We have not to fight
the battle of life with Hellenic waiters; and, even if we had,
Romaic, or modern Greek, is much more easily learned than the old
classical tongue.  The reason of this comparative ease will be plain
to any one who, retaining a vague memory of his Greek grammar, takes
up a modern Greek newspaper.  He will find that the idioms of the
modern newspaper are the idioms of all newspapers, that the grammar
is the grammar of modern languages, that the opinions are expressed
in barbarous translations of barbarous French and English
journalistic cliches or commonplaces.  This ugly and undignified
mixture of the ancient Greek characters, and of ancient Greek words
with modern grammar and idioms, and stereotyped phrases, is
extremely distasteful to the scholar.  Modern Greek, as it is at
present printed, is not the natural spoken language of the peasants.
You can read a Greek leading article, though you can hardly make
sense of a Greek rural ballad.  The peasant speech is a thing of
slow development; there is a basis of ancient Greek in it, with
large elements of Slavonic, Turkish, Italian, and other imposed or
imported languages.  Modern literary Greek is a hybrid of revived
classical words, blended with the idioms of the speeches which have
arisen since the fall of the Roman Empire.  Thus, thanks to the
modern and familiar element in it, modern Greek "as she is writ" is
much more easily learned than ancient Greek.  Consequently, if any
one has need for the speech in business or travel, he can acquire as
much of it as most of us have of French, with considerable ease.
People therefore argue that ancient Greek is particularly
superfluous in schools.  Why waste time on it, they ask, which could
be expended on science, on modern languages, or any other branch of
education?  There is a great deal of justice in this position.  The
generation of men who are now middle-aged bestowed much time and
labour on Greek; and in what, it may be asked, are they better for
it?  Very few of them "keep up their Greek."  Say, for example, that
one was in a form with fifty boys who began the study--it is odds
against five of the survivors still reading Greek books.  The
worldly advantages of the study are slight:  it may lead three of
the fifty to a good degree, and one to a fellowship; but good
degrees may be taken in other subjects, and fellowships may be
abolished, or "nationalised," with all other forms of property.

Then, why maintain Greek in schools?  Only a very minute percentage
of the boys who are tormented with it really learn it.  Only a still
smaller percentage can read it after they are thirty.  Only one or
two gain any material advantage by it.  In very truth, most minds
are not framed by nature to excel and to delight in literature, and
only to such minds and to schoolmasters is Greek valuable.

This is the case against Greek put as powerfully as one can state
it.  On the other side, we may say, though the remark may seem
absurd at first sight, that to have mastered Greek, even if you
forget it, is not to have wasted time.  It really is an educational
and mental discipline.  The study is so severe that it needs the
earnest application of the mind.  The study is averse to indolent
intellectual ways; it will not put up with a "there or thereabouts,"
any more than mathematical ideas admit of being made to seem
"extremely plausible."  He who writes, and who may venture to offer
himself as an example, is naturally of a most slovenly and
slatternly mental habit.  It is his constant temptation to "scamp"
every kind of work, and to say "it will do well enough."  He hates
taking trouble and verifying references.  And he can honestly
confess that nothing in his experience has so helped, in a certain
degree, to counteract those tendencies--as the labour of thoroughly
learning certain Greek texts--the dramatists, Thucydides, some of
the books of Aristotle.  Experience has satisfied him that Greek is
of real educational value, and, apart from the acknowledged and
unsurpassed merit of its literature, is a severe and logical
training of the mind.  The mental constitution is strengthened and
braced by the labour, even if the language is forgotten in later
life.

It is manifest, however, that this part of education is not for
everybody.  The real educational problem is to discover what boys
Greek will be good for, and what boys will only waste time and
dawdle over it.  Certainly to men of a literary turn (a very minute
percentage), Greek is of an inestimable value.  Great poets, even,
may be ignorant of it, as Shakespeare probably was, as Keats and
Scott certainly were, as Alexandre Dumas was.  But Dumas regretted
his ignorance; Scott regretted it.  We know not how much Scott's
admitted laxity of style and hurried careless habit might have been
modified by a knowledge of Greek; how much of grace, permanence, and
generally of art, his genius might have gained from the language and
literature of Hellas.  The most Homeric of modern men could not read
Homer.  As for Keats, he was born a Greek, it has been said; but had
he been born with a knowledge of Greek, he never, probably, would
have been guilty of his chief literary faults.  This is not certain,
for some modern men of letters deeply read in Greek have all the
qualities of fustian and effusiveness which Longinus most despised.
Greek will not make a luxuriously Asiatic mind Hellenic, it is
certain; but it may, at least, help to restrain effusive and
rhetorical gabble.  Our Asiatic rhetoricians might perhaps be even
more barbarous than they are if Greek were a sealed book to them.
However this may be, it is, at least, well to find out in a school
what boys are worth instructing in the Greek language.  Now, of
their worthiness, of their chances of success in the study, Homer
seems the best touchstone; and he is certainly the most attractive
guide to the study.

At present boys are introduced to the language of the Muses by
pedantically written grammars, full of the queerest and most arid
metaphysical and philological verbiage.  The very English in which
these deplorable books are composed may be scientific, may be
comprehensible by and useful to philologists, but is utterly heart-
breaking to boys.

Philology might be made fascinating; the history of a word, and of
the processes by which its different forms, in different senses,
were developed, might be made as interesting as any other story of
events.  But grammar is not taught thus:  boys are introduced to a
jargon about matters meaningless, and they are naturally as much
enchanted as if they were listening to a chimaera bombinans in
vacuo.  The grammar, to them, is a mere buzz in a chaos of nonsense.
They have to learn the buzz by rote; and a pleasant process that is-
-a seductive initiation into the mysteries.  When they struggle so
far as to be allowed to try to read a piece of Greek prose, they are
only like the Marchioness in her experience of beer:  she once had a
sip of it.  Ten lines of Xenophon, narrating how he marched so many
parasangs and took breakfast, do not amount to more than a very
unrefreshing sip of Greek.  Nobody even tells the boys who Xenophon
was, what he did there, and what it was all about.  Nobody gives a
brief and interesting sketch of the great march, of its history and
objects.  The boys straggle along with Xenophon, knowing not whence
or whither:


"They stray through a desolate region,
And often are faint on the march."


One by one they fall out of the ranks; they mutiny against Xenophon;
they murmur against that commander; they desert his flag.  They
determine that anything is better than Greek, that nothing can be
worse than Greek, and they move the tender hearts of their parents.
They are put to learn German; which they do not learn, unluckily,
but which they find it comparatively easy to shirk.  In brief, they
leave school without having learned anything whatever.

Up to a certain age my experiences at school were precisely those
which I have described.  Our grammar was not so philological,
abstruse and arid as the instruments of torture employed at present.
But I hated Greek with a deadly and sickening hatred; I hated it
like a bully and a thief of time.  The verbs in [Greek text]
completed my intellectual discomfiture, and Xenophon routed me with
horrible carnage.  I could have run away to sea, but for a strong
impression that a life on the ocean wave "did not set my genius," as
Alan Breck says.  Then we began to read Homer; and from the very
first words, in which the Muse is asked to sing the wrath of
Achilles, Peleus' son, my mind was altered, and I was the devoted
friend of Greek.  Here was something worth reading about; here one
knew where one was; here was the music of words, here were poetry,
pleasure, and life.  We fortunately had a teacher (Dr. Hodson) who
was not wildly enthusiastic about grammar.  He would set us long
pieces of the Iliad or Odyssey to learn, and, when the day's task
was done, would make us read on, adventuring ourselves in "the
unseen," and construing as gallantly as we might, without grammar or
dictionary.  On the following day we surveyed more carefully the
ground we had pioneered or skirmished over, and then advanced again.
Thus, to change the metaphor, we took Homer in large draughts, not
in sips:  in sips no epic can be enjoyed.  We now revelled in Homer
like Keats in Spenser, like young horses let loose in a pasture.
The result was not the making of many accurate scholars, though a
few were made; others got nothing better than enjoyment in their
work, and the firm belief, opposed to that of most schoolboys, that
the ancients did not write nonsense.  To love Homer, as Steele said
about loving a fair lady of quality, "is a liberal education."

Judging from this example, I venture very humbly to think that any
one who, even at the age of Cato, wants to learn Greek, should begin
where Greek literature, where all profane literature begins--with
Homer himself.  It was thus, not with grammars in vacuo, that the
great scholars of the Renaissance began.  It was thus that Ascham
and Rabelais began, by jumping into Greek and splashing about till
they learned to swim.  First, of course, a person must learn the
Greek characters.  Then his or her tutor may make him read a dozen
lines of Homer, marking the cadence, the surge and thunder of the
hexameters--a music which, like that of the Sirens, few can hear
without being lured to the seas and isles of song.  Then the tutor
might translate a passage of moving interest, like Priam's appeal to
Achilles; first, of course, explaining the situation.  Then the
teacher might go over some lines, minutely pointing out how the
Greek words are etymologically connected with many words in English.
Next, he might take a substantive and a verb, showing roughly how
their inflections arose and were developed, and how they retain
forms in Homer which do not occur in later Greek.  There is no
reason why even this part of the lesson should be uninteresting.  By
this time a pupil would know, more or less, where he was, what Greek
is, and what the Homeric poems are like.  He might thus believe from
the first that there are good reasons for knowing Greek; that it is
the key to many worlds of life, of action, of beauty, of
contemplation, of knowledge.  Then, after a few more exercises in
Homer, the grammar being judiciously worked in along with the
literature of the epic, a teacher might discern whether it was worth
while for his pupils to continue in the study of Greek.  Homer would
be their guide into the "realms of gold."

It is clear enough that Homer is the best guide.  His is the oldest
extant Greek, his matter is the most various and delightful, and
most appeals to the young, who are wearied by scraps of Xenophon,
and who cannot be expected to understand the Tragedians.  But Homer
is a poet for all ages, all races, and all moods.  To the Greeks the
epics were not only the best of romances, the richest of poetry; not
only their oldest documents about their own history,--they were also
their Bible, their treasury of religious traditions and moral
teaching.  With the Bible and Shakespeare, the Homeric poems are the
best training for life.  There is no good quality that they lack:
manliness, courage, reverence for old age and for the hospitable
hearth; justice, piety, pity, a brave attitude towards life and
death, are all conspicuous in Homer.  He has to write of battles;
and he delights in the joy of battle, and in all the movement of
war.  Yet he delights not less, but more, in peace:  in prosperous
cities, hearths secure, in the tender beauty of children, in the
love of wedded wives, in the frank nobility of maidens, in the
beauty of earth and sky and sea, and seaward murmuring river, in sun
and snow, frost and mist and rain, in the whispered talk of boy and
girl beneath oak and pine tree.

Living in an age where every man was a warrior, where every city
might know the worst of sack and fire, where the noblest ladies
might be led away for slaves, to light the fire and make the bed of
a foreign master, Homer inevitably regards life as a battle.  To
each man on earth comes "the wicked day of destiny," as Malory
unconsciously translates it, and each man must face it as hardily as
he may.

Homer encourages them by all the maxims of chivalry and honour.  His
heart is with the brave of either side--with Glaucus and Sarpedon of
Lycia no less than with Achilles and Patroclus.  "Ah, friend," cries
Sarpedon, "if once escaped from this battle we were for ever to be
ageless and immortal, neither would I myself fight now in the
foremost ranks, nor would I urge thee into the wars that give
renown; but now--for assuredly ten thousand fates of death on every
side beset us, and these may no man shun, nor none avoid--forward
now let us go, whether we are to give glory or to win it!"  And
forth they go, to give and take renown and death, all the shields
and helms of Lycia shining behind them, through the dust of battle,
the singing of the arrows, the hurtling of spears, the rain of
stones from the Locrian slings.  And shields are smitten, and
chariot-horses run wild with no man to drive them, and Sarpedon
drags down a portion of the Achaean battlement, and Aias leaps into
the trench with his deadly spear, and the whole battle shifts and
shines beneath the sun.  Yet he who sings of the war, and sees it
with his sightless eyes, sees also the Trojan women working at the
loom, cheating their anxious hearts with broidery work of gold and
scarlet, or raising the song to Athene, or heating the bath for
Hector, who never again may pass within the gates of Troy.  He sees
the poor weaving woman, weighing the wool, that she may not defraud
her employers, and yet may win bread for her children.  He sees the
children, the golden head of Astyanax, his shrinking from the
splendour of the hero's helm.  He sees the child Odysseus, going
with his father through the orchard, and choosing out some apple
trees "for his very own."  It is in the mouth of the ruthless
Achilles, the fatal, the fated, the swift-footed hero with the hands
of death, that Homer places the tenderest of his similes.
"Wherefore weepest thou, Patroclus, like a fond little maid, that
runs by her mother's side, praying her mother to take her up,
snatching at her gown, and hindering her as she walks, and tearfully
looking at her till her mother takes her up?--like her, Patroclus,
dost thou softly weep."

This is what Chesterfield calls "the porter-like language of Homer's
heroes."  Such are the moods of Homer, so full of love of life and
all things living, so rich in all human sympathies, so readily moved
when the great hound Argus welcomes his master, whom none knew after
twenty years, but the hound knew him, and died in that welcome.
With all this love of the real, which makes him dwell so fondly on
every detail of armour, of implement, of art; on the divers-coloured
gold-work of the shield, on the making of tires for chariot-wheels,
on the forging of iron, on the rose-tinted ivory of the Sidonians,
on cooking and eating and sacrificing, on pet dogs, on wasps and
their ways, on fishing, on the boar hunt, on scenes in baths where
fair maidens lave water over the heroes, on undiscovered isles with
good harbours and rich land, on ploughing, mowing, and sowing, on
the furniture of houses, on the golden vases wherein the white dust
of the dead is laid,--with all this delight in the real, Homer is
the most romantic of poets.  He walks with the surest foot in the
darkling realm of dread Persephone, beneath the poplars on the
solemn last beach of Ocean.  He has heard the Siren's music, and the
song of Circe, chanting as she walks to and fro, casting the golden
shuttle through the loom of gold.  He enters the cave of the Man
Eater; he knows the unsunned land of the Cimmerians; in the summer
of the North he has looked, from the fiord of the Laestrygons, on
the Midnight Sun.  He has dwelt on the floating isle of AEolus, with
its wall of bronze unbroken, and has sailed on those Phaeacian barks
that need no help of helm or oar, that fear no stress either of wind
or tide, that come and go and return obedient to a thought and
silent as a dream.  He has seen the four maidens of Circe, daughters
of wells and woods, and of sacred streams.  He is the second-sighted
man, and beholds the shroud that wraps the living who are doomed,
and the mystic dripping from the walls of blood yet unshed.  He has
walked in the garden closes of Phaeacia, and looked on the face of
gods who fare thither, and watch the weaving of the dance.  He has
eaten the honey-sweet fruit of the lotus, and from the hand of Helen
he brings us that Egyptian nepenthe which puts all sorrow out of
mind.  His real world is as real as that in Henry V., his enchanted
isles are charmed with the magic of the Tempest.  His young wooers
are as insolent as Claudio, as flushed with youth; his beggar-men
are brethren of Edie Ochiltree; his Nausicaa is sister to Rosalind,
with a different charm of stately purity in love.  His enchantresses
hold us yet with their sorceries; his Helen is very Beauty:  she has
all the sweetness of ideal womanhood, and her repentance is without
remorse.  His Achilles is youth itself, glorious, cruel, pitiful,
splendid, and sad, ardent and loving, and conscious of its doom.
Homer, in truth, is to be matched only with Shakespeare, and of
Shakespeare he has not the occasional wilfulness, freakishness, and
modish obscurity.  He is a poet all of gold, universal as humanity,
simple as childhood, musical now as the flow of his own rivers, now
as the heavy plunging wave of his own Ocean.

Such, then, as far as weak words can speak of him, is the first and
greatest of poets.  This is he whom English boys are to be ignorant
of, if Greek be ousted from our schools, or are to know only in the
distorting mirror of a versified, or in the pale shadow of a prose
translation.  Translations are good only as teachers to bring men to
Homer.  English verse has no measure which even remotely suggests
the various flow of the hexameter.  Translators who employ verse
give us a feeble Homer, dashed with their own conceits, and moulded
to their own style.  Translators who employ prose "tell the story
without the song," but, at least, they add no twopenny "beauties"
and cheap conceits of their own.

I venture to offer a few examples of original translation, in which
the mannerisms of poets who have, or have not, translated Homer, are
parodied, and, of course (except in the case of Pope), exaggerated.
The passage is the speech of the Second-sighted Man, before the
slaying of the wooers in the hall:-


"Ah! wretched men, what ill is this ye suffer?  In night are swathed
your heads, your faces, your knees; and the voice of wailing is
kindled, and cheeks are wet with tears, and with blood drip the
walls, and the fair main beams of the roof, and the porch is full of
shadows, and full is the courtyard, of ghosts that hasten hellward
below the darkness, and the sun has perished out of heaven, and an
evil mist sweeps up over all."


So much for Homer.  The first attempt at metric translation here
given is meant to be in the manner of Pope:


"Caitiffs!" he cried, "what heaven-directed blight
Involves each countenance with clouds of night!
What pearly drop the ashen cheek bedews!
Why do the walls with gouts ensanguined ooze?
The court is thronged with ghosts that 'neath the gloom
Seek Pluto's realm, and Dis's awful doom;
In ebon curtains Phoebus hides his head,
And sable mist creeps upward from the dead."


This appears pretty bad, and nearly as un-Homeric as a translation
could possibly be.  But Pope, aided by Broome and Fenton, managed to
be much less Homeric, much more absurd, and infinitely more
"classical" in the sense in which Pope is classical:


"O race to death devote! with Stygian shade
Each destined peer impending fates invade;
With tears your wan distorted cheeks are drowned;
With sanguine drops the walls are rubied round:
Thick swarms the spacious hall with howling ghosts,
To people Orcus and the burning coasts!
Nor gives the sun his golden orb to roll,
But universal night usurps the pole."


Who could have conjectured that even Pope would wander away so far
from his matchless original?  "Wretches!" cries Theoclymenus, the
seer; and that becomes, "O race to death devote!"  "Your heads are
swathed in night," turns into "With Stygian shade each destined
peer" (peer is good!) "impending fates invade," where Homer says
nothing about Styx nor peers.  The Latin Orcus takes the place of
Erebus, and "the burning coasts" are derived from modern popular
theology.  The very grammar detains or defies the reader; is it the
sun that does not give his golden orb to roll, or who, or what?

The only place where the latter-day Broome or Fenton can flatter
himself that he rivals Pope at his own game is -


"What pearly drop the ashen cheek bedews!"


This is, if possible, MORE classical than Pope's own -


"With tears your wan distorted cheeks are drowned."


But Pope nobly revindicates his unparalleled power of translating
funnily, when, in place of "the walls drip with blood," he writes -


"With sanguine drops the walls are rubied round."


Homer does not appear to have been acquainted with rubies; but what
of that?  And how noble, how eminently worthy of Pope it is to add
that the ghosts "howl"!  I tried to make them gibber, but ghosts DO
gibber in Homer (though not in this passage), so Pope, Fenton,
Broome, and Co., make them howl.

No, Pope is not lightly to be rivalled by a modern translator.  The
following example, a far-off following of a noted contemporary poet,
may be left unsigned -


"Wretches, the bane hath befallen, the night and the blight of your
sin
Sweeps like a shroud o'er the faces and limbs that were gladsome
therein;
And the dirge of the dead breaketh forth, and the faces of all men
are wet,
And the walls are besprinkled with blood, and the ghosts in the
gateway are met,
Ghosts in the court and the gateway are gathered, Hell opens her
lips,
And the sun in his splendour is shrouded, and sickens in spasm of
eclipse."


The next is longer and slower:  the poet has a difficulty in telling
his story:


"Wretches," he cried, "what doom is this? what night
Clings like a face-cloth to the face of each, -
Sweeps like a shroud o'er knees and head? for lo!
The windy wail of death is up, and tears
On every cheek are wet; each shining wall
And beauteous interspace of beam and beam
Weeps tears of blood, and shadows in the door
Flicker, and fill the portals and the court -
Shadows of men that hellwards yearn--and now
The sun himself hath perished out of heaven,
And all the land is darkened with a mist."


That could never be mistaken for a version by the Laureate, as
perhaps any contemporary hack's works might have been taken for
Pope's.  The difficulty, perhaps, lies here:  any one knows where to
have Pope, any one knows that he will evade the mot propre, though
the precise evasion he may select is hard to guess.  But the
Laureate would keep close to his text, and yet would write like
himself, very beautifully, but not with an Homeric swiftness and
strength.  Who is to imitate him?  As to Mr. William Morris, he
might be fabled to render [Greek text] "niddering wights," but
beyond that, conjecture is baffled. {2} Or is THIS the kind of
thing? -


"Niddering wights, what a bane do ye bear, for your knees in the
night,
And your heads and your faces, are shrouded, and clamour that knows
not delight
Rings, and your cheeks are begrutten, and blood is besprent on the
walls,
Blood on the tapestry fair woven, and barrow-wights walk in the
halls.
Fetches and wraiths of the chosen of the Norns, and the sun from the
lift
Shudders, and over the midgarth and swan's bath the cloud-shadows
drift."


It may be argued that, though this is perhaps a translation, it is
not English, never was, and never will be.  But it is quite as like
Homer as the performance of Pope.

Such as these, or not so very much better than these as might be
wished, are our efforts to translate Homer.  From Chapman to Avia,
or Mr. William Morris, they are all eminently conscientious, and
erroneous, and futile.  Chapman makes Homer a fanciful, euphuistic,
obscure, and garrulous Elizabethan, but Chapman has fire.  Pope
makes him a wit, spirited, occasionally noble, full of points, and
epigrams, and queer rococo conventionalisms.  Cowper makes him slow,
lumbering, a Milton without the music.  Maginn makes him pipe an
Irish jig:-


"Scarcely had she begun to wash
When she was aware of the grisly gash!"


Lord Derby makes him respectable and ponderous.  Lord Tennyson makes
him not less, but certainly not more, than Tennysonian.  Homer, in
the Laureate's few fragments of experiment, is still a poet, but he
is not Homer.  Mr. Morris, and Avia, make him Icelandic, and
archaistic, and hard to scan, though vigorous in his fetters for all
that.  Bohn makes him a crib; and of other translators in prose it
has been said, with a humour which one of them appreciates, that
they render Homer into a likeness of the Book of Mormon.

