which has been discussed--for the benefit of youthful ambition--in this
article, we are inclined to think that that rival was the Rev. Aris
Willmott. This now almost forgotten writer was a very voluminous author
both in verse and prose; but his merits were not appreciated by an
ungrateful public so much as they ought to have been. He resorted,
therefore, to the following exquisitely ingenious device. He published
a handsome volume, which is now before us, entitled _Gems from English
Literature_, thus arranged: Bacon, Rev. Aris Willmott, Jeremy Taylor,
Rev. Aris Willmott, Barrow, Rev. Aris Willmott, sandwiching himself
regularly through the prose classics, and in the same way through the
poets--Shakespeare, Rev. Aris Willmott, Milton, Rev. Aris, etc. As
birthday books, press notices, interviews at home, portraits of
distinguished authors in their studies, and the like are getting a
little stale, we cordially recommend this rev. gentleman’s expedient--it
may be judiciously modified--to the notice of all who are unable to
distinguish fame from notoriety.
R. L. STEVENSON’S LETTERS[22]
[Footnote 22: _The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson to his Family and
Friends._ Selected and Edited with Notes and Introduction by Sidney
Colvin. 2 vols.]
The late Robert Louis Stevenson is a writer who has every title to
commiseration, and the appearance of the volumes before us may be said
to mark the climax of his misfortunes. Diseased and sickly from his
birth, with his life frequently hanging on a thread, he probably never
knew the sensation of perfect health. During the impressionable years of
early youth his surroundings appear to have been most uncongenial; he
was forced into a profession for which he had no taste and no aptitude.
In constant straits for money, at times he was miserably poor; his
apprenticeship to letters was long and arduous, for he was not one of
Nature’s favourites, and attained what he did attain by unsparing and
severe labour. His wandering and restless life, bringing him as it did
into contact with all phases of humanity and with all parts of the
world, was of course in many respects favourable to his work, but it
had at the same time serious disadvantages. It gave him little time for
reflection; it imported a certain feverishness into his energy, and
rendered that concentration and steadiness, without which no really
great work can be accomplished, impossible. That in these circumstances
Stevenson should have produced so much, and so much which is of a high
order of merit, is most creditable to him, and not a little surprising.
“He stands,” says his friend Professor Colvin, “as the writer who in the
last quarter of the nineteenth century has handled with the most of
freshness and inspiriting power the widest range of established literary
forms--the moral, critical and personal essay, travels sentimental and
other, parables and tales of mystery, boys’ stories of adventure,
memoirs; nor let lyrical and meditative verse both English and Scottish,
and especially nursery verse, a new vein for genius to work in, be
forgotten.” With some reservation this may be conceded, and this is as
far as eulogy can legitimately be stretched.
But, unhappily, some of Stevenson’s admirers have made themselves and
their idol ridiculous, by raising him to a position his claims to which
are preposterous. If he be measured with his contemporaries the
comparison will generally be in his favour--he certainly did best what
hundreds can do well. His essays have distinction and excellence; his
novels, travels, and short tales, though scarcely entitled to the praise
of originality, as they strike no new notes and are mere variants of the
work of Scott, Kingston, Ballantyne, De Quincey and Poe, bear the
impress of genius as distinguished from mere talent, and reflect a very
charming personality; his verse, too, is pleasing and skilful. But when
we are told that he will stand the third in a trio with Burns and Scott,
and when we have to listen to serious appeals to Edinburgh to raise a
statue to him beside the author of _Marmion_ and the Waverley Novels,
all who truly appreciate his work may well tremble for the reaction
which is certain to succeed such extravagant overestimation. The truth
is that poor Stevenson, himself one of the simplest, sincerest and most
modest of men, got involved with a clique who may be described as
manufacturers of factitious reputations,--the circulators of a false
currency in criticism. In these days of appeals to the masses it is as
easy to write up the sort of works which are addressed to them--popular
essays, tales and novels--as it is to write up the commodities of quack
doctors and the shares of bogus companies. The production of popular
literature is now a trade, and in some cases this kind of puffery is the
work of deliberate fraud, originating from various motives. In many
cases it simply springs from ignorance and critical incompetence,
current criticism being, to a considerable extent, in the hands of very
young men who, having neither the requisite knowledge nor the proper
training, are unable to judge a writer comparatively. In other cases it
is to be attributed to good nature and the tendency in the genial
appreciation of real merit to indulge in extravagant expression. But the
result is the same. A reputation, so grotesquely out of proportion to
what is really merited that sober people are inclined to suspect that
all is imposture, is gradually inflated. Eulogy kindles eulogy;
hyperbole is heaped on hyperbole; a ludicrous importance is attached to
every trifle which falls, or which ever has fallen, from this
Press-created Fetish. While he is alive he is encouraged, or rather
importuned, to force his power of production to keep pace with the
demand for everything bearing his signature; when he is dead the very
refuse of his study finds eager publishers.
