Transcribed from the 1912 Longmans, Green and Co. edition by David Price,
email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
by Andrew Lang
Contents:
Preface
Adventures Among Books
Recollections of Robert Louis Stevenson
Rab's Friend
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Mr. Morris's Poems
Mrs. Radcliffe's Novels
A Scottish Romanticist of 1830
The Confessions of Saint Augustine
Smollett
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Paradise of Poets
Paris and Helen
Enchanted Cigarettes
Stories and Story-telling
The Supernatural in Fiction
An Old Scottish Psychical Researcher
The Boy
PREFACE
Of the Essays in this volume "Adventures among Books," and "Rab's
Friend," appeared in _Scribner's Magazine_; and "Recollections of Robert
Louis Stevenson" (to the best of the author's memory) in _The North
American Review_. The Essay on "Smollett" was in the _Anglo-Saxon_,
which has ceased to appear; and the shorter papers, such as "The
Confessions of Saint Augustine," in a periodical styled _Wit and Wisdom_.
For "The Poems of William Morris" the author has to thank the Editor of
_Longman's Magazine_; for "The Boy," and "Mrs. Radcliffe's Novels," the
Proprietors of _The Cornhill Magazine_; for "Enchanted Cigarettes," and
possibly for "The Supernatural in Fiction," the Proprietors of _The
Idler_. The portrait, after Sir William Richmond, R.A., was done about
the time when most of the Essays were written--and that was not
yesterday.
CHAPTER I: ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
I
In an age of reminiscences, is there room for the confessions of a
veteran, who remembers a great deal about books and very little about
people? I have often wondered that a _Biographia Literaria_ has so
seldom been attempted--a biography or autobiography of a man in his
relations with other minds. Coleridge, to be sure, gave this name to a
work of his, but he wandered from his apparent purpose into a world of
alien disquisitions. The following pages are frankly bookish, and to the
bookish only do they appeal. The habit of reading has been praised as a
virtue, and has been denounced as a vice. In no case, if we except the
perpetual study of newspapers (which cannot fairly be called reading), is
the vice, or the virtue, common. It is more innocent than opium-eating,
though, like opium-eating, it unlocks to us artificial paradises. I try
to say what I have found in books, what distractions from the world, what
teaching (not much), and what consolations.
In beginning an _autobiographia literaria_, an account of how, and in
what order, books have appealed to a mind, which books have ever above
all things delighted, the author must pray to be pardoned for the sin of
egotism. There is no other mind, naturally, of which the author knows so
much as of his own. _On n'a que soi_, as the poor girl says in one of M.
Paul Bourget's novels. In literature, as in love, one can only speak for
himself. This author did not, like Fulke Greville, retire into the
convent of literature from the strife of the world, rather he was born to
be, from the first, a dweller in the cloister of a library. Among the
poems which I remember best out of early boyhood is Lucy Ashton's song,
in the "Bride of Lammermoor":--
"Look not thou on beauty's charming,
Sit thou still when kings are arming,
Taste not when the wine-cup glistens,
Speak not when the people listens,
Stop thine ear against the singer,
From the red gold keep thy finger,
Vacant heart, and hand, and eye,
Easy live and quiet die."
The rhymes, unlearned, clung to my memory; they would sing themselves to
me on the way to school, or cricket-field, and, about the age of ten,
probably without quite understanding them, I had chosen them for a kind
of motto in life, a tune to murmur along the _fallentis semita vitae_.
This seems a queer idea for a small boy, but it must be confessed.
"It takes all sorts to make a world," some are soldiers from the cradle,
some merchants, some orators; nothing but a love of books was the gift
given to me by the fairies. It was probably derived from forebears on
both sides of my family, one a great reader, the other a considerable
collector of books which remained with us and were all tried, persevered
with, or abandoned in turn, by a student who has not blanched before the
_Epigoniad_.
About the age of four I learned to read by a simple process. I had heard
the elegy of Cock Robin till I knew it by rote, and I picked out the
letters and words which compose that classic till I could read it for
myself. Earlier than that, "Robinson Crusoe" had been read aloud to me,
in an abbreviated form, no doubt. I remember the pictures of Robinson
finding the footstep in the sand, and a dance of cannibals, and the
parrot. But, somehow, I have never read "Robinson" since: it is a
pleasure to come.
The first books which vividly impressed me were, naturally, fairy tales,
and chap-books about Robert Bruce, William Wallace, and Rob Roy. At that
time these little tracts could be bought for a penny apiece. I can still
see Bruce in full armour, and Wallace in a kilt, discoursing across a
burn, and Rob Roy slipping from the soldier's horse into the stream. They
did not then awaken a precocious patriotism; a boy of five is more at
home in Fairyland than in his own country. The sudden appearance of the
White Cat as a queen after her head was cut off, the fiendish malice of
the Yellow Dwarf, the strange cake of crocodile eggs and millet seed
which the mother of the Princess Frutilla made for the Fairy of the
Desert--these things, all fresh and astonishing, but certainly to be
credited, are my first memories of romance. One story of a White
Serpent, with a woodcut of that mysterious reptile, I neglected to
secure, probably for want of a penny, and I have regretted it ever since.
One never sees those chap books now. "The White Serpent," in spite of
all research, remains _introuvable_. It was a lost chance, and Fortune
does not forgive. Nobody ever interfered with these, or indeed with any
other studies of ours at that time, as long as they were not prosecuted
on Sundays. "The fightingest parts of the Bible," and the Apocrypha, and
stories like that of the Witch of Endor, were sabbatical literature, read
in a huge old illustrated Bible. How I advanced from the fairy tales to
Shakespeare, what stages there were on the way--for there must have been
stages--is a thing that memory cannot recover. A nursery legend tells
that I was wont to arrange six open books on six chairs, and go from one
to the others, perusing them by turns. No doubt this was what people
call "desultory reading," but I did not hear the criticism till later,
and then too often for my comfort. Memory holds a picture, more vivid
than most, of a small boy reading the "Midsummer Night's Dream" by
firelight, in a room where candles were lit, and some one touched the
piano, and a young man and a girl were playing chess. The Shakespeare
was a volume of Kenny Meadows' edition; there are fairies in it, and the
fairies seemed to come out of Shakespeare's dream into the music and the
firelight. At that moment I think that I was happy; it seemed an
enchanted glimpse of eternity in Paradise; nothing resembling it remains
with me, out of all the years.