Homer is untranslatable.  None of us can bend the bow of Eurytus,
and make the bow-string "ring sweetly at the touch, like the
swallow's song."  The adventure is never to be achieved; and, if
Greek is to be dismissed from education, not the least of the
sorrows that will ensue is English ignorance of Homer.



THE LAST FASHIONABLE NOVEL



The editor of a great American newspaper once offered the author of
these lines a commission to explore a lost country, the seat of a
fallen and forgotten civilisation.  It was not in Yucatan, or
Central Africa, or Thibet, or Kafiristan, this desolate region, once
so popular, so gaudy, so much frequented and desired.  It was only
the fashionable novels of the Forties, say from 1835 to 1850, that I
was requested to examine and report upon.  But I shrank from the
colossal task.  I am no Mr. Stanley; and the length, the
difficulties, the arduousness of the labour appalled me.  Besides, I
do not know where that land lies, the land of the old Fashionable
Novel, the Kor of which Thackeray's Lady Fanny Flummery is the
Ayesha.  What were the names of the old novels, and who were the
authors, and in the circulating library of what undiscoverable
watering-place are they to be found?  We have heard of Mrs. Gore, we
have heard of Tremayne, and Emilia Wyndham, and the Bachelor of the
Albany; and many of us have read Pelham, or know him out of
Carlyle's art, and those great curses which he spoke.  But who was
the original, or who were the originals, that sat for the portrait
of the "Fashionable Authoress," Lady Fanny Flummery? and of what
work is Lords and Liveries a parody?  The author is also credited
with Dukes and Dejeuners, Marchionesses and Milliners, etc.  Could,
any candidate in a literary examination name the prototypes?  "Let
mantua-makers puff her, but not men," says Thackeray, speaking of
Lady Fanny Flummery, "and the Fashionable Authoress is no more.
Blessed, blessed thought!  No more fiddle-faddle novels!  When will
you arrive, O happy Golden Age!"

Well, it has arrived, though we are none the happier for all that.
The Fashionable Novel has ceased to exist, and the place of the
fashionable authoress knows her no more.  Thackeray plainly detested
Lady Fanny.  He writes about her, her books, her critics, her
successes, with a certain bitterness.  Can it be possible that a
world which rather neglected Barry Lyndon was devoted to
Marchionesses and Milliners?  Lady Fanny is represented as having
editors and reviewers at her feet; she sits among the flowers, like
the Sirens, and around her are the bones of critics corrupt in
death.  She is puffed for the sake of her bouquets, her dinners, her
affabilities and condescensions.  She gives a reviewer a great
garnet pin, adorned wherewith he paces the town.  Her adorers
compare her to "him who sleeps by Avon."  In one of Mr. Black's
novels there is a lady of this kind, who captivates the tribe of
"Log Rollers," as Mr. Black calls them.  This lady appears to myself
to be a quite impossible She.  One has never met her with her wiles,
nor come across her track, even, and seen the bodies and the bones
of those who perished in puffing her.  Some persons of rank and
fashion have a taste for the society of some men of letters, but
nothing in the way of literary puffery seems to come of it.  Of
course many critics like to give their friends and acquaintances an
applausive hand, and among their acquaintances may be ladies of
fashion who write novels; but we read nowhere such extraordinary
adulations as Augustus Timson bestowed on Lady Fanny.  The
fashionable authoress is nearly extinct, though some persons write
well albeit they are fashionable.  The fashionable novel is as dead
as a door nail:  Lothair was nearly the last of the species.  There
are novelists who write about "Society," to be sure, like Mr.
Norris; but their tone is quite different.  They do not speak as if
Dukes and Earls were some strange superior kind of beings; their
manner is that of men accustomed to and undazzled by Earls, writing
for readers who do not care whether the hero is a lord or a
commoner.  They are "at ease," though not terribly "in Zion."
Thackeray himself introduces plenty of the peerage, but it cannot be
said that he is always at ease in their society.  He remembers that
they are lords, and is on his guard, very often, and suspicious and
sarcastic, except, perhaps when he deals with a gentleman like Lord
Kew.  He examines them like curious wild animals in the Jardin des
Plantes.  He is an accomplished naturalist, and not afraid of the
lion; but he remembers that the animal is royal, and has a title.
Mr. Norris, for instance, shows nothing of this mood.  Mr. Trollope
was not afraid of his Dukes:  he thought none the worse of a man
because he was the high and puissant prince of Omnium.  As for most
novelists, they no longer paint fashionable society with enthusiasm.
Mr. Henry James has remarked that young British peers favour the
word "beastly,"--a point which does not always impress itself into
other people so keenly as into Mr. Henry James.  In reading him you
do not forget that his Tufts are Tufts.  But then Tufts are really
strange animals to the denizens of the Great Republic.  Perhaps the
modern realism has made novelists desert the world where Dukes and
Dowagers abound.  Novelists do not know very much about it; they are
not wont to haunt the gilded saloons, and they prefer to write about
the manners which they know.  A very good novel, in these strange
ruinous times, might be written with a Duke for hero; but nobody
writes it, and, if anybody did write it in the modern manner, it
would not in the least resemble the old fashionable novel.

Here a curious point arises.  We have all studied the ingenious lady
who calls herself Ouida.  Now, is Ouida, or rather was Ouida in her
early state sublime, the last of the old fashionable novelists, or
did Thackeray unconsciously prophesy of her when he wrote his
burlesque Lords and Liveries?  Think of the young earl of Bagnigge,
"who was never heard to admire anything except a coulis de
dindonneau e la St. Menehould, . . . or the bouquet of a flask of
Medoc, of Carbonnell's best quality, or a goutte of Marasquin, from
the cellars of Briggs and Hobson."  We have met such young
patricians in Under Two Flags and Idalia.  But then there is a
difference:  Ouida never tells us that her hero was "blest with a
mother of excellent principles, who had imbued his young mind with
that morality which is so superior to all the vain pomps of the
world."  But a hero of Ouida's might easily have had a father who
"was struck down by the side of the gallant Collingwood in the Bay
of Fundy."  The heroes themselves may have "looked at the Pyramids
without awe, at the Alps without reverence."  They do say "Corpo di
Bacco," and the Duca de Montepulciano does reply, "E' bellissima
certamente."  And their creator might conceivably remark "Non cuivis
contigit."  But Lady Fanny Flummery's ladies could not dress as
Ouida's ladies do:  they could not quote Petronius Arbiter; they had
never heard of Suetonius.  No age reproduces itself.  There is much
of our old fashionable authoress in Ouida's earlier tales; there is
plenty of the Peerage, plenty of queer French in old novels and
Latin yet more queer; but where is the elan which takes archaeology
with a rush, which sticks at no adventure, however nobly incredible?
where is the pathos, the simplicity, the purple splendour of Ouida's
manner, or manners?  No, the spirit of the world, mirroring itself
in the minds of individuals, simpered, and that simper was Lady
Fanny Flummery.  But it did many things more portentous than
simpering, when it reflected itself in Ouida.

Is it that we do no longer gape on the aristocracy admiringly, and
write of them curiously, as if they were creatures in a Paradise?
Is it that Thackeray has converted us?  In part, surely, we are just
as snobbish as ever, though the gods of our adoration totter to
their fall, and "a hideous hum" from the mob outside thrills through
the temples.  In fiction, on the other hand, the world of fashion is
"played out."  Nobody cares to read or write about the dear duchess.
If a peer comes into a novel he comes in, not as a coroneted
curiosity, but as a man, just as if he were a dentist, or a
stockbroker.  His rank is an accident; it used to be the essence of
his luminous apparition.  I scarce remember a lord in all the many
works of Mr. Besant, nor do they people the romances of Mr. Black.
Mr. Kipling does not deal in them, nor Mr. George Meredith much; Mr.
Haggard hardly gets beyond a baronet, and HE wears chain mail in
Central Africa, and tools with an axe.  Mrs. Oliphant has a Scotch
peer, but he is less interesting and prominent than his family
ghost.  No, we have only Ouida left, and Mr. Norris--who writes
about people of fashion, indeed, but who has nothing in him of the
old fashionable novelist.

Is it to a Republic, to France, that we must look for our
fashionable novels--to France and to America.  Every third person in
M. Guy de Maupassant's tales has a "de," and is a Marquis or a
Vicomte.  As for M. Paul Bourget, one really can be happy with him
in the fearless old fashion.  With him we meet Lord Henry Bohun, and
M. De Casal (a Vicomte), and all the Marquises and Marquises; and
all the pale blue boudoirs, and sentimental Duchesses, whose hearts
are only too good, and who get into the most complicated amorous
scrapes.  That young Republican, M. Bourget, sincerely loves a
blason, a pedigree, diamonds, lace, silver dressing cases, silver
baths, essences, pomatums, le grand luxe.  So does Gyp:  apart from
her wit, Gyp is delightful to read, introducing us to the very best
of bad company.  Even M. Fortune du Boisgobey likes a Vicomte, and
is partial to the noblesse, while M. Georges Ohnet is accused of
entering the golden world of rank, like a man without a wedding
garment, and of being lost and at sea among his aristocrats.  They
order these things better in France:  they still appeal to the fine
old natural taste for rank and luxury, splendour and refinement.
What is Gyp but a Lady Fanny Flummery reussie,--Lady Fanny with the
trifling additional qualities of wit and daring?  Observe her noble
scorn of M. George Ohnet:  it is a fashionable arrogance.

To my mind, I confess, the decay of the British fashionable novel
seems one of the most threatening signs of the times.  Even in
France institutions are much more permanent than here.  In France
they have fashionable novels, and very good novels too:  no man of
sense will deny that they are far better than our dilettantism of
the slums, or our religious and social tracts in the disguise of
romance.  If there is no new tale of treasure and bandits and fights
and lions handy, may I have a fashionable novel in French to fall
back upon!  Even Count Tolstoi does not disdain the genre.  There is
some uncommonly high life in Anna Karenine.  He adds a great deal of
psychology, to be sure; so does M. Paul Bourget.  But he takes you
among smart people, who have everything handsome about them--titles,
and lands, and rents.  Is it not a hard thing that an honest British
snob, if he wants to move in the highest circles of fiction, must
turn to French novelists, or Russian, or American?  As to the
American novels of the elite and the beau monde, their elegance is
obscured to English eyes, because that which makes one New Yorker
better than another, that which creates the Upper Ten Thousand (dear
phrase!) of New York, is so inconspicuous.  For example, the
scientific inquirer may venture himself among the novels of two
young American authors.  Few English students make this voyage of
exploration.  But the romances of these ingenious writers are
really, or really try to be, a kind of fashionable novels.  It is a
queer domain of fashion, to be sure, peopled by the strangest
aborigines, who talk and are talked about in a language most
interesting to the philologist.  Here poor Lady Fanny Flummery would
have been sadly to seek, for her characters, though noble, were
moral, and her pen was wielded on the side of Church and State.  But
these western fashionables have morals and a lingo of their own,
made in equal parts of the American idioms and of expressions
transferred from the jargon of Decadence and the Parnassiculet
Contemporain.  As one peruses these novels one thinks of a new tale
to be told--The Last of the Fashionables, who died away, like the
buffalo and the grisly bear, in some canon or forest of the Wild
West.  I think this distinguished being, Ultimus hominum
venustiorum, will find the last remnants of the Gentlemanly Party in
some Indian tribe, Apaches or Sioux.  I see him raised to the rank
of chief, and leading the red-skinned and painted cavaliers on the
war-path against the Vulgarians of the ultimate Democracy.  To
depict this dandy chief would require the art at once of a Cooper
and a Ouida.  Let me attempt -


THE LAST FIGHT OF FOUR HAIR-BRUSHES


By this time the Sioux were flying in all directions, mowed down by
the fire of Gatling and Maxim guns.  The scrub of Little Big Horn
Creek was strewn with the bodies of writhing braves.  On the livid
and volcanic heights of Mount Buncombe, the painted tents were
blazing merrily.  But on a mound above the creek, an ancient
fortress of some long-forgotten people, a small group of Indian
horsemen, might be observed, steady as rocks in the refluent tide of
war.  The fire from their Winchester repeaters blazed out like the
streamers of the Northern Lights.  Again and again the flower of the
United States army had charged up the mound, only to recoil in
flight, or to line the cliff with their corpses.  The First Irish
Cuirassiers had been annihilated:  Parnell's own, alas! in the heat
of the combat had turned their fratricidal black-thorns on
M'Carthy's brigade, and these two gallant squadrons were mixed and
broken, falling beneath the blows of brothers estranged.

But at last the fire from the Redmen on the bluff slackened and grew
silent.  The ammunition was exhausted.  There was a movement in the
group of braves.  Crazy Horse and Bald Coyote turned to Four Hair-
Brushes, who sat his steed Atalanta, last winner of the last Grand
National, with all the old careless elegance of the Row.

"Four Hair-Brushes," said Crazy Horse (and a tear rolled down his
painted cheek), "nought is left but flight."

"Then fly," said Four Hair-Brushes, languidly, lighting a cigarette,
which he took from a diamond-studded gold etui, the gift of the
Kaiser in old days.

"Nay, not without the White Chief," said Bald Coyote; and he seized
the reins of Four Hair-Brushes, to lead him from that stricken
field.

"Vous etes trop vieux jeu, mon ami," murmured Four Hair-Brushes, "je
ne suis ni Edouard II., ni Charles Edouard e Culloden.  Quatre-
brosses meurt, mais il ne se rend pas."

The Indian released his hold, baffled by the erudition and the calm
courage of his captain.

"I make tracks," he said; and, swinging round so that his horse
concealed his body, he galloped down the bluff, and through the
American cavalry, scattering death from the arrows which he loosed
under his horse's neck.

Four Hair-Brushes was alone.

Unarmed, as ever, he sat, save for the hunting-whip in his right
hand.

"Scalp him!" yelled the Friendly Crows.

"Nay, take him alive:  a seemlier knight never backed steed!" cried
the gallant Americans.

From their midst rode a courteous cavalier, Captain John Barry, the
scholar, the hero of sword and pen.

"Yield thee, Sir Knight!" he said, doffing his kepi in martial
courtesy.

Four Hair-Brushes replied to his salute, and was opening his curved
and delicate lips to speak, when a chance bullet struck him full in
the breast.  He threw up his arms, reeled, and fell.  The gallant
American, leaping from saddle to ground, rushed to raise his head.

Through the war-paint he recognised him.

"Great Heaven!" he cried, "it is--"

"Hush!" whispered Four Hair-Brushes, with a weary smile:  "let
Annesley de Vere of the Blues die unnamed.  Tell them that I fell in
harness."

He did, indeed.  Under his feathered and painted cloak Barry found
that Annesley, ever careful of his figure, ever loyal in love, the
last of the Dandies, yet wore the corset of Madame de Telliere.  It
was wet with his life-blood.

"So dies," said Barry, "the last English gentleman."



THACKERAY



"I thought how some people's towering intellects and splendid
cultivated geniuses rise upon simple, beautiful foundations hidden
out of sight."  Thus, in his Letters to Mrs. Brookfield, Mr.
Thackeray wrote, after visiting the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral,
with its "charming, harmonious, powerful combination of arches and
shafts, beautiful whichever way you see them developed, like a fine
music."  The simile applies to his own character and genius, to his
own and perhaps to that of most great authors, whose works are our
pleasure and comfort in this troublesome world.  There are critics
who profess a desire to hear nothing, or as little as may be, of the
lives of great artists, whether their instrument of art was the pen,
or the brush, or the chisel, or the strings and reeds of music.
With those critics perhaps most of us agree, when we read books that
gossip about Shelley, or Coleridge, or Byron.  "Give us their
poetry," we say, "and leave their characters alone:  we do not want
tattle about Claire and chatter about Harriet; we want to be happy
with 'The Skylark' or 'The Cloud.'"  Possibly this instinct is
correct, where such a poet as Shelley is concerned, whose life, like
his poetry, was as "the life of winds and tides," whose genius,
unlike the skylark's, was more true to the point of heaven than the
point of home.  But reflection shows us that on the whole, as Mr.
Thackeray says, a man's genius must be builded on the foundations of
his character.  Where that genius deals with the mingled stuff of
human life--sorrow, desire, love, hatred, kindness, meanness--then
the foundation of character is especially important.  People are
sometimes glad that we know so little of Shakespeare the man; yet
who can doubt that a true revelation of his character would be not
less worthy, noble and charming than the general effect of his
poems?  In him, it is certain, we should always find an example of
nobility, of generosity, of charity and kindness and self-
forgetfulness.  Indeed, we find these qualities, as a rule, in the
biographies of the great sympathetic poets and men of genius of the
pen--I do not say in the lives of rebels of genius, "meteoric poets"
like Byron.  The same basis, the same foundations of rectitude, of
honour, of goodness, of melancholy, and of mirth, underlie the art
of Moliere, of Scott, of Fielding, and as his correspondence shows,
of Thackeray.

It seems probable that a complete biography of Thackeray will never
be written.  It was his wish to live in his works alone:  that wish
his descendants respect; and we must probably regard the Letters to
Mr. and Mrs. Brookfield as the last private and authentic record of
the man which will be given, at least to this generation.  In these
Letters all sympathetic readers will find the man they have long
known from his writings--the man with a heart so tender that the
world often drove him back into a bitterness of opposition, into an
assumed hardness and defensive cynicism.  There are readers so
unluckily constituted that they can see nothing in Thackeray but
this bitterness, this cruel sense of meanness and power of analysing
shabby emotions, sneaking vanities, contemptible ambitions.  All of
us must often feel with regret that he allowed himself to be made
too unhappy by the spectacle of failings so common in the world he
knew best, that he dwelt on them too long and lashed them too
complacently.  One hopes never to read "Lovel the Widower" again,
and one gladly skips some of the speeches of the Old Campaigner in
"The Newcomes."  They are terrible, but not more terrible than life.
Yet it is hard to understand how Mr. Ruskin, for example, can let
such scenes and characters hide from his view the kindness,
gentleness, and pity of Thackeray's nature.  The Letters must open
all eyes that are not wilfully closed, and should at last overcome
every prejudice.

In the Letters we see a man literally hungering and thirsting after
affection, after love--a man cut off by a cruel stroke of fate from
his natural solace, from the centre of a home.


"God took from me a lady dear,"


he says, in the most touching medley of doggerel and poetry, made
"instead of writing my Punch this morning."  Losing "a lady dear,"
he takes refuge as he may, he finds comfort as he can, in all the
affections within his reach, in the society of an old college friend
and of his wife, in the love of all children, beginning with his
own; in a generous liking for all good work and for all good
fellows.

Did any man of letters except Scott ever write of his rivals as
Thackeray wrote of Dickens?  Artists are a jealous race.  "Potter
hates potter, and poet hates poet," as Hesiod said so long ago.
This jealousy is not mere envy, it is really a strong sense of how
things ought to be done, in any art, touched with a natural
preference for a man's own way of doing them.  Now, what could be
more unlike than the "ways" of Dickens and Thackeray?  The subjects
chosen by these great authors are not more diverse than their
styles.  Thackeray writes like a scholar, not in the narrow sense,
but rather as a student and a master of all the refinements and
resources of language.  Dickens copies the chaff of the street, or
he roams into melodramatics, "drops into poetry"--blank verse at
least--and touches all with peculiarities, we might say mannerisms,
of his own.  I have often thought, and even tried to act on the
thought, that some amusing imaginary letters might be written, from
characters of Dickens about characters of Thackeray, from characters
of Thackeray about characters of Dickens.  They might be supposed to
meet each other in society, and describe each other.  Can you not
fancy Captain Costigan on Dick Swiveller, Blanche Amory on Agnes,
Pen on David Copperfield, and that "tiger" Steerforth?  What would
the family solicitor of "The Newcomes" have to say of Mr.
Tulkinghorn?  How would George Warrington appreciate Mr. Pickwick?
Yes, the two great novelists were as opposed as two men could be--in
manner, in style, in knowledge of books, and of the world.  And yet
how admirably Thackeray writes about Dickens, in his letters as in
his books!  How he delights in him!  How manly is that emulation
which enables an author to see all the points in his rival, and not
to carp at them, but to praise, and be stimulated to keener effort!

Consider this passage.  "Have you read Dickens?  O! it is charming!
Brave Dickens!  It has some of his very prettiest touches--those
inimitable Dickens touches which make such a great man of him, and
the reading of the book has done another author a great deal of
good."

Thackeray is just as generous, and perhaps more critical, in writing
of Kingsley.  "A fine, honest, go-a-head fellow, who charges a
subject heartily, impetuously, with the greatest courage and
simplicity; but with narrow eyes (his are extraordinarily brave,
blue and honest), and with little knowledge of the world, I think.
But he is superior to us worldlings in many ways, and I wish I had
some of his honest pluck."

I have often wished that great authors, when their days of creation
were over, when "their minds grow grey and bald," would condescend
to tell us the history of their books.  Sir Walter Scott did
something of this kind in the prefaces to the last edition of the
Waverley Novels published during his life.  What can be more
interesting than his account, in the introduction to the "Fortunes
of Nigel," of how he worked, how he planned, and found all his plots
and plans overridden by the demon at the end of his pen!  But Sir
Walter was failing when he began those literary confessions; good as
they are, he came to them too late.  Yet these are not confessions
which an author can make early.  The pagan Aztecs only confessed
once in a lifetime--in old age, when they had fewer temptations to
fall to their old loves:  then they made a clean breast of it once
for all.  So it might be with an author.  While he is in his
creative vigour, we want to hear about his fancied persons, about
Pendennis, Beatrix, Becky, not about himself, and how he invented
them.  But when he has passed his best, then it is he who becomes of
interest; it is about himself that we wish him to speak, as far as
he modestly may.  Who would not give "Lovel the Widower" and
"Philip" for some autobiographical and literary prefaces to the
older novels?  They need not have been more egotistic than the
"Roundabout Papers."  They would have had far more charm.  Some
things cannot be confessed.  We do not ask who was the original Sir
Pitt Crawley, or the original Blanche Amory.  But we might learn in
what mood, in what circumstances the author wrote this passage or
that.