This kind of thing has obviously many advantages, which are by no means
confined to the object of the idolatry itself. In the first place it
means business; it is the creation of a goose which can lay golden eggs,
and it is, in the second place, a creation which reflects no little
glory on the creators. Is it nothing to be the satellites of so radiant
a luminary? When the familiar correspondence of the great man is
printed, will not what he was pleased to say, with all the friendly
license of private intercourse, in the way of compliment and eulogy, be
proclaimed from the house-tops?
All this is exactly what has happened in the case of poor Stevenson. No
man ever took more justly his own measure, or would have been more
annoyed at the preposterous eulogies of which he has been made the
subject, on the part of interested or ill-judging friends. We wonder
what he would himself have said, could he have seen the letters before
us described, as they were described in one of the current Reviews, as
“the most exhaustive and distinguished literary correspondence which
England has ever seen.” We entirely absolve Professor Colvin from any
suspicion of being actuated by unworthy motives in publishing them. It
is abundantly clear that he has not published them to puff himself, that
his labour has been a labour of love, and that he believed himself to be
piously fulfilling a duty to his friend. But they ought never to have
been given to the world. More than two-thirds have nothing whatever to
justify their appearance in print, and merely show, what will surprise
those who knew Stevenson by his literary writings, how vapid, vulgar and
commonplace he could be. In their slangy familiarity and careless
spontaneity they remind us of Byron’s, but what a contrast do these
trivial and too often insipid tattlings present to Byron’s brilliance
and point, his wit, his piquancy, his insight into life and men! Only
here and there, in a touch of description, or in a casual reflection, do
we find anything to distinguish them from the myriads of letters which
are interchanged between young men every day in the year. Their one
attraction lies in the glimpses they reveal of Stevenson’s own charming
personality, his kindliness, his sympathy, his great modesty, his
manliness, his transparent truthfulness and honesty. It is amusing to
watch him with one of his correspondents who was evidently endeavouring
to establish a mutual exchange of flattery. The urbane skill with which
this gentleman’s persistently fulsome compliments are either fenced or
waived aside, the ironical delicacy with which, when a return is
extorted, they are repaid, in a measure strictly adjusted to desert and
yet certain not to disappoint expectant vanity, are quite exquisite.
“The suns go swiftly out,” he writes to him, referring to the death of
Tennyson and Browning and others, “and I see no suns to follow, nothing
but a universal twilight of the demi-divinities, with parties like you
and me beating on toy drums, and playing on penny whistles about
glow-worms.” The indignant letter to the _New York Tribune_, in defence
of James Payn, who had been accused of plagiarising from one of
Stevenson’s fictions, well deserves placing on permanent record, as an
illustration of his chivalrous loyalty to his friends.
We are sorry, we repeat, that these letters have been given to the
world. So far as Stevenson’s reputation is concerned they can only
detract from it. When they illustrate him on his best side they merely
emphasise what his works illustrate so abundantly that further
illustration is a mere work of supererogation. When they present him, as
for the most part they do, in dishabille, they exhibit him very greatly
to his disadvantage. If Professor Colvin had printed about one-third of
them, and retained his excellent elucidatory introductions, which form
practically a biography of Stevenson, he would have produced a work for
which all admirers of that most pleasing writer would have thanked him.
As it is, he has been guilty, in our opinion, of a grave error of
judgment.