We went from the border to the south of England, when the number of my
years was six, and in England we found another paradise, a circulating
library with brown, greasy, ill-printed, odd volumes of Shakespeare and
of the "Arabian Nights." How their stained pages come before the eyes
again--the pleasure and the puzzle of them! What did the lady in the
Geni's glass box want with the Merchants? what meant all these
conversations between the Fat Knight and _Ford_, in the "Merry Wives"? It
was delightful, but in parts it was difficult. Fragments of "The
Tempest," and of other plays, remain stranded in my memory from these
readings: _Ferdinand_ and _Miranda_ at chess, _Cleopatra_ cuffing the
messenger, the asp in the basket of figs, the _Friar_ and the
_Apothecary_, _Troilus_ on the Ilian walls, a vision of _Cassandra_ in
white muslin with her hair down. People forbid children to read this or
that. I am sure they need not, and that even in our infancy the
magician, Shakespeare, brings us nothing worse than a world of beautiful
visions, half realised. In the Egyptian wizard's little pool of ink,
only the pure can see the visions, and in Shakespeare's magic mirror
children see only what is pure. Among other books of that time I only
recall a kind of Sunday novel, "Naomi; or, The Last Days of Jerusalem."
Who, indeed, could forget the battering-rams, and the man who cried on
the battlements, "Woe, woe to myself and to Jerusalem!" I seem to hear
him again when boys break the hum of London with yells of the latest
"disaster."
We left England in a year, went back to Scotland, and awoke, as it were,
to know the glories of our birth. We lived in Scott's country, within
four miles of Abbotsford, and, so far, we had heard nothing of it. I
remember going with one of the maids into the cottage of a kinsman of
hers, a carpenter; a delightful place, where there was sawdust, where our
first fishing-rods were fashioned. Rummaging among the books, of course,
I found some cheap periodical with verses in it. The lines began--
"The Baron of Smaylhome rose with day,
He spurred his courser on,
Without stop or stay, down the rocky way
That leads to Brotherstone."
A rustic tea-table was spread for us, with scones and honey, not to be
neglected. But they _were_ neglected till we had learned how--
"The sable score of fingers four
Remains on that board impressed,
And for evermore that lady wore
A covering on her wrist."
We did not know nor ask the poet's name. Children, probably, say very
little about what is in their minds; but that unhappy knight, Sir Richard
of Coldinghame, and the Priest, with his chamber in the east, and the
moody Baron, and the Lady, have dwelt in our mind ever since, and hardly
need to be revived by looking at "The Eve of St. John."
Soon after that we were told about Sir Walter, how great he was, how
good, how, like Napoleon, his evil destiny found him at last, and he wore
his heart away for honour's sake. And we were given the "Lay," and "The
Lady of the Lake." It was my father who first read "Tam o' Shanter" to
me, for which I confess I did not care at that time, preferring to take
witches and bogies with great seriousness. It seemed as if Burns were
trifling with a noble subject. But it was in a summer sunset, beside a
window looking out on Ettrick and the hill of the Three Brethren's Cairn,
that I first read, with the dearest of all friends, how--
"The stag at eve had drunk his fill
Where danced the moon on Monan's rill,
And deep his midnight lair had made
In lone Glenartney's hazel shade."
Then opened the gates of romance, and with Fitz-James we drove the chase,
till--
"Few were the stragglers, following far,
That reached the lake of Vennachar,
And when the Brig of Turk was won,
The foremost horseman rode alone."
From that time, for months, there was usually a little volume of Scott in
one's pocket, in company with the miscellaneous collection of a boy's
treasures. Scott certainly took his fairy folk seriously, and the Mauth
Dog was rather a disagreeable companion to a small boy in wakeful hours.
{1} After this kind of introduction to Sir Walter, after learning one's
first lessons in history from the "Tales of a Grandfather," nobody, one
hopes, can criticise him in cold blood, or after the manner of Mr. Leslie
Stephen, who is not sentimental. Scott is not an author like another,
but our earliest known friend in letters; for, of course, we did not ask
who Shakespeare was, nor inquire about the private history of Madame
d'Aulnoy. Scott peopled for us the rivers and burnsides with his
reivers; the Fairy Queen came out of Eildon Hill and haunted Carterhaugh;
at Newark Tower we saw "the embattled portal arch"--
"Whose ponderous grate and massy bar
Had oft rolled back the tide of war,"--
just as, at Foulshiels, on Yarrow, we beheld the very roofless cottage
whence Mungo Park went forth to trace the waters of the Niger, and at
Oakwood the tower of the Wizard Michael Scott.
Probably the first novel I ever read was read at Elgin, and the story was
"Jane Eyre." This tale was a creepy one for a boy of nine, and Rochester
was a mystery, St. John a bore. But the lonely little girl in her
despair, when something came into the room, and her days of starvation at
school, and the terrible first Mrs. Rochester, were not to be forgotten.
They abide in one's recollection with a Red Indian's ghost, who carried a
rusty ruined gun, and whose acquaintance was made at the same time.
I fancy I was rather an industrious little boy, and that I had minded my
lessons, and satisfied my teachers--I know I was reading Pinnock's
"History of Rome" for pleasure--till "the wicked day of destiny" came,
and I felt a "call," and underwent a process which may be described as
the opposite of "conversion." The "call" came from Dickens. "Pickwick"
was brought into the house. From that hour it was all over, for five or
six years, with anything like industry and lesson-books. I read
"Pickwick" in convulsions of mirth. I dropped Pinnock's "Rome" for good.
