PREFACE
BY WAY OF CRITICISM.
THESE studies are collected from the monthly press. One appeared in the
_New Quarterly_, one in _Macmillan’s_, and the rest in the _Cornhill
Magazine_. To the _Cornhill_ I owe a double debt of thanks; first, that
I was received there in the very best society, and under the eye of the
very best of editors; and second, that the proprietors have allowed me to
republish so considerable an amount of copy.
These nine worthies have been brought together from many different ages
and countries. Not the most erudite of men could be perfectly prepared
to deal with so many and such various sides of human life and manners.
To pass a true judgment upon Knox and Burns implies a grasp upon the very
deepest strain of thought in Scotland,—a country far more essentially
different from England than many parts of America; for, in a sense, the
first of these men re-created Scotland, and the second is its most
essentially national production. To treat fitly of Hugo and Villon would
involve yet wider knowledge, not only of a country foreign to the author
by race, history, and religion, but of the growth and liberties of art.
Of the two Americans, Whitman and Thoreau, each is the type of something
not so much realised as widely sought after among the late generations of
their countrymen; and to see them clearly in a nice relation to the
society that brought them forth, an author would require a large habit of
life among modern Americans. As for Yoshida, I have already disclaimed
responsibility; it was but my hand that held the pen.
In truth, these are but the readings of a literary vagrant. One book led
to another, one study to another. The first was published with
trepidation. Since no bones were broken, the second was launched with
greater confidence. So, by insensible degrees, a young man of our
generation acquires, in his own eyes, a kind of roving judicial
commission through the ages; and, having once escaped the perils of the
Freemans and the Furnivalls, sets himself up to right the wrongs of
universal history and criticism. Now, it is one thing to write with
enjoyment on a subject while the story is hot in your mind from recent
reading, coloured with recent prejudice; and it is quite another business
to put these writings coldly forth again in a bound volume. We are most
of us attached to our opinions; that is one of the “natural affections”
of which we hear so much in youth; but few of us are altogether free from
paralysing doubts and scruples. For my part, I have a small idea of the
degree of accuracy possible to man, and I feel sure these studies teem
with error. One and all were written with genuine interest in the
subject; many, however, have been conceived and finished with imperfect
knowledge; and all have lain, from beginning to end, under the
disadvantages inherent in this style of writing.
Of these disadvantages a word must here be said. The writer of short
studies, having to condense in a few pages the events of a whole
lifetime, and the effect on his own mind of many various volumes, is
bound, above all things, to make that condensation logical and striking.
For the only justification of his writing at all is that he shall present
a brief, reasoned, and memorable view. By the necessity of the case, all
the more neutral circumstances are omitted from his narrative; and that
of itself, by the negative exaggeration of which I have spoken in the
text, lends to the matter in hand a certain false and specious glitter.
By the necessity of the case, again, he is forced to view his subject
throughout in a particular illumination, like a studio artifice. Like
Hales with Pepys, he must nearly break his sitter’s neck to get the
proper shadows on the portrait. It is from one side only that he has
time to represent his subject. The side selected will either be the one
most striking to himself, or the one most obscured by controversy; and in
both cases that will be the one most liable to strained and sophisticated
reading. In a biography, this and that is displayed; the hero is seen at
home, playing the flute; the different tendencies of his work come, one
after another, into notice; and thus something like a true, general
impression of the subject may at last be struck. But in the short study,
the writer, having seized his “point of view,” must keep his eye steadily
to that. He seeks, perhaps, rather to differentiate than truly to
characterise. The proportions of the sitter must be sacrificed to the
proportions of the portrait; the lights are heightened, the shadows
overcharged; the chosen expression, continually forced, may degenerate at
length into a grimace; and we have at best something of a caricature, at
worst a calumny. Hence, if they be readable at all, and hang together by
their own ends, the peculiar convincing force of these brief
representations. They take so little a while to read, and yet in that
little while the subject is so repeatedly introduced in the same light
and with the same expression, that, by sheer force of repetition, that
view is imposed upon the reader. The two English masters of the style,
Macaulay and Carlyle, largely exemplify its dangers. Carlyle, indeed,
had so much more depth and knowledge of the heart, his portraits of
mankind are felt and rendered with so much more poetic comprehension, and
he, like his favourite Ram Dass, had a fire in his belly so much more
hotly burning than the patent reading lamp by which Macaulay studied,
that it seems at first sight hardly fair to bracket them together. But
the “point of view” was imposed by Carlyle on the men he judged of in his
writings with an austerity not only cruel but almost stupid. They are
too often broken outright on the Procrustean bed; they are probably
always disfigured. The rhetorical artifice of Macaulay is easily spied;
it will take longer to appreciate the moral bias of Carlyle. So with all
writers who insist on forcing some significance from all that comes
before them; and the writer of short studies is bound, by the necessity
of the case, to write entirely in that spirit. What he cannot vivify he
should omit.