LITERARY ICONOCLASM[23]
[Footnote 23: _The Authorship of the Kingis Quair._ A New Criticism by
J. T. T. Brown.]
Among the worthies of the fifteenth century there is no more interesting
and picturesque figure than the Poet-King of Scotland, James I. Long
before the poem on which his fame rests was given to the world,
tradition had assigned him a high place among native makers, and his
countrymen had been proud to add to the names of Dunbar and Douglas, of
Henryson and Lyndsay, the name of the best of their kings. Great was
their joy, therefore, when, in 1783, William Tytler gave public proof
that the good King’s title to the laurel was no mere title by courtesy,
but that he had been the author of a poem which could fairly be regarded
as one of the gems of Scottish literature. There cannot, in truth, be
two opinions about the _Kingis Quair_. It is a poem of singular charm
and beauty, and, though it is modelled closely on certain of Chaucer’s
minor poems, and is in other respects largely indebted to them, it is
no servile imitation; it bears the impress of original genius, not so
much in details and incident as in tone, colour, and touch; it is a
brilliant and most memorable achievement, and Rossetti hardly
exaggerates when he describes it as
“More sweet than ever a poet’s heart
Gave yet to the English tongue.”
For more than a hundred years it has been the delight of all who care
for the poetry of the past, and the story it tells, and tells so
pathetically, is now among the “consecrated legends” which every one
cherishes. “The best poet among kings, and the best king among poets,”
the name of the author of the _Kingis Quair_ heads the list of royal
authors. The stanza which he employed, though invented or adopted by
Chaucer, takes its title from the King, and “the rime royal” will be in
perpetual evidence of his services to poetry, as the University of St.
Andrews will be of his services to learning and education. No generation
has passed, from Sir Walter Scott to Mrs. Browning, and from Mrs.
Browning to Gabriel Rossetti, which has not been lavish of honour and
homage to him.
But, it seems, we have all been under a delusion. Our simple ancestors
believed that James was the author of _Peebles to the Play_ and
_Christ’s Kirk on the Green_; but _Peebles to the Play_ and _Christ’s
Kirk on the Green_ “are now”--Mr. J. T. T. Brown is
speaking--“relegated to the anonymous poetry of the sixteenth century,
inexorably deposed by the internal evidence”; and Mr. Brown aspires to
send the _Kingis Quair_ the same way. His fell purpose is “to deprive
James of his singing garment, and reduce him to the humbler rank of a
King of Scots.” There is something almost terrible in the exultation
with which Mr. Brown assumes that--the King’s claim to every other poem
attributed to him having been completely demolished--it only remains to
deprive him of the _Kingis Quair_, to make his poetical bankruptcy
complete. And to the demolition of the King’s claim to the “Quair” Mr.
Brown ruthlessly proceeds. Now we have no intention of entering into the
question of the authenticity of the minor poems to which Mr. Brown
refers; but we shall certainly break a lance with this destructive
critic in defence of James’s claim to the _Kingis Quair_.
Mr. Brown contends, first, that there is no satisfactory external
evidence in favour of the King’s authorship of the poem; and, secondly,
that the internal evidence is almost conclusive against him. What are
the facts? In the Bodleian Library is a MS. the date of which is
uncertain, but it cannot be assigned to an earlier period than 1488.
This MS. contains certain poems of Chaucer, Hoccleve, Lydgate, and
others, together with the _Kingis Quair_. Of the _Kingis Quair_ it is,
so far as is known, the only MS., and to it alone we owe the
preservation of the poem. Both title and colophon assign the work to
James I., the words being: “Heireefter followis the quair Maid be King
James of Scotland ye first, callit ye Kingis quair, and Maid quhen his
Ma. wes in Ingland,” the colophon running, “Explicit, &c., &c., quod
Jacobus primus scotorum rex Illustrissimus.” This is surely precise
enough; but Mr. Brown insists that the statement carries very little
weight, being no more than the _ipse dixit_ of not merely an
irresponsible, but of an unusually reckless copyist. The recklessness of
this copyist Mr. Brown deduces from the fact that, of ten poems
attributed to Chaucer in the same MS., five undoubtedly do not belong to
him. On this we shall only remark that it would be interesting to know
whether these poems have been attributed to Chaucer in other MSS. In any
case, Mr. Brown must surely know that it is a very different thing for a
copyist to miss-assign a few short poems and to make a statement so
explicit as the statement here made with regard to the _Kingis Quair_.