I neglected everything printed in Latin, in fact everything that one was
understood to prepare for one's classes in the school whither I was now
sent, in Edinburgh. For there, living a rather lonely small boy in the
house of an aged relation, I found the Waverley Novels. The rest is
transport. A conscientious tutor dragged me through the Latin grammar,
and a constitutional dislike to being beaten on the hands with a leather
strap urged me to acquire a certain amount of elementary erudition. But,
for a year, I was a young hermit, living with Scott in the "Waverleys"
and the "Border Minstrelsy," with Pope, and Prior, and a translation of
Ariosto, with Lever and Dickens, David Copperfield and Charles O'Malley,
Longfellow and Mayne Reid, Dumas, and in brief, with every kind of light
literature that I could lay my hands upon. Carlyle did not escape me; I
vividly remember the helpless rage with which I read of the Flight to
Varennes. In his work on French novelists, Mr. Saintsbury speaks of a
disagreeable little boy, in a French romance, who found Scott
_assommant_, stunningly stupid. This was a very odious little boy, it
seems (I have not read his adventures), and he came, as he deserved, to a
bad end. Other and better boys, I learn, find Scott "slow."
Extraordinary boys! Perhaps "Ivanhoe" was first favourite of yore; you
cannot beat Front de Boeuf, the assault on his castle, the tournament. No
other tournament need apply. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, greatly daring, has
attempted to enter the lists, but he is a mere Ralph the Hospitaller.
Next, I think, in order of delight, came "Quentin Durward," especially
the hero of the scar, whose name Thackeray could not remember, Quentin's
uncle. Then "The Black Dwarf," and Dugald, our dear Rittmeister. I
could not read "Rob Roy" then, nor later; nay, not till I was forty. Now
Di Vernon is the lady for me; the queen of fiction, the peerless, the
brave, the tender, and true.
The wisdom of the authorities decided that I was to read no more novels,
but, as an observer remarked, "I don't see what is the use of preventing
the boy from reading novels, for he's just reading 'Don Juan' instead."
This was so manifestly no improvement, that the ban on novels was tacitly
withdrawn, or was permitted to become a dead letter. They were far more
enjoyable than Byron. The worst that came of this was the suggestion of
a young friend, whose life had been adventurous--indeed he had served in
the Crimea with the Bashi Bazouks--that I should master the writings of
Edgar Poe. I do not think that the "Black Cat," and the "Fall of the
House of Usher," and the "Murders in the Rue Morgue," are very good
reading for a boy who is not peculiarly intrepid. Many a bad hour they
gave me, haunting me, especially, with a fear of being prematurely
buried, and of waking up before breakfast to find myself in a coffin. Of
all the books I devoured in that year, Poe is the only author whom I wish
I had reserved for later consideration, and whom I cannot conscientiously
recommend to children.
I had already enjoyed a sip of Thackeray, reading at a venture, in
"Vanity Fair," about the Battle of Waterloo. It was not like Lever's
accounts of battles, but it was enchanting. However, "Vanity Fair" was
under a taboo. It is not easy to say why; but Mr. Thackeray himself
informed a small boy, whom he found reading "Vanity Fair" under the
table, that he had better read something else. What harm can the story
do to a child? He reads about Waterloo, about fat Jos, about little
George and the pony, about little Rawdon and the rat-hunt, and is happy
and unharmed.
Leaving my hermitage, and going into the very different and very
disagreeable world of a master's house, I was lucky enough to find a
charming library there. Most of Thackeray was on the shelves, and
Thackeray became the chief enchanter. As Henry Kingsley says, a boy
reads him and thinks he knows all about life. I do not think that the
mundane parts, about Lady Kew and her wiles, about Ethel and the Marquis
of Farintosh, appealed to one or enlightened one. Ethel was a mystery,
and not an interesting mystery, though one used to copy Doyle's pictures
of her, with the straight nose, the impossible eyes, the impossible
waist. It was not Ethel who captivated us; it was Clive's youth and art,
it was J. J., the painter, it was jolly F. B. and his address to the maid
about the lobster. "A finer fish, Mary, my dear, I have never seen. Does
not this solve the vexed question whether lobsters are fish, in the
French sense?" Then "The Rose and the Ring" came out. It was worth
while to be twelve years old, when the Christmas books were written by
Dickens and Thackeray. I got hold of "The Rose and the Ring," I know,
and of the "Christmas Carol," when they were damp from the press. King
Valoroso, and Bulbo, and Angelica were even more delightful than Scrooge,
and Tiny Tim, and Trotty Veck. One remembers the fairy monarch more
vividly, and the wondrous array of egg-cups from which he sipped
brandy--or was it right Nantes?--still "going on sipping, I am sorry to
say," even after "Valoroso was himself again."
But, of all Thackeray's books, I suppose "Pendennis" was the favourite.
The delightful Marryat had entertained us with Peter Simple and O'Brien
(how good their flight through France is!) with Mesty and Mr. Midshipman
Easy, with Jacob Faithful (Mr. Thackeray's favourite), and with
Snarleyyow; but Marryat never made us wish to run away to sea. That did
not seem to be one's vocation. But the story of Pen made one wish to run
away to literature, to the Temple, to streets where Brown, the famous
reviewer, might be seen walking with his wife and umbrella. The writing
of poems "up to" pictures, the beer with Warrington in the mornings, the
suppers in the back-kitchen, these were the alluring things, not society,
and Lady Rockminster, and Lord Steyne. Well, one has run away to
literature since, but where is the matutinal beer? Where is the back-
kitchen? Where are Warrington, and Foker, and F. B.? I have never met
them in this living world, though Brown, the celebrated reviewer, is
familiar to me, and also Mr. Sydney Scraper, of the Oxford and Cambridge
Club. Perhaps back-kitchens exist, perhaps there are cakes and ale in
the life literary, and F. B. may take his walks by the Round Pond. But
one never encounters these rarities, and Bungay and Bacon are no longer
the innocent and ignorant rivals whom Thackeray drew. They do not give
those wonderful parties; Miss Bunnion has become quite conventional;
Percy Popjoy has abandoned letters; Mr. Wenham does not toady; Mr. Wagg
does not joke any more. The literary life is very like any other, in
London, or is it that we do not see it aright, not having the eyes of
genius? Well, a life on the ocean wave, too, may not be so desirable as
it seems in Marryat's novels: so many a lad whom he tempted into the navy
has discovered. The best part of the existence of a man of letters is
his looking forward to it through the spectacles of Titmarsh.