Had it been possible to rewrite some of these papers, I hope I should
have had the courage to attempt it. But it is not possible. Short
studies are, or should be, things woven like a carpet, from which it is
impossible to detach a strand. What is perverted has its place there for
ever, as a part of the technical means by which what is right has been
presented. It is only possible to write another study, and then, with a
new “point of view,” would follow new perversions and perhaps a fresh
caricature. Hence, it will be, at least, honest to offer a few grains of
salt to be taken with the text; and as some words of apology, addition,
correction, or amplification fall to be said on almost every study in the
volume, it will be most simple to run them over in their order. But this
must not be taken as a propitiatory offering to the gods of shipwreck; I
trust my cargo unreservedly to the chances of the sea; and do not, by
criticising myself, seek to disarm the wrath of other and less partial
critics.
_Hugo’s Romances_.—This is an instance of the “point of view.” The five
romances studied with a different purpose might have given different
results, even with a critic so warmly interested in their favour. The
great contemporary master of wordmanship, and indeed of all literary arts
and technicalities, had not unnaturally dazzled a beginner. But it is
best to dwell on merits, for it is these that are most often overlooked.
_Burns_.—I have left the introductory sentences on Principal Shairp,
partly to explain my own paper, which was merely supplemental to his
amiable but imperfect book, partly because that book appears to me truly
misleading both as to the character and the genius of Burns. This seems
ungracious, but Mr. Shairp has himself to blame; so good a Wordsworthian
was out of character upon that stage.
This half apology apart, nothing more falls to be said except upon a
remark called forth by my study in the columns of a literary Review. The
exact terms in which that sheet disposed of Burns I cannot now recall;
but they were to this effect—that Burns was a bad man, the impure vehicle
of fine verses; and that this was the view to which all criticism tended.
Now I knew, for my own part, that it was with the profoundest pity, but
with a growing esteem, that I studied the man’s desperate efforts to do
right; and the more I reflected, the stranger it appeared to me that any
thinking being should feel otherwise. The complete letters shed, indeed,
a light on the depths to which Burns had sunk in his character of Don
Juan, but they enhance in the same proportion the hopeless nobility of
his marrying Jean. That I ought to have stated this more noisily I now
see; but that any one should fail to see it for himself, is to me a thing
both incomprehensible and worthy of open scorn. If Burns, on the facts
dealt with in this study, is to be called a bad man, I question very much
whether either I or the writer in the Review have ever encountered what
it would be fair to call a good one. All have some fault. The fault of
each grinds down the hearts of those about him, and—let us not blink the
truth—hurries both him and them into the grave. And when we find a man
persevering indeed, in his fault, as all of us do, and openly overtaken,
as not all of us are, by its consequences, to gloss the matter over, with
too polite biographers, is to do the work of the wrecker disfiguring
beacons on a perilous seaboard; but to call him bad, with a
self-righteous chuckle, is to be talking in one’s sleep with Heedless and
Too-bold in the arbour.
Yet it is undeniable that much anger and distress is raised in many
quarters by the least attempt to state plainly, what every one well
knows, of Burns’s profligacy, and of the fatal consequences of his
marriage. And for this there are perhaps two subsidiary reasons. For,
first, there is, in our drunken land, a certain privilege extended to
drunkenness. In Scotland, in particular, it is almost respectable, above
all when compared with any “irregularity between the sexes.” The
selfishness of the one, so much more gross in essence, is so much less
immediately conspicuous in its results that our demiurgeous Mrs. Grundy
smiles apologetically on its victims. It is often said—I have heard it
with these ears—that drunkenness “may lead to vice.” Now I did not think
it at all proved that Burns was what is called a drunkard; and I was
obliged to dwell very plainly on the irregularity and the too frequent
vanity and meanness of his relations to women. Hence, in the eyes of
many, my study was a step towards the demonstration of Burns’s radical
badness.