The Letters contain a few notes of this kind, a few literary
confessions.  We hear that Emmy Sedley was partly suggested by Mrs.
Brookfield, partly by Thackeray's mother, much by his own wife.
There scarce seems room for so many elements in Emmy's personality.
For some reason ladies love her not, nor do men adore her.  I have
been her faithful knight ever since I was ten years old and read
"Vanity Fair" somewhat stealthily.  Why does one like her except
because she is such a thorough woman?  She is not clever, she is not
very beautiful, she is unhappy, and she can be jealous.  One pities
her, and that is akin to a more tender sentiment; one pities her
while she sits in the corner, and Becky's green eyes flatter her oaf
of a husband; one pities her in the poverty of her father's house,
in the famous battle over Daffy's Elixir, in the separation from the
younger George.  You begin to wish some great joy to come to her:
it does not come unalloyed; you know that Dobbin had bad quarters of
an hour with this lady, and had to disguise a little of his
tenderness for his own daughter.  Yes, Emmy is more complex than she
seems, and perhaps it needed three ladies to contribute the various
elements of her person and her character.  One of them, the jealous
one, lent a touch to Helen Pendennis, to Laura, to Lady Castlewood.
Probably this may be the reason why some persons dislike Thackeray
so.  His very best women are not angels. {3} Are the very best women
angels?  It is a pious opinion--that borders on heresy.

When the Letters began to be written, in 1847, Thackeray had his
worst years, in a worldly sense, behind him.  They were past:  the
times when he wrote in Galignani for ten francs a day.  Has any
literary ghoul disinterred his old ten-franc articles in Galignani?
The time of "Barry Lyndon," too, was over.  He says nothing of that
masterpiece, and only a word about "The Great Hoggarty Diamond."  "I
have been re-reading it.  Upon my word and honour, if it doesn't
make you cry, I shall have a mean opinion of you.  It was written at
a time of great affliction, when my heart was very soft and humble.
Amen.  Ich habe auch viel geliebt."  Of "Pendennis," as it goes on,
he writes that it is "awfully stupid," which has not been the
verdict of the ages.  He picks up materials as he passes.  He dines
with some officers, and perhaps he stations them at Chatteris.  He
meets Miss G-, and her converse suggests a love passage between Pen
and Blanche.  Why did he dislike fair women so?  It runs all through
his novels.  Becky is fair.  Blanche is fair.  Outside the old
yellow covers of "Pendennis," you see the blonde mermaid, "amusing,
and clever, and depraved," dragging the lover to the sea, and the
nut-brown maid holding him back.  Angelina, of the "Rose and the
Ring," is the Becky of childhood; she is fair, and the good Rosalba
is brune.  In writing "Pendennis" he had a singular experience.  He
looked over his own "back numbers," and found "a passage which I had
utterly forgotten as if I had never read or written it."  In
Lockhart's "Life of Scott," James Ballantyne says that "when the
'Bride of Lammermoor' was first put into his hands in a complete
shape, he did not recollect one single incident, character, or
conversation it contained."  That is to say, he remembered nothing
of his own invention, though his memory of the traditional parts was
as clear as ever.  Ballantyne remarks, "The history of the human
mind contains nothing more wonderful."  The experience of Thackeray
is a parallel to that of Scott.  "Pendennis," it must be noted, was
interrupted by a severe illness, and "The Bride of Lammermoor" was
dictated by Sir Walter when in great physical pain.  On one occasion
Thackeray "lit upon a very stupid part of 'Pendennis,' I am sorry to
say; and yet how well written it is!  What a shame the author don't
write a complete good story!  Will he die before doing so? or come
back from America and do it?"

Did he ever write "a complete, good story"?  Did any one ever do
such a thing as write a three-volume, novel, or a novel of equal
length, which was "a complete, good story"?  Probably not; or if any
mortal ever succeeded in the task, it was the great Alexander Dumas.
"The Three Musketeers," I take leave to think, and "Twenty Years
After," are complete good stories, good from beginning to end,
stories from beginning to end without a break, without needless
episode.  Perhaps one may say as much for "Old Mortality," and for
"Quentin Durward."  But Scott and Dumas were born story-tellers;
narrative was the essence of their genius at its best; the current
of romance rolls fleetly on, bearing with it persons and events,
mirroring scenes, but never ceasing to be the main thing--the
central interest.  Perhaps narrative like this is the chief success
of the novelist.  He is triumphant when he carries us on, as Wolf,
the famous critic, was carried on by the tide of the Iliad, "in that
pure and rapid current of action."  Nobody would claim this especial
merit for Thackeray.  He is one of the greatest of novelists; he
displays human nature and human conduct so that we forget ourselves
in his persons, but he does not make us forget ourselves in their
fortunes.  Whether Clive does or does not marry Ethel, or Esmond,
Beatrix, does not very greatly excite our curiosity.  We cannot ring
the bells for Clive's second wedding as the villagers celebrated the
bridal of Pamela.  It is the development of character, it is the
author's comments, it is his own personality and his unmatched and
inimitable style, that win our admiration and affection.  We can
take up "Vanity Fair," or "Pendennis," or "The Newcomes," just where
the book opens by chance, and read them with delight, as we may read
Montaigne.  When one says one can take up a book anywhere, it
generally means that one can also lay it down anywhere.  But it is
not so with Thackeray.  Whenever we meet him he holds us with his
charm, his humour, his eloquence, his tenderness.  If he has not, in
the highest degree, the narrative power, he does possess, in a
degree perhaps beyond any other writer of English, that kind of
poetic quality which is not incompatible with prose writing.

A great deal has been said about prose poetry.  As a rule, it is
very poor stuff.  As prose it has a tendency to run into blank
verse; as poetry it is highly rhetorical and self-conscious.  It
would be invidious and might be irritating to select examples from
modern masters of prose-poetry.  They have never been poets.  But
the prose of a poet like Milton may be, and is, poetical in the true
sense; and so, upon occasions, was the prose of Thackeray.  Some
examples linger always in the memory, and dwell with their music in
the hearing.  One I have quoted elsewhere; the passage in "The
Newcomes" where Clive, at the lecture on the Poetry of the Domestic
Affections, given by Sir Barnes Newcome, sees Ethel, whom he has
lost.

"And the past, and its dear histories, and youth and its hopes and
passions, and tones and looks, for ever echoing in the heart and
present in the memory--those, no doubt, poor Clive saw and heard as
he looked across the great gulf of time and parting and grief, and
beheld the woman he had loved for many years."  "The great gulf of
time, and parting, and grief,"--some of us are on the farther side
of it, and our old selves, and our old happiness, and our old
affections beyond, grow near, grow clear, now and then, at the sight
of a face met by chance in the world, at the chance sound of a
voice.  Such are human fortunes, and human sorrows; not the worst,
not the greatest, for these old loves do not die--they live in
exile, and are the better parts of our souls.  Not the greatest, nor
the worst of sorrows, for shame is worse, and hopeless hunger, and a
life all of barren toil without distractions, without joy, must be
far worse.  But of those myriad tragedies of the life of the poor,
Thackeray does not write.  How far he was aware of them, how deeply
he felt them, we are not informed.  His highest tragedy is that of
the hunger of the heart; his most noble prose sounds in that meeting
of Harry Esmond with Lady Castlewood, in the immortal speech which
has the burden, "bringing your sheaves with you!"  All that scene
appears to me no less unique, no less unsurpassable, no less
perfect, than the "Ode to the Nightingale" of Keats, or the Lycidas
of Milton.  It were superfluous to linger over the humour of
Thackeray.  Only Shakespeare and Dickens have graced the language
with so many happy memories of queer, pleasant people, with so many
quaint phrases, each of which has a kind of freemasonry, and when
uttered, or recalled, makes all friends of Thackeray into family
friends of each other.  The sayings of Mr. Harry Foker, of Captain
Costigan, of Gumbo, are all like old dear family phrases, they live
imperishable and always new, like the words of Sir John, the fat
knight, or of Sancho Panza, or of Dick Swiveller, or that other
Sancho, Sam Weller.  They have that Shakespearian gift of being ever
appropriate, and undyingly fresh.

These are among the graces of Thackeray, these and that inimitable
style, which always tempts and always baffles the admiring and
despairing copyist.  Where did he find the trick of it, of the words
which are invariably the best words, and invariably fall exactly in
the best places?  "The best words in the best places," is part of
Coleridge's definition of poetry; it is also the essence of
Thackeray's prose.  In these Letters to Mrs. Brookfield the style is
precisely the style of the novels and essays.  The style, with
Thackeray, was the man.  He could not write otherwise.  But
probably, to the last, this perfection was not mechanical, was not
attained without labour and care.  In Dr. John Brown's works, in his
essay on Thackeray, there is an example of a proof-sheet on which
the master has made corrections, and those corrections bring the
passage up to his accustomed level, to the originality of his
rhythm.  Here is the piece:-


"Another Finis, another slice of life which Tempus edax has
devoured!  And I may have to write the word once or twice, perhaps,
and then an end of Ends.  [Finite is ever and Infinite beginning.]
Oh, the troubles, the cares, the ennui, [the complications,] the
repetitions, the old conversations over and over again, and here and
there all the delightful passages, the dear, the brief, the forever-
remembered!

"[And then]  A few chapters more, and then the last, and behold
Finis itself coming to an end, and the Infinite beginning."


"How like music this," writes Dr. John Brown--"like one trying the
same air in different ways, as it were, searching out and sounding
all its depths!"  The words were almost the last that Thackeray
wrote, perhaps the very last.  They reply, as it were, to other
words which he had written long before to Mrs. Brookfield.

"I don't pity anybody who leaves the world; not even a fair young
girl in her prime; I pity those remaining.  On her journey, if it
pleases God to send her, depend on it there's no cause for grief,
that's but an earthly condition.  Out of our stormy life, and
brought nearer the Divine light and warmth, there must be a serene
climate.  Can't you fancy sailing into the calm?"

Ah! nowhere else shall we find the Golden Bride, "passionless bride,
divine Tranquillity."

As human nature persistently demands a moral, and, as, to say truth,
Thackeray was constantly meeting the demand, what is the lesson of
his life and his writings?  So people may ask, and yet how futile is
the answer!  Life has a different meaning, a different riddle, a
different reply for each of us.  There is not one sphinx, but many
sphinxes--as many as there are women and men.  We must all answer
for ourselves.  Pascal has one answer, "Believe!"  Moliere has
another, "Observe!"  Thackeray's answer is, "Be good and enjoy!" but
a melancholy enjoyment was his.  Dr. John Brown says:

"His persistent state, especially for the later half of his life,
was profoundly morne, there is no other word for it.  This arose in
part from temperament, from a quick sense of the littleness and
wretchedness of mankind . . . This feeling, acting on a harsh and
savage nature, ended in the saeva indignatio of Swift; acting on the
kindly and sensitive nature of Mr. Thackeray, it led only to
compassionate sadness."

A great part of his life, and most of his happiness, lay in love.
"Ich habe auch viel geliebt," he says, and it is a hazardous kind of
happiness that attends great affection.  Your capital is always at
the mercy of failures, of death, of jealousy, of estrangement.  But
he had so much love to give that he could not but trust those
perilous investments.

Other troubles he had that may have been diversions from those.  He
did not always keep that manly common sense in regard to criticism,
which he shows in a letter to Mrs. Brookfield.  "Did you read the
Spectator's sarcastic notice of 'Vanity Fair'?  I don't think it is
just, but think Kintoul (Rintoul?) is a very honest man, and rather
inclined to deal severely with his private friends lest he should
fall into the other extreme:  to be sure he keeps out of it, I mean
the other extreme, very well."

That is the way to take unfavourable criticisms--not to go declaring
that a man is your enemy because he does not like your book, your
ballads, your idyls, your sermons, what you please.  Why cannot
people keep literature and liking apart?  Am I bound to think Jones
a bad citizen, a bad man, a bad householder, because his poetry
leaves me cold?  Need he regard me as a malevolent green-eyed
monster, because I don't want to read him?  Thackeray was not always
true in his later years to these excellent principles.  He was
troubled about trifles of criticisms and gossip, bagatelles not
worth noticing, still less worth remembering and recording.  Do not
let us record them, then.

We cannot expect for Thackeray, we cannot even desire for him, a
popularity like that of Dickens.  If ever any man wrote for the
people, it was Dickens.  Where can we find such a benefactor, and
who has lightened so many lives with such merriment as he?  But
Thackeray wrote, like the mass of authors, for the literary class--
for all who have the sense of style, the delight in the best
language.  He will endure while English literature endures, while
English civilisation lasts.  We cannot expect all the world to share
our affection for this humourist whose mirth springs from his
melancholy.  His religion, his education, his life in this
unsatisfying world, are not the life, the education, the religion of
the great majority of human kind.  He cannot reach so many ears and
hearts as Shakespeare or Dickens, and some of those whom he reaches
will always and inevitably misjudge him.  Mais c'est mon homme, one
may say, as La Fontaine said of Moliere.  Of modern writers, putting
Scott aside, he is to me the most friendly and sympathetic.  Great
genius as he was, he was also a penman, a journalist; and
journalists and penmen will always look to him as their big brother,
the man in their own line of whom they are proudest.  As devout
Catholics did not always worship the greatest saints, but the
friendliest saints, their own, so we scribes burn our cheap incense
to St. William Makepeace.  He could do all that any of us could do,
and he did it infinitely better.  A piece of verse for Punch, a
paragraph, a caricature, were not beneath the dignity of the author
of "Esmond."  He had the kindness and helpfulness which I, for one,
have never met a journalist who lacked.  He was a good Englishman;
the boy within him never died; he loved children, and boys, and a
little slang, and a boxing match.  If he had failings, who knew them
better than he?  How often he is at once the boy at the swishing
block and Dr. Birch who does not spare the rod!  Let us believe with
that beloved physician, our old friend Dr. John Brown, that "Mr.
Thackeray was much greater, much nobler than his works, great and
noble as they are."  Let us part with him, remembering his own
words:


"Come wealth or want, come good or ill,
Let young and old accept their part,
And bow before the awful Will,
And bear it with an honest heart."



DICKENS



"I cannot read Dickens!"  How many people make this confession, with
a front of brass, and do not seem to know how poor a figure they
cut!  George Eliot says that a difference of taste in jokes is a
great cause of domestic discomfort.  A difference of taste in books,
when it is decided and vigorous, breaks many a possible friendship,
and nips many a young liking in the bud.  I would not willingly seem
intolerant.  A man may not like Sophocles, may speak disrespectfully
of Virgil, and even sneer at Herodotus, and yet may be endured.  But
he or she (it is usually she) who contemns Scott, and "cannot read
Dickens," is a person with whom I would fain have no further
converse.  If she be a lady, and if one meets her at dinner, she
must of course be borne with, and "suffered gladly."  But she has
dug a gulf that nothing can bridge; she may be fair, clever and
popular, but she is Anathema.  I feel towards her (or him if he
wears a beard) as Bucklaw did towards the person who should make
inquiries about that bridal night of Lammermoor.

But this admission does not mean that one is sealed of the tribe of
Charles--that one is a Dickensite pure and simple, convinced and
devout--any more than Mr. Matthew Arnold was a Wordsworthian.
Dickens has many such worshippers, especially (and this is an
argument in favour of the faith) among those who knew him in his
life.  He must have had a wonderful charm; for his friends in life
are his literary partisans, his uncompromising partisans, even to
this day.  They will have no half-hearted admiration, and scout him
who tries to speak of Dickens as of an artist not flawless, no less
than they scorn him who cannot read Dickens at all.  At one time
this honourable enthusiasm (as among the Wordsworthians) took the
shape of "endless imitation."  That is over; only here and there is
an imitator of the master left in the land.  All his own genius was
needed to carry his mannerisms; the mannerisms without the genius
were an armour that no devoted David had proved, that none could
wear with success.

Of all great writers since Scott, Dickens is probably the man to
whom the world owes most gratitude.  No other has caused so many sad
hearts to be lifted up in laughter; no other has added so much mirth
to the toilsome and perplexed life of men, of poor and rich, of
learned and unlearned.  "A vast hope has passed across the world,"
says Alfred de Musset; we may say that with Dickens a happy smile, a
joyous laugh, went round this earth.  To have made us laugh so
frequently, so inextinguishably, so kindly--that is his great good
deed.  It will be said, and with a great deal of truth, that he has
purged us with pity and terror as well as with laughter.  But it is
becoming plain that his command of tears is less assured than of
old, and I cannot honestly regret that some of his pathos--not all,
by any means--is losing its charm and its certainty of appeal.
Dickens's humour was rarely too obvious; it was essentially
personal, original, quaint, unexpected, and his own.  His pathos was
not infrequently derived from sources open to all the world, and
capable of being drawn from by very commonplace writers.  Little
Nells and Dombeys, children unhappy, overthrown early in the melee
of the world, and dying among weeping readers, no longer affect us
as they affected another generation.  Mrs. Beecher Stowe and the
author of "Misunderstood," once made some people weep like anything
by these simple means.  Ouida can do it; plenty of people can do it.
Dickens lives by virtue of what none but he can do:  by virtue of
Sairey Gamp, and Sam Weller, and Dick Swiveller, and Mr. Squeers,
with a thousand other old friends, of whom we can never weary.  No
more than Cleopatra's can custom stale their infinite variety.

I do not say that Dickens' pathos is always of the too facile sort,
which plays round children's death-beds.  Other pathos he has, more
fine and not less genuine.  It may be morbid and contemptible to
feel "a great inclination to cry" over David Copperfield's boyish
infatuation for Steerforth; but I feel it.  Steerforth was a
"tiger,"--as Major Pendennis would have said, a tiger with his curly
hair and his ambrosial whiskers.  But when a little boy loses his
heart to a big boy he does not think of this.  Traddles thought of
it.  "Shame, J. Steerforth!" cried Traddles, when Steerforth bullied
the usher.  Traddles had not lost his heart, nor set up the big boy
as a god in the shrine thereof.  But boys do these things; most of
us have had our Steerforths--tall, strong, handsome, brave, good-
humoured.  Far off across the years I see the face of such an one,
and remember that emotion which is described in "David Copperfield,"
chap. xix., towards the end of the chapter.  I don't know any other
novelist who has touched this young and absolutely disinterested
belief of a little boy in a big one--touched it so kindly and
seriously, that is there is a hint of it in "Dr. Birch's School
Days."

But Dickens is always excellent in his boys, of whom he has drawn
dozens of types--all capital.  There is Tommy Traddles, for example.
And how can people say that Dickens could not draw a gentleman?  The
boy who shouted, "Shame, J. Steerforth!" was a gentleman, if one may
pretend to have an opinion about a theme so difficult.  The Dodger
and Charley Bates are delightful boys--especially Bates.  Pip, in
the good old days, when he was the prowling boy, and fought Herbert
Pocket, was not less attractive, and Herbert himself, with his
theory and practice of the art of self-defence--could Nelson have
been more brave, or Shelley (as in Mr. Matthew Arnold's opinion)
more "ineffectual"?  Even the boys at Dotheboys Hall are each of
them quite distinct.  Dickens's boys are almost as dear to me as
Thackeray's--as little Rawdon himself.  There is one exception.  I
cannot interest myself in Little Dombey.  Little David Copperfield
is a jewel of a boy with a turn for books.  Doubtless he is created
out of Dickens's memories of himself as a child.  That is true
pathos again, and not overwrought, when David is sent to Creakle's,
and his poor troubled mother dare hardly say farewell to him.

And this brings us back to that debatable thing--the pathos of
Dickens--from which one has been withdrawn by the attractions of his
boys.  Little Dombey is a prize example of his pathos.  Little Nell
is another.  Jeffrey, of the Edinburgh Review, who criticised
"Marmion" and the "Lady of the Lake" so vindictively, shed tears
over Little Nell.  It is a matter of taste, or, as Science might
say, of the lachrymal glands as developed in each individual.  But
the lachrymal glands of this amateur are not developed in that
direction.  Little Dombey and Little Nell leave me with a pair of
dry eyes.  I do not "melt visibly" over Little Dombey, like the
weak-eyed young man who took out his books and trunk to the coach.
The poor little chap was feeble and feverish, and had dreams of
trying to stop a river with his childish hands, or to choke it with
sand.  It may be very good pathology, but I cannot see that it is at
all right pathos.  One does not like copy to be made out of the
sufferings of children or of animals.  One's heart hardens:  the
object is too manifest, the trick is too easy.  Conceive a child of
Dombey's age remarking, with his latest breath, "Tell them that the
picture on the stairs at school is not Divine enough!"  That is not
the delirium of infancy, that is art-criticism:  it is the Athenaeum
on Mr. Holman Hunt.  It is not true to nature; it is not good in
art:  it is the kind of thing that appears in Sunday-school books
about the virtuous little boy who died.  There is more true pathos
in many a page of "Huckleberry Finn."  Yet this is what Jeffrey
gushed over.  "There has been nothing like the actual dying of that
sweet Paul."  So much can age enfeeble the intellect, that he who
had known Scott, and yet nibbled at his fame, descended to admiring
the feeblest of false sentiment.  As for Little Nell, who also has
caused floods of tears to be shed, her case is sufficiently
illustrated by the picture in the first edition ("Master Humphrey's
Clock,", 1840, p. 210):


"'When I die
Put near me something that has loved the light,
And had the sky above it always.'  Those
Were her words."

"Dear, gentle, patient, noble Nell was dead!"


The pathos is about as good as the prose, and THAT is blank verse.
Are the words in the former quotation in the least like anything
that a little girl would say?  A German sentimentalist might have
said them; Obermann might have murmured them in his weaker moments.
Let us try a piece of domestic pathos by another hand.  It is the
dawn of Waterloo.

"Heart-stained and shame-stricken, he stood at the bed's foot, and
looked at the sleeping girl.  How dared he--who was he--to pray for
one so spotless!  God bless her!  God bless her!  He came to the
bedside, and looked at the hand, the little soft hand, lying asleep,
and he bent over the pillow noiselessly towards the gentle pale
face.  Two fair arms closed tenderly round his neck as he stooped
down.  'I am awake, George,' the poor child said, with a sob."

