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I. TO W. M. THACKERAY 1
II. TO CHARLES DICKENS 10
III. TO PIERRE DE RONSARD 22
IV. TO HERODOTUS 34
V. EPISTLE TO MR. ALEXANDER POPE 46
VI. TO LUCIAN OF SAMOSATA 55
VII. TO MAÎTRE FRANÇOYS RABELAIS 66
VIII. TO JANE AUSTEN 75
IX. TO MASTER ISAAK WALTON 86
X. TO M. CHAPELAIN 98
XI. TO SIR JOHN MAUNDEVILLE, KT. 110
XII. TO ALEXANDRE DUMAS 119
XIII. TO THEOCRITUS 130
XIV. TO EDGAR ALLAN POE 140
XV. TO SIR WALTER SCOTT, BART. 152
XVI. TO EUSEBIUS OF CÆSAREA 162
XVII. TO PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 173
XVIII. TO MONSIEUR DE MOLIÈRE, VALET DE CHAMBRE DU ROI 184
XIX. TO ROBERT BURNS 195
XX. TO LORD BYRON 205
XXI. TO OMAR KHAYYÂM 216
XXII. TO Q. HORATIUS FLACCUS 223
I.
_To W. M. Thackeray_.
SIR,—There are many things that stand in the way of the critic when he
has a mind to praise the living. He may dread the charge of writing
rather to vex a rival than to exalt the subject of his applause. He
shuns the appearance of seeking the favour of the famous, and would not
willingly be regarded as one of the many parasites who now advertise each
movement and action of contemporary genius. “Such and such men of
letters are passing their summer holidays in the Val d’Aosta,” or the
Mountains of the Moon, or the Suliman Range, as it may happen. So
reports our literary “Court Circular,” and all our _Précieuses_ read the
tidings with enthusiasm. Lastly, if the critic be quite new to the world
of letters, he may superfluously fear to vex a poet or a novelist by the
abundance of his eulogy. No such doubts perplex us when, with all our
hearts, we would commend the departed; for they have passed almost beyond
the reach even of envy; and to those pale cheeks of theirs no
commendation can bring the red.
You, above all others, were and remain without a rival in your many-sided
excellence, and praise of you strikes at none of those who have survived
your day. The increase of time only mellows your renown, and each year
that passes and brings you no successor does but sharpen the keenness of
our sense of loss. In what other novelist, since Scott was worn down by
the burden of a forlorn endeavour, and died for honour’s sake, has the
world found so many of the fairest gifts combined? If we may not call
you a poet (for the first of English writers of light verse did not seek
that crown), who that was less than a poet ever saw life with a glance so
keen as yours, so steady, and so sane? Your pathos was never cheap, your
laughter never forced; your sigh was never the pulpit trick of the
preacher. Your funny people—your Costigans and Fokers—were not mere
characters of trick and catch-word, were not empty comic masks. Behind
each the human heart was beating; and ever and again we were allowed to
see the features of the man.
Thus fiction in your hands was not simply a profession, like another, but
a constant reflection of the whole surface of life: a repeated echo of
its laughter and its complaint. Others have written, and not written
badly, with the stolid professional regularity of the clerk at his desk;
you, like the Scholar Gipsy, might have said that “it needs heaven-sent
moments for this skill.” There are, it will not surprise you, some
honourable women and a few men who call you a cynic; who speak of “the
withered world of Thackerayan satire;” who think your eyes were ever
turned to the sordid aspects of life—to the mother-in-law who threatens
to “take away her silver bread-basket;” to the intriguer, the sneak, the
termagant; to the Beckys, and Barnes Newcomes, and Mrs. Mackenzies of
this world. The quarrel of these sentimentalists is really with life,
not with you; they might as wisely blame Monsieur Buffon because there
are snakes in his Natural History. Had you not impaled certain noxious
human insects, you would have better pleased Mr. Ruskin; had you confined
yourself to such performances, you would have been more dear to the
Neo-Balzacian school in fiction.
You are accused of never having drawn a good woman who was not a doll,
but the ladies that bring this charge seldom remind us either of Lady
Castlewood or of Theo or Hetty Lambert. The best women can pardon you
Becky Sharp and Blanche Amory; they find it harder to forgive you Emmy
Sedley and Helen Pendennis. Yet what man does not know in his heart that
the best women—God bless them—lean, in their characters, either to the
sweet passiveness of Emmy or to the sensitive and jealous affections of
Helen? ’Tis Heaven, not you, that made them so; and they are easily
pardoned, both for being a very little lower than the angels and for
their gentle ambition to be painted, as by Guido or Guercino, with wings
and harps and haloes. So ladies have occasionally seen their own faces
in the glass of fancy, and, thus inspired, have drawn Romola and
Consuelo. Yet when these fair idealists, Mdme. Sand and George Eliot,
designed Rosamund Vincy and Horace, was there not a spice of malice in
the portraits which we miss in your least favourable studies?