One can never say how much one owes to a school-master who was a friend
of literature, who kept a houseful of books, and who was himself a
graceful scholar, and an author, while he chose to write, of poetic and
humorous genius. Such was the master who wrote the "Day Dreams of a
Schoolmaster," Mr. D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, to whom, in this place, I
am glad to confess my gratitude after all these many years. While we
were deep in the history of Pendennis we were also being dragged through
the Commentaries of Caius Julius Caesar, through the Latin and Greek
grammars, through Xenophon, and the Eclogues of Virgil, and a depressing
play of Euripides, the "Phoenissae." I can never say how much I detested
these authors, who, taken in small doses, are far, indeed, from being
attractive. Horace, to a lazy boy, appears in his Odes to have nothing
to say, and to say it in the most frivolous and vexatious manner. Then
Cowper's "Task," or "Paradise Lost," as school-books, with notes, seems
arid enough to a school-boy. I remember reading ahead, in Cowper,
instead of attending to the lesson and the class-work. His observations
on public schools were not uninteresting, but the whole English school-
work of those days was repugnant. One's English education was all got
out of school.
As to Greek, for years it seemed a mere vacuous terror; one invented for
one's self all the current arguments against "compulsory Greek." What
was the use of it, who ever spoke in it, who could find any sense in it,
or any interest? A language with such cruel superfluities as a middle
voice and a dual; a language whose verbs were so fantastically irregular,
looked like a barbaric survival, a mere plague and torment. So one
thought till Homer was opened before us. Elsewhere I have tried to
describe the vivid delight of first reading Homer, delight, by the way,
which St. Augustine failed to appreciate. Most boys not wholly immersed
in dulness felt it, I think; to myself, for one, Homer was the real
beginning of study. One had tried him, when one was very young, in Pope,
and had been baffled by Pope, and his artificial manner, his "fairs," and
"swains." Homer seemed better reading in the absurd "crib" which Mr.
Buckley wrote for Bohn's series. Hector and Ajax, in that disguise, were
as great favourites as Horatius on the Bridge, or the younger Tarquin.
Scott, by the way, must have made one a furious and consistent
Legitimist. In reading the "Lays of Ancient Rome," my sympathies were
with the expelled kings, at least with him who fought so well at Lake
Regillus:--
"Titus, the youngest Tarquin,
Too good for such a breed."
Where--
"Valerius struck at Titus,
And lopped off half his crest;
But Titus stabbed Valerius
A span deep in the breast,"--
I find, on the margin of my old copy, in a schoolboy's hand, the words
"Well done, the Jacobites!" Perhaps my politics have never gone much
beyond this sentiment. But this is a digression from Homer. The very
sound of the hexameter, that long, inimitable roll of the most various
music, was enough to win the heart, even if the words were not
understood. But the words proved unexpectedly easy to understand, full
as they are of all nobility, all tenderness, all courage, courtesy, and
romance. The "Morte d'Arthur" itself, which about this time fell into
our hands, was not so dear as the "Odyssey," though for a boy to read Sir
Thomas Malory is to ride at adventure in enchanted forests, to enter
haunted chapels where a light shines from the Graal, to find by lonely
mountain meres the magic boat of Sir Galahad.
After once being initiated into the mysteries of Greece by Homer, the
work at Greek was no longer tedious. Herodotus was a charming and
humorous story-teller, and, as for Thucydides, his account of the
Sicilian Expedition and its ending was one of the very rare things in
literature which almost, if not quite, brought tears into one's eyes. Few
passages, indeed, have done that, and they are curiously discrepant. The
first book that ever made me cry, of which feat I was horribly ashamed,
was "Uncle Tom's Cabin," with the death of Eva, Topsy's friend. Then it
was trying when Colonel Newcome said _Adsum_, and the end of Socrates in
the _Phaedo_ moved one more than seemed becoming--these, and a passage in
the history of Skalagrim Lamb's Tail, and, as I said, the ruin of the
Athenians in the Syracusan Bay. I have read these chapters in an old
French version derived through the Italian from a Latin translation of
Thucydides. Even in this far-descended form, the tale keeps its pathos;
the calm, grave stamp of that tragic telling cannot be worn away by much
handling, by long time, by the many changes of human speech. "Others
too," says Nicias, in that fatal speech, when--
"_All was done that men may do_,
_And all was done in vain_,"--
"having achieved what men may, have borne what men must." This is the
very burden of life, and the last word of tragedy. For now all is vain:
courage, wisdom, piety, the bravery of Lamachus, the goodness of Nicias,
the brilliance of Alcibiades, all are expended, all wasted, nothing of
that brave venture abides, except torture, defeat, and death. No play
not poem of individual fortunes is so moving as this ruin of a people; no
modern story can stir us, with all its eloquence, like the brief gravity
of this ancient history. Nor can we find, at the last, any wisdom more
wise than that which bids us do what men may, and bear what men must.
Such are the lessons of the Greek, of the people who tried all things, in
the morning of the world, and who still speak to us of what they tried in
words which are the sum of human gaiety and gloom, of grief and triumph,
hope and despair. The world, since their day, has but followed in the
same round, which only seems new: has only made the same experiments, and
failed with the same failure, but less gallantly and less gloriously.
One's school-boy adventures among books ended not long after winning the
friendship of Homer and Thucydides, of Lucretius and Catullus. One's
application was far too desultory to make a serious and accurate scholar.
I confess to having learned the classical languages, as it were by
accident, for the sake of what is in them, and with a provokingly
imperfect accuracy. Cricket and trout occupied far too much of my mind
and my time: Christopher North, and Walton, and Thomas Tod Stoddart, and
"The Moor and the Loch," were my holiday reading, and I do not regret it.
Philologists and Ireland scholars are not made so, but you can, in no
way, fashion a scholar out of a casual and inaccurate intelligence. The
true scholar is one whom I envy, almost as much as I respect him; but
there is a kind of mental short-sightedness, where accents and verbal
niceties are concerned, which cannot be sharpened into true scholarship.
Yet, even for those afflicted in this way, and with the malady of being
"idle, careless little boys," the ancient classics have a value for which
there is no substitute. There is a charm in finding ourselves--our
common humanity, our puzzles, our cares, our joys, in the writings of men
severed from us by race, religion, speech, and half the gulf of
historical time--which no other literary pleasure can equal. Then there
is to be added, as the university preacher observed, "the pleasure of
despising our fellow-creatures who do not know Greek." Doubtless in that
there is great consolation.