I know I am making enemies of a large proportion of the readers of
this page.  "Odious, sneering beast!" is the quotation which they
will apply, perhaps unconscious of its origin, to a critic who is
humble but would fain be honest, to a critic who thinks that Dickens
has his weak places, and that his pathos is one of these.  It cannot
be helped.  Each of us has his author who is a favourite, a friend,
an idol, whose immaculate perfection he maintains against all
comers.  For example, things are urged against Scott; I receive them
in the attitude of the deaf adder of St. Augustine, who stops one
ear with his tail and presses the other against the dust.  The same
with Moliere:  M. Scherer utters complaints against Moliere!  He
would not convince me, even if I were convinced.  So, with regard to
Dickens, the true believer will not listen, he will not be
persuaded.  But if any one feels a little shaken, let him try it
another way.  There is a character in M. Alphonse Daudet's "Froment
Jeune et Rissler Aine"--a character who, people say, is taken bodily
from Dickens.  This is Desiree Delobelle, the deformed girl, the
daughter of un rate, a pretentious imbecile actor.  She is poor,
stunted, laborious, toiling at a small industry; she is in love, is
rejected, she tries to drown herself, she dies.  The sequence of
ideas is in Dickens's vein; but read the tale, and I think you will
see how little the thing is overdone, how simple and unforced it is,
compared with analogous persons and scenes in the work of the
English master.  The idiotic yell of "plagiarism" has been raised,
of course, by critical cretins.  M. Daudet, as I understand what he
says in "Trente Ans de Paris," had not read Dickens at all, when he
wrote "Froment Jeune"--certainly had not read "Our Mutual Friend."
But there is something of Dickens's genius in M. Daudet's, and that
something is kept much better in hand by the Frenchman, is more
subordinated to the principles of taste and of truth.

On the other hand, to be done with this point, look at Delobelle,
the father of Desiree, and compare him with Dickens's splendid
strollers, with Mr. Vincent Crummles, and Mr. Lenville, and the
rest.  As in Desiree so in Delobelle, M. Daudet's picture is much
the more truthful.  But it is truthful with a bitter kind of truth.
Now, there is nothing not genial and delightful in Crummles and Mrs.
Crummles and the Infant Phenomenon.  Here Dickens has got into a
region unlike the region of the pathetic, into a world that welcomes
charge or caricature, the world of humour.  We do not know, we never
meet Crummleses quite so unsophisticated as Vincent, who is "not a
Prussian," who "can't think who puts these things into the papers."
But we do meet stage people who come very near to this naivete of
self-advertisement, and some of whom are just as dismal as Crummles
is delightful.

Here, no doubt, is Dickens's forte.  Here his genius is all pure
gold, in his successful studies or inventions of the humorous, of
character parts.  One literally does not know where to begin or end
in one's admiration for this creative power that peopled our fancies
with such troops of dear and impossible friends.  "Pickwick" comes
practically first, and he never surpassed "Pickwick."  He was a poor
story-teller, and in "Pickwick" he had no story to tell; he merely
wandered at adventure in that merrier England which was before
railways were.  "Pickwick" is the last of the stories of the road
that begin in the wandering, aimless, adventurous romances of
Greece, or in Petronius Arbiter, and that live with the life of "Gil
Blas" and "Don Quixote," of "Le Roman Comique," of "Tom Jones and
"Joseph Andrews."  These tales are progresses along highways
bristling with adventure, and among inns full of confusion, Mr.
Pickwick's affair with the lady with yellow curl-papers being a mild
example.  Though "Tom Jones" has a plot so excellent, no plot is
needed here, and no consecutive story is required.  Detached
experiences, vagrants of every rank that come and go, as in real
life, are all the material of the artist.  With such materials
Dickens was exactly suited; he was at home on high-road and lane,
street and field-path, in inns and yeomen's warm hospitable houses.
Never a humour escaped him, and he had such a wealth of fun and high
spirits in these glad days as never any other possessed before.  He
was not in the least a bookish man, not in any degree a scholar; but
Nature taught him, and while he wrote with Nature for his teacher,
with men and women for his matter, with diversion for his aim, he
was unsurpassable--nay, he was unapproachable.

He could not rest here; he was, after all, a child of an age that
grew sad, and earnest, and thoughtful.  He saw abuses round him--
injustice, and oppression, and cruelty.  He had a heart to which
those things were not only abhorrent, but, as it were, maddening.
He knew how great an influence he wielded, and who can blame him for
using it in any cause he thought good?  Very possibly he might have
been a greater artist if he had been less of a man, if he had been
quite disinterested, and had never written "with a purpose."  That
is common, and even rather obsolete critical talk.  But when we
remember that Fielding, too, very often wrote "with a purpose," and
that purpose the protection of the poor and unfriended; and when we
remember what an artist Fielding was, I do not see how we can blame
Dickens.  Occasionally he made his art and his purpose blend so
happily that his work was all the better for his benevolent
intentions.  We owe Mr. Squeers, Mrs. Squeers, Fanny Squeers,
Wackford and all, to Dickens's indignation against the nefarious
school pirates of his time.  If he is less successful in attacking
the Court of Chancery, and very much less successful still with the
Red Tape and Circumlocution Office affairs, that may be merely
because he was less in the humour, and not because he had a purpose
in his mind.  Every one of a man's books cannot be his masterpiece.
There is nothing in literary talk so annoying as the spiteful joy
with which many people declare that an author is "worked out,"
because his last book is less happy than some that went before.
There came a time in Dickens' career when his works, to my own taste
and that of many people, seemed laboured, artificial--in fact, more
or less failures.  These books range from "Dombey and Son," through
"Little Dorrit," I dare not say to "Our Mutual Friend."  One is
afraid that "Edwin Drood," too, suggests the malady which Sir Walter
already detected in his own "Peveril of the Peak."  The intense
strain on the faculties of Dickens--as author, editor, reader, and
man of the world--could not but tell on him; and years must tell.
"Philip" is not worthy of the author of "Esmond," nor "Daniel
Deronda" of the author of "Silas Marner."  At that time--the time of
the Dorrits and Dombeys--Blackwood's Magazine published a
"Remonstrance with Boz"; nor was it quite superfluous.  But Dickens
had abundance of talent still to display--above all in "Great
Expectations" and "A Tale of Two Cities."  The former is, after
"Pickwick," "Copperfield," "Martin Chuzzlewit," and "Nicholas
Nickleby"--after the classics, in fact--the most delightful of
Dickens's books.  The story is embroiled, no doubt.  What are we to
think of Estelle?  Has the minx any purpose?  Is she a kind of Ethel
Newcome of odd life?  It is not easy to say; still, for a story of
Dickens's the plot is comparatively clear and intelligible.  For a
study of a child's life, of the nature Dickens drew best--the river
and the marshes--and for plenty of honest explosive fun, there is no
later book of Dickens's like "Great Expectations."  Miss Havisham,
too, in her mouldy bridal splendour, is really impressive; not like
Ralph Nickleby and Monk in "Oliver Twist"--a book of which the plot
remains to me a mystery. {4} Pip and Pumblechook and Mr. Wopsle and
Jo are all immortal, and cause laughter inextinguishable.  The
rarity of this book, by the way, in its first edition--the usual
library three volumes--is rather difficult to explain.  One very
seldom sees it come into the market, and then it is highly priced.

I have mentioned more than once the obscurity of Dickens's plots.
This difficulty may be accounted for in a very flattering manner.
Where do we lose ourselves?  Not in the bare high-road, but among
lanes, between hedges hung with roses, blackberries, morning
glories, where all about us is so full of pleasure that our
attention is distracted and we miss our way.  Now, in Dickens--in
"Oliver Twist," in "Martin Chuzzlewit," in "Nicholas Nickleby"--
there is, as in the lanes, so much to divert and beguile, that we
cease to care very much where the road leads--a road so full of
happy marvels.  The dark, plotting villains--like the tramp who
frightened Sir Walter Scott so terribly, as he came from Miss
Baillie's at Hampstead--peer out from behind the hedges now and
then.  But we are too much amused by the light hearts that go all
the way, by the Dodger and Crummles and Mrs. Gamp, to care much for
what Ralph, and Monk, and Jonas Chuzzlewit are plotting.  It may not
be that the plot is so confused, but that we are too much diverted
to care for the plot, for the incredible machinations of Uriah Heap,
to choose another example.  Mr. Micawber cleared these up; but it is
Mr. Micawber that hinders us from heeding them.

This, at least, is a not unfriendly explanation.  Yet I cannot but
believe that, though Dickens took great pains with his plots, he was
not a great plotter.  He was not, any more than Thackeray, a story-
teller first and foremost.  We can hold in our minds every thread of
Mr. Wilkie Collins' web, or of M. Fortune du Boisgobey's, or of M.
Gaboriau's--all great weavers of intrigues.  But Dickens goes about
darkening his intrigue, giving it an extra knot, an extra twist,
hinting here, ominously laughing there, till we get mystified and
bored, and give ourselves up to the fun of the humours, indifferent
to the destinies of villains and victims.  Look at "Edwin Drood."  A
constant war about the plot rages in the magazines.  I believe, for
one, that Edwin Drood was resuscitated; but it gives me no pleasure.
He was too uninteresting.  Dickens's hints, nods, mutterings,
forebodings, do not at all impress one like that deepening and
darkening of the awful omens in "The Bride of Lammermoor."  Here
Scott--unconsciously, no doubt--used the very manner of Homer in the
Odyssey, and nowhere was his genius more Homeric.  That was romance.

The "Tale of Two Cities" is a great test of the faith--that is in
Dickensites.  Of all his works it is the favourite with the wrong
sort!  Ladies prefer it.  Many people can read it who cannot
otherwise read Dickens at all.  This in itself proves that it is not
a good example of Dickens, that it is not central, that it is an
outlying province which he conquered.  It is not a favourite of
mine.  The humour of the humorous characters rings false--for
example, the fun of the resurrection-man with the wife who "flops."
But Sidney Carton has drawn many tears down cheeks not accustomed to
what Mr. B. in "Pamela" calls "pearly fugitives."

It sometimes strikes one that certain weaknesses in our great
novelists, in Thackeray as well as Dickens, were caused by their
method of publication.  The green and yellow leaves flourished on
the trees for two whole years.  Who (except Alexandre the Great)
could write so much, and yet all good?  Do we not all feel that
"David Copperfield" should have been compressed?  As to "Pendennis,"
Mr. Thackeray's bad health when he wrote it might well cause a
certain languor in the later pages.  Moreover, he frankly did not
care for the story, and bluffly says, in the preface, that he
respited Colonel Altamont almost at the foot of the gallows.
Dickens took himself more in earnest, and, having so many pages to
fill, conscientiously made Uriah Heap wind and wriggle through them
all.

To try to see blots in the sun, and to pick holes in Dickens, seems
ungrateful, and is indeed an ungrateful task; to no mortal man have
more people owed mirth, pleasure, forgetfulness of care, knowledge
of life in strange places.  There never was such another as Charles
Dickens, nor shall we see his like sooner than the like of
Shakespeare.  And he owed all to native genius and hard work; he
owed almost nothing to literature, and that little we regret.  He
was influenced by Carlyle, he adopted his method of nicknames, and
of hammering with wearisome iteration on some peculiarity--for
example, on Carker's teeth, and the patriarch's white hair.  By the
way, how incredible is all the Carker episode in "Dombey"!  Surely
Dickens can never have intended Edith, from the first, to behave as
she did!  People may have influenced him, as they influenced Scott
about "St. Ronan's Well."  It has been said that, save for Carlyle,
Dickens was in letters a self-taught artist, that he was no man's
pupil, and borrowed from none.  No doubt this makes him less
acceptable to the literary class than a man of letters, like
Thackeray--than a man in whose treasure chamber of memory all the
wealth of the Middle Ages was stored, like Scott.  But the native
naked genius of Dickens,--his heart, his mirth, his observation, his
delightful high spirits, his intrepid loathing of wrong, his
chivalrous desire to right it,--these things will make him for ever,
we hope and believe, the darling of the English people.



ADVENTURES OF BUCCANEERS



Most of us, as boys, have envied the buccaneers.  The greatest of
all boys, Canon Kingsley, once wrote a pleasing and regretful poem
in which the Last Buccaneer represents himself as a kind of
picturesque philanthropist:-


"There were forty craft in Aves that were both swift and stout,
All furnished well with small arms, and cannons round about;
And a thousand men in Aves made laws so fair and free,
To choose their valiant captains and obey them loyally.
Thence we sailed against the Spaniard with his hoards of plate and
gold,
Which he wrung with cruel tortures from Indian folk of old;
Likewise the merchant captains, with hearts as hard as stone,
Who flog men and keel-haul them, and starve them to the bone."


The buccaneer is "a gallant sailor," according to Kingsley's poem--a
Robin Hood of the waters, who preys only on the wicked rich, or the
cruel and Popish Spaniard, and the extortionate shipowner.  For his
own part, when he is not rescuing poor Indians, the buccaneer lives
mainly "for climate and the affections":-


"Oh, sweet it was in Aves to hear the landward breeze,
A swing with good tobacco in a net between the trees,
With a negro lass to fan you, while you listened to the roar
Of the breakers on the reef outside that never touched the shore."


This is delightfully idyllic, like the lives of the Tahitian
shepherds in the Anti-Jacobin--the shepherds whose occupation was a
sinecure, as there were no sheep in Tahiti.

Yet the vocation was not really so touchingly chivalrous as the poet
would have us deem.  One Joseph Esquemeling, himself a buccaneer,
has written the history and described the exploits of his companions
in plain prose, warning eager youths that "pieces-of-eight do not
grow on every tree," as many raw recruits have believed.  Mr.
Esquemeling's account of these matters may be purchased, with a
great deal else that is instructive and entertaining, in "The
History of the Buccaneers in America."  My edition (of 1810) is a
dumpy little book, in very small type, and quite a crowd of
publishers took part in the venture.  The older editions are
difficult to procure if your pockets are not stuffed with pieces-of-
eight.  You do not often find even this volume, but "when found make
a note of," and you have a reply to Canon Kingsley.

A charitable old Scotch lady, who heard our ghostly foe evil spoken
of, remarked that, "If we were all as diligent and conscientious as
the Devil, it would be better for us."  Now, the buccaneers were
certainly models of diligence and conscientiousness in their own
industry, which was to torture people till they gave up their goods,
and then to run them through the body, and spend the spoils over
drink and dice.  Except Dampier, who was a clever man, but a poor
buccaneer (Mr. Clark Russell has written his life), they were the
most hideously ruthless miscreants that ever disgraced the earth and
the sea.  But their courage and endurance were no less notable than
their greed and cruelty, so that a moral can be squeezed even out of
these abandoned miscreants.  The soldiers and sailors who made their
way within gunshot of Khartoum, overcoming thirst, hunger, heat, the
desert, and the gallant children of the desert, did not fight,
march, and suffer more bravely than the scoundrels who sacked
Mairaibo and burned Panama.  Their good qualities were no less
astounding and exemplary than their almost incredible wickedness.
They did not lie about in hammocks much, listening to the landward
wind among the woods--the true buccaneers.  To tell the truth, most
of them had no particular cause to love the human species.  They
were often Europeans who had been sold into slavery on the West
Indian plantations, where they learned lessons of cruelty by
suffering it.  Thus Mr. Joseph Esquemeling, our historian, was
beaten, tortured, and nearly starved to death in Tortuga, "so I
determined, not knowing how to get any living, to enter into the
order of the pirates or robbers of the sea."  The poor Indians of
the isles, much pitied by Kingsley's buccaneer, had a habit of
sticking their prisoners all over with thorns, wrapped in oily
cotton, whereto they then set fire.  "These cruelties many
Christians have seen while they lived among these barbarians."  Mr.
Esquemeling was to see, and inflict, plenty of this kind of torment,
which was not out of the way nor unusual.  One planter alone had
killed over a hundred of his servants--"the English did the same
with theirs."

A buccaneer voyage began in stealing a ship, collecting desperadoes,
and torturing the local herdsmen till they gave up their masters'
flocks, which were salted as provisions.  Articles of service were
then drawn up, on the principle "no prey, no pay."  The spoils, when
taken, were loyally divided as a rule, though Captain Morgan, of
Wales, made no more scruple about robbing his crew than about
barbecuing a Spanish priest.  "They are very civil and charitable to
each other, so that if any one wants what another has, with great
willingness they give it to one another."  In other matters they did
not in the least resemble the early Christians.  A fellow nick-named
The Portuguese may be taken as our first example of their
commendable qualities.

With a small ship of four guns he had taken a great one of twenty
guns, with 70,000 pieces-of-eight . . . He himself, however, was
presently captured by a larger vessel, and imprisoned on board.
Being carelessly watched, he escaped on two earthen jars (for he
could not swim), reached the woods in Campechy, and walked for a
hundred and twenty miles through the bush.  His only food was a few
shell-fish, and by way of a knife he had a large nail, which he
whetted to an edge on a stone.  Having made a kind of raft, he
struck a river, and paddled to Golpho Triste, where he found
congenial pirates.  With twenty of these, and a boat, he returned to
Campechy, where he had been a prisoner, and actually captured the
large ship in which he had lain captive!  Bad luck pursued him,
however:  his prize was lost in a storm; he reached Jamaica in a
canoe, and never afterwards was concerned as leader in any affair of
distinction.  Not even Odysseus had more resource, nor was more
long-enduring; but Fortune was The Portuguese's foe.

Braziliano, another buccaneer, served as a pirate before the mast,
and "was beloved and respected by all."  Being raised to command, he
took a plate ship; but this success was of indifferent service to
his otherwise amiable character.  "He would often appear foolish and
brutish when in drink," and has been known to roast Spaniards alive
on wooden spits "for not showing him hog yards where he might steal
swine."  One can hardly suppose that Kingsley would have regretted
THIS buccaneer, even if he had been the last, which unluckily he was
not.  His habit of sitting in the street beside a barrel of beer,
and shooting all passers-by who would not drink with him, provoked
remark, and was an act detestable to all friends of temperance
principles.

Francois L'Olonnois, from southern France, had been kidnapped, and
sold as a slave in the Caribbee Islands.  Recovering his freedom, he
plundered the Spanish, says my buccaneer author, "till his
unfortunate death."  With two canoes he captured a ship which had
been sent after him, carrying ten guns and a hangman for his express
benefit.  This hangman, much to the fellow's chagrin, L'Olonnois put
to death like the rest of his prisoners.  His great achievements
were in the Gulf of Venezuela or Bay of Maracaibo.  The gulf is a
strong place; the mouth, no wider than a gun-shot, is guarded by two
islands.  Far up the inlet is Maracaibo, a town of three thousand
people, fortified and surrounded by woods.  Yet farther up is the
town of Gibraltar.  To attack these was a desperate enterprise; but
L'Olonnois stole past the forts, and frightened the townsfolk into
the woods.  As a rule the Spaniards made the poorest resistance;
there were examples of courage, but none of conduct.  With strong
forts, heavy guns, many men, provisions, and ammunition, they
quailed before the desperate valour of the pirates.  The towns were
sacked, the fugitives hunted out in the woods, and the most
abominable tortures were applied to make them betray their friends
and reveal their treasures.  When they were silent, or had no
treasures to declare, they were hacked, twisted, burned, and starved
to death.

Such were the manners of L'Olonnois; and Captain Morgan, of Wales,
was even more ruthless.

Gibraltar was well fortified and strengthened after Maracaibo fell;
new batteries were raised, the way through the woods was barricaded,
and no fewer than eight hundred men were under arms to resist a
small pirate force, exhausted by debauch, and having its retreat cut
off by the forts at the mouth of the great salt-water loch.  But
L'Olonnois did not blench:  he told the men that audacity was their
one hope, also that he would pistol the first who gave ground.  The
men cheered enthusiastically, and a party of three hundred and fifty
landed.  The barricaded way they could not force, and in a newly cut
path they met a strong battery which fired grape.  But L'Olonnois
was invincible.  He tried that old trick which rarely fails, a sham
retreat, and this lured the Spaniards from their earthwork on the
path.  The pirates then turned, sword in hand, slew two hundred of
the enemy, and captured eight guns.  The town yielded, the people
fled to the woods, and then began the wonted sport of torturing the
prisoners.  Maracaibo they ransomed afresh, obtained a pilot, passed
the forts with ease, and returned after sacking a small province.
On a dividend being declared, they parted 260,000 pieces-of-eight
among the band, and spent the pillage in a revel of three weeks.

L'Olonnois "got great repute" by this conduct, but I rejoice to add
that in a raid on Nicaragua he "miserably perished," and met what
Mr. Esquemeling calls "his unfortunate death."  For L'Olonnois was
really an ungentlemanly character.  He would hack a Spaniard to
pieces, tear out his heart, and "gnaw it with his teeth like a
ravenous wolf, saying to the rest, 'I will serve you all alike if
you show me not another way'" (to a town which he designed
attacking).  In Nicaragua he was taken by the Indians, who, being
entirely on the Spanish side, tore him to pieces and burned him.
Thus we really must not be deluded by the professions of Mr.
Kingsley's sentimental buccaneer, with his pity for "the Indian folk
of old."

Except Denis Scott, a worthy bandit in his day, Captain Henry Morgan
is the first renowned British buccaneer.  He was a young Welshman,
who, after having been sold as a slave in Barbadoes, became a sailor
of fortune.  With about four hundred men he assailed Puerto Bello.
"If our number is small," he said, "our hearts are great," and so he
assailed the third city and place of arms which Spain then possessed
in the West Indies.  The entrance of the harbour was protected by
two strong castles, judged as "almost impregnable," while Morgan had
no artillery of any avail against fortresses.  Morgan had the luck
to capture a Spanish soldier, whom he compelled to parley with the
garrison of the castle.  This he stormed and blew up, massacring all
its defenders, while with its guns he disarmed the sister fortress.
When all but defeated in a new assault, the sight of the English
colours animated him afresh.  He made the captive monks and nuns
carry the scaling ladders; in this unwonted exploit the poor
religious folk lost many of their numbers.  The wall was mounted,
the soldiers were defeated, though the Governor fought like a
Spaniard of the old school, slew many pirates with his own hand, and
pistolled some of his own men for cowardice.  He died at his post,
refusing quarter, and falling like a gentleman of Spain.  Morgan,
too, was not wanting in fortitude:  he extorted 100,000 pieces-of-
eight from the Governor of Panama, and sent him a pistol as a sample
of the gun wherewith he took so great a city.  He added that he
would return and take this pistol out of Panama; nor was he less
good than his word.  In Cuba he divided 250,000 pieces-of-eight, and
a great booty in other treasure.  A few weeks saw it all in the
hands of the tavern-keepers and women of the place.