But second, there is a certain class, professors of that low morality so
greatly more distressing than the better sort of vice, to whom you must
never represent an act that was virtuous in itself, as attended by any
other consequences than a large family and fortune. To hint that Burns’s
marriage had an evil influence is, with this class, to deny the moral
law. Yet such is the fact. It was bravely done; but he had presumed too
far on his strength. One after another the lights of his life went out,
and he fell from circle to circle to the dishonoured sickbed of the end.
And surely for any one that has a thing to call a soul he shines out
tenfold more nobly in the failure of that frantic effort to do right,
than if he had turned on his heel with Worldly Wiseman, married a
congenial spouse, and lived orderly and died reputably an old man. It is
his chief title that he refrained from “the wrong that amendeth wrong.”
But the common, trashy mind of our generation is still aghast, like the
Jews of old, at any word of an unsuccessful virtue. Job has been written
and read; the tower of Siloam fell nineteen hundred years ago; yet we
have still to desire a little Christianity, or, failing that, a little
even of that rude, old, Norse nobility of soul, which saw virtue and vice
alike go unrewarded, and was yet not shaken in its faith.
_Walt Whitman_.—This is a case of a second difficulty which lies
continually before the writer of critical studies: that he has to mediate
between the author whom he loves and the public who are certainly
indifferent and frequently averse. Many articles had been written on
this notable man. One after another had leaned, in my eyes, either to
praise or blame unduly. In the last case, they helped to blindfold our
fastidious public to an inspiring writer; in the other, by an excess of
unadulterated praise, they moved the more candid to revolt. I was here
on the horns of a dilemma; and between these horns I squeezed myself with
perhaps some loss to the substance of the paper. Seeing so much in
Whitman that was merely ridiculous, as well as so much more that was
unsurpassed in force and fitness,—seeing the true prophet doubled, as I
thought, in places with the Bull in a China Shop,—it appeared best to
steer a middle course, and to laugh with the scorners when I thought they
had any excuse, while I made haste to rejoice with the rejoicers over
what is imperishably good, lovely, human, or divine, in his extraordinary
poems. That was perhaps the right road; yet I cannot help feeling that
in this attempt to trim my sails between an author whom I love and honour
and a public too averse to recognise his merit, I have been led into a
tone unbecoming from one of my stature to one of Whitman’s. But the good
and the great man will go on his way not vexed with my little shafts of
merriment. He, first of any one, will understand how, in the attempt to
explain him credibly to Mrs. Grundy, I have been led into certain airs of
the man of the world, which are merely ridiculous in me, and were not
intentionally discourteous to himself. But there is a worse side to the
question; for in my eagerness to be all things to all men, I am afraid I
may have sinned against proportion. It will be enough to say here that
Whitman’s faults are few and unimportant when they are set beside his
surprising merits. I had written another paper full of gratitude for the
help that had been given me in my life, full of enthusiasm for the
intrinsic merit of the poems, and conceived in the noisiest extreme of
youthful eloquence. The present study was a rifacimento. From it, with
the design already mentioned, and in a fit of horror at my old excess,
the big words and emphatic passages were ruthlessly excised. But this
sort of prudence is frequently its own punishment; along with the
exaggeration, some of the truth is sacrificed; and the result is cold,
constrained, and grudging. In short, I might almost everywhere have
spoken more strongly than I did.
_Thoreau_.—Here is an admirable instance of the “point of view” forced
throughout, and of too earnest reflection on imperfect facts. Upon me
this pure, narrow, sunnily-ascetic Thoreau had exercised a great charm.
