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 workmanship, 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 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
meditate 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 a native power. The old author, breaking with an
_eclat 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 student's 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
AEtatis tenerae
Nitidiorem
Veneris sidere:
Tunc columbinam
Mentis dulcedinem,
Nunc serpentinam
Amaritudinem.
Verbo rogantes
Removes ostio,
Munera dantes
Foves cubiculo,
Illos abire praecipis
A quibus nihil accipis,
Caecos claudosque recipis,
Viros illustres decipis
Cum melle venenosa.[1]
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 mediaeval 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 and 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 tongue was sometimes hardly
courteous and seldom wholly just.