Morgan's next performance was a new sack of Maracaibo, now much
stronger than L'Olonnois had found it.  After the most appalling
cruelties, not fit to be told, he returned, passing the castles at
the mouth of the port by an ingenious stratagem.  Running boatload
after boatload of men to the land side, he brought them back by
stealth, leading the garrison to expect an attack from that quarter.
The guns were massed to landward, and no sooner was this done than
Morgan sailed up through the channel with but little loss.  Why the
Spaniards did not close the passage with a boom does not appear.
Probably they were glad to be quit of Morgan on any terms.

A great Spanish fleet he routed by the ingenious employment of a
fire-ship.  In a later expedition a strong place was taken by a
curious accident.  One of the buccaneers was shot through the body
with an arrow.  He drew it out, wrapped it in cotton, fired it from
his musket, and so set light to a roof and burned the town.

His raid on Panama was extraordinary for the endurance of his men.
For days they lived on the leather of bottles and belts.  "Some, who
were never out of their mothers' kitchens, may ask how these pirates
could eat and digest these pieces of leather, so hard and dry?  Whom
I answer--that could they once experience what hunger, or rather
famine is, they would find the way, as the pirates did."  It was at
the close of this march that the Indians drove wild bulls among
them; but they cared very little for these new allies of the
Spaniards:  beef, in any form, was only too welcome.

Morgan burned the fair cedar houses of Panama, but lost the plate
ship with all the gold and silver out of the churches.  How he
tortured a poor wretch who chanced to wear a pair of taffety
trousers belonging to his master, with a small silver key hanging
out, it is better not to repeat.  The men only got two hundred
pieces-of-eight each, after all their toil, for their Welshman was
indeed a thief, and bilked his crews, no less than he plundered the
Spaniards, without remorse.  Finally, he sneaked away from the fleet
with a ship or two; and it is to be feared that Captain Morgan made
rather a good thing by dint of his incredible cruelty and villainy.

And so we leave Mr. Esquemeling, whom Captain Morgan also deserted;
for who would linger long when there is not even honour among
thieves?  Alluring as the pirate's profession is, we must not forget
that it had a seamy side, and was by no means all rum and pieces-of-
eight.  And there is something repulsive to a generous nature in
roasting men because they will not show you where to steal hogs.



THE SAGAS



"The general reader," says a frank critic, "hates the very name of a
Saga."  The general reader, in that case, is to be pitied, and, if
possible, converted.  But, just as Pascal admits that the sceptic
can only become religious by living as if he WERE religious--by
stupefying himself, as Pascal plainly puts it, with holy water--so
it is to be feared that there is but a single way of winning over
the general reader to the Sagas.  Preaching and example, as in this
brief essay, will not avail with him.  He must take Pascal's advice,
and live for an hour or two as if he were a lover of Sagas.  He
must, in brief, give that old literature a fair chance.  He has now
his opportunity:  Mr. William Morris and Mr. Eirikr Magnusson are
publishing a series of cheap translations--cheap only in coin of the
realm--a Saga Library.  If a general reader tries the first tale in
the first volume, story of "Howard the Halt,"--if he tries it
honestly, and still can make no way with it, then let him take
comfort in the doctrine of Invincible Ignorance.  Let him go back to
his favourite literature of gossiping reminiscence, or of realistic
novels.  We have all, probably, a drop of the Northmen's blood in
us, but in that general reader the blood is dormant.

What is a Saga?  It is neither quite a piece of history nor wholly a
romance.  It is a very old story of things and adventures that
really happened, but happened so long ago, and in times so
superstitious, that marvels and miracles found their way into the
legend.  The best Sagas are those of Iceland, and those, in
translations, are the finest reading that the natural man can
desire.  If you want true pictures of life and character, which are
always the same at bottom, or true pictures of manners, which are
always changing, and of strange customs and lost beliefs, in the
Sagas they are to be found.  Or if you like tales of enterprise, of
fighting by land and sea, fighting with men and beasts, with storms
and ghosts and fiends, the Sagas are full of this entertainment.

The stories of which we are speaking were first told in Iceland,
perhaps from 950 to 1100 B.C.  When Norway and Sweden were still
heathen, a thousand years ago, they were possessed by families of
noble birth, owning no master, and often at war with each other,
when the men were not sailing the seas, to rob and kill in Scotland,
England, France, Italy, and away east as far as Constantinople, or
farther.  Though they were wild sea robbers and warriors, they were
sturdy farmers, great shipbuilders; every man of them, however
wealthy, could be his own carpenter, smith, shipwright, and
ploughman.  They forged their own good short swords, hammered their
own armour, ploughed their own fields.  In short, they lived like
Odysseus, the hero of Homer, and were equally skilled in the arts of
war and peace.  They were mighty lawyers, too, and had a most
curious and minute system of laws on all subjects--land, marriage,
murder, trade, and so forth.  These laws were not written, though
the people had a kind of letters called runes.  But they did not use
them much for documents, but merely for carving a name on a sword-
blade, or a tombstone, or on great gold rings such as they wore on
their arms.  Thus the laws existed in the memory and judgment of the
oldest and wisest and most righteous men of the country.  The most
important was the law of murder.  If one man slew another, he was
not tried by a jury, but any relation of the dead killed him "at
sight," wherever he found him.  Even in an Earl's hall, Kari struck
the head off one of his friend Njal's Burners, and the head bounded
on the board, among the trenchers of meat and the cups of mead or
ale.  But it was possible, if the relations of a slain man
consented, for the slayer to pay his price--every man was valued at
so much--and then revenge was not taken.  But, as a rule, one
revenge called for another.  Say Hrut slew Hrap, then Atli slew
Hrut, and Gisli slew Atli, and Kari slew Gisli, and so on till
perhaps two whole families were extinct and there was peace.  The
gods were not offended by manslaughter openly done, but were angry
with treachery, cowardice, meanness, theft, perjury, and every kind
of shabbiness.

This was the state of affairs in Norway when a king arose, Harold
Fair-Hair, who tried to bring all these proud people under him, and
to make them pay taxes and live more regularly and quietly.  They
revolted at this, and when they were too weak to defy the king they
set sail and fled to Iceland.  There in the lonely north, between
the snow and fire, the hot-water springs, the volcano of Hecla, the
great rivers full of salmon that rush down such falls as Golden
Foot, there they lived their old-fashioned life, cruising as pirates
and merchants, taking foreign service at Mickle Garth, or in England
or Egypt, filling the world with the sound of their swords and the
sky with the smoke of their burnings.  For they feared neither God
nor man nor ghost, and were no less cruel than brave; the best of
soldiers, laughing at death and torture, like the Zulus, who are a
kind of black Vikings of Africa.  On some of them "Bersark's gang"
would fall--that is, they would become in a way mad, slaying all and
sundry, biting their shields, and possessed with a furious strength
beyond that of men, which left them as weak as children when it
passed away.  These Bersarks were outlaws, all men's enemies, and to
kill them was reckoned a great adventure, and a good deed.  The
women were worthy of the men--bold, quarrelsome, revengeful.  Some
were loyal, like Bergthora, who foresaw how all her sons and her
husband were to be burned; but who would not leave them, and
perished in the burning without a cry.  Some were as brave as
Howard's wife, who enabled her husband, old and childless, to
overthrow the wealthy bully, the slayer of his only son.  Some were
treacherous, as Halgerda the Fair.  Three husbands she had, and was
the death of every man of them.  Her last lord was Gunnar of
Lithend, the bravest and most peaceful of men.  Once she did a mean
thing, and he slapped her face.  She never forgave him.  At last
enemies besieged him in his house.  The doors were locked--all was
quiet within.  One of the enemies climbed up to a window slit, and
Gunnar thrust him through with his lance.  "Is Gunnar at home?" said
the besiegers.  "I know not--but his lance is," said the wounded
man, and died with that last jest on his lips.  For long Gunnar kept
them at bay with his arrows, but at last one of them cut the arrow
string.  "Twist me a string with thy hair," he said to his wife,
Halgerda, whose yellow hair was very long and beautiful.  "Is it a
matter of thy life or death?" she asked. "Ay," he said.  "Then I
remember that blow thou gavest me, and I will see thy death."  So
Gunnar died, overcome by numbers, and they killed Samr, his hound,
but not before Samr had killed a man.

So they lived always with sword or axe in hand--so they lived, and
fought, and died.

Then Christianity was brought to them from Norway by Thangbrand, and
if any man said he did not believe a word of it, Thangbrand had the
schoolboy argument, "Will you fight?"  So they fought a duel on a
holm or island, that nobody might interfere--holm-gang they called
it--and Thangbrand usually killed his man.  In Norway, Saint Olaf
did the like, killing and torturing those who held by the old gods--
Thor, Odin, and Freya, and the rest.  So, partly by force and partly
because they were somewhat tired of bloodshed, horsefights, and the
rest, they received the word of the white Christ and were baptised,
and lived by written law, and did not avenge themselves by their own
hands.

They were Christians now, but they did not forget the old times, the
old feuds and fightings and Bersarks, and dealings with ghosts, and
with dead bodies that arose and wrought horrible things, haunting
houses and strangling men.  The Icelandic ghosts were able-bodied,
well "materialised," and Grettir and Olaf Howard's son fought them
with strength of arm and edge of steel.  TRUE stories of the ancient
days were told at the fireside in the endless winter nights by story
tellers or Scalds.  It was thought a sin for any one to alter these
old stories, but as generations passed more and more wonderful
matters came into the legend.  It was believed that the dead Gunnar,
the famed archer, sang within his cairn or "Howe," the mound wherein
he was buried, and his famous bill or cutting spear was said to have
been made by magic, and to sing in the night before the wounding of
men and the waking of war.  People were thought to be "second-
sighted"--that is, to have prophetic vision.  The night when Njal's
house was burned his wife saw all the meat on the table "one gore of
blood," just as in Homer the prophet Theoclymenus beheld blood
falling in gouts from the walls, before the slaying of the Wooers.
The Valkyries, the Choosers of the slain, and the Norns who wove the
fates of men at a ghastly loom were seen by living eyes.  In the
graves where treasures were hoarded the Barrowwights dwelt, ghosts
that were sentinels over the gold:  witchwives changed themselves
into wolves and other monstrous animals, and for many weeks the
heroes Signy and Sinfjotli ran wild in the guise of wolves.

These and many other marvels crept into the Sagas, and made the
listeners feel a shudder of cold beside the great fire that burned
in the centre of the skali or hall where the chief sat, giving meat
and drink to all who came, where the women span and the Saga man
told the tales of long ago.  Finally, at the end of the middle ages,
these Sagas were written down in Icelandic, and in Latin
occasionally, and many of them have been translated into English.

Unluckily, these translations have hitherto been expensive to buy,
and were not always to be had easily.  For the wise world, which
reads newspapers all day and half the night, does not care much for
books, still less for good books, least of all for old books.  You
can make no money out of reading Sagas:  they have nothing to say
about stocks and shares, nor about Prime Ministers and politics.
Nor will they amuse a man, if nothing amuses him but accounts of
races and murders, or gossip about Mrs. Nokes's new novel, Mrs.
Stokes's new dresses, or Lady Jones's diamonds.  The Sagas only tell
how brave men--of our own blood very likely--lived, and loved, and
fought, and voyaged, and died, before there was much reading or
writing, when they sailed without steam, travelled without railways,
and warred hand-to-hand, not with hidden dynamite and sunk
torpedoes.  But, for stories of gallant life and honest purpose, the
Sagas are among the best in the world.

Of Sagas in English one of the best is the "Volsunga," the story of
the Niflungs and Volsungs.  This book, thanks to Mr. William Morris,
can be bought for a shilling.  It is a strange tale in which gods
have their parts, the tale of that oldest Treasure Hunt, the Hunt
for the gold of the dwarf Andvari.  This was guarded by the serpent,
Fafnir, who had once been a man, and who was killed by the hero
Sigurd.  But Andvari had cursed the gold, because his enemies robbed
him of it to the very last ring, and had no pity.  Then the brave
Sigurd was involved in the evil luck.  He it was who rode through
the fire, and woke the fair enchanted Brynhild, the Shield-maiden.
And she loved him, and he her, with all their hearts, always to the
death.  But by ill fate she was married to another man, Sigurd's
chief friend, and Sigurd to another woman.  And the women fell to
jealousy and quarrelling as women will, and they dragged the friends
into the feud, and one manslaying after another befell, till that
great murder of men in the Hall of Atli, the King.  The curse came
on one and all of them--a curse of blood, and of evil loves, and of
witchwork destroying good and bad, all fearless, and all fallen in
one red ruin.

The "Volsunga Saga" has this unique and unparalleled interest, that
it gives the spectacle of the highest epic genius, struggling out of
savagery into complete and free and conscious humanity.  It is a
mark of the savage intellect not to discriminate abruptly between
man and the lower animals.  In the tales of the lower peoples, the
characters are just as often beasts as men and women.  Now, in the
earlier and wilder parts of the "Volsunga Saga," otters and dragons
play human parts.  Signy and his son, and the mother of their enemy,
put on the skins of wolves, become wolves, and pass through hideous
adventures.  The story reeks with blood, and ravins with lust of
blood.  But when Sigurd arrives at full years of manhood, the
barbarism yields place, the Saga becomes human and conscious.

These legends deal little with love.  But in the "Volsunga Saga" the
permanent interest is the true and deathless love of Sigurd and
Brynhild:  their separation by magic arts, the revival of their
passion too late, the man's resigned and heroic acquiescence, the
fiercer passion of the woman, who will neither bear her fate nor
accept her bliss at the price of honour and her plighted word.

The situation, the nodus, is neither ancient merely nor modern
merely, but of all time.  Sigurd, having at last discovered the net
in which he was trapped, was content to make the best of marriage
and of friendship.  Brynhild was not.  "The hearts of women are the
hearts of wolves," says the ancient Sanskrit commentary on the Rig
Veda.  But the she-wolf's heart broke, like a woman's, when she had
caused Sigurd's slaying.  Both man and woman face life, as they
conceive it, with eyes perfectly clear.

The magic and the supernatural wiles are accidental, the human heart
is essential and eternal.  There is no scene like this in the epics
of Greece.  This is a passion that Homer did not dwell upon.  In the
Iliad and Odyssey the repentance of Helen is facile; she takes life
easily.  Clytemnestra is not brought on the stage to speak for
herself.  In this respect the epic of the North, without the charm
and the delightfulness of the Southern epic, excels it; in this and
in a certain bare veracity, but in nothing else.  We cannot put the
Germanic legend on the level of the Greek, for variety, for many-
sided wisdom, for changing beauty of a thousand colours.  But in
this one passion of love the "Volsunga Saga" excels the Iliad.

The Greek and the Northern stories are alike in one thing.  Fate is
all-powerful over gods and men.  Odin cannot save Balder; nor
Thetis, Achilles; nor Zeus, Sarpedon.  But in the Sagas fate is more
constantly present to the mind.  Much is thought of being "lucky,"
or "unlucky."  Howard's "good luck" is to be read in his face by the
wise, even when, to the common gaze, he seems a half-paralytic
dotard, dying of grief and age.

Fate and evil luck dog the heroes of the Sagas.  They seldom "end
well," as people say,--unless, when a brave man lies down to die on
the bed he has strewn of the bodies of his foes, you call THAT
ending well.  So died Grettir the Strong.  Even from a boy he was
strong and passionate, short of temper, quick of stroke, but loyal,
brave, and always unlucky.  His worst luck began after he slew Glam.
This Glam was a wicked heathen herdsman, who would not fast on
Christmas Eve.  So on the hills his dead body was found, swollen as
great as an ox, and as blue as death.

What killed him they did not know.  But he haunted the farmhouse,
riding the roof, kicking the sides with his heels, killing cattle
and destroying all things.  Then Grettir came that way, and he slept
in the hall.  At night the dead Glam came in, and Grettir arose, and
to it they went, struggling and dashing the furniture to bits.  Glam
even dragged Grettir to the door, that he might slay him under the
sky, and for all his force Grettir yielded ground.  Then on the very
threshold he suddenly gave way when Glam was pulling hardest, and
they fell, Glam undermost.  Then Grettir drew the short sword,
"Kari's loom," that he had taken from a haunted grave, and stabbed
the dead thing that had lived again.  But, as Glam lay a-dying in
the second death, the moon fell on his awful eyes, and Grettir saw
the horror of them, and from that hour he could not endure to be in
the dark, and he never dared to go alone.  This was his death, for
he had an evil companion who betrayed him to his enemies; but when
they set on Grettir, though he was tired and sick of a wound, many
died with him.  No man died like Grettir the Strong, nor slew so
many in his death.

Besides those Sagas, there is the best of all, but the longest,
"Njala" (pronounced "Nyoula"), the story of Burnt Njal.  That is too
long to sketch here, but it tells how, through the hard hearts and
jealousy of women, ruin came at last on the gentle Gunnar, and the
reckless Skarphedin of the axe, "The Ogress of War," and how Njal,
the wisest, the most peaceful, the most righteous of men, was burned
with all his house, and how that evil deed was avenged on the
Burners of Kari.

The site of Njal's house is yet to be seen, after these nine hundred
years, and the little glen where Kari hid when he leaped through the
smoke and the flame that made his sword-blade blue.  Yes, the very
black sand that Bergthora and her maids threw on the fire lies there
yet, and remnants of the whey they cast on the flames, when water
failed them.  They were still there beneath the earth when an
English traveller dug up some of the ground last year, and it is
said that an American gentleman found a gold ring in the house of
Njal.  The story of him and of his brave sons, and of his slaves,
and of his kindred, and of Queens and Kings of Norway, and of the
coming of the white Christ, are all in the "Njala."  That and the
other Sagas would bear being shortened for general readers; once
they were all that the people had by way of books, and they liked
them long.  But, shortened or not, they are brave books for men, for
the world is a place of battle still, and life is war.  These old
heroes knew it, and did not shirk it, but fought it out, and left
honourable names and a glory that widens year by year.  For the
story of Njal and Gunnar and Skarphedin was told by Captain Speedy
to the guards of Theodore, King of Abyssinia.  They liked it well;
and with queer altered names and changes of the tale, that Saga will
be told in Abyssinia, and thence carried all through Africa where
white men have never wandered.  So wide, so long-enduring a renown
could be given by a nameless Sagaman.



CHARLES KINGSLEY



When I was very young, a distinguished Review was still younger.  I
remember reading one of the earliest numbers, being then myself a
boy of ten, and coming on a review of a novel.  Never, as it seemed
to me, or seems to my memory, was a poor novel more heavily handled:
and yet I felt that the book must be a book to read on the very
earliest opportunity.  It was "Westward Ho!" the most famous, and
perhaps the best novel, of Charles Kingsley.  Often one has read it
since, and it is an example of those large, rich, well-fed romances,
at which you can cut and come again, as it were, laying it down, and
taking it up on occasion, with the certainty of being excited,
amused--and preached at.

Lately I have re-read "Westward Ho!" and some of Kingsley's other
books, "Hypatia," "Hereward the Wake," and the poems, over again.
The old pleasure in them is not gone indeed, but it is modified.
One must be a boy to think Kingsley a humourist.  At the age of
twelve or ten you take the comic passages which he conscientiously
provides, without being vexed or offended; you take them merely in
the way of business.  Better things are coming:  struggles with the
Inquisition, storms at sea, duels, the Armada, wanderings in the
Lotus land of the tropical west; and for the sake of all this a boy
puts up good-naturedly with Kingsley's humour.  Perhaps he even
grins over Amyas "burying alternately his face in the pasty and the
pasty in his face," or he tries to feel diverted by the Elizabethan
waggeries of Frank.  But there is no fun in them--they are
mechanical; they are worse than the humours of Scott's Sir Percy
Shafto, which are not fine.

The same sense of everything not being quite so excellent as one
remembered it haunts one in "Hereward the Wake, the Last of the
English."  Kingsley calls him "the Last of the English," but he is
really the first of the literary Vikings.  In the essay on the Sagas
here I have tried to show, very imperfectly, what the Norsemen were
actually like.  They caught Kingsley's fancy, and his "Hereward,"
though born on English soil, is really Norse--not English.  But
Kingsley did not write about the Vikings, nor about his Elizabethan
heroes in "Westward Ho!" in a perfectly simple, straightforward way.
He was always thinking of our own times and referring to them.  That
is why even the rather ruffianly Hereward is so great an enemy of
saints and monks.  That is why, in "Hypatia" (which opens so well),
we have those prodigiously dull, stupid, pedantic, and conceited
reflections of Raphael Ben Ezra.  That is why, in all Kingsley's
novels, he is perpetually exciting himself in defence of marriage
and the family life, as if any monkish ideas about the blessedness
of bachelorhood were ever likely to drive the great Anglo-Saxon race
into convents and monasteries.  That is the very last thing we have
to be afraid of; but Kingsley was afraid of it, and was eternally
attacking everything Popish and monkish.

Boys and young people, then, can read "Westward Ho!" and "Hypatia,"
and "Hereward the Wake," with far more pleasure than their elders.
They hurry on with the adventures, and do not stop to ask what the
moralisings mean.  They forgive the humour of Kingsley because it is
well meant.  They get, in short, the real good of this really great
and noble and manly and blundering genius.  They take pleasure in
his love of strong men, gallant fights, desperate encounters with
human foes, with raging seas, with pestilence, or in haunted
forests.  For in all that is good of his talent--in his courage, his
frank speech, his love of sport, his clear eyes, his devotion to
field and wood, river, moor, sea, and storms--Kingsley is a boy.  He
has the brave, rather hasty, and not over well-informed enthusiasm
of sixteen, for persons and for causes.  He saw an opponent (it
might be Father Newman):  his heart lusted for a fight; he called
his opponent names, he threw his cap into the ring, he took his coat
off, he fought, he got a terrible scientific drubbing.  It was like
a sixth-form boy matching himself against the champion.  And then he
bore no malice.  He took his defeat bravely.  Nay, are we not left
with a confused feeling that he was not far in the wrong, though he
had so much the worse of the fight?

