of fond compliance with his authors. By no means are they this, but
hence their charm. There is much pestilent trash now being talked about
‘Ministry of Books,’ and the ‘Sublimity of Art,’ and I know not what
other fine phrases. It almost amounts to a religious service conducted
before an altar of first editions. Mr. Stephen takes no part in such
silly rites. He remains outside with a pail of cold water.
‘It sometimes strikes readers of books that literature is, on
the whole, a snare and a delusion. Writers, of course, do not
generally share that impression; and on the contrary have said
a great many fine things about the charm of conversing with the
choice minds of all ages, with the _innuendo_, to use the legal
phrase, that they themselves modestly demand some place amongst
the aforesaid choice minds. But at times we are disposed to retort
upon our teachers. “Are you not,” we observe, “exceedingly given
to humbug?”’
Mr. Stephen has indeed, by way of preface to his own three volumes,
collected a goodly number of these very fine things, but then he has,
with grim humour, dubbed them ‘Opinions of Authors,’ thus reducing them
to the familiar level of ‘Nothing like leather!’
But of course, though Mr. Leslie Stephen, like the wise man he is,
occasionally hits his idol over the costard with a club just to
preserve his own independence, he is and frankly owns himself to be a
bookish man from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot. He even
confesses he loves the country best in books; but then it must be in
real country-books and not in descriptive poetry, which, says he with
Johnsonian calmness, is for the most part ‘intolerably dull.’
There is no better living representative of the great clan of sensible
men and women who delight in reading for the pleasure it gives them
than Mr. Stephen. If he is only pleased, it is quite shocking what he
will put up with, and even loudly commend.
‘We are indeed told dogmatically that a novelist should never
indulge in little asides to a reader. Why not?... I like to read
about Tom Jones or Colonel Newcome; but I am also very glad when
Fielding or Thackeray puts his puppets aside for the moment and
talks to me in his own person. A child, it is true, dislikes to
have the illusion broken, and is angry if you try to persuade him
that Giant Despair was not a real personage like his favourite
Blunderbore. But the attempt to produce such illusions is really
unworthy of work intended for full-grown readers.’
Puppets indeed! It is evil and wicked treason against our Sovereign
Lady, the Art we serve, to talk of puppets. The characters of our
living Novelists live and move and have an independent being all their
very own. They are clothed in flesh and blood. They talk and jostle one
another. Where, we breathlessly inquire, do they do all or any of these
fine things? Is it in the printed page? Alas! no. It is only in the
minds of their Authors, whither we cannot follow them even if we would.
Mr. Stephen has great enthusiasm, which ought to reconcile us to his
discriminating judgment and occasional easterly blast. Nobody loves a
good book better than he. Whether his subject be Nathaniel Hawthorne
or Daniel De Foe, it is handled cunningly, as by a man who knows. But
his highest praise is his unbought verdict. He is his own man. He is
dominated by no prevailing taste or fashion. Even his affection does
not bias him. He yields to none in his admiration for the ‘good Sir
Walter,’ yet he writes:
‘It is a question perhaps whether the firmer parts of Scott’s
reputation will be sufficiently coherent to resist after the removal of
the rubbish.’
‘Rubbish.’ It is a harsh word, and might well make Dean Stanley
and a bygone generation of worshippers and believers in the plenary
inspiration of Scott stir uneasily in their graves. It grates upon my
own ear. But if it is a true word, what then? Why even then it does
not matter very much, for when Time, that old ravager, has done his
very worst, there will be enough left of Sir Walter to carry down his
name and fame to the remotest age. He cannot be ejected from his native
land. Loch Katrine and Loch Leven are not exposed to criticism, and
they will pull Sir Walter through.
Mr. Stephen has another recommendation. Every now and again he goes
hopelessly wrong. This is most endearing. Must I give instances? If I
must I will, but without further note or comment. He is wrong in his
depreciation of ‘Wuthering Heights,’ and wrong, amazingly wrong, in
his unaccountable partiality for ‘Henrietta Temple.’