That the creator of Colonel Newcome and of Henry Esmond was a snarling
cynic; that he who designed Rachel Esmond could not draw a good woman:
these are the chief charges (all indifferent now to you, who were once so
sensitive) that your admirers have to contend against. A French critic,
M. Taine, also protests that you do preach too much. Did any author but
yourself so frequently break the thread (seldom a strong thread) of his
plot to converse with his reader and moralise his tale, we also might be
offended. But who that loves Montaigne and Pascal, who that likes the
wise trifling of the one and can bear with the melancholy of the other,
but prefers your preaching to another’s playing!
Your thoughts come in, like the intervention of the Greek Chorus, as an
ornament and source of fresh delight. Like the songs of the Chorus, they
bid us pause a moment over the wider laws and actions of human fate and
human life, and we turn from your persons to yourself, and again from
yourself to your persons, as from the odes of Sophocles or Aristophanes
to the action of their characters on the stage. Nor, to my taste, does
the mere music and melancholy dignity of your style in these passages of
meditation fall far below the highest efforts of poetry. I remember that
scene where Clive, at Barnes Newcome’s Lecture on the Poetry of the
Affections, sees Ethel who is lost to him. “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—these, 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.”
_For ever echoing in the heart and present in the memory_: who has not
heard these tones, who does not hear them as he turns over your books
that, for so many years, have been his companions and comforters? We
have been young and old, we have been sad and merry with you, we have
listened to the midnight chimes with Pen and Warrington, have stood with
you beside the death-bed, have mourned at that yet more awful funeral of
lost love, and with you have prayed in the inmost chapel sacred to our
old and immortal affections, _à léal souvenir_! And whenever you speak
for yourself, and speak in earnest, how magical, how rare, how lonely in
our literature is the beauty of your sentences! “I can’t express the
charm of them” (so you write of George Sand; so we may write of you):
“they seem to me like the sound of country bells, provoking I don’t know
what vein of music and meditation, and falling sweetly and sadly on the
ear.” Surely that style, so fresh, so rich, so full of surprises—that
style which stamps as classical your fragments of slang, and perpetually
astonishes and delights—would alone give immortality to an author, even
had he little to say. But you, with your whole wide world of fops and
fools, of good women and brave men, of honest absurdities and cheery
adventurers: you who created the Steynes and Newcomes, the Beckys and
Blanches, Captain Costigan and F. B., and the Chevalier Strong—all that
host of friends imperishable—you must survive with Shakespeare and
Cervantes in the memory and affection of men.
II.
_To Charles Dickens_.
SIR,—It has been said that every man is born a Platonist or an
Aristotelian, though the enormous majority of us, to be sure, live and
die without being conscious of any invidious philosophic partiality
whatever. With more truth (though that does not imply very much) every
Englishman who reads may be said to be a partisan of yourself or of Mr.
Thackeray. Why should there be any partisanship in the matter; and why,
having two such good things as your novels and those of your
contemporary, should we not be silently happy in the possession? Well,
men are made so, and must needs fight and argue over their tastes in
enjoyment. For myself, I may say that in this matter I am what the
Americans do _not_ call a “Mugwump,” what English politicians dub a
“superior person”—that is, I take no side, and attempt to enjoy the best
of both.
It must be owned that this attitude is sometimes made a little difficult
by the vigour of your special devotees. They have ceased, indeed, thank
Heaven! to imitate you; and even in “descriptive articles” the touch of
Mr. Gigadibs, of him whom “we almost took for the true Dickens,” has
disappeared. The young lions of the Press no longer mimic your less
admirable mannerisms—do not strain so much after fantastic comparisons,
do not (in your manner and Mr. Carlyle’s) give people nick-names derived
from their teeth, or their complexion; and, generally, we are spared
second-hand copies of all that in your style was least to be commended.
But, though improved by lapse of time in this respect, your devotees
still put on little conscious airs of virtue, robust manliness, and so
forth, which would have irritated you very much, and there survive some
press men who seem to have read you a little (especially your later
works), and never to have read anything else. Now familiarity with the
pages of “Our Mutual Friend” and “Dombey and Son” does not precisely
constitute a liberal education, and the assumption that it does is apt
(quite unreasonably) to prejudice people against the greatest comic
genius of modern times.