Such was Kingsley:  a man with a boy's heart; a hater of cruelty and
injustice, and also with a brave, indomitable belief that his own
country and his own cause were generally in the right, whatever the
quarrel.  He loved England like a mistress, and hated her enemies,
Spain and the Pope, though even in them he saw the good.  He is for
ever scolding the Spanish for their cruelties to the Indians, but he
defends our doings to the Irish, which (at that time) were neither
more nor less oppressive than the Spanish performances in America.
"Go it, our side!" you always hear this good Kingsley crying; and
one's heart goes out to him for it, in an age when everybody often
proves his own country to be in the wrong.

Simple, brave, resolute, manly, a little given to "robustiousness,"
Kingsley transfigured all these qualities by possessing the soul and
the heart of a poet.  He was not a very great poet, indeed, but a
true poet--one of the very small band who are cut off, by a gulf
that can never be passed, from mere writers of verse, however
clever, educated, melodious, ingenious, amiable, and refined.  He
had the real spark of fire, the true note; though the spark might
seldom break into flame, and the note was not always clear.  Never
let us confuse true poets with writers of verse, still less with
writers of "poetic prose."  Kingsley wrote a great deal of that-
perhaps too much:  his descriptions of scenes are not always as good
as in Hereward's ride round the Fens, or when the tall, Spanish
galleon staggers from the revenge of man to the vengeance of God, to
her doom through the mist, to her rest in the sea.  Perhaps only a
poet could have written that prose; it is certain no writer of
"poetic prose" could have written Kingsley's poems.

His songs are his best things; they really are songs, not merely
lyric poems.  They have the merit of being truly popular, whether
they are romantic, like "The Sands o' Dee," which actually
reproduces the best qualities of the old ballad; or whether they are
pathetic, like the "Doll's Song," in "Water Babies"; or whether they
attack an abuse, as in the song of "The Merry Brown Hares"; or
whether they soar higher, as in "Deep, deep Love, within thine own
abyss abiding"; or whether they are mere noble nonsense, as in
"Lorraine Loree":-


"She mastered young Vindictive; oh, the gallant lass was she,
And kept him straight and won the race, as near as near could be;
But he killed her at the brook against a pollard willow tree;
Oh, he killed her at the brook, the brute, for all the world to see,
And no one but the baby cried for poor Lorraine Loree."


The truth about Charles Kingsley seems to be that he rather made a
brave and cheery noise in this night-battle of modern life, than
that he directed any movement of forces.  He kept cheering, as it
were, and waving his sword with a contagious enthusiasm.  Being a
poet, and a man both of heart and of sentiment, he was equally
attached to the best things of the old world and to the best of the
new world, as far as one can forecast what it is to be.  He loved
the stately homes of England, the ancient graduated order of
society, the sports of the past, the military triumphs, the
patriotic glories.  But he was also on the side of the poor:  as
"Parson Lot" he attempted to be a Christian Socialist.

Now, the Socialists are the people who want to take everything; the
Christians are the persons who do not want to give more than they
find convenient.  Kingsley himself was ready to give, and did give,
his time, his labour, his health, and probably his money, to the
poor.  But he was by no means minded that they should swallow up the
old England with church and castle, manor-house and tower, wealth,
beauty, learning, refinement.  The man who wrote "Alton Locke," the
story of the starved tailor-poet, was the man who nearly wept when
he heard a fox bark, and reflected that the days of fox-hunting were
numbered.  He had a poet's politics, Colonel Newcome's politics.  He
was for England, for the poor, for the rich, for the storied houses
of the chivalrous past, for the cottage, for the hall; and was dead
against the ideas of Manchester, and of Mr. John Bright.  "My
father," he says in a letter, "would have put his hand to a spade or
an axe with any man, and so could I pretty well, too, when I was in
my prime; and my eldest son is now working with his own hands at
farming, previous to emigrating to South America, where he will do
the drudgery of his own cattle-pens and sheepfolds; and if I were
twenty-four and unmarried I would go out there too, and work like an
Englishman, and live by the sweat of my brow."

This was the right side of his love of the Vikings; it was thus THEY
lived, when not at war--thus that every gentleman who has youth and
health should work, winning new worlds for his class, in place of
this miserable, over-crowded, brawling England.  This, I think, was,
or should have been, the real lesson and message of Kingsley for the
generations to come.  Like Scott the scion of an old knightly line,
he had that drop of wild blood which drives men from town into the
air and the desert, wherever there are savage lands to conquer,
beasts to hunt, and a hardy life to be lived.  But he was the son of
a clergyman, and a clergyman himself.  The spirit that should have
gone into action went into talking, preaching, writing--all sources
of great pleasure to thousands of people, and so not wasted.  Yet
these were not the natural outlets of Kingsley's life:  he should
have been a soldier, or an explorer; at least, we may believe that
he would have preferred such fortune.  He did his best, the best he
knew, and it is all on the side of manliness, courage, kindness.
Perhaps he tried too many things--science, history, fairy tales,
religious and political discussions, romance, poetry.  Poetry was
what he did best, romance next; his science and his history are
entertaining, but without authority.

This, when one reads it again, seems a cold, unfriendly estimate of
a man so ardent and so genuine, a writer so vivacious and courageous
as Kingsley.  Even the elderly reviewer bears to him, and to his
brother Henry, a debt he owes to few of their generation.  The truth
is we should READ Kingsley; we must not criticise him.  We must
accept him and be glad of him, as we accept a windy, sunny autumn
day--beautiful and blusterous--to be enjoyed and struggled with.  If
once we stop and reflect, and hesitate, he seems to preach too much,
and with a confidence which his knowledge of the world and of
history does not justify.  To be at one with Kingsley we must be
boys again, and that momentary change cannot but be good for us.
Soon enough--too soon--we shall drop back on manhood, and on all the
difficulties and dragons that Kingsley drove away by a blast on his
chivalrous and cheery horn.



CHARLES LEVER:  HIS BOOKS, ADVENTURES AND MISFORTUNES



Surely it is a pleasant thing that there are books, like other
enjoyments, for all ages.  You would not have a boy prefer whist to
fives, nor tobacco to toffee, nor Tolstoi to Charles Lever.  The
ancients reckoned Tyrtaecus a fine poet, not that he was
particularly melodious or reflective, but that he gave men heart to
fight for their country.  Charles Lever has done as much.  In his
biography, by Mr. Fitzpatrick, it is told that a widow lady had but
one son, and for him she obtained an appointment at Woolwich.  The
boy was timid and nervous, and she fancied that she must find for
him some other profession--perhaps that of literature.  But he one
day chanced on Lever's novels, and they put so much heart into him
that his character quite altered, and he became the bravest of the
brave.

Lever may not do as much for every one, but he does teach contempt
of danger, or rather, delight in it:  a gay, spontaneous, boyish
kind of courage--Irish courage at its best.  We may get more good
from that than harm from all his tales of much punch and many
drinking bouts.  These are no longer in fashion and are not very gay
reading, perhaps, but his stories and songs, his duels and battles
and hunting scenes are as merry and as good as ever.  Wild as they
seem in the reading, they are not far from the truth, as may be
gathered out of "Barrington's Memoirs," and their tales of the
reckless Irish life some eighty years ago.

There were two men in Charles Lever--a glad man and a sad man.  The
gaiety was for his youth, when he poured out his "Lorrequers" and
"O'Malleys," all the mirth and memories of his boyhood, all the
tales of fighting and feasting he gleaned from battered, seasoned
old warriors, like Major Monsoon.  Even then, Mr. Thackeray, who
knew him, and liked and laughed at him, recognised through his
merriment "the fund of sadness beneath."  "The author's character is
NOT humour, but sentiment . . . extreme delicacy, sweetness and
kindliness of heart.  The spirits are mostly artificial, the fond is
sadness, as appears to me to be that of most Irish writing and
people."   Even in "Charles O'Malley," what a true, dark picture
that is of the duel beside the broad, angry river on the level waste
under the wide grey sky!  Charles has shot his opponent, Bodkin, and
with Considine, his second, is making his escape.  "Considine cried
out suddenly, 'Too infamous, by Jove:  we are murdered men!'"

"'What do you mean?' said I.

"'Don't you see that?' said he, pointing to something black which
floated from a pole at the opposite side of the river.

"'Yes; what is it?'

"'It's his coat they've put upon an oar, to show the people he's
killed--that's all.  Every man here's his tenant; and look there!
they're not giving us much doubt as to their intentions.'

"Here a tremendous yell burst forth from the mass of people along
the shore, which, rising to a terrific cry, sank gradually down to a
low wailing, then rose and fell several times, as the Irish death-
cry filled the air, and rose to heaven, as if imploring vengeance on
a murderer."

Passages like this, and that which follows--the dangerous voyage
through the storm on the flooded Shannon, and through the reefs--are
what Mr. Thackeray may have had in his mind when he spoke of Lever's
underlying melancholy.  Like other men with very high spirits, he
had hours of gloom, and the sadness and the thoughtfulness that were
in him came forth then and informed his later books.  These are far
more carefully written, far more cunningly constructed, than the old
chapters written from month to month as the fit took him, with no
more plan or premeditation than "Pickwick."  But it is the early
stories that we remember, and that he lives by--the pages thrown off
at a heat, when he was a lively doctor with few patients, and was
not over-attentive to them.  These were the days of Harry Lorrequer
and Tom Burke; characters that ran away with him, and took their own
path through a merry world of diversion.  Like the knights in Sir
Thomas Malory, these heroes "ride at adventure," ride amazing horses
that dread no leap, be it an Irish stone wall on a mountain crest,
or be it the bayonets of a French square.

Mr. Lever's biographer has not been wholly successful in pleasing
the critics, and he does not seem to affect very critical airs
himself, but he tells a straightforward tale.  The life of Charles
Lever is the natural commentary on his novels.  He was born at
Dublin in 1806, the son of a builder or architect.  At school he was
very much flogged, and the odds are that he deserved these
attentions, for he had high spirits beyond the patience of dominies.
Handsome, merry and clever, he read novels in school hours, wore a
ring, and set up as a dandy.  Even then he was in love with the
young lady whom he married in the end.  At a fight with boys of
another school, he and a friend placed a mine under the ground
occupied by the enemy, and blew them, more or less, into the air.
Many an eyebrow was singed off on that fatal day, when, for the only
time, this romancer of the wars "smelled powder."  He afterwards
pleaded for his party before the worthy police magistrate, and
showed great promise as a barrister.  At Trinity College, Dublin, he
was full of his fun, made ballads, sang them through the streets in
disguise (like Fergusson, the Scottish poet), and one night
collected thirty shillings in coppers.

The original of Frank Webber, in "Charles O'Malley," was a chum of
his, and he took part in the wonderful practical jokes which he has
made immortal in that novel.

From Trinity College, Dublin, Lever went to Gottingen, where he
found fun and fighting enough among the German students.  From that
hour he became a citizen of the world, or, at least, of Europe, and
perhaps, like the prophets, was most honoured when out of his own
country.  He returned to Dublin and took his degree in medicine,
after playing a famous practical joke.  A certain medical professor
was wont to lecture in bed.  One night he left town unexpectedly.
Lever, by chance, came early to lecture, found the Professor absent,
slipped into his bed, put on his nightcap, and took the class
himself.  On another day he was standing outside the Foundling
Hospital with a friend, a small man.  Now, a kind of stone cradle
for foundlings was built outside the door, and, when a baby was
placed therein, a bell rang.  Lever lifted up his friend, popped him
into the cradle, and had the joy of seeing the promising infant
picked out by the porter.

It seems a queer education for a man of letters; but, like Sir
Walter Scott when revelling in Liddesdale, he "was making himself
all the time."  He was collecting myriads of odd experiences and
treasures of anecdotes; he was learning to know men of all sorts;
and later, as a country doctor, he had experiences of mess tables,
of hunting, and of all the ways of his remarkable countrymen.  When
cholera visited his district he stuck to his work like a man of
heart and courage.  But the usual tasks of a country doctor wearied
him; he neglected them, he became unpopular with the authorities, he
married his first love and returned to Brussels, where he practised
as a physician.  He had already begun his first notable book, "Harry
Lorrequer," in the University Magazine.  It is merely a string of
Irish and other stories, good, bad, and indifferent--a picture
gallery full of portraits of priests, soldiers, peasants and odd
characters.  The plot is of no importance; we are not interested in
Harry's love affairs, but in his scrapes, adventures, duels at home
and abroad.  He fights people by mistake whom he does not know by
sight, he appears on parade with his face blackened, he wins large
piles at trente et quarante, he disposes of coopers of claret and
bowls of punch, and the sheep on a thousand hills provide him with
devilled kidneys.  The critics and the authors thought little of the
merry medley, but the public enjoyed it, and defied the reviewers.
One paper preferred the book to a wilderness of "Pickwicks"; and as
this opinion was advertised everywhere by M'Glashan, the publisher,
Mr. Dickens was very much annoyed indeed.  Authors are easily
annoyed.  But Lever writes ut placeat pueris, and there was a
tremendous fight at Rugby between two boys, the "Slogger Williams"
and "Tom Brown" of the period, for the possession of "Harry
Lorrequer."  When an author has the boys of England on his side, he
can laugh at the critics.  Not that Lever laughed:  he, too, was
easily vexed, and much depressed, when the reviews assailed him.
Next he began "Charles O'Malley"; and if any man reads this essay
who has not read the "Irish Dragoon," let him begin at once.
"O'Malley" is what you can recommend to a friend.  Here is every
species of diversion:  duels and steeplechases, practical jokes at
college (good practical jokes, not booby traps and apple-pie beds);
here is fighting in the Peninsula.  If any student is in doubt, let
him try chapter xiv.--the battle on the Douro.  This is, indeed,
excellent military writing, and need not fear comparison as art with
Napier's famous history.  Lever has warmed to his work; his heart is
in it; he had the best information from an eye-witness; and the
brief beginning, on the peace of nature before the strife of men, is
admirably poetical.

To reach the French, under Soult, Wellesley had to cross the deep
and rapid Douro, in face of their fire, and without regular
transport.  "He dared the deed.  What must have been his confidence
in the men he commanded! what must have been his reliance on his own
genius!"

You hold your breath as you read, while English and Germans charge,
till at last the field is won, and the dust of the French columns
retreating in the distance blows down the road to Spain.

The Great Duke read this passage, and marvelled how Lever knew
certain things that he tells.  He learned this, and much more, the
humours of war, from the original of Major Monsoon.  Falstaff is
alone in the literature of the world, but if ever there came a later
Falstaff, Monsoon was the man.  And where have you such an Irish
Sancho Panza as Micky Free, that independent minstrel, or such an
Irish Di Vernon as Baby Blake?  The critics may praise Lever's
thoughtful and careful later novels as they will, but "Charles
O'Malley" will always be the pattern of a military romance.  The
anecdote of "a virtuous weakness" in O'Shaughnessy's father's
character would alone make the fortune of many a story.  The truth
is, it is not easy to lay down "Charles O'Malley," to leave off
reading it, and get on with the account of Lever.

His excellent and delightful novel scarcely received one favourable
notice from the press.  This may have been because it was so
popular; but Lever became so nervous that he did not like to look at
the papers.  When he went back to Dublin and edited a magazine
there, he was more fiercely assailed than ever.  It is difficult for
an Irishman to write about the Irish, or for a Scot to write about
the Scottish, without hurting the feelings of his countrymen.  While
their literary brethren are alive they are not very dear to the
newspaper scribes of these gallant nations; and thus Jeffrey was
more severe to Scott than he need have been, while the Irish press,
it appears, made an onslaught on Lever.  Mr. Thackeray met Lever in
Dublin, and he mentions this unkind behaviour.  "Lorrequer's
military propensities have been objected to strongly by his
squeamish Hibernian brethren . . . But is Lorrequer the only man in
Ireland who is fond of military spectacles?  Why does the Nation
publish these edifying and Christian war songs? . . . And who is it
that prates about the Irish at Waterloo, and the Irish at Fontenoy,
and the Irish at Seringapatam, and the Irish at Timbuctoo?  If Mr.
O'Connell, like a wise rhetorician, chooses, and very properly, to
flatter the national military passion, why not Harry Lorrequer?"

Why not, indeed?  But Mr. Lever was a successful Irishman of
letters, and a good many other Irish gentlemen of letters, honest
Doolan and his friends, were not successful.  That is the humour of
it.

Though you, my youthful reader, if I have one, do not detest Jones
because he is in the Eleven, nor Brown because he has "got his cap,"
nor Smith because he does Greek Iambics like Sophocles; though you
rather admire and applaud these champions, you may feel very
differently when you come to thirty years or more, and see other men
doing what you cannot do, and gaining prizes beyond your grasp.  And
then, if you are a reviewer, you "will find fault with a book for
what it does not give," as thus, to take Mr. Thackeray's example:-

"Lady Smigsmag's novel is amusing, but lamentably deficient in
geological information."  "Mr. Lever's novels are trashy and
worthless, for his facts are not borne out by any authority, and he
gives us no information about the political state of Ireland.  'Oh!
our country, our green and beloved, our beautiful and oppressed?'"
and so forth.

It was not altogether a happy time that Lever passed at home.  Not
only did his native critics belabour him most ungrudgingly for "Tom
Burke," that vivid and chivalrous romance, but he made enemies of
authors.  He edited a magazine!  Is not that enough?  He wearied of
wading through waggon-loads of that pure unmitigated rubbish which
people are permitted to "shoot" at editorial doors.  How much dust
there is in it to how few pearls!  He did not return MSS. punctually
and politely.  The office cat could edit the volunteered
contributions of many a magazine, but Lever was even more casual and
careless than an experienced office cat.  He grew crabbed, and tried
to quarrel with Mr. Thackeray for that delightful parody "Phil
Fogarty," nearly as good as a genuine story by Lever.

Beset by critics, burlesqued by his friend, he changed his style
(Mr. Fitzpatrick tells us) and became more sober--and not so
entertaining.  He actually published a criticism of Beyle, of
Stendhal, that psychological prig, the darling of culture and of M.
Paul Bourget.  Harry Lorrequer on Stendhal!--it beggars belief.  He
nearly fought a duel with the gentleman who is said to have
suggested Mr. Pecksniff to Dickens!  Yet they call his early novels
improbable.  Nothing could be less plausible than a combat between
Harry Lorrequer and a gentleman who, even remotely, resembled the
father of Cherry and Merry.

Lever went abroad again, and in Florence or the Baths of Lucca, in
Trieste or Spezia, he passed the rest of his life.  He saw the
Italian revolution of 1848, and it added to his melancholy.  This is
plain from one of his novels with a curious history--"Con Cregan."
He wrote it at the same time as "The Daltons," and he did not sign
it.  The reviewers praised "Con Cregan" at the expense of the signed
work, rejoicing that Lever, as "The Daltons" proved, was exhausted,
and that a new Irish author, the author of "Con Cregan," was coming
to eclipse him.  In short, he eclipsed himself, and he did not like
it.  His right hand was jealous of what his left hand did.  It seems
odd that any human being, however dull and envious, failed to detect
Lever in the rapid and vivacious adventures of his Irish "Gil Blas,"
hero of one of the very best among his books, a piece not unworthy
of Dumas.  "Con" was written after midnight, "The Daltons" in the
morning; and there can be no doubt which set of hours was more
favourable to Lever's genius.  Of course he liked "The Daltons"
best; of all people, authors appear to be their own worst critics.

It is not possible even to catalogue Lever's later books here.
Again he drove a pair of novels abreast--"The Dodds" and "Sir Jasper
Carew"--which contain some of his most powerful situations.  When
almost an old man, sad, outworn in body, straitened in
circumstances, he still produced excellent tales in this later
manner--"Lord Kilgobbin," "That Boy of Norcott's," "A Day's Ride,"
and many more.  These are the thoughts of a tired man of the world,
who has done and seen everything that such men see and do.  He says
that he grew fat, and bald, and grave; he wrote for the grave and
the bald, not for the happier world which is young, and curly, and
merry.  He died at last, it is said, in his sleep; and it is added
that he did what Harry Lorrequer would not have done--he left his
affairs in perfect order.

Lever lived in an age so full of great novelists that, perhaps, he
is not prized as he should be.  Dickens, Bulwer, Thackeray,
Trollope, George Eliot, were his contemporaries.  But when we turn
back and read him once more, we see that Lever, too, was a worthy
member of that famous company--a romancer for boys and men.



THE POEMS OF SIR WALTER SCOTT



Yesterday, as the sun was very bright, and there was no wind, I took
a fishing-rod on chance and Scott's poems, and rowed into the middle
of St. Mary's Loch.  Every hill, every tuft of heather was reflected
in the lake, as in a silver mirror.  There was no sound but the
lapping of the water against the boat, the cry of the blackcock from
the hill, and the pleasant plash of a trout rising here and there.
So I read "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" over again, here, in the
middle of the scenes where the story is laid and where the fights
were fought.  For when the Baron went on pilgrimage,


"And took with him this elvish page
To Mary's Chapel of the Lowes,"

it was to the ruined chapel HERE that he came,


"For there, beside our Ladye's lake,
An offering he had sworn to make,
And he would pay his vows."


But his enemy, the Lady of Branksome, gathered a band,


"Of the best that would ride at her command,"


and they all came from the country round.  Branksome, where the lady
lived, is twenty miles off, towards the south, across the ranges of
lonely green hills.  Harden, where her ally, Wat of Harden, abode,
is within twelve miles; and Deloraine, where William dwelt, is
nearer still; and John of Thirlestane had his square tower in the
heather, "where victual never grew," on Ettrick Water, within ten
miles.  These gentlemen, and their kinsfolk and retainers, being at
feud with the Kers, tried to slay the Baron, in the Chapel of "Lone
St. Mary of the Waves."


"They were three hundred spears and three.
Through Douglas burn, up Yarrow stream,
Their horses prance, their lances gleam.
They came to St. Mary's Lake ere day;
But the chapel was void, and the Baron away.
They burned the chapel for very rage,
And cursed Lord Cranstoun's goblin-page."


The Scotts were a rough clan enough to burn a holy chapel because
they failed to kill their enemy within the sacred walls.  But, as I
read again, for the twentieth time, Sir Walter's poem, floating on
the lonely breast of the lake, in the heart of the hills where
Yarrow flows, among the little green mounds that cover the ruins of
chapel and castle and lady's bower, I asked myself whether Sir
Walter was indeed a great and delightful poet, or whether he pleases
me so much because I was born in his own country, and have one drop
of the blood of his Border robbers in my own veins?

