and to explain its private history with the motives which begat it.
"This is the Augustan age of English criticism," say the reviewers, who are
fond of remarking that the period is one of literary appreciation rather than
of original production that is, contemporary reviewers, critics and
monograph-writers are more important than "makers" in verse or in prose. In
fact it is their aurea ætas. I reply "Virgin ore, no!" on the whole mixed
metal, some noble, much ignoble; a little gold, more silver and an abundance
of brass, lead and dross. There is the criticism of Sainte Beuve, of the late
Matthew Arnold and of Swinburne, there is also the criticism of the Saturday
Reviler and of the Edinburgh criticaster. The golden is truth and honour
incarnate: it possesses outsight and insight: it either teaches and inspires
or it comforts and consoles, save when a strict sense of duty compels it to
severity: briefly, it is keen and guiding and creative. Let the young beginner
learn by rote what one master says of another:--"He was never provoked into
coarseness: his thrusts were made with the rapier according to the received
rules of fence, he firmly upheld the honour of his calling, and in the
exercise of it was uniformly fearless, independent and incorrupt." The Brazen
is partial, one-sided, tricksy, misleading, immoral; serving personal and
interested purposes and contemptuously forgetful of every obligation which an
honest and honourable pen owes to the public and to itself. Such critiques
bring no profit to the reviewed. He feels that he has been written up or
written down by a literary hireling who has possibly been paid to praise or
abuse him secondarily, and primarily to exalt or debase his publisher or his
printer.
My own literary career has supplied me with many a curious study. Writing upon
subjects, say The Lake Regions of Central Africa which were then a type of the
Unknown I could readily trace in the journalistic notices all the tricks and
dodges of the trade. The rare honest would confess that they could say nothing
upon the subject, they came to me therefore for information and professed
themselves duly thankful. The many dishonest had recourse to a variety of
devices. The hard worker would read-up voyages and travels treating of the
neighboring countries, Abyssinia, the Cape and the African Coasts Eastern and
Western; thus he would write in a kind of reflected light without
acknowledging his obligation to my volumes. Another would review my book after
the easy American fashion of hashing up the author's production, taking all
its facts from me with out disclosing that one fact to the reader and then
proceed to "butter" or "slash." The worst, "fulfyld with malace of froward
entente," would choose for theme not the work but the worker, upon the good
old principle "Abuse the plaintiff's attorney." These arts fully account for
the downfall of criticism in our day and the deafness of the public to such
literary verdicts. But a few years ago a favourable review in a first-rate
paper was "fifty pounds in the author's pocket": now it is not worth as many
pence unless signed by some well-known scribbling statesman or bustling
reverend who caters for the public taste. The decline and fall is well
expressed in the old lines:--
"Non est sanctior quod laudaris:
Non est vilior si vituperaris."
"No one, now-a-days, cares for reviews," wrote Darwin as far back as 1849; and
it is easy to see the whys and the wherefores. I have already touched upon the
duty of reviewing the reviewer when the latter's work calls for the process,
despite the pretensions of modern criticism that it must not be criticised.
Although to buffet an anonym is to beat the air, still the very effort does
good. A well-known and popular novelist of the present day was a favourite
butt for certain journalists who, with the normal half-knowledge of men--
"That read too little, and that write too much"--
persistently fell foul of the points in which the author was almost always
right and the reviewer was wrong. "An eagle hawketh not at flies;" the object
of ill-natured satire despised--
"The creatures of the stall and stye,"
and persisted in contemptuous reticence, giving consent by silence to what was
easily refuted, and suffering a fond and foolish sentence to misguide the
public which it pretends to direct. "Take each man's censure but reserve thy
judgment," is a wise saying when silently practiced; it leads, however, to
suffering in public esteem. The case in question was wholly changed when, at
my suggestion, the writer was persuaded to catch a few of the culprits and to
administer the dressing and redressing they so richly deserved.
And now to my tale.
Mr. Henry Reeve, Editor of the Edinburgh Review, wrote to me shortly before my
first volume was issued to subscribers (September,'85) asking for advance
sheets, as his magazine proposed to produce a general notice of The Arabian
Nights Entertainments. But I suspected the man whose indiscretion and
recklessness had been so unpleasantly paraded in the shape of the Greville
(Mr. Worldly Wiseman's) Memoirs, and I had not forgotten the untruthful and
malignant articles of perfervid brutality which during the hot youth and calm
middle age of the Edinburgh had disgraced the profession of letters. My
answer, which was temporising and diplomatic, induced only a second and a more
urgent application. Bearing in mind that professional etiquette hardly
justifies publicly reviewing a book intended only for private reading and
vividly remembering the evil of the periodical, I replied that the sheets
should be forwarded but on one condition, namely, that the reviewer would not
dwell too lovingly and longingly upon the "archaics," which had so excited the
Tartuffean temperament of the chaste Pall Mall Gazette. Mr. Henry Reeves
replied (surlily) that he was not in the habit of dictating to his staff and I
rejoined by refusing to grant his request. So he waited until five, that is
one half of my volumes had been distributed to subscribers, and revenged
himself by placing them for review in the hands of the "Lane-Poole" clique
which, as the sequel proved could be noisy and combative as setting hens
disturbed when their nest-egg was threatened by an intruding hand.