On the other hand, Time is at last beginning to sift the true admirers of
Dickens from the false. Yours, Sir, in the best sense of the word, is a
popular success, a popular reputation. For example, I know that, in a
remote and even Pictish part of this kingdom, a rural household, humble
and under the shadow of a sorrow inevitably approaching, has found in
“David Copperfield” oblivion of winter, of sorrow, and of sickness. On
the other hand, people are now picking up heart to say that “they cannot
read Dickens,” and that they particularly detest “Pickwick.” I believe
it was young ladies who first had the courage of their convictions in
this respect. “Tout sied aux belles,” and the fair, in the confidence of
youth, often venture on remarkable confessions. In your “Natural History
of Young Ladies” I do not remember that you describe the Humorous Young
Lady. {13} She is a very rare bird indeed, and humour generally is at a
deplorably low level in England.
Hence come all sorts of mischief, arisen since you left us; and it may be
said that inordinate philanthropy, genteel sympathy with Irish murder and
arson, Societies for Badgering the Poor, Esoteric Buddhism, and a score
of other plagues, including what was once called Æstheticism, are all,
primarily, due to want of humour. People discuss, with the gravest
faces, matters which properly should only be stated as the wildest
paradoxes. It naturally follows that, in a period almost destitute of
humour, many respectable persons “cannot read Dickens,” and are not
ashamed to glory in their shame. We ought not to be angry with others
for their misfortunes; and yet when one meets the _crétins_ who boast
that they cannot read Dickens, one certainly does feel much as Mr. Samuel
Weller felt when he encountered Mr. Job Trotter.
How very singular has been the history of the decline of humour! Is
there any profound psychological truth to be gathered from consideration
of the fact that humour has gone out with cruelty? A hundred years ago,
eighty years ago—nay, fifty years ago—we were a cruel but also a humorous
people. We had bull-baitings, and badger-drawings, and hustings, and
prize-fights, and cock-fights; we went to see men hanged; the pillory and
the stocks were no empty “terrors unto evil-doers,” for there was
commonly a malefactor occupying each of these institutions. With all
this we had a broad-blown comic sense. We had Hogarth, and Bunbury, and
George Cruikshank, and Gilray; we had Leech and Surtees, and the creator
of Tittlebat Titmouse; we had the Shepherd of the “Noctes,” and, above
all, we had _you_.
From the old giants of English fun—burly persons delighting in broad
caricature, in decided colours, in cockney jokes, in swashing blows at
the more prominent and obvious human follies—from these you derived the
splendid high spirits and unhesitating mirth of your earlier works. Mr.
Squeers, and Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp, and all the Pickwickians, and Mr.
Dowler, and John Browdie—these and their immortal companions were reared,
so to speak, on the beef and beer of that naughty, fox-hunting,
badger-baiting old England, which we have improved out of existence. And
these characters, assuredly, are your best; by them, though stupid people
cannot read about them, you will live while there is a laugh left among
us. Perhaps that does not assure you a very prolonged existence, but
only the future can show.
The dismal seriousness of the time cannot, let us hope, last for ever and
a day. Honest old Laughter, the true _lutin_ of your inspiration, must
have life left in him yet, and cannot die; though it is true that the
taste for your pathos, and your melodrama, and plots constructed after
your favourite fashion (“Great Expectations” and the “Tale of Two Cities”
are exceptions) may go by and never be regretted. Were people simpler,
or only less clear-sighted, as far as your pathos is concerned, a
generation ago? Jeffrey, the hard-headed shallow critic, who declared
that Wordsworth “would never do,” cried, “wept like anything,” over your
Little Nell. One still laughs as heartily as ever with Dick Swiveller;
but who can cry over Little Nell?
Ah, Sir, how could you—who knew so intimately, who remembered so
strangely well the fancies, the dreams, the sufferings of childhood—how
could you “wallow naked in the pathetic,” and massacre holocausts of the
Innocents? To draw tears by gloating over a child’s death-bed, was it
worthy of you? Was it the kind of work over which our hearts should
melt? I confess that Little Nell might die a dozen times, and be
welcomed by whole legions of Angels, and I (like the bereaved fowl
mentioned by Pet Marjory) would remain unmoved.
She was more than usual calm,
She did not give a single dam,
wrote the astonishing child who diverted the leisure of Scott. Over your
Little Nell and your Little Dombey I remain more than usual calm; and
probably so do thousands of your most sincere admirers. But about matter
of this kind, and the unseating of the fountains of tears, who can argue?
Where is taste? where is truth? What tears are “manly, Sir, manly,” as
Fred Bayham has it; and of what lamentations ought we rather to be
ashamed? _Sunt lacrymæ rerum_; one has been moved in the cell where
Socrates tasted the hemlock; or by the river-banks where Syracusan arrows
slew the parched Athenians among the mire and blood; or, in fiction, when
Colonel Newcome says _Adsum_, or over the diary of Clare Doria Forey, or
where Aramis laments, with strange tears, the death of Porthos. But over
Dombey (the Son), or Little Nell, one declines to snivel.