I have scarce written ten sentences since I was introduced to him, but
his influence might be somewhere detected by a close observer. Still it
was as a writer that I had made his acquaintance; I took him on his own
explicit terms; and when I learned details of his life, they were, by the
nature of the case and my own _parti-pris_, read even with a certain
violence in terms of his writings. There could scarce be a perversion
more justifiable than that; yet it was still a perversion. The study
indeed, raised so much ire in the breast of Dr. Japp (H. A. Page),
Thoreau’s sincere and learned disciple, that had either of us been men, I
please myself with thinking, of less temper and justice, the difference
might have made us enemies instead of making us friends. To him who knew
the man from the inside, many of my statements sounded like inversions
made on purpose; and yet when we came to talk of them together, and he
had understood how I was looking at the man through the books, while he
had long since learned to read the books through the man, I believe he
understood the spirit in which I had been led astray.
On two most important points, Dr. Japp added to my knowledge, and with
the same blow fairly demolished that part of my criticism. First, if
Thoreau were content to dwell by Walden Pond, it was not merely with
designs of self-improvement, but to serve mankind in the highest sense.
Hither came the fleeing slave; thence was he despatched along the road to
freedom. That shanty in the woods was a station in the great Underground
Railroad; that adroit and philosophic solitary was an ardent worker, soul
and body, in that so much more than honourable movement, which, if
atonement were possible for nations, should have gone far to wipe away
the guilt of slavery. But in history sin always meets with condign
punishment; the generation passes, the offence remains, and the innocent
must suffer. No underground railroad could atone for slavery, even as no
bills in Parliament can redeem the ancient wrongs of Ireland. But here
at least is a new light shed on the Walden episode.
Second, it appears, and the point is capital, that Thoreau was once
fairly and manfully in love, and, with perhaps too much aping of the
angel, relinquished the woman to his brother. Even though the brother
were like to die of it, we have not yet heard the last opinion of the
woman. But be that as it may, we have here the explanation of the
“rarefied and freezing air” in which I complained that he had taught
himself to breathe. Reading the man through the books, I took his
professions in good faith. He made a dupe of me, even as he was seeking
to make a dupe of himself, wresting philosophy to the needs of his own
sorrow. But in the light of this new fact, those pages, seemingly so
cold, are seen to be alive with feeling. What appeared to be a lack of
interest in the philosopher turns out to have been a touching insincerity
of the man to his own heart; and that fine-spun airy theory of
friendship, so devoid, as I complained, of any quality of flesh and
blood, a mere anodyne to lull his pains. The most temperate of living
critics once marked a passage of my own with a cross and the words, “This
seems nonsense.” It not only seemed; it was so. It was a private
bravado of my own, which I had so often repeated to keep up my spirits,
that I had grown at last wholly to believe it, and had ended by setting
it down as a contribution to the theory of life. So with the more icy
parts of this philosophy of Thoreau’s. He was affecting the Spartanism
he had not; and the old sentimental wound still bled afresh, while he
deceived himself with reasons.
Thoreau’s theory, in short, was one thing and himself another: of the
first, the reader will find what I believe to be a pretty faithful
statement and a fairly just criticism in the study; of the second he will
find but a contorted shadow. So much of the man as fitted nicely with
his doctrines, in the photographer’s phrase, came out. But that large
part which lay outside and beyond, for which he had found or sought no
formula, on which perhaps his philosophy even looked askance, is wanting
in my study, as it was wanting in the guide I followed. In some ways a
less serious writer, in all ways a nobler man, the true Thoreau still
remains to be depicted.
_Villon_.—I am tempted to regret that I ever wrote on this subject, not
merely because the paper strikes me as too picturesque by half, but
because I regarded Villon as a bad fellow. Others still think well of
him, and can find beautiful and human traits where I saw nothing but
artistic evil; and by the principle of the art, those should have written
of the man, and not I. Where you see no good, silence is the best.
Though this penitence comes too late, it may be well, at least, to give
it expression.