He must either have been guilty of deliberate fraud--and what right have
we to assume this?--or he must have been misled, an hypothesis which is
equally unwarrantable, unless it be adequately supported. And how does
Mr. Brown proceed to support it? He contends that we have no
satisfactory evidence from other sources that James was the author of
the poem. Walter Bower, the one contemporary historian, though he gives
in his _Scotichronicon_ an elaborate account of the King’s
accomplishments, is silent, Mr. Brown triumphantly observes, about his
poetry. This may be conceded. But Weldon is equally silent about the
poetry of James VI., and Buchanan about the poetry of Mary. And what
says the next historian, John Major? “In the vernacular”--we give the
passage in Mr. Brown’s own version--“he was a most skilful composer....
He wrote a clever little book about the Queen before he took her to wife
and while he was a prisoner,” a plain reference to the _Kingis Quair_.
Testimony to his poetical ability is also given by Hector Boyes in his
_History of Scotland_, “In linguâ vernaculâ tam ornata faciebat carmina,
ut poetam natum credidisses.” So say John Bellenden, John Leslie, and
George Buchanan. Of these witnesses Mr. Brown coolly observes that they
carry little or no weight, because they only echo each other and Major.
Major, Mr. Brown insists, is “the sole authority for the ascription to
James of the vernacular poems.” Certainly fame in the face of such
critics as Mr. Brown is held on a very precarious tenure. Dunbar, in his
_Lament of the Makaris_, enumerates, continues our critic, twenty-one
Scottish poets, but passes James over in silence, therefore James’s
title to being a poet was unknown to him. Possibly; but that Dunbar’s
list was not meant to be exhaustive is proved by the fact that he makes
no mention of a poet, and of a considerable poet, who must have been
well known to him, Thomas of Ercildoune. Nothing can be more misleading
than deductions like these. Ovid has given us an elaborate catalogue of
the poets of his time, but makes no mention of Manilius. Heywood and
Taylor have given elaborate catalogues of the contemporary Elizabethan
dramatists and make no mention of Cyril Tourneur. Addison has given us
an account of the principal English poets, and makes no mention of
Shakespeare. If Dante’s and Chaucer’s acquaintance with their
distinguished brethren is to be estimated by those whom they noticed, it
must have been far more limited than we know it, by other evidence, to
have been. Lyndsay, again, is cited as testimony of ignorance of James’s
title to rank among poets; but in the list, in which he is silent about
James, he is silent about poets so famous as Barbour, Blind Harry,
Wyntown, Kennedy, and Douglas.
Mr. Brown next proceeds to the question of internal evidence. He cannot
understand how it could come to pass, that a Scotchman, who left his
native country when he was under twelve years of age, and who was
educated by English tutors in England, should, after eighteen years of
exile, employ “the Lowland Scottish dialect.” This is surely not very
difficult to explain. Nothing so much endears his country to a man as
exile, and nothing is more cherished by a patriot than his native
language. Ten years’ exile among the Getæ did not corrupt the Latinity
of Ovid, and more than twenty years’ exile did not impair the purity of
Thucydides’ Attic. The King may have had English tutors, but Wyntown
distinctly tells us that he was allowed to retain, as his companions,
four of his countrymen. When he served in France he had a Scottish
bodyguard. The document in the King’s own handwriting, printed by
Chalmers, proves that in 1412 he was conversant with the Lowland
dialect. In all probability, therefore, he carefully cherished his
native language. The consensus of tradition places it beyond all doubt
that he composed poetry in the vernacular, and as he wrote the _Kingis
Quair_ when he knew that he was about to return to Scotland as its king,
it was surely the most natural thing in the world that he should compose
a poem which told the story of himself and his young bride, whom he was
introducing to his subjects as their queen, in the language of the
country. But, says Mr. Brown, it is the Lowland dialect, with inflexions
peculiar to Midland English, with many Chaucerian inflections engrafted
on it. And what more natural? The Midland dialect was the dialect of his
English teachers. The poems of Chaucer he probably had by heart.