The author of ‘Hours in a Library’ belongs, it is hardly necessary
to say, to the class of writers who use their steam for the purpose
of going straight ahead. He is always greatly concerned with his
subject. If he is out fox-hunting, he comes home with the brush, and
not with a spray of blackberries; but if, on the other hand, he goes
out blackberrying, he will return deeply dyed the true tint, and not
dragging behind him a languishing coil of seaweed. Metaphors will, I
know, ultimately be my ruin, but in the meantime I hope I make myself
reasonably plain. In this honest characteristic Mr. Leslie Stephen
resembles his distinguished brother, Sir James Stephen, who, in his
admirable ‘Horæ Sabbaticæ’ (Macmillan, 3 vols.), may be discovered at
any time tearing authors into little bits and stripping them of their
fringe, and then presenting to you, in a few masterly pages, the marrow
of their arguments and the pith of their position.
Much genuine merriment is, however, almost always to be extracted from
writers of this kind. Mr. Leslie Stephen’s humour, none the worse for
belonging to the sardonic species, is seldom absent from a page. It
would be both pleasant and easy to collect a number of his epigrams,
witty sayings, and humorous terms--but it is better to leave then where
they are. The judicious will find them for themselves for many a long
day to come. The sensible and truthful writers are the longest livers.
AMERICANISMS AND BRITICISMS.
Messrs. Harper Bros., of New York, have lately printed and published,
and Mr. Brander Matthews has written, the prettiest possible little
book, called ‘Americanisms and Briticisms, with other Essays on other
Isms.’ To slip it into your pocket when first you see it is an almost
irresistible impulse, and yet--would you believe it?--this pretty
little book is in reality a bomb, intended to go off and damage British
authors by preventing them from being so much as quoted in the States.
Mr. Brander Matthews, however, is so obviously a good-natured man, and
his little fit of the spleen is so evidently of a passing character,
that it is really not otherwise than agreeable to handle his bombshell
gently and to inquire how it could possibly come about that the
children of one family should ever be invited to fall out and strive
and fight over their little books and papers.
It is easy to accede something to Mr. Matthews. Englishmen are often
provoking, and not infrequently insolent. The airs they give themselves
are ridiculous, but nobody really minds them in these moods; and, _per
contra_, Americans are not easily laughed out of a good conceit of
themselves, and have been known to be as disagreeable as they could.
To try to make ‘an international affair’ over the ‘u’ in honour and
the second ‘l’ in traveller is surely a task beneath the dignity
of anyone who does not live by penning paragraphs for the evening
papers, yet this is very much what Mr. Matthews attempts to do in this
pleasingly-bound little volume. It is rank McKinleyism from one end
to the other. ‘Every nation,’ says he, ‘ought to be able to supply
its own second-rate books, and to borrow from abroad only the best
the foreigner has to offer it.’ What invidious distinctions! Who is
to prepare the classification? I don’t understand this Tariff at all.
If anything of the kind were true, which it is not, I should have
said it was just the other way, and that a nation, if it really were
one, would best foster its traditions and maintain its vitality by
consuming its own first-rate books--its Shakespeares and Bacons, its
Taylors and Miltons, its Drydens and Gibbons, its Wordsworths and
Tennysons--whilst it might very well be glad to vary the scene a little
by borrowing from abroad less vitalizing but none the less agreeable
wares.
But the whole notion is preposterous. In Fish and Potatoes a ring is
possible, but hardly in Ideas. What is the good of being educated and
laboriously acquiring foreign tongues and lingoes--getting to know,
for instance, what a ‘freight’ train is and what a bobolink--if I
am to be prevented by a diseased patriotism from reading whatever I
choose in any language I can? Mr. Matthews’ wrath, or his seeming
wrath--for it is impossible to suppose that he is really angry--grows
redder as he proceeds. ‘It cannot,’ he exclaims, ‘be said too often or
too emphatically that the British are foreigners, and their ideals in
life, in literature, in politics, in taste, in art’ (why not add ‘in
victuals and drink?’) ‘are not our ideals.’
What rant this is! Mr. Matthews, however frequently and loudly he
repeats himself, cannot unchain the canons of taste and compel them to
be domiciled exclusively in America; nor can he hope to persuade the
more intelligent of his countrymen to sail to the devil in an ark of
their own sole construction. Artists all the world over are subject
to the same laws. Nations, however big, are not the arbiters of good
taste, though they may be excellent exemplars of bad. As for Mr.
Matthews’ determination to call Britons foreigners, that is his matter,
but feelings of this kind, to do any harm, must be both reciprocal and
general. The majority of reasonable Englishmen and Americans will,
except when angry, feel it as hard to call one another foreigners, as
John Bright once declared he would find it hard to shout ‘bastard’
after the issue of a marriage between a man and his deceased wife’s
sister.