The spirit of Villon is still living in the literature of France. Fat
Peg is oddly of a piece with the work of Zola, the Goncourts, and the
infinitely greater Flaubert; and, while similar in ugliness, still
surpasses them in native power. The old author, breaking with an _éclat
de voix_, out of his tongue-tied century, has not yet been touched on his
own ground, and still gives us the most vivid and shocking impression of
reality. Even if that were not worth doing at all, it would be worth
doing as well as he has done it; for the pleasure we take in the author’s
skill repays us, or at least reconciles us to the baseness of his
attitude. Fat Peg (_La Grosse Margot_) is typical of much; it is a piece
of experience that has nowhere else been rendered into literature; and a
kind of gratitude for the author’s plainness mingles, as we read, with
the nausea proper to the business. I shall quote here a verse of an old
students’ song, worth laying side by side with Villon’s startling
ballade. This singer, also, had an unworthy mistress, but he did not
choose to share the wages of dishonour; and it is thus, with both wit and
pathos, that he laments her fall:—
Nunc plango florem
Ætatis teneræ
Nitidiorem
Veneris sidere:
Tunc columbinam
Mentis dulcedinem,
Nunc serpentinam
Amaritudinem.
Verbo rogantes
Removes ostio,
Munera dantes
Foves cubiculo,
Illos abire præcipis
A quibus nihil accipis,
Cæcos claudosque recipis,
Viros illustres decipis
Cum melle venenosa. {0}
But our illustrious writer of ballades it was unnecessary to deceive; it
was the flight of beauty alone, not that of honesty or honour, that he
lamented in his song; and the nameless mediæval vagabond has the best of
the comparison.
There is now a Villon Society in England; and Mr. John Payne has
translated him entirely into English, a task of unusual difficulty. I
regret to find that Mr. Payne and I are not always at one as to the
author’s meaning; in such cases I am bound to suppose that he is in the
right, although the weakness of the flesh withholds me from anything
beyond a formal submission. He is now upon a larger venture, promising
us at last that complete Arabian Nights to which we have all so long
looked forward.
_Charles of Orleans_.—Perhaps I have done scanty justice to the charm of
the old Duke’s verses, and certainly he is too much treated as a fool.
The period is not sufficiently remembered. What that period was, to what
a blank of imbecility the human mind had fallen, can only be known to
those who have waded in the chronicles. Excepting Comines and La Salle
and Villon, I have read no author who did not appal me by his torpor; and
even the trial of Joan of Arc, conducted as it was by chosen clerks,
bears witness to a dreary, sterile folly,—a twilight of the mind peopled
with childish phantoms. In relation to his contemporaries, Charles seems
quite a lively character.
It remains for me to acknowledge the kindness of Mr. Henry Pyne, who,
immediately on the appearance of the study, sent me his edition of the
Debate between the Heralds: a courtesy from the expert to the amateur
only too uncommon in these days.
_Knox_.—Knox, the second in order of interest among the reformers, lies
dead and buried in the works of the learned and unreadable M‘Crie. It
remains for some one to break the tomb and bring him forth, alive again
and breathing, in a human book. With the best intentions in the world, I
have only added two more flagstones, ponderous like their predecessors,
to the mass of obstruction that buries the reformer from the world; I
have touched him in my turn with that “mace of death,” which Carlyle has
attributed to Dryasdust; and my two dull papers are, in the matter of
dulness, worthy additions to the labours of M‘Crie. Yet I believe they
are worth reprinting in the interest of the next biographer of Knox. I
trust his book may be a masterpiece; and I indulge the hope that my two
studies may lend him a hint or perhaps spare him a delay in its
composition.
Of the _Pepys_ I can say nothing; for it has been too recently through my
hands; and I still retain some of the heat of composition. Yet it may
serve as a text for the last remark I have to offer. To Pepys I think I
have been amply just; to the others, to Burns, Thoreau, Whitman, Charles
of Orleans, even Villon, I have found myself in the retrospect ever too
grudging of praise, ever too disrespectful in manner. It is not easy to
see why I should have been most liberal to the man of least pretensions.
Perhaps some cowardice withheld me from the proper warmth of tone;
perhaps it is easier to be just to those nearer us in rank of mind. Such
at least is the fact, which other critics may explain. For these were
all men whom, for one reason or another, I loved; or when I did not love
the men, my love was the greater to their books. I had read them and
lived with them; for months they were continually in my thoughts; I
seemed to rejoice in their joys and to sorrow with them in their griefs;
and behold, when I came to write of them, my tone was sometimes hardly
courteous and seldom wholly just.