It would be interesting, were it possible, to know what proportion of
people really care for poetry, and how the love of poetry came to them,
and grew in them, and where and when it stopped. Modern poets whom one
meets are apt to say that poetry is not read at all. Byron's Murray
ceased to publish poetry in 1830, just when Tennyson and Browning were
striking their preludes. Probably Mr. Murray was wise in his generation.
But it is also likely that many persons, even now, are attached to
poetry, though they certainly do not buy contemporary verse. How did the
passion come to them? How long did it stay? When did the Muse say good-
bye? To myself, as I have remarked, poetry came with Sir Walter Scott,
for one read Shakespeare as a child, rather in a kind of dream of
fairyland and enchanted isles, than with any distinct consciousness that
one was occupied with poetry. Next to Scott, with me, came Longfellow,
who pleased one as more reflective and tenderly sentimental, while the
reflections were not so deep as to be puzzling. I remember how
"Hiawatha" came out, when one was a boy, and how delightful was the free
forest life, and Minnehaha, and Paupukkeewis, and Nokomis. One did not
then know that the same charm, with a yet fresher dew upon it, was to
meet one later, in the "Kalewala." But, at that time, one had no
conscious pleasure in poetic style, except in such ringing verse as
Scott's, and Campbell's in his patriotic pieces. The pleasure and
enchantment of style first appealed to me, at about the age of fifteen,
when one read for the first time--
"So all day long the noise of battle rolled
Among the mountains by the winter sea;
Until King Arthur's Table, man by man,
Had fallen in Lyonnesse about their Lord."
Previously one had only heard of Mr. Tennyson as a name. When a child I
was told that a poet was coming to a house in the Highlands where we
chanced to be, a poet named Tennyson. "Is he a poet like Sir Walter
Scott?" I remember asking, and was told, "No, he was not like Sir Walter
Scott." Hearing no more of him, I was prowling among the books in an
ancient house, a rambling old place with a ghost-room, where I found
Tupper, and could not get on with "Proverbial Philosophy." Next I tried
Tennyson, and instantly a new light of poetry dawned, a new music was
audible, a new god came into my medley of a Pantheon, a god never to be
dethroned. "Men scarcely know how beautiful fire is," Shelley says. I
am convinced that we scarcely know how great a poet Lord Tennyson is; use
has made him too familiar. The same hand has "raised the Table Round
again," that has written the sacred book of friendship, that has lulled
us with the magic of the "Lotus Eaters," and the melody of "Tithonus." He
has made us move, like his own Prince--
"Among a world of ghosts,
And feel ourselves the shadows of a dream."
He has enriched our world with conquests of romance; he has recut and
reset a thousand ancient gems of Greece and Rome; he has roused our
patriotism; he has stirred our pity; there is hardly a human passion but
he has purged it and ennobled it, including "this of love." Truly, the
Laureate remains the most various, the sweetest, the most exquisite, the
most learned, the most Virgilian of all English poets, and we may pity
the lovers of poetry who died before Tennyson came.
Here may end the desultory tale of a desultory bookish boyhood. It was
not in nature that one should not begin to rhyme for one's self. But
those exercises were seldom even written down; they lived a little while
in a memory which has lost them long ago. I do remember me that I tried
some of my attempts on my dear mother, who said much what Dryden said to
"Cousin Swift," "You will never be a poet," a decision in which I
straightway acquiesced. For to rhyme is one thing, to be a poet quite
another. A good deal of mortification would be avoided if young men and
maidens only kept this obvious fact well posed in front of their vanity
and their ambition.
In these bookish memories I have said nothing about religion and
religious books, for various reasons. But, unlike other Scots of the
pen, I got no harm from "The Shorter Catechism," of which I remember
little, and neither then nor now was or am able to understand a single
sentence. Some precocious metaphysicians comprehended and stood aghast
at justification, sanctification, adoption, and effectual calling. These,
apparently, were necessary processes in the Scottish spiritual life. But
we were not told what they meant, nor were we distressed by a sense that
we had not passed through them. From most children, one trusts,
Calvinism ran like water off a duck's back; unlucky were they who first
absorbed, and later were compelled to get rid of, "The Shorter
Catechism!"
One good thing, if no more, these memories may accomplish. Young men,
especially in America, write to me and ask me to recommend "a course of
reading." Distrust a course of reading! People who really care for
books _read all of them_. There is no other course. Let this be a
reply. No other answer shall they get from me, the inquiring young men.
II
People talk, in novels, about the delights of a first love. One may
venture to doubt whether everybody exactly knows which was his, or her,
first love, of men or women, but about our first loves in books there can
be no mistake. They were, and remain, the dearest of all; after boyhood
the bloom is off the literary rye. The first parcel of these garrulities
ended when the author left school, at about the age of seventeen. One's
literary equipment seems to have been then almost as complete as it ever
will be, one's tastes definitely formed, one's favourites already chosen.
As long as we live we hope to read, but we never can "recapture the first
fine careless rapture." Besides, one begins to write, and that is fatal.
My own first essays were composed at school--for other boys. Not long
ago the gentleman who was then our English master wrote to me, informing
me he was my earliest public, and that he had never credited my younger
brother with the essays which that unscrupulous lad ("I speak of him but
brotherly") was accustomed to present for his consideration.
On leaving school at seventeen I went to St. Leonard's Hall, in the
University of St. Andrews. That is the oldest of Scotch universities,
and was founded by a papal bull. St. Leonard's Hall, after having been a
_hospitium_ for pilgrims, a home for old ladies (about 1500), and a
college in the University, was now a kind of cross between a master's
house at school, and, as before 1750, a college. We had more liberty
than schoolboys, less than English undergraduates. In the Scotch
universities the men live scattered, in lodgings, and only recently, at
St. Andrews, have they begun to dine together in hall. We had a common
roof, common dinners, wore scarlet gowns, possessed football and cricket
clubs, and started, of course, a kind of weekly magazine. It was only a
manuscript affair, and was profusely illustrated. For the only time in
my life, I was now an editor, under a sub-editor, who kept me up to my
work, and cut out my fine passages. The editor's duty was to write most
of the magazine--to write essays, reviews (of books by the professors,
very severe), novels, short stories, poems, translations, also to
illustrate these, and to "fag" his friends for "copy" and drawings. A
deplorable flippancy seems, as far as one remembers, to have been the
chief characteristic of the periodical--flippancy and an abundant use of
the supernatural. These were the days of Lord' Lytton's "Strange Story,"
which I continue to think a most satisfactory romance. Inspired by Lord
Lytton, and aided by the University library, I read Cornelius Agrippa,
Trithemius, Petrus de Abano, Michael Scott, and struggled with Iamblichus
and Plotinus.