There is a portrait of Mr. Matthews at the beginning of this book or
bomb of his, and he does not look in the least like a foreigner. I
am sorry to disappoint him, but truth will out. The fact is that Mr.
Matthews has no mind for reciprocity; he advises Cousin Sam to have
nothing to do with John Bull’s second-rate performances, but he feels
a very pardonable pride in the fact that John Bull more and more reads
his cousin’s short stories and other things of the kind.
He gives a countrywoman of his, Miss Agnes Repplier, quite a
scolding for quoting in a little book of hers no less than fifteen
British authors of very varying degrees of merit. Why, in the name
of common-sense, should she not if they serve her turn? Was a
more ludicrous passage than the following ever penned? It follows
immediately after the enumeration of the fifteen authors just referred
to:
‘But there is nothing from Lowell, than whom a more quotable
writer never lived. In like manner, we find Miss Repplier
discussing the novels and characters of Miss Austen and of Scott,
of Dickens, of Thackeray, and of George Eliot, but never once
referring to the novels or characters of Hawthorne. Just how it
was possible for any clever American woman to write nine essays
in criticism, rich in references and quotations, without once
happening on Lowell or on Hawthorne, is to me inexplicable.’
O Patriotism! what follies are committed in thy name!
The fact is, it is a weak point in certain American writers of
‘the patriotic school’ to be for ever dragging in and puffing the
native article, just because it is native and for no other reason
whatever; as if it mattered an atom whether an author whom, whilst
you are discussing literature, you find it convenient to quote was
born in Boston, Lincoln, or Boston, Massachusetts. One wearies of it
indescribably. It is always Professor This or Colonel That. If you want
to quote, quote and let your reader judge your samples; but do not
worry him into rudeness by clawing and scraping.
Here we all are, Heaven knows how many million of us, speaking, writing
and spelling the English language more or less ungrammatically in a
world as full as it can hold of sorrows and cares, and fustian and
folly. Literature is a solace and a charm. I will not stop for a
moment in my headlong course to compare it with tobacco; though if it
ever came to the vote, mine would be cast for letters. Men and women
have been born in America, as in Great Britain and Ireland, who have
written books, poems, and songs which have lightened sorrow, eased
pain, made childhood fascinating, middle-age endurable, and old age
comfortable. They will go on being born and doing this in both places.
What reader cares a snap of his finger where the man was cradled who
makes him for awhile forget himself. Nationality indeed! It is not a
question of Puffendorf or Grotius or Wheaton, even in the American
edition with Mr. Dana’s notes, but of enjoyment, of happiness, out of
which we do not intend to be fleeced. Let us throw all our books into
hotch-pot. Who cares about spelling? Milton spelt ‘dog’ with two g’s.
The American Milton, when he comes, may spell it with three, while all
the world wonders, if he is so minded.
But we are already in hotch-pot. Cooper and Irving, Longfellow, Bryant
and Poe, Hawthorne, Lowell, and Whitman, and living writers by the
score from the other side of the sea, are indistinguishably mixed with
our own books and authors. The boundaries are hopelessly confused, and
it is far too late for Mr. Brander Matthews to come upon the scene with
chalk and tape, and try to mark us off into rival camps.
There is some girding and gibing, of course. Authors and critics
cannot help nagging at one another. Some affect the grand air, ‘assume
the god,’ and attempt to distinguish, as Mr. Matthews himself does
in this little book of his, ‘between the authors who are not to be
taken seriously, between the man of letters who is somebody and the
scribbler who is merely, in the French phrase, _quelconque_, nobody in
particular.’ Others, again, though leading quiet, decent lives, pass
themselves off in literature as swaggering Bohemians, cut-and-thrust
men. When these meet there must be blows--pen-and-ink blows, as
bloodless as a French duel. All the time the stream of events flows
gigantically along. But to the end of all things Man will require to
be interested, to be taken out of himself, to be amused; and that
interest, that zest, that amusement, he will find where he can--at home
or abroad, with alien friends or alien enemies: what cares he?
AUTHORS AND CRITICS.