It is not always pleasant to go back to places, or to meet people,
whom we have loved well, long ago.  If they have changed little, we
have changed much.  The little boy, whose first book of poetry was
"The Lady of the Lake," and who naturally believed that there was no
poet like Sir Walter, is sadly changed into the man who has read
most of the world's poets, and who hears, on many sides, that Scott
is outworn and doomed to deserved oblivion.  Are they right or
wrong, the critics who tell us, occasionally, that Scott's good
novels make up for his bad verse, or that verse and prose, all must
go?  Pro captu lectoris, by the reader's taste, they stand or fall;
yet even pessimism can scarcely believe that the Waverley Novels are
mortal.  They were once the joy of every class of minds; they cannot
cease to be the joy of those who cling to the permanently good, and
can understand and forgive lapses, carelessnesses, and the leisurely
literary fashion of a former age.  But, as to the poems, many give
them up who cling to the novels.  It does not follow that the poems
are bad.  In the first place, they are of two kinds--lyric and
narrative.  Now, the fashion of narrative in poetry has passed away
for the present.  The true Greek epics are read by a few in Greek;
by perhaps fewer still in translations.  But so determined are we
not to read tales in verse, that prose renderings, even of the
epics, nay, even of the Attic dramas, have come more or less into
vogue.  This accounts for the comparative neglect of Sir Walter's
lays.  They are spoken of as Waverley Novels spoiled.  This must
always be the opinion of readers who will not submit to stories in
verse; it by no means follows that the verse is bad.  If we make an
exception, which we must, in favour of Chaucer, where is there
better verse in story telling in the whole of English literature?
The readers who despise "Marmion," or "The Lady of the Lake," do so
because they dislike stories told in poetry.  From poetry they
expect other things, especially a lingering charm and magic of
style, a reflective turn, "criticism of life."  These things, except
so far as life can be criticised in action, are alien to the Muse of
narrative.  Stories and pictures are all she offers:  Scott's
pictures, certainly, are fresh enough, his tales are excellent
enough, his manner is sufficiently direct.  To take examples:  every
one who wants to read Scott's poetry should begin with the "Lay."
From opening to close it never falters:-


"Nine and twenty knights of fame
Hung their shields in Branksome Hall;
Nine and twenty squires of name
Brought their steeds to bower from stall,
Nine and twenty yeomen tall
Waited, duteous, on them all . . .
Ten of them were sheathed in steel,
With belted sword, and spur on heel;
They quitted not their harness bright
Neither by day nor yet by night:
They lay down to rest
With corslet laced,
Pillowed on buckler cold and hard;
They carved at the meal
With gloves of steel,
And they drank the red wine through the helmet barred."


Now, is not that a brave beginning?  Does not the verse clank and
chime like sword sheath on spur, like the bits of champing horses?
Then, when William of Deloraine is sent on his lonely midnight ride
across the haunted moors and wolds, does the verse not gallop like
the heavy armoured horse?


"Unchallenged, thence passed Deloraine,
To ancient Riddell's fair domain,
Where Aill, from mountains freed,
Down from the lakes did raving come;
Each wave was crested with tawny foam,
Like the mane of a chestnut steed,
In vain! no torrent, deep or broad,
Might bar the bold moss-trooper's road;
At the first plunge the horse sunk low,
And the water broke o'er the saddle-bow."


These last two lines have the very movement and note, the deep heavy
plunge, the still swirl of the water.  Well I know the lochs whence
Aill comes red in flood; many a trout have I taken in Aill, long
ago.  This, of course, causes a favourable prejudice, a personal
bias towards admiration.  But I think the poetry itself is good, and
stirs the spirit, even of those who know not Ailmoor, the mother of
Aill, that lies dark among the melancholy hills.

The spirit is stirred throughout by the chivalry and the courage of
Scott's men and of his women.  Thus the Lady of Branksome addresses
the English invaders who have taken her boy prisoner:-


"For the young heir of Branksome's line,
God be his aid, and God be mine;
Through me no friend shall meet his doom;
Here, while I live, no foe finds room.
Then if thy Lords their purpose urge,
Take our defiance loud and high;
Our slogan is their lyke-wake dirge,
Our moat, the grave where they shall lie."


Ay, and though the minstrel says he is no love poet, and though,
indeed, he shines more in war than in lady's bower, is not this a
noble stanza on true love, and worthy of what old Malory writes in
his "Mort d'Arthur"?  Because here Scott speaks for himself, and of
his own unhappy and immortal affection:-


"True love's the gift which God has given
To man alone beneath the Heaven.
It is not Fantasy's hot fire,
Whose wishes, soon as granted, fly;
It liveth not in fierce desire,
With dead desire it dock not die:
It is the secret sympathy,
The silver link, the silken tie,
Which heart to heart and mind to mind,
In body and in soul can bind."


Truth and faith, courage and chivalry, a free life in the hills and
by the streams, a shrewd brain, an open heart, a kind word for
friend or foeman, these are what you learn from the "Lay," if you
want to learn lessons from poetry.  It is a rude legend, perhaps, as
the critics said at once, when critics were disdainful of wizard
priests and ladies magical.  But it is a deathless legend, I hope;
it appeals to every young heart that is not early spoiled by low
cunning, and cynicism, and love of gain.  The minstrel's own
prophecy is true, and still, and always,


"Yarrow, as he rolls along,
Bears burden to the minstrel's song."


After the "Lay" came "Marmion, a Tale of Flodden Field."  It is far
more ambitious and complicated than the "Lay," and is not much worse
written.  Sir Walter was ever a rapid and careless poet, and as he
took more pains with his plot, he took less with his verse.  His
friends reproved him, but he answered to one of them -


"Since oft thy judgment could refine
My flattened thought and cumbrous line,
Still kind, as is thy wont, attend,
And in the minstrel spare the friend:
Though wild as cloud, as stream, as gale,
Flow forth, flow unrestrained, my tale!"


Any one who knows Scott's country knows how cloud and stream and
gale all sweep at once down the valley of Ettrick or of Tweed.  West
wind, wild cloud, red river, they pour forth as by one impulse--
forth from the far-off hills.  He let his verse sweep out in the
same stormy sort, and many a "cumbrous line," many a "flattened
thought," you may note, if you will, in "Marmion."  For example -


"And think what he must next have felt,
At buckling of the falchion belt."


The "Lay" is a tale that only verse could tell; much of "Marmion"
might have been told in prose, and most of "Rokeby."  But prose
could never give the picture of Edinburgh, nor tell the tale of
Flodden Fight in "Marmion," which I verily believe is the best
battle-piece in all the poetry of all time, better even than the
stand of Aias by the ships in the Iliad, better than the slaying of
the Wooers in the Odyssey.  Nor could prose give us the hunting of
the deer and the long gallop over hillside and down valley, with
which the "Lady of the Lake" begins, opening thereby the enchanted
gates of the Highlands to the world.  "The Lady of the Lake," except
in the battle-piece, is told in a less rapid metre than that of the
"Lay," less varied than that of "Marmion."  "Rokeby" lives only by
its songs; the "Lord of the Isles" by Bannockburn, the "Field of
Waterloo" by the repulse of the Cuirassiers.  But all the poems are
interspersed with songs and ballads, as the beautiful ballad of
"Alice Brand"; and Scott's fame rests on THESE far more than on his
later versified romances.  Coming immediately after the very tamest
poets who ever lived, like Hayley, Scott wrote songs and ballads as
wild and free, as melancholy or gay, as ever shepherd sang, or gipsy
carolled, or witch-wife moaned, or old forgotten minstrel left to
the world, music with no maker's name.  For example, take the
Outlaw's rhyme -


"With burnished brand and musketoon,
So gallantly you come,
I read you for a bold dragoon
That lists the tuck of drum.
I list no more the tuck of drum,
No more the trumpet hear;
But when the beetle sounds his hum,
My comrades take the spear.
And, oh, though Brignal banks be fair,
And Greta woods be gay,
Yet mickle must the maiden dare,
Would reign my Queen of May!"


How musical, again, is this! -


"This morn is merry June, I trow,
The rose is budding fain;
But she shall bloom in winter snow,
Ere we two meet again.
He turned his charger as he spake,
Upon the river shore,
He gave his bridle-reins a shake,
Said, 'Adieu for evermore,
My love!
Adieu for evermore!'"


Turning from the legends in verse, let it not be forgotten that
Scott was a great lyrical poet.  Mr. Palgrave is not too lenient a
judge, and his "Golden Treasury" is a touchstone, as well as a
treasure, of poetic gold.  In this volume Wordsworth contributes
more lyrics than any other poet:  Shelley and Shakespeare come next;
then Sir Walter.  For my part I would gladly sacrifice a few of
Wordsworth's for a few more of Scott's.  But this may be prejudice.
Mr. Palgrave is not prejudiced, and we see how high is his value for
Sir Walter.

There are scores of songs in his works, touching and sad, or gay as
a hunter's waking, that tell of lovely things lost by tradition, and
found by him on the moors:  all these--not prized by Sir Walter
himself--are in his gift, and in that of no other man.  For example,
his "Eve of St. John" is simply a masterpiece, a ballad among
ballads.  Nothing but an old song moves us like -


"Are these the links o' Forth, she said,
Are these the bends o' Dee!"


He might have done more of the best, had he very greatly cared.
Alone among poets, he had neither vanity nor jealousy; he thought
little of his own verse and his own fame:  would that he had thought
more! would that he had been more careful of what was so precious!
But he turned to prose; bade poetry farewell.


"Yet, once again, farewell, thou Minstrel Harp,
Yet, once again, forgive my feeble sway.
And little reck I of the censure sharp
May idly cavil at an idle lay."


People still cavil idly, complaining that Scott did not finish, or
did not polish his pieces; that he was not Keats, or was not
Wordsworth.  He was himself; he was the Last Minstrel, the latest,
the greatest, the noblest of natural poets concerned with natural
things.  He sang of free, fierce, and warlike life, of streams yet
rich in salmon, and moors not yet occupied by brewers; of lonely
places haunted in the long grey twilights of the North; of crumbling
towers where once dwelt the Lady of Branksome or the Flower of
Yarrow.  Nature summed up in him many a past age a world of ancient
faiths; and before the great time of Britain wholly died, to
Britain, as to Greece, she gave her Homer.  When he was old, and
tired, and near his death--so worn with trouble and labour that he
actually signed his own name wrong--he wrote his latest verse, for a
lady.  It ends -


"My country, be thou glorious still!"


and so he died, within the sound of the whisper of Tweed, foreseeing
the years when his country would no more be glorious, thinking of
his country only, forgetting quite the private sorrow of his own
later days.

People will tell you that Scott was not a great poet; that his bolt
is shot, his fame perishing.  Little he cared for his fame!  But for
my part I think and hope that Scott can never die, till men grow up
into manhood without ever having been boys--till they forget that


"One glorious hour of crowded life
Is worth an age without a name!"


Thus, the charges against Sir Walter's poetry are, on the whole,
little more than the old critical fallacy of blaming a thing for not
being something else.  "It takes all sorts to make a world," in
poetry as in life.  Sir Walter's sort is a very good sort, and in
English literature its place was empty, and waiting for him.  Think
of what he did.  English poetry had long been very tame and
commonplace, written in couplets like Pope's, very artificial and
smart, or sensible and slow.  He came with poems of which the music
seemed to gallop, like thundering hoofs and ringing bridles of a
rushing border troop.  Here were goblin, ghost, and fairy, fight and
foray, fair ladies and true lovers, gallant knights and hard blows,
blazing beacons on every hill crest and on the bartisan of every
tower.  Here was a world made alive again that had been dead for
three hundred years--a world of men and women.

They say that the archaeology is not good.  Archaeology is a
science; in its application to poetry, Scott was its discoverer.
Others can name the plates of a coat of armour more learnedly than
he, but he made men wear them.  They call his Gothic art false, his
armour pasteboard; but he put living men under his castled roofs,
living men into his breastplates and taslets.  Science advances, old
knowledge becomes ignorance; it is poetry that does not die, and
that will not die, while -


"The triple pride
Of Eildon looks over Strathclyde."



JOHN BUNYAN



Dr. Johnson once took Bishop Percy's little daughter on his knee,
and asked her what she thought of the "Pilgrim's Progress."  The
child answered that she had not read it.  "No?" replied the Doctor;
"then I would not give one farthing for you," and he set her down
and took no further notice of her.

This story, if true, proves that the Doctor was rather intolerant.
We must not excommunicate people because they have not our taste in
books.  The majority of people do not care for books at all.

There is a descendant of John Bunyan's alive now, or there was
lately, who never read the "Pilgrim's Progress."  Books are not in
his line.  Nay, Bunyan himself, who wrote sixty works, was no great
reader.  An Oxford scholar who visited him in his study found no
books at all, except some of Bunyan's own and Foxe's "Book of
Martyrs."

Yet, little as the world in general cares for reading, it has read
Bunyan more than most.  One hundred thousand copies of the "Pilgrim"
are believed to have been sold in his own day, and the story has
been done into the most savage languages, as well as into those of
the civilised world.

Dr. Johnson, who did not like Dissenters, praises the "invention,
imagination, and conduct of the story," and knew no other book he
wished longer except "Robinson Crusoe" and "Don Quixote."  Well, Dr.
Johnson would not have given a farthing for ME, as I am quite
contented with the present length of these masterpieces.  What books
do YOU wish longer?  I wish Homer had written a continuation of the
Odyssey, and told us what Odysseus did among the far-off men who
never tasted salt nor heard of the sea.  A land epic after the sea
epic, how good it would have been--from Homer!  But it would have
taxed the imagination of Dante to continue the adventures of
Christian and his wife after they had once crossed the river and
reached the city.

John Bunyan has been more fortunate than most authors in one of his
biographies.

His life has been written by the Rev. Dr. Brown, who is now minister
of his old congregation at Bedford; and an excellent life it is.
Dr. Brown is neither Roundhead nor Cavalier; for though he is, of
course, on Bunyan's side, he does not throw stones at the beautiful
Church of England.

Probably most of us are on Bunyan's side now.  It might be a good
thing that we should all dwell together in religious unity, but
history shows that people cannot be bribed into brotherhood.  They
tried to bully Bunyan; they arrested and imprisoned him--unfairly
even in law, according to Dr. Brown, not unfairly, Mr. Froude
thinks--and he would not be bullied.

What was much more extraordinary, he would not be embittered.  In
spite of all, he still called Charles II. "a gracious Prince."  When
a subject is in conscience at variance with the law, Bunyan said, he
has but one course--to accept peaceably the punishment which the law
awards.  He was never soured, never angered by twelve years of
durance, not exactly in a loathsome dungeon, but in very
uncomfortable quarters.  When there came a brief interval of
toleration, he did not occupy himself in brawling, but in preaching,
and looking after the manners and morals of the little "church,"
including one woman who brought disagreeable charges against
"Brother Honeylove."  The church decided that there was nothing in
the charges, but somehow the name of Brother Honeylove does not
inspire confidence.

Almost everybody knows the main facts of Bunyan's life.  They may
not know that he was of Norman descent (as Dr. Brown seems to
succeed in proving), nor that the Bunyans came over with the
Conqueror, nor that he was a gipsy, as others hold.  On Dr. Brown's
showing, Bunyan's ancestors lost their lands in process of time and
change, and Bunyan's father was a tinker.  He preferred to call
himself a brazier--his was the rather unexpected trade to which Mr.
Dick proposed apprenticing David Copperfield.

Bunyan himself, "the wondrous babe," as Dr. Brown enthusiastically
styles him, was christened on November 30th, 1628.  He was born in a
cottage, long fallen, and hard by was a marshy place, "a veritable
slough of despond."  Bunyan may have had it in mind when he wrote of
the slough where Christian had so much trouble.  He was not a
travelled man:  all his knowledge of people and places he found at
his doors.  He had some schooling, "according to the rate of other
poor men's children," and assuredly it was enough.

The great civil war broke out, and Bunyan was a soldier; he tells us
not on which side.  Dr. Brown and Mr. Lewis Morris think he was on
that of the Parliament, but his old father, the tinker, stood for
the King.  Mr. Froude is rather more inclined to hold that he was
among the "gay gallants who struck for the crown."  He does not seem
to have been much under fire, but he got that knowledge of the
appearance of war which he used in his siege of the City of Mansoul.
One can hardly think that Bunyan liked war--certainly not from
cowardice, but from goodness of heart.

In 1646 the army was disbanded, and Bunyan went back to Elstow
village and his tinkering, his bell-ringing, his dancing with the
girls, his playing at "cat" on a Sunday after service.

He married very young and poor.  He married a pious wife, and read
all her library--"The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven," and "The
Practice of Piety."  He became very devout in the spirit of the
Church of England, and he gave up his amusements.  Then he fell into
the Slough of Despond, then he went through the Valley of the
Shadow, and battled with Apollyon.

People have wondered WHY he fancied himself such a sinner?  He
confesses to having been a liar and a blasphemer.  If I may guess, I
fancy that this was merely the literary genius of Bunyan seeking for
expression.  His lies, I would go bail, were tremendous romances,
wild fictions told for fun, never lies of cowardice or for gain.  As
to his blasphemies, he had an extraordinary power of language, and
that was how he gave it play.  "Fancy swearing" was his only
literary safety-valve, in those early days, when he played cat on
Elstow Green.

Then he heard a voice dart from heaven into his soul, which said,
"Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to heaven, or have thy sins and go
to hell?"  So he fell on repentance, and passed those awful years of
mental torture, when all nature seemed to tempt him to the Unknown
Sin.

What did all this mean?  It meant that Bunyan was within an ace of
madness.

It happens to a certain proportion of men, religiously brought up,
to suffer like Bunyan.  They hear voices, they are afraid of that
awful unknown iniquity, and of eternal death, as Bunyan and Cowper
were afraid.

Was it not De Quincey who was at school with a bully who believed he
had been guilty of the unpardonable offence?  Bullying is an offence
much less pardonable than most men are guilty of.  Their best plan
(in Bunyan's misery) is to tell Apollyon that the Devil is an ass,
to do their work and speak the truth.

Bunyan got quit of his terror at last, briefly by believing in the
goodness of God.  He did not say, like Mr. Carlyle, "Well, if all my
fears are true, what then?"  His was a Christian, not a stoical
deliverance.

The "church" in which Bunyan found shelter had for minister a
converted major in a Royalist regiment.  It was a quaint little
community, the members living like the early disciples, correcting
each other's faults, and keeping a severe eye on each other's lives.
Bunyan became a minister in it; but, Puritan as he was, he lets his
Pilgrims dance on joyful occasions, and even Mr. Ready-to-Halt
waltzes with a young lady of the Pilgrim company.

As a minister and teacher Bunyan began to write books of controversy
with Quakers and clergymen.  The points debated are no longer
important to us; the main thing was that he got a pen into his hand,
and found a proper outlet for his genius, a better way than fancy
swearing.

If he had not been cast into Bedford jail for preaching in a
cottage, he might never have dreamed his immortal dream, nor become
all that he was.  The leisures of gaol were long.  In that "den" the
Muse came to him, the fair kind Muse of the Home Beautiful.  He saw
all that company of his, so like and so unlike Chaucer's:  Faithful,
and Hopeful, and Christian, the fellowship of fiends, the truculent
Cavaliers of Vanity Fair, and Giant Despair, with his grievous
crabtree cudgel; and other people he saw who are with us always,--
the handsome Madam Bubble, and the young woman whose name was Dull,
and Mr. Worldly Wiseman, and Mr. Facing Bothways, and Byends, all
the persons of the comedy of human life.

He hears the angelic songs of the City beyond the river; he hears
them, but repeat them to us he cannot, "for I'm no poet," as he says
himself.  He beheld the country of Beulah, and the Delectable
Mountains, that earthly Paradise of nature where we might be happy
yet, and wander no farther, if the world would let us--fair
mountains in whose streams Izaak Walton was then even casting angle.

It is pleasant to fancy how Walton and Bunyan might have met and
talked, under a plane tree by the Ouse, while the May showers were
falling.  Surely Bunyan would not have likened the good old man to
Formalist; and certainly Walton would have enjoyed travelling with
Christian, though the book was by none of his dear bishops, but by a
Non-conformist.  They were made to like but not to convert each
other; in matters ecclesiastical they saw the opposite sides of the
shield.  Each wrote a masterpiece.  It is too late to praise "The
Complete Angler" or the "Pilgrim's Progress."  You may put ingenuity
on the rack, but she can say nothing new that is true about the best
romance that ever was wedded to allegory, nor about the best idyl of
old English life.

The people are living now--all the people:  the noisy bullying
judges, as of the French Revolutionary Courts, or the Hanging Courts
after Monmouth's war; the demure, grave Puritan girls; and Matthew,
who had the gripes; and lazy, feckless Ignorance, who came to so ill
an end, poor fellow; and sturdy Old Honest, and timid Mr. Fearing;
not single persons, but dozens, arise on the memory.

They come, as fresh, as vivid, as if they were out of Scott or
Moliere; the Tinker is as great a master of character and fiction as
the greatest, almost; his style is pure, and plain, and sound, full
of old idioms, and even of something like old slang.  But even his
slang is classical.

Bunyan is everybody's author.  The very Catholics have their own
edition of the Pilgrim:  they have cut out Giant Pope, but have been
too good-natured to insert Giant Protestant in his place.
Unheralded, unannounced, though not uncriticised (they accused the
Tinker of being a plagiarist, of course), Bunyan outshone the Court
wits, the learned, the poets of the Restoration, and even the great
theologians.

His other books, except "Grace Abounding" (an autobiography), "The
Holy War," and "Mr. Badman," are only known to students, nor much
read by them.  The fashion of his theology, as of all theology,
passed away; it is by virtue of his imagination, of his romance,
that he lives.

The allegory, of course, is full of flaws.  It would not have been
manly of Christian to run off and save his own soul, leaving his
wife and family.  But Bunyan shrank from showing us how difficult,
if not impossible, it is for a married man to be a saint.
Christiana was really with him all through that pilgrimage; and how
he must have been hampered by that woman of the world!  But had the
allegory clung more closely to the skirts of truth, it would have
changed from a romance to a satire, from "The Pilgrim's Progress" to
"Vanity Fair."  There was too much love in Bunyan for a satirist of
that kind; he had just enough for a humourist.

Born in another class, he might have been, he would have been, a
writer more refined in his strength, more uniformly excellent, but
never so universal nor so popular in the best sense of the term.