These are really but disappointing writers. It soon became evident
enough that the devil was not to be raised by their prescriptions, that
the philosopher's stone was beyond the reach of the amateur. Iamblichus
is particularly obscure and tedious. To any young beginner I would
recommend Petrus de Abano, as the most adequate and gruesome of the
school, for "real deevilry and pleesure," while in the wilderness of
Plotinus there are many beautiful passages and lofty speculations. Two
winters in the Northern University, with the seamy side of school life
left behind, among the kindest of professors--Mr. Sellar, Mr. Ferrier,
Mr. Shairp--in the society of the warden, Mr. Rhoades, and of many dear
old friends, are the happiest time in my life. This was true literary
leisure, even if it was not too well employed, and the _religio loci_
should be a liberal education in itself. We had debating societies--I
hope I am now forgiven for an attack on the character of Sir William
Wallace, _latro quidam_, as the chronicler calls him, "a certain
brigand." But I am for ever writing about St. Andrews--writing
inaccurately, too, the Scotch critics declare. "Farewell," we cried,
"dear city of youth and dream," eternally dear and sacred.
Here we first made acquaintance with Mr. Browning, guided to his works by
a parody which a lady wrote in our little magazine. Mr. Browning was not
a popular poet in 1861. His admirers were few, a little people, but they
were not then in the later mood of reverence, they did not awfully
question the oracles, as in after years. They read, they admired, they
applauded, on occasion they mocked, good-humouredly. The book by which
Mr. Browning was best known was the two green volumes of "Men and Women."
In these, I still think, is the heart of his genius beating most
strenuously and with an immortal vitality. Perhaps this, for its
compass, is the collection of poetry the most various and rich of modern
English times, almost of any English times. But just as Mr. Fitzgerald
cared little for what Lord Tennyson wrote after 1842, so I have never
been able to feel quite the same enthusiasm for Mr. Browning's work after
"Men and Women." He seems to have more influence, though that influence
is vague, on persons who chiefly care for thought, than on those who
chiefly care for poetry. I have met a lady who had read "The Ring and
the Book" often, the "Lotus Eaters" not once. Among such students are
Mr. Browning's disciples of the Inner Court: I dwell but in the Court of
the Gentiles. While we all--all who attempt rhyme--have more or less
consciously imitated the manner of Lord Tennyson, Mr. Swinburne, Mr.
Rossetti, such imitations of Mr. Browning are uncommonly scarce. He is
lucky enough not to have had the seed of his flower stolen and sown
everywhere till--
"Once again the people
Called it but a weed."
The other new poet of these days was Mr. Clough, who has many
undergraduate qualities. But his peculiar wistful scepticism in religion
had then no influence on such of us as were still happily in the ages of
faith. Anything like doubt comes less of reading, perhaps, than of the
sudden necessity which, in almost every life, puts belief on her trial,
and cries for an examination of the creeds hitherto held upon authority,
and by dint of use and wont. In a different way one can hardly care for
Mr. Matthew Arnold, as a boy, till one has come under the influence of
Oxford. So Mr. Browning was the only poet added to my pantheon at St.
Andrews, though Macaulay then was admitted and appeared to be more the
true model of a prose writer than he seems in the light of later
reflection. Probably we all have a period of admiring Carlyle almost
exclusively. College essays, when the essayist cares for his work, are
generally based on one or the other. Then they recede into the
background. As for their thought, we cannot for ever remain disciples.
We begin to see how much that looks like thought is really the expression
of temperament, and how individual a thing temperament is, how each of us
must construct his world for himself, or be content to wait for an answer
and a synthesis "in that far-off divine event to which the whole creation
moves." So, for one, in these high matters, I must be content as a
"masterless man" swearing by no philosopher, unless he be the imperial
Stoic of the hardy heart, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus.
Perhaps nothing in education encourages this incredulity about "masters"
of thought like the history of philosophy. The professor of moral
philosophy, Mr. Ferrier, was a famous metaphysician and scholar. His
lectures on "The History of Greek Philosophy" were an admirable
introduction to the subject, afterwards pursued, in the original
authorities, at Oxford. Mr. Ferrier was an exponent of other men's ideas
so fair and persuasive that, in each new school, we thought we had
discovered the secret. We were physicists with Thales and that
pre-Socratic "company of gallant gentlemen" for whom Sydney Smith
confessed his lack of admiration. We were now Empedocleans, now
believers in Heraclitus, now in Socrates, now in Plato, now in Aristotle.
In each lecture our professor set up a new master and gently
disintegrated him in the next. "Amurath to Amurath succeeds," as Mr. T.
H. Green used to say at Oxford. He himself became an Amurath, a sultan
of thought, even before his apotheosis as the guide of that bewildered
clergyman, Mr. Robert Elsmere. At Oxford, when one went there, one found
Mr. Green already in the position of a leader of thought, and of young
men. He was a tutor of Balliol, and lectured on Aristotle, and of him
eager youth said, in the words of Omar Khayyam, "_He knows_! _he knows_!"
What was it that Mr. Green knew? Where was the secret? To a mind
already sceptical about masters, it seemed that the secret (apart from
the tutor's noble simplicity and rare elevation of character) was a knack
of translating St. John and Aristotle alike into a terminology which we
then believed to be Hegelian. Hegel we knew, not in the original German,
but in lectures and in translations. Reasoning from these inadequate
premises, it seemed to me that Hegel had invented evolution before Mr.