At the gracious Christmas season of the year we are reminded by
nearly every post of our duty towards our neighbours, meaning thereby
not merely those who live within what Wordsworth, with greater
familiarity than precision, has defined as ‘an easy walk,’ but,
with few exceptions, mainly of a party character, all mankind. The
once wide boundaries of an Englishman’s sphere of hatred are sorely
circumscribed. We are now expected not only to love all peoples, which
in theory is easy enough, particularly if we are no great travellers,
but to read their publications in translations unverified by
affidavit, which in practice is very hard. Yet if we do not do it, we
are Chauvinists, which has a horrid sound.
Much is now expected of a man. Even in his leisure hours, when his feet
are on the hob, he must be zealous in some cause, say Realism; serious,
as he reflects upon the interests of literature and the position of
authors; and, above all and hardest of all, he must be sympathetic.
Irony he should eschew, and levity, but disquisitions on duty are never
out of place.
This disposition of mind, however praiseworthy, makes the aspect of
things heavy, and yet this is the very moment selected by certain
novelists, playwrights, and irresponsible persons of that kind, to whom
we have been long accustomed to look for relaxation, to begin prating,
not of their duty to please us, but of our duty to appreciate them.
It appears that we owe a duty to our contemporaries who write, which
is not merely passive, that is, to abstain from slandering them, but
active, namely, to read and admire them.
The authors who grumble and explain the merits of their own things are
not the denizens of Grub Street, or those poor neglected souls to one
of whom Mr. Alfred Austin lately addressed these consolatory words:
‘Friend, be not fretful if the voice of fame,
Along the narrow way of hurrying men,
Where unto echo echo shouts again,
Be all day long not noisy with your name.’
No; it is the shouted authors who are most discontented; the men who
have best availed themselves of all the resources of civilization, who
belong to syndicates, employ agents, have a price-current, and know
what it is to be paid half a dozen times over for the same thing. Even
the prospect of American copyright and taxing all the intelligence
of a reading Republic--even this does not satisfy them. They want to
be classics in their own lifetime, and to be spoken and written of as
if they were already embalmed in the memory of a grateful nation. To
speak or write lightly of departed genius is offensive, but people
who have the luck to be alive must not expect to be taken quite so
seriously. But they do. Everything is taken seriously in these grim
days, even short stories. There is said to be a demand for short
stories, begotten, amongst many other things, by that reckless parent,
the Spirit of the Age. There is no such demand. The one and only
demand poor wearied humanity has ever made, or will ever make, of the
story-teller, be he as long-winded as Richardson or as breathless
as Kipling, is to be made self-forgetful for a season. Interest me
somehow, anyhow; make me mindless of the room I am sitting in, of the
people about me; soothe me, excite me, tickle me, make me better,
make me worse; do what you like with me, only make it possible for me
to keep reading on, and a joy to do so. This is our demand. There is
nothing unreasonable in it. It is matter of experience. Authors have
done all this for us, and are doing it to-day. It is their trade, and a
glorious one.
But the only thing that concerns the reader is the book he holds in
his hand. He cannot derive inspiration from any other quarter. To the
author the characters may be living, he may have lived amongst them for
months; they may be inexpressibly dear to him, and his fine eyes may
fill with tears as he thinks of Jane or Sarah, but this avails naught
to the reader. Our authors are too apt to forget this, and to tell us
what they think of their own figments, and how they came to write their
books. The imitation of Carlyle cannot be generally recommended, but in
one respect, at all events, his example should be followed. Though he
made fuss enough whilst he was writing a book, as soon as he had done
with it he never mentioned it again.
This sudden display of nervousness on the part of authors is perhaps
partly due to their unreasonable confusion of the Reviewers with the
Readers. The great mass of criticism is, delivered _vivâ voce_, and
never appears in print at all. This spoken criticism is of far greater
importance than printed criticism. It is repeated again and again, in
all sorts of places, on hundreds of occasions, and cannot fail to make
dints in people’s minds, whereas the current printed criticism of the
week runs lightly off the surface. ‘Press notices,’ as they are called,
have no longer ‘boodle’ in them, if I may use a word the genius of Mr.
Stevenson has already consecrated for all delightful use. The pen may,
in peaceful times, be mightier than the sword, but in this matter of
criticism of our contemporaries the tongue is mightier than the pen.
Authors should remember this.
The volume of unprinted criticism is immense, and its force amazing.