Mr. Brown’s object in all this is to relegate the _Kingis Quair_ to
that group of poems which are represented by the _Romaunt of the Rose_,
_The Court of Love_, and _Lancelot of the Lak_, which appeared late in
the fifteenth century, and in which all these peculiarities are very
pronounced. Into philological details we have not space to enter, but
this we will say. We will admit that _ane_ before a consonant, the past
participle in _yt_ or _it_, the pronouns _thaire_ and _thame_, the
plural form _quhilkis_, the employment of the verb _to do_ in the
emphatic conjugation and the like, are peculiarities which belong to a
period not earlier than about 1440, and that all these peculiarities are
to be found in the poem. But, we contend that these are just as likely
to be due to the transcriber as they are to the author. Nothing was so
common with copyists as to import into their texts the peculiarities of
their own dialects, indeed it was habitual with them. Thus Hampole’s
_Pricke of Conscience_ was greatly altered by southern scribes. Thus, in
the Bannatyne MS., Chaucer’s minor poems were similarly altered by
northern scribes. It is, in truth, the very height of rashness to
dispute the genuineness of an original, in consequence of the presence
of peculiarities which might quite well have been imported into it by a
copyist. The resemblances between this poem and the _Court of Love_ are,
we admit, not likely to have been mere coincidences, and we are quite
ready to admit that the _Court of Love_ in the form in which we have it
now, must be assigned to a much later date, more than a century later,
than the date (1423) assigned to the _Kingis Quair_. But this is
certain--that many, and very many, of the resemblances between the two
poems are to be attributed to the fact that the writers were saturated
with the influence of Chaucer, and delighted in imitating and recalling
his poetry. If, again, it be assumed that one poem was the exemplar of
the other, this is indisputable, that the _Court of Love_ was modelled
on the _Kingis Quair_, and not the _Kingis Quair_ on the _Court of
Love_. For, setting aside peculiarities which may be assigned to
transcribers, there can be little doubt that the _Court of Love_ belongs
to the sixteenth century at the very earliest, while Mr. Brown himself
admits that the MS. of the _Kingis Quair_ may be approximately fixed at
1488.
Nothing can be more unsatisfactory than Mr. Brown’s attempt to show that
the poem breaks down in autobiographical details, and that it derives
these details from Wyntown’s _Chronicle_. James does not mention the
exact year in which he was taken prisoner. He tells us that he commenced
his voyage when the sun had begun to drive his course upward in the sign
of Aries, that is, on or about the 12th of March--and that he had not
far passed the state of innocence, “bot nere about the nowmer of zeris
thre”--in other words, that he was about ten years of age. Hereupon Mr.
Brown, assuming that Wyntown gives the date of the King’s birth
correctly, proceeds to point out that the King was not at this time
“about ten,” but that he was about eleven and a half; and then asks
triumphantly whether James would have been likely to forget his own age.
Again, he contends that the King’s capture could not have taken place in
March, because it is highly probable that at the end of February, or at
the beginning of March, the King was in the Tower. For the fact that he
was in the Tower at that date there is not an iota of proof, or even of
tolerably satisfactory presumptive evidence. How the author of the
_Kingis Quair_ could have been indebted to Wyntown’s _Chronicle_ for the
autobiographical details it is, indeed, difficult to see. The poem gives
March as the date of the capture; the _Chronicle_ gives April. According
to the poem, the King’s age at the time of his capture was about ten;
according to the _Chronicle_, about eleven and a half. The _Chronicle_
gives the year of the capture; the poem does not. The _Chronicle_ gives
details not to be found in the poem; the poem details not to be found in
the _Chronicle_. Mr. Brown has no authority whatever for asserting that
Book IX. chap. xxv. of the _Chronicle_ was certainly written years
before James returned to Scotland. All we know about the _Chronicle_ is
that it was finished between the 3rd of September, 1420, and the return
of James in April, 1424.
Mr. Brown must forgive us for expressing regret that he should have
wasted so much time and learning, in attempting to support a paradox
which can only serve to perplex and mislead. Scholars, especially in
these days, would do well to remember, that nothing can justify
destructive criticism but a conscientious desire, on the part of those
who apply it, to correct error and to discover truth. And they would
also do well to ponder over Bacon’s weighty words: “Like as many
substances in Nature which are solid do putrify and corrupt into worms,
so it is the property of good and sound knowledge to putrify and
dissolve into a number of subtle, idle, unwholesome, and, as I may term
them, vermiculate questions, which have indeed a kind of quickness and
life of spirit, but no soundness of matter nor goodness of substance.”
WILLIAM DUNBAR[24]
[Footnote 24: _William Dunbar._ By Oliphant Smeaton. Edinburgh:
Oliphant.]