For the clique had appropriated all right and claim to a monopoly of The
Arabian Nights Entertainments which they held in hand as a rotten borough. The
"Uncle and Master," Mr. Edward William Lane, eponymous hero of the house, had
retranslated certain choice specimens of the Recueil and the "nephews of their
uncle" resolved to make a private gold-mine thereof. The book came out in
monthly parts at half-a-crown (1839-41) and when offered for sale in 3 vols.
royal 8 vo, the edition of 5,000 hung fire at first until the high price (3
pounds 3s.) was reduced to 27 shillings for the trade. The sale then went off
briskly and amply repaid the author and the publishers--Charles Knight and Co.
And although here and there some "old Tory" grumbled that new-fangled words
(as Wezeer, Kádee and Jinnee) had taken the places of his childhood's pets,
the Vizier, the Cadi, and the Genie, none complained of the workmanship for
the all-sufficient reason that naught better was then known or could be
wanted. Its succes de salon was greatly indebted to the "many hundred
engravings on wood, from original designs by William Harvey", with a host of
quaint and curious Arabesques, Cufic inscriptions, vignettes, head pieces and
culs- de-lampes. These, with the exception of sundry minor accessories,
[FN#447] were excellent and showed for the first time the realistic East and
not the absurdities drawn from the depths of artistical ignorance and
self-consciousness--those of Smirke, Deveria, Chasselot and Co., not to speak
of the horrors of the De Sacy edition, whose plates have apparently been used
by Prof. Weil and by the Italian versions. And so the three bulky and handsome
volumes found a ready way into many a drawing room during the Forties, when
the public was uncritical enough to hail the appearance of these scattered
chapters and to hold that at last they had the real thing, pure and
unadulterated. No less than three reprints of the "Standard Edition," 1859
(the last being in '83), succeeded one another and the issue was finally
stopped, not by the author's death (ætat 75; London, August 10, 1876: net.
Hereford, September 17, 1801), nor by the plates, which are now the property
of Messieurs Chatto and Windus, becoming too worn for use, but simply by
deficient demand. And the clique, represented by the late Edward Lane-Poole in
1879, who edited the last edition (1883) with a Preface by Mr. Stanley
Lane-Poole, during a long run of forty-three years never paid the public the
compliment of correcting the multitudinous errors and short comings of the
translation. Even the lengthy and longsome notes, into which The Nights have
too often been merged, were left untrimmed. Valuable in themselves and full of
information, while wholly misplaced in a recueil of folk-lore, where they
stand like pegs behung with the contents of the translator's adversaria, the
monographs on details of Arab life have also been exploited and reprinted
under the "fatuous" title, "Arabian (for Egyptian) Society in the Middle Ages:
Studies on The Thousand and One Nights." They were edited by Mr. Stanley
Lane-Poole (Chatto and Windus) in 1883.
At length the three volumes fell out of date, and the work was formally
pronounced unreadable. Goëthe followed from afar by Emerson, had foreseen the
"inevitable increase of Oriental influence upon the Occident," and the
eagerness with which the men of the West would apply themselves to the
languages and literature of the East. Such garbled and mutilated, unsexed and
unsoured versions and perversions like Lane's were felt to be survivals of the
unfittest. Mr. John Payne (for whom see my Foreword, vol. i. pp. xi.-xii.)
resolved to give the world the first honest and complete version of the
Thousand Nights and a Night. He put forth samples of his work in the New
Quarterly Magazine (January- April, 1879), whereupon he was incontinently
assaulted by Mr. Reginald Stuart Poole, the then front of the monopolists, who
after drawing up a list of fifteen errata (which were not errata) in two
Nights, declared that "they must be multiplied five hundred-fold to give the
sum we may expect." (The Academy, April 26, 1879; November 29, 1881; and
December 7, 1881.) The critic had the courage, or rather impudence, to fall
foul of Mr. Payne's mode and mannerism, which had long become deservedly
famous, and concludes: --"The question of English style may for the present be
dropped, as, if a translator cannot translate, it little matters in what form
his results appear. But it may lie questioned whether an Arab edifice should
be decorated with old English wall-papers."
Evidently I had scant reason to expect mercy from the clique: I wanted none
and I received none.