In the change of times and belief it is not impossible that Bunyan
will live among the class whom he least thought of addressing--
scholars, lovers of worldly literature--for devotion and poverty are
parting company, while art endures till civilisation perishes.

Are we better or worse for no longer believing as Bunyan believed,
no longer seeing that Abyss of Pascal's open beside our armchairs?
The question is only a form of that wide riddle, Does any
theological or philosophical opinion make us better or worse?  The
vast majority of men and women are little affected by schemes and
theories of this life and the next.  They who even ask for a reply
to the riddle are the few:  most of us take the easy-going morality
of our world for a guide, as we take Bradshaw for a railway journey.
It is the few who must find out an answer:  on that answer their
lives depend, and the lives of others are insensibly raised towards
their level.  Bunyan would not have been a worse man if he had
shared the faith of Izaak Walton.  Izaak had his reply to all
questions in the Church Catechism and the Articles.  Bunyan found
his in the theology of his sect, appealing more strongly than
orthodoxy to a nature more bellicose than Izaak's.  Men like him,
with his indomitable courage, will never lack a solution of the
puzzle of the earth.  At worst they will live by law, whether they
dare to speak of it as God's law, or dare not.  They will always be
our leaders, our Captain Greathearts, in the pilgrimage to the city
where, led or unled, we must all at last arrive.  They will not fail
us, while loyalty and valour are human qualities.  The day may
conceivably come when we have no Christian to march before us, but
we shall never lack the company of Greatheart.



TO A YOUNG JOURNALIST



Dear Smith, -

You inform me that you desire to be a journalist, and you are kind
enough to ask my advice.  Well, be a journalist, by all means, in
any honest and honourable branch of the profession.  But do not be
an eavesdropper and a spy.  You may fly into a passion when you
receive this very plainly worded advice.  I hope you will; but, for
several reasons, which I now go on to state, I fear that you won't.
I fear that, either by natural gift or by acquired habit, you
already possess the imperturbable temper which will be so useful to
you if you do join the army of spies and eavesdroppers.  If I am
right, you have made up your mind to refuse to take offence, as long
as by not taking offence you can wriggle yourself forward in the
band of journalistic reptiles.  You will be revenged on me, in that
case, some day; you will lie in wait for me with a dirty bludgeon,
and steal on me out of a sewer.  If you do, permit me to assure you
that I don't care.  But if you are already in a rage, if you are
about tearing up this epistle, and are starting to assault me
personally, or at least to answer me furiously, then there is every
hope for you and for your future.  I therefore venture to state my
reasons for supposing that you are inclined to begin a course which
your father, if he were alive, would deplore, as all honourable men
in their hearts must deplore it.  When you were at the University
(let me congratulate you on your degree) you edited, or helped to
edit, The Bull-dog.  It was not a very brilliant nor a very witty,
but it was an extremely "racy" periodical.  It spoke of all men and
dons by their nicknames.  It was full of second-hand slang.  It
contained many personal anecdotes, to the detriment of many people.
It printed garbled and spiteful versions of private conversations on
private affairs.  It did not even spare to make comments on ladies,
and on the details of domestic life in the town and in the
University.  The copies which you sent me I glanced at with extreme
disgust.

In my time, more than a score of years ago, a similar periodical,
but a much more clever periodical, was put forth by members of the
University.  It contained a novel which, even now, would be worth
several ill-gotten guineas to the makers of the chronique
scandaleuse.  But nobody bought it, and it died an early death.
Times have altered, I am a fogey; but the ideas of honour and
decency which fogies hold now were held by young men in the sixties
of our century.  I know very well that these ideas are obsolete.  I
am not preaching to the world, nor hoping to convert society, but to
YOU, and purely in your own private, spiritual interest.  If you
enter on this path of tattle, mendacity, and malice, and if, with
your cleverness and light hand, you are successful, society will not
turn its back on you.  You will be feared in many quarters, and
welcomed in others.  Of your paragraphs people will say that "it is
a shame, of course, but it is very amusing."  There are so many
shames in the world, shames not at all amusing, that you may see no
harm in adding to the number.  "If I don't do it," you may argue,
"some one else will."  Undoubtedly; but WHY SHOULD YOU DO IT?

You are not a starving scribbler; if you determine to write, you can
write well, though not so easily, on many topics.  You have not that
last sad excuse of hunger, which drives poor women to the streets,
and makes unhappy men act as public blabs and spies.  If YOU take to
this metier, it must be because you like it, which means that you
enjoy being a listener to and reporter of talk that was never meant
for any ears except those in which it was uttered.  It means that
the hospitable board is not sacred for YOU; it means that, with you,
friendship, honour, all that makes human life better than a low
smoking-room, are only valuable for what their betrayal will bring.
It means that not even the welfare of your country will prevent you
from running to the Press with any secret which you may have been
entrusted with, or which you may have surprised.  It means, this
peculiar kind of profession, that all things open and excellent, and
conspicuous to all men, are with you of no account.  Art,
literature, politics, are to cease to interest you.  You are to
scheme to surprise gossip about the private lives, dress, and talk
of artists, men of letters, politicians.  Your professional work
will sink below the level of servants' gossip in a public-house
parlour.  If you happen to meet a man of known name, you will watch
him, will listen to him, will try to sneak into his confidence, and
you will blab, for money, about him, and your blab will inevitably
be mendacious.  In short, like the most pitiable outcasts of
womankind, and, without their excuse, you will live by selling your
honour.  You will not suffer much, nor suffer long.  Your conscience
will very speedily be seared with a red-hot iron.  You will be on
the road which leads from mere dishonour to crime; and you may find
yourself actually practising chantage, and extorting money as the
price of your silence.  This is the lowest deep:  the vast majority,
even of social mouchards, do not sink so low as this.

The profession of the critic, even in honourable and open criticism,
is beset with dangers.  It is often hard to avoid saying an unkind
thing, a cruel thing, which is smart, and which may even be
deserved.  Who can say that he has escaped this temptation, and what
man of heart can think of his own fall without a sense of shame?
There are, I admit, authors so antipathetic to me, that I cannot
trust myself to review them.  Would that I had never reviewed them!
They cannot be so bad as they seem to me:  they must have qualities
which escape my observation.  Then there is the temptation to hit
back.  Some one writes, unjustly or unkindly as you think, of you or
of your friends.  You wait till your enemy has written a book, and
then you have your innings.  It is not in nature that your review
should be fair:  you must inevitably be more on the look-out for
faults than merits.  The ereintage, the "smashing" of a literary foe
is very delightful at the moment, but it does not look well in the
light of reflection.  But these deeds are mere peccadilloes compared
with the confirmed habit of regarding all men and women as fair game
for personal tattle and the sating of private spite.  Nobody,
perhaps, begins with this intention.  Most men and women can find
ready sophistries.  If a report about any one reaches their ears,
they say that they are doing him a service by publishing it and
enabling him to contradict it.  As if any mortal ever listened to a
contradiction!  And there are charges--that of plagiarism, for
example--which can never be disproved, even if contradictions were
listened to by the public.  The accusation goes everywhere, is
copied into every printed rag; the contradiction dies with the daily
death of a single newspaper.  You may reply that a man of sense will
be indifferent to false accusations.  He may, or may not be,--that
is not the question for you; the question for you is whether you
will circulate news that is false, probably, and spiteful,
certainly.

In short, the whole affair regards yourself more than it regards the
world.  Plenty of poison is sold:  is it well for you to be one of
the merchants?  Is it the business of an educated gentleman to live
by the trade of an eavesdropper and a blab?  In the Memoirs of M.
Blowitz he tells you how he began his illustrious career by
procuring the publication of remarks which M. Thiers had made to
him.  He then "went to see M. Thiers, not without some
apprehension."  Is that the kind of emotion which you wish to be
habitual in your experience?  Do you think it agreeable to become
shame-faced when you meet people who have conversed with you
frankly?  Do you enjoy being a sneak, and feeling like a sneak?  Do
you find blushing pleasant?  Of course you will soon lose the power
of blushing; but is that an agreeable prospect?  Depend on it, there
are discomforts in the progress to the brazen, in the journey to the
shameless.  You may, if your tattle is political, become serviceable
to men engaged in great affairs.  They may even ask you to their
houses, if that is your ambition.  You may urge that they condone
your deeds, and are even art and part in them.  But you must also be
aware that they call you, and think you, a reptile.  You are not one
of those who will do the devil's work without the devil's wages; but
do you seriously think that the wages are worth the degradation?

Many men think so, and are not in other respects bad men.  They may
even be kindly and genial.  Gentlemen they cannot be, nor men of
delicacy, nor men of honour.  They have sold themselves and their
self-respect, some with ease (they are the least blamable), some
with a struggle.  They have seen better things, and perhaps vainly
long to return to them.  These are "St. Satan's Penitents," and
their remorse is vain:


Virtutem videant, intabescantque relicta.


If you don't wish to be of this dismal company, there is only one
course open to you.  Never write for publication one line of
personal tattle.  Let all men's persons and private lives be as
sacred to you as your father's,--though there are tattlers who would
sell paragraphs about their own mothers if there were a market for
the ware.  There is no half-way house on this road.  Once begin to
print private conversation, and you are lost--lost, that is, to
delicacy and gradually, to many other things excellent and of good
report.  The whole question for you is, Do you mind incurring this
damnation?  If there is nothing in it which appals and revolts you,
if your conscience is satisfied with a few ready sophisms, or if you
don't care a pin for your conscience, fall to!

Vous irez loin!  You will prattle in print about men's private lives
their hidden motives, their waistcoats, their wives, their boots,
their businesses, their incomes.  Most of your prattle will
inevitably be lies.  But go on! nobody will kick you, I deeply
regret to say.  You will earn money.  You will be welcomed in
society.  You will live and die content, and without remorse.  I do
not suppose that any particular inferno will await you in the future
life.  Whoever watches this world "with larger other eyes than ours"
will doubtless make allowance for you, as for us all.  I am not
pretending to be a whit better than you; probably I am worse in many
ways, but not in your way.  Putting it merely as a matter of taste,
I don't like the way.  It makes me sick--that is all.  It is a sin
which I can comfortably damn, as I am not inclined to it.  You may
put it in that light; and I have no way of converting you, nor, if I
have not dissuaded you, of dissuading you, from continuing, on a
larger scale, your practices in The Bull-dog.



MR. KIPLING'S STORIES



The wind bloweth where it listeth.  But the wind of literary
inspiration has rarely shaken the bungalows of India, as, in the
tales of the old Jesuit missionaries, the magical air shook the
frail "medicine tents," where Huron conjurors practised their
mysteries.  With a world of romance and of character at their doors,
Englishmen in India have seen as if they saw it not.  They have been
busy in governing, in making war, making peace, building bridges,
laying down roads, and writing official reports.  Our literature
from that continent of our conquest has been sparse indeed, except
in the way of biographies, of histories, and of rather local and
unintelligible facetiae.  Except the novels by the author of "Tara,"
and Sir Henry Cunningham's brilliant sketches, such as "Dustypore,"
and Sir Alfred Lyall's poems, we might almost say that India has
contributed nothing to our finer literature.  That old haunt of
history, the wealth of character brought out in that confusion of
races, of religions, and the old and new, has been wealth untouched,
a treasure-house sealed:  those pagoda trees have never been shaken.
At last there comes an Englishman with eyes, with a pen
extraordinarily deft, an observation marvellously rapid and keen;
and, by good luck, this Englishman has no official duties:  he is
neither a soldier, nor a judge; he is merely a man of letters.  He
has leisure to look around him, he has the power of making us see
what he sees; and, when we have lost India, when some new power is
ruling where we ruled, when our empire has followed that of the
Moguls, future generations will learn from Mr. Kipling's works what
India was under English sway.

It is one of the surprises of literature that these tiny
masterpieces in prose and verse were poured, "as rich men give that
care not for their gifts," into the columns of Anglo-Indian
journals.  There they were thought clever and ephemeral--part of the
chatter of the week.  The subjects, no doubt, seemed so familiar,
that the strength of the handling, the brilliance of the colour,
were scarcely recognised.  But Mr. Kipling's volumes no sooner
reached England than the people into whose hands they fell were
certain that here were the beginnings of a new literary force.  The
books had the strangeness, the colour, the variety, the perfume of
the East.  Thus it is no wonder that Mr. Kipling's repute grew up as
rapidly as the mysterious mango tree of the conjurors.  There were
critics, of course, ready to say that the thing was merely a trick,
and had nothing of the supernatural.  That opinion is not likely to
hold its ground.  Perhaps the most severe of the critics has been a
young Scotch gentleman, writing French, and writing it wonderfully
well, in a Parisian review.  He chose to regard Mr. Kipling as
little but an imitator of Bret Harte, deriving his popularity mainly
from the novel and exotic character of his subjects.  No doubt, if
Mr. Kipling has a literary progenitor, it is Mr. Bret Harte.  Among
his earlier verses a few are what an imitator of the American might
have written in India.  But it is a wild judgment which traces Mr.
Kipling's success to his use, for example, of Anglo-Indian phrases
and scraps of native dialects.  The presence of these elements is
among the causes which have made Englishmen think Anglo-Indian
literature tediously provincial, and India a bore.  Mr. Kipling, on
the other hand, makes us regard the continent which was a bore an
enchanted land, full of marvels and magic which are real.  There
has, indeed, arisen a taste for exotic literature:  people have
become alive to the strangeness and fascination of the world beyond
the bounds of Europe and the United States.  But that is only
because men of imagination and literary skill have been the new
conquerors--the Corteses and Balboas of India, Africa, Australia,
Japan, and the isles of the southern seas.  All such conquerors,
whether they write with the polish of M. Pierre Loti, or with the
carelessness of Mr. Boldrewood, have, at least, seen new worlds for
themselves; have gone out of the streets of the over-populated lands
into the open air; have sailed and ridden, walked and hunted; have
escaped from the fog and smoke of towns.  New strength has come from
fresher air into their brains and blood; hence the novelty and
buoyancy of the stories which they tell.  Hence, too, they are
rather to be counted among romanticists than realists, however real
is the essential truth of their books.  They have found so much to
see and to record, that they are not tempted to use the microscope,
and pore for ever on the minute in character.  A great deal of
realism, especially in France, attracts because it is novel, because
M. Zola and others have also found new worlds to conquer.  But
certain provinces in those worlds were not unknown to, but were
voluntarily neglected by, earlier explorers.  They were the "Bad
Lands" of life and character:  surely it is wiser to seek quite new
realms than to build mud huts and dunghills on the "Bad Lands."

Mr. Kipling's work, like all good work, is both real and romantic.
It is real because he sees and feels very swiftly and keenly; it is
romantic, again, because he has a sharp eye for the reality of
romance, for the attraction and possibility of adventure, and
because he is young.  If a reader wants to see petty characters
displayed in all their meannesses, if this be realism, surely
certain of Mr. Kipling's painted and frisky matrons are realistic
enough.  The seamy side of Anglo-Indian life:  the intrigues,
amorous or semi-political--the slang of people who describe dining
as "mangling garbage" the "games of tennis with the seventh
commandment"--he has not neglected any of these.  Probably the
sketches are true enough, and pity 'tis true:  for example, the
sketches in "Under the Deodars" and in "The Gadsbys."  That worthy
pair, with their friends, are to myself as unsympathetic, almost, as
the characters in "La Conquete de Plassans."  But Mr. Kipling is too
much a true realist to make their selfishness and pettiness
unbroken, unceasing.  We know that "Gaddy" is a brave, modest, and
hard-working soldier; and, when his little silly bride (who prefers
being kissed by a man with waxed moustaches) lies near to death,
certainly I am nearer to tears than when I am obliged to attend the
bed of Little Dombey or of Little Nell.  Probably there is a great
deal of slangy and unrefined Anglo-Indian society; and, no doubt, to
sketch it in its true colours is not beyond the province of art.  At
worst it is redeemed, in part, by its constancy in the presence of
various perils--from disease, and from "the bullet flying down the
pass."  Mr. Kipling may not be, and very probably is not, a reader
of "Gyp"; but "The Gadsbys," especially, reads like the work of an
Anglo-Indian disciple, trammelled by certain English conventions.
The more Pharisaic realists--those of the strictest sect--would
probably welcome Mr. Kipling as a younger brother, so far as "Under
the Deodars" and "The Gadsbys" are concerned, if he were not
occasionally witty and even flippant, as well as realistic.  But,
very fortunately, he has not confined his observation to the
leisures and pleasures of Simla; he has looked out also on war and
on sport, on the life of all native tribes and castes; and has even
glanced across the borders of "The Undiscovered Country."

Among Mr. Kipling's discoveries of new kinds of characters, probably
the most popular is his invention of the British soldier in India.
He avers that he "loves that very strong man, Thomas Atkins"; but
his affection has not blinded him to the faults of the beloved.  Mr.
Atkins drinks too much, is too careless a gallant in love, has been
educated either too much or too little, and has other faults, partly
due, apparently, to recent military organisation, partly to the
feverish and unsettled state of the civilised world.  But he is
still brave, when he is well led; still loyal, above all, to his
"trusty chum."  Every Englishman must hope that, if Terence Mulvaney
did not take the city of Lungtung Pen as described, yet he is ready,
and willing so to take it.  Mr. Mulvaney is as humorous as Micky
Free, but more melancholy and more truculent.  He has, perhaps, "won
his way to the mythical" already, and is not so much a soldier, as
an incarnation, not of Krishna, but of many soldierly qualities.  On
the other hand, Private Ortheris, especially in his frenzy, seems to
shew all the truth, and much more than the life of, a photograph.
Such, we presume, is the soldier, and such are his experiences and
temptations and repentance.  But nobody ever dreamed of telling us
all this, till Mr. Kipling came.  As for the soldier in action, the
"Taking of Lungtung Pen," and the "Drums of the Fore and Aft," and
that other tale of the battle with the Pathans in the gorge, are
among the good fights of fiction.  They stir the spirit, and they
should be distributed (in addition, of course, to the "Soldier's
Pocket Book") in the ranks of the British army.  Mr. Kipling is as
well informed about the soldier's women-kind as about the soldier:
about Dinah Shadd as about Terence Mulvaney.  Lever never instructed
us on these matters:  Micky Free, if he loves, rides away; but
Terence Mulvaney is true to his old woman.  Gallant, loyal,
reckless, vain, swaggering, and tender-hearted, Terence Mulvaney, if
there were enough of him, "would take St. Petersburg in his
drawers."  Can we be too grateful to an author who has extended, as
Mr. Kipling in his military sketches has extended, the frontiers of
our knowledge and sympathy?

It is a mere question of individual taste; but, for my own part, had
I to make a small selection from Mr. Kipling's tales, I would
include more of his studies in Black than in White, and many of his
excursions beyond the probable and natural.  It is difficult to have
one special favourite in this kind; but perhaps the story of the two
English adventurers among the freemasons of unknown Kafiristan (in
the "Phantom Rickshaw") would take a very high place.  The gas-
heated air of the Indian newspaper office is so real, and into it
comes a wanderer who has seen new faces of death, and who carries
with him a head that has worn a royal crown.  The contrasts are of
brutal force; the legend is among the best of such strange fancies.
Then there is, in the same volume, "The Strange Ride of Morrowbie
Jukes," the most dreadful nightmare of the most awful Bunker in the
realms of fancy.  This is a very early work; if nothing else of Mr.
Kipling's existed, his memory might live by it, as does the memory
of the American Irishman by the "Diamond Lens."  The sham magic of
"In the House of Suddhu" is as terrible as true necromancy could be,
and I have a faiblesse for the "Bisara of Pooree."  "The Gate of the
Hundred Sorrows" is a realistic version of "The English Opium
Eater," and more powerful by dint of less rhetoric.  As for the
sketches of native life--for example, "On the City Wall"--to English
readers they are no less than revelations.  They testify, more even
than the military stories, to the author's swift and certain vision,
his certainty in his effects.  In brief, Mr. Kipling has conquered
worlds, of which, as it were, we knew not the existence.

His faults are so conspicuous, so much on the surface, that they
hardly need to be named.  They are curiously visible to some readers
who are blind to his merits.  There is a false air of hardness
(quite in contradiction to the sentiment in his tales of childish
life); there is a knowing air; there are mannerisms, such as "But
that is another story"; there is a display of slang; there is the
too obtrusive knocking of the nail on the head.  Everybody can mark
these errors; a few cannot overcome their antipathy, and so lose a
great deal of pleasure.

It is impossible to guess how Mr. Kipling will fare if he ventures
on one of the usual novels, of the orthodox length.  Few men have
succeeded both in the conte and the novel.  Mr. Bret Harte is
limited to the conte; M. Guy de Maupassant is probably at his best
in it.  Scott wrote but three or four short tales, and only one of
these is a masterpiece.  Poe never attempted a novel.  Hawthorne is
almost alone in his command of both kinds.  We can live only in the
hope that Mr. Kipling, so skilled in so many species of the conte,
so vigorous in so many kinds of verse, will also be triumphant in
the novel:  though it seems unlikely that its scene can be in
England, and though it is certain that a writer who so cuts to the
quick will not be happy with the novel's almost inevitable
"padding."  Mr. Kipling's longest effort, "The Light which Failed,"
can, perhaps, hardly be considered a test or touchstone of his
powers as a novelist.  The central interest is not powerful enough;
the characters are not so sympathetic, as are the interest and the
characters of his short pieces.  Many of these persons we have met
so often that they are not mere passing acquaintances, but already
find in us the loyalty due to old friends.



Footnotes:

{1}  The subject has been much more gravely treated in Mr. Robert
Bridges's "Achilles in Scyros."

{2}  Conjecture may cease, as Mr. Morris has translated the Odyssey.

{3}  For Helen Pendennis, see the "Letters," p. 97.

{4}  Mr. Henley has lately, as a loyal Dickensite, been defending
the plots of Dickens, and his tragedy.  Pro captu lectoris; if the
reader likes them, then they are good for the reader:  "good
absolute, not for me though," perhaps.  The plot of "Martin
Chuzzlewit" may be good, but the conduct of old Martin would strike
me as improbable if I met it in the "Arabian Nights."  That the
creator of Pecksniff should have taken his misdeeds seriously, as if
Mr. Pecksniff had been a Tartuffe, not a delight, seems curious.





End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Essays in Little, by Andrew Lang