Darwin, that his system showed, so to speak, the spirit at work in
evolution, the something within the wheels. But this was only a personal
impression made on a mind which knew Darwin, and physical speculations in
general, merely in the vague popular way. Mr. Green's pupils could
generally write in his own language, more or less, and could "envisage"
things, as we said then, from his point of view. To do this was
believed, probably without cause, to be useful in examinations. For one,
I could never take it much more seriously, never believed that "the
Absolute," as the _Oxford Spectator_ said, had really been "got into a
corner." The Absolute has too often been apparently cornered, too often
has escaped from that situation. Somewhere in an old notebook I believe
I have a portrait in pencil of Mr. Green as he wrestled at lecture with
Aristotle, with the Notion, with his chair and table. Perhaps he was the
last of that remarkable series of men, who may have begun with Wycliffe,
among whom Newman's is a famous name, that were successively accepted at
Oxford as knowing something esoteric, as possessing a shrewd guess at the
secret.
"None the less
I still came out no wiser than I went."
All of these masters and teachers made their mark, probably won their
hold, in the first place, by dint of character, not of some peculiar
views of theology and philosophy. Doubtless it was the same with
Socrates, with Buddha. To be like them, not to believe with them, is the
thing needful. But the younger we are, the less, perhaps, we see this
clearly, and we persuade ourselves that there is some mystery in these
men's possession, some piece of knowledge, some method of thinking which
will lead us to certainty and to peace. Alas, their secret is
incommunicable, and there is no more a philosophic than there is a royal
road to the City.
This may seem a digression from Adventures among Books into the Book of
Human Life. But while much of education is still orally communicated by
lectures and conversations, many thoughts which are to be found in books,
Greek or German, reach us through the hearing. There are many pupils who
can best be taught in this way; but, for one, if there be aught that is
desirable in a book, I then, as now, preferred, if I could, to go to the
book for it.
Yet it is odd that one remembers so little of one's undergraduate
readings, apart from the constant study of the ancient classics, which
might not be escaped. Of these the calm wisdom of Aristotle, in moral
thought and in politics, made perhaps the deepest impression. Probably
politicians are the last people who read Aristotle's "Politics." The
work is, indeed, apt to disenchant one with political life. It is
melancholy to see the little Greek states running the regular
round--monarchy, oligarchy, tyranny, democracy in all its degrees, the
"ultimate democracy" of plunder, lawlessness, license of women, children,
and slaves, and then tyranny again, or subjection to some foreign power.
In politics, too, there is no secret of success, of the happy life for
all. There is no such road to the City, either democratic or royal. This
is the lesson which Aristotle's "Polities" impresses on us, this and the
impossibility of imposing ideal constitutions on mankind.
"Whate'er is best administered is best." These are some of the
impressions made at Oxford by the studies of the schools, the more or
less inevitable "curricoolum," as the Scotch gentleman pronounced the
word. But at Oxford, for most men, the regular work of the schools is
only a small part of the literary education. People read, in different
degrees, according to their private tastes. There are always a few men,
at least, who love literary studies for their own sake, regardless of
lectures and of "classes." In my own time I really believe you could
know nothing which might not "pay" in the schools and prove serviceable
in examinations. But a good deal depended on being able to use your
knowledge by way of literary illustration. Perhaps the cleverest of my
own juniors, since very well known in letters, did not use his own
special vein, even when he had the chance, in writing answers to
questions in examinations. Hence his academic success was much below his
deserts. For my own part, I remember my tutor saying, "Don't write as if
you were writing for a penny paper." Alas, it was "a prediction, cruel,
smart." But, "as yet no sin was dreamed."
At my own college we had to write weekly essays, alternately in English
and Latin. This might have been good literary training, but I fear the
essays were not taken very seriously. The chief object was to make the
late learned Dr. Scott bound on his chair by paradoxes. But nobody ever
succeeded. He was experienced in trash. As for what may be called
unacademic literature, there were not many essays in that art. There
have been very literary generations, as when Corydon and Thyrsis "lived
in Oxford as if it had been a great country house;" so Corydon confessed.
Probably many of the poems by Mr. Matthew Arnold and many of Mr.
Swinburne's early works were undergraduate poems. A later generation
produced "Love in Idleness," a very pleasing volume. But the gods had
not made us poetical. In those days I remember picking up, in the Union
Reading-room, a pretty white quarto, "Atalanta in Calydon," by A. C.
Swinburne. Only once had I seen Mr. Swinburne's name before, signing a
brief tale in _Once a Week_. "Atalanta" was a revelation; there was a
new and original poet here, a Balliol man, too. In my own mind
"Atalanta" remains the best, the most beautiful, the most musical of Mr.
Swinburne's many poems. He instantly became the easily parodied model of
undergraduate versifiers.
Swinburnian prize poems, even, were attempted, without success. As yet
we had not seen Mr. Matthew Arnold's verses. I fell in love with them,
one long vacation, and never fell out of love. He is not, and cannot be,
the poet of the wide world, but his charm is all the more powerful over
those whom he attracts and subdues. He is the one Oxford poet of Oxford,
and his "Scholar Gypsy" is our "Lycidas." At this time he was Professor
of Poetry; but, alas, he lectured just at the hour when wickets were
pitched on Cowley Marsh, and I never was present at his discourses, at
his humorous prophecies of England's fate, which are coming all too true.
So many weary lectures had to be attended, could not be "cut," that we
abstained from lectures of supererogation, so to speak. For the rest
there was no "literary movement" among contemporary undergraduates. They
read for the schools, and they rowed and played cricket. We had no
poets, except the stroke of the Corpus boat, Mr. Bridges, and he
concealed his courtship of the Muse. Corpus is a small college, but Mr.
Bridges pulled its boat to the proud place of second on the river. B. N.
C. was the head boat, and even B. N. C. did Corpus bump. But the triumph
was brief. B. N. C. made changes in its crew, got a new ship, drank the
foaming grape, and bumped Corpus back. I think they went head next year,
but not that year. Thus Mr. Bridges, as Kingsley advises, was doing
noble deeds, not dreaming them, at that moment.