Lunching last year at a chophouse, I was startled to hear a really
important oath emerge from the lips of a clerkly-looking man who
sat opposite me, and before whom the hurried waiter had placed a
chump-chop. ‘Take the thing away,’ cried the man with the oath
aforesaid, ‘and bring me a loin chop.’ Then, observing the surprise I
could not conceal that an occurrence so trifling should have evoked an
expression so forcible, the man muttered half to himself and half to
me: ‘There is nothing I hate so much in the wide world as a chump-chop,
unless indeed it be’ (speaking slowly and thoughtfully) ‘the poetry of
Mr. ----,’ and here the fellow, unabashed, named right out the name of
a living poet who, in the horrid phrase of the second-hand booksellers,
is ‘much esteemed’ by himself, and some others. After this explosion
of feeling the conversation between us became frankly literary, but I
contrived to learn in the course of it that this chump-chop-hater was a
clerk in an insurance office, and had never printed a line in his life.
He was, as sufficiently appears, a whimsical fellow, full of strange
oaths and stranger prejudice, but for criticism of contemporary
authors--keen, searching, detached, genuine--it would be impossible
to find his equal in the Press. The man is living yet--he was lately
seen in Cheapside, elbowing his way through the crowd with a masterful
air, and so long as he lives he criticises, and what is more, permeates
his circle--for he must live somewhere--with his opinions. These are
your gods, O Authors! It is these voices which swell the real chorus
of praise or blame. These judges are untainted by hatreds, strangers
to jealousy; your vanity, your egotism, your necktie, your anecdotes,
do not prevent _them_ from enjoying your books or revelling in your
humour, be it new or old, for they do not know you by sight; but
neither will the praise of the _Athenæum_, or of any newspaper, or the
conventional respect of other authors save your productions, your poem,
your novel, your drama, your collected trifles, from the shafts of
their ridicule or the dust of their indifference.
But do we owe any duty to contemporary authors? Clearly we are at
liberty to talk about them and their ‘work’ as much as ever we
choose--at dinner-tables, in libraries and smoking-rooms, in railway
carriages (if we like shouting and do not mind being inaudible), in
boats, at balls, in Courts of Justice, and other places, _ejusdem
generis_, at Congresses (before, during, and after the speeches),
and, indeed, everywhere and at all times, if we are so disposed and
can find anybody to listen, or even to seem to listen, to us. Of this
liberty we can never be deprived even by a veto of authors _ad hoc_,
and, as already stated, the free exercise of it is a far more important
constituent in the manufacture of literary opinion than printed notices
of books.
But though we are just as much entitled to express in conversation our
delight in, or abhorrence of, a contemporary author as we are to bless
or curse the weather, it cannot be said to be our duty to do so. No
adult stands in a fiduciary relationship to another adult in the matter
of his reading. If we like a book very much, it is only natural to say
so; but if we do not like it, we may say so or hold our tongues as we
choose.
Suppose one dreamt (gentle reader, remember this is nothing but a
dream) that there was one woebegone creature alive at this moment in
this Britain of ours who cordially disliked, and shrank from, the
poetry of Sir Edwin Arnold, Mr. Lewis Morris, and Mr. Alfred Austin,
who could not away with ‘Robert Elsmere,’ ‘The Wages of Sin,’ or
‘Donovan,’ who abhorred the writings of Mrs. Lynn Linton, Archdeacon
Farrar, and Mr. Shorthouse, who hated ‘Amiel’s Journal,’ ‘Marie
Bashkirtseff,’ and ‘Little Lord Fauntleroy,’ who found it easy, and
even helpful, to live for six months at a time without reading a new
novel by Mr. Hall Caine or Mr. Black, who failed to respond to the
careful and often-repeated raptures of those wise critics who assured
him that the author of ‘Amos Barton’ and ‘Middlemarch’ cowers and
crouches by the side of Mr. Hardy and Mr. Meredith; who, when he wants
to laugh very heartily indeed, does not take down the works of---- But
my list is long enough for a dream--could you honestly advise that
man to run amuck in print against all these powerful and delightful
writers? What good could come of it? The good people who like a writer
will not like him or her any the less because you don’t. Reading is
a democratic pursuit, else why are children taught it--very badly,
no doubt--out of the rates? Sensible men and foolish men alike resent
being dictated to about their contemporaries. They are willing to learn
about the dead, but they crave leave to lay their own hands upon the
living.