When an author deliberately sits down and says, “Now, let us have a good
cry,” he poisons the wells of sensibility and chokes, at least in many
breasts, the fountain of tears. Out of “Dombey and Son” there is little
we care to remember except the deathless Mr. Toots; just as we forget the
melodramatics of “Martin Chuzzlewit.” I have read in that book a score
of times; I never see it but I revel in it—in Pecksniff, and Mrs. Gamp,
and the Americans. But what the plot is all about, what Jonas did, what
Montagu Tigg had to make in the matter, what all the pictures with plenty
of shading illustrate, I have never been able to comprehend. In the same
way, one of your most thorough-going admirers has allowed (in the licence
of private conversation) that “Ralph Nickleby and Monk are too steep;”
and probably a cultivated taste will always find them a little
precipitous.
“Too steep:”—the slang expresses that defect of an ardent genius, carried
above itself, and out of the air we breathe, both in its grotesque and in
its gloomy imaginations. To force the note, to press fantasy too hard,
to deepen the gloom with black over the indigo, that was the failing
which proved you mortal. To take an instance in little: when Pip went to
Mr. Pumblechook’s, the boy thought the seedsman “a very happy man to have
so many little drawers in his shop.” The reflection is thoroughly
boyish; but then you add, “I wondered whether the flower-seeds and bulbs
ever wanted of a fine day to break out of those jails and bloom.” That
is not boyish at all; that is the hard-driven, jaded literary fancy at
work.
“So we arraign her; but she,” the Genius of Charles Dickens, how
brilliant, how kindly, how beneficent she is! dwelling by a fountain of
laughter imperishable; though there is something of an alien salt in the
neighbouring fountain of tears. How poor the world of fancy would be,
how “dispeopled of her dreams,” if, in some ruin of the social system,
the books of Dickens were lost; and if The Dodger, and Charley Bates, and
Mr. Crinkle, and Miss Squeers and Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp, and Dick
Swiveller were to perish, or to vanish with Menander’s men and women! We
cannot think of our world without them; and, children of dreams as they
are, they seem more essential than great statesmen, artists, soldiers,
who have actually worn flesh and blood, ribbons and orders, gowns and
uniforms. May we not almost welcome “Free Education”? for every
Englishman who can read, unless he be an Ass, is a reader the more for
you.
P.S.—Alas, how strangely are we tempered, and how strong is the national
bias! I have been saying things of you that I would not hear an enemy
say. When I read, in the criticism of an American novelist, about your
“hysterical emotionality” (for he writes in American), and your “waste of
verbiage,” I am almost tempted to deny that our Dickens has a single
fault, to deem you impeccable!
III.
_To Pierre de Ronsard_
(PRINCE OF POETS)
MASTER AND PRINCE OF POETS,—As we know what choice thou madest of a
sepulchre (a choice how ill fulfilled by the jealousy of Fate), so we
know well the manner of thy chosen immortality. In the Plains Elysian,
among the heroes and the ladies of old song, there was thy Love with thee
to enjoy her paradise in an eternal spring.
_Là du plaisant Avril la saison immortelle_
_Sans eschange le suit_,
_La terre sans labour, de sa grasse mamelle_,
_Toute chose y produit_;
_D’enbas la troupe sainte autrefois amoureuse_,
_Nous honorant sur tous_,
_Viendra nous saluer, s’estimant bien-heureuse_
_De s’accointer de nous_.
There thou dwellest, with the learned lovers of old days, with Belleau,
and Du Bellay, and Baïf, and the flower of the maidens of Anjou. Surely
no rumour reaches thee, in that happy place of reconciled affections, no
rumour of the rudeness of Time, the despite of men, and the change which
stole from thy locks, so early grey, the crown of laurels and of thine
own roses. How different from thy choice of a sepulchre have been the
fortunes of thy tomb!
I will that none should break
The marble for my sake,
Wishful to make more fair
My sepulchre!
So didst thou sing, or so thy sweet numbers run in my rude English.
Wearied of Courts and of priories, thou didst desire a grave beside thine
own Loire, not remote from
The caves, the founts that fall
From the high mountain wall,
That fall and flash and fleet,
With silver feet.
Only a laurel tree
Shall guard the grave of me;
Only Apollo’s bough
Shall shade me now!
Far other has been thy sepulchre: not in the free air, among the field
flowers, but in thy priory of Saint Cosme, with marble for a monument,
and no green grass to cover thee. Restless wert thou in thy life; thy
dust was not to be restful in thy death. The Huguenots, _ces nouveaux
Chrétiens qui la France ont pillée_, destroyed thy tomb, and the warning
of the later monument,