There existed a periodical entirely devoted to verse, but nobody knew
anybody who wrote in it. A comic journal was started; I remember the
pride with which when a freshman, I received an invitation to join its
councils as an artist. I was to do the caricatures of all things. Now,
methought, I shall meet the Oxford wits of whom I have read. But the
wits were unutterably disappointing, and the whole thing died early and
not lamented. Only one piece of academic literature obtained and
deserved success. This was _The Oxford Spectator_, a most humorous
little periodical, in shape and size like Addison's famous journal. The
authors were Mr. Reginald Copleston, now Bishop of Colombo, Mr. Humphry
Ward, and Mr. Nolan, a great athlete, who died early. There have been
good periodicals since; many amusing things occur in the _Echoes from the
Oxford Magazine_, but the _Spectator_ was the flower of academic
journals. "When I look back to my own experience," says the _Spectator_,
"I find one scene, of all Oxford, most deeply engraved upon 'the mindful
tablets of my soul.' And yet not a scene, but a fairy compound of smell
and sound, and sight and thought. The wonderful scent of the meadow air
just above Iffley, on a hot May evening, and the gay colours of twenty
boats along the shore, the poles all stretched out from the bank to set
the boats clear, and the sonorous cries of 'ten seconds more,' all down
from the green barge to the lasher. And yet that unrivalled moment is
only typical of all the term; the various elements of beauty and pleasure
are concentrated there."
Unfortunately, life at Oxford is not all beauty and pleasure. Things go
wrong somehow. Life drops her happy mask. But this has nothing to do
with books.
About books, however, I have not many more confessions that I care to
make. A man's old self is so far away that he can speak about it and its
adventures almost as if he were speaking about another who is dead. After
taking one's degree, and beginning to write a little for publication, the
topic has a tendency to become much more personal. My last undergraduate
literary discoveries were of France and the Renaissance. Accidentally
finding out that I could read French, I naturally betook myself to
Balzac. If you read him straight on, without a dictionary, you begin to
learn a good many words. The literature of France has been much more
popular in England lately, but thirty years agone it was somewhat
neglected. There does seem to be something in French poetry which fails
to please "the German paste in our composition." Mr. Matthew Arnold, a
disciple of Sainte-Beuve, never could appreciate French poetry. A poet-
critic has even remarked that the French language is nearly incapable of
poetry! We cannot argue in such matters, where all depends on the taste
and the ear.
Our ancestors, like the author of the "Faery Queen," translated and
admired Du Bellay and Ronsard; to some critics of our own time this taste
seems a modish affectation. For one, I have ever found an original charm
in the lyrics of the Pleiad, and have taken great delight in Hugo's
amazing variety of music, in the romance of Alfred de Musset, in the
beautiful cameos of Gautier. What is poetical, if not the "Song of
Roland," the only true national epic since Homer? What is frank, natural
verse, if not that of the old _Pastourelles_? Where is there _naivete_
of narrative and unconscious charm, if not in _Aucassin et Nicolette_? In
the long normally developed literature of France, so variously rich, we
find the nearest analogy to the literature of Greece, though that of
England contains greater masterpieces, and her verse falls more winningly
on the ear. France has no Shakespeare and no Milton; we have no Moliere
and no "Song of Roland." One star differs from another in glory, but it
is a fortunate moment when this planet of France swims into our ken. Many
of our generation saw it first through Mr. Swinburne's telescope, heard
of it in his criticisms, and are grateful to that watcher of the skies,
even if we do not share all his transports. There then arose at Oxford,
out of old French, and old oak, and old china, a "school" or "movement."
It was aesthetic, and an early purchaser of Mr. William Morris's wall
papers. It existed ten or twelve years before the public "caught on," as
they say, to these delights. But, except one or two of the masters, the
school were only playing at aesthetics, and laughing at their own
performances. There was more fun than fashion in the cult, which was
later revived, developed, and gossiped about more than enough.
To a writer now dead, and then first met, I am specially bound in
gratitude--the late Mr. J. F. M'Lennan. Mr. M'Lennan had the most acute
and ingenious of minds which I have encountered. His writings on early
marriage and early religion were revelations which led on to others. The
topic of folklore, and the development of custom and myths, is not
generally attractive, to be sure. Only a few people seem interested in
that spectacle, so full of surprises--the development of all human
institutions, from fairy tales to democracy. In beholding it we learn
how we owe all things, humanly speaking, to the people and to genius. The
natural people, the folk, has supplied us, in its unconscious way, with
the stuff of all our poetry, law, ritual: and genius has selected from
the mass, has turned customs into codes, nursery tales into romance, myth
into science, ballad into epic, magic mummery into gorgeous ritual. The
world has been educated, but not as man would have trained and taught it.
"He led us by a way we knew not," led, and is leading us, we know not
whither; we follow in fear.
The student of this lore can look back and see the long trodden way
behind him, the winding tracks through marsh and forest and over burning
sands. He sees the caves, the camps, the villages, the towns where the
race has tarried, for shorter times or longer, strange places many of
them, and strangely haunted, desolate dwellings and inhospitable. But
the scarce visible tracks converge at last on the beaten ways, the ways
to that city whither mankind is wandering, and which it may never win. We
have a foreboding of a purpose which we know not, a sense as of will,
working, as we would not have worked, to a hidden end.
This is the lesson, I think, of what we call folklore or anthropology,
which to many seems trivial, to many seems dull. It may become the most
attractive and serious of the sciences; certainly it is rich in strange
curiosities, like those mystic stones which were fingered and arrayed by
the pupils in that allegory of Novalis. I am not likely to regret the
accident which brought me up on fairy tales, and the inquisitiveness
which led me to examine the other fragments of antiquity. But the poetry
and the significance of them are apt to be hidden by the enormous crowd
of details. Only late we find the true meaning of what seems like a mass
of fantastic, savage eccentricities. I very well remember the moment
when it occurred to me, soon after taking my degree, that the usual ideas
about some of these matters were the reverse of the truth, that the
common theory had to be inverted. The notion was "in the air," it had
already flashed on Mannhardt, probably, but, like the White Knight in
"Alice," I claimed it for "my own invention."
These reminiscences and reflections have now been produced as far as
1872, or thereabouts, and it is not my intention to pursue them further,
nor to speak of any living contemporaries who have not won their way to
the classical. In writing of friends and teachers at Oxford, I have not
ventured to express gratitude to those who still live, still teach, still
are the wisest and kindest friends of the hurrying generations. It is a
silence not of thanklessness, but of respect and devotion. About
others--contemporaries, or juniors by many years--who have instructed,
consoled, strengthened, and amused us, we must also be silent.