[Speech of Andrew Lang at the annual banquet of the Royal Academy,
London, May 6, 1894. This speech on some of the aspects of modern
fiction was delivered by Mr. Lang in response to the toast "The
Interests of Literature," regularly proposed on these occasions. The
President of the Academy, Sir Frederic Leighton, said in introducing
Mr. Lang: "Your Royal Highness, My Lords and Gentlemen: Let us drink
to the honor of science and of letters. If of the latter it may be
affirmed without fear that few things are more often misapprehended
than their true relation to art, it is not less certain that no body
of men are more than artists responsive to their stimulating force.
How closely science, which is knowledge, is interwoven on many sides
with art, it is needless here to say. In the name of letters I have to
call upon one of the most versatile of their votaries, a man whose
nimble intellect plays with luminous ease round many and various
subjects; delicate as a poet, acute and picturesque as a critic, a
sparkling journalist, no one has pursued with more earnest and more
fruitful zeal the graver study of the birth and evolution of natural
myths than Mr. Andrew Lang, to whom I turn for response."]
YOUR ROYAL HIGHNESS, MR. PRESIDENT, MY LORDS AND GENTLEMEN:--He
to whom it falls or rather on whom falls the task of replying for
English literature may well feel ground to dust by the ponderous honor.
Who can be the representative of such a Parnassian constituency of
divine poets, philosophers, romancers, historians, from Beowulf to the
last new novel? The consciousness is crushing. The momentary
representative feels himself to be like Mr. Chevy Slyme "the most
littery fellow in the world," who is over-borne like the bride of the
Lord of Burleigh--
"By the burden of an honor
Unto which she was not born."
Naturally he flies to thoughts which whisper of humility. He finds them
easily. In the first place literature is but a very insignificant flake
on the foam of the wave of the world. As Mr. Pepys reminds us, most
people please themselves "with easy delights of the world, eating,
drinking, dancing, hunting, fencing," and not with book learning. Easy
he calls them! I wish they were:--
"I cannot eat but little meat,
My stomach is not good."
Still less can I dance or hunt. Yet to the general public these things
come easier than reading; and their good-humored contempt keeps us poor
"littery gents" in our proper place and frame of mind. I have lately
read somewhere about a man of letters who conceived himself to be the
idol of the great and good-natured American people. They sent him the
kindest letters, they invited him to lecture, but ah! when his
publishers' accounts came in, he found there "To American sales: six and
twopence!" [Laughter.] Here is matter for mortification!
Again, one is not so much to speak for English literature as to speak
about it; one is not a representative but a reporter; we critics are but
the cagots or despised pariah class in the world of letters. If we ever
give in to the belief that we might attempt something creative, we, like
the insects celebrated by the poet, "have lesser" critics upon our backs
to bite us [laughter] and to remind us of our limitations. Our function
in the game is like that of the scorers and umpires at Lords or the
Oval; men of accurate intellectual habit, and incorruptible integrity
from whom not much is to be expected with bat or ball. We are not to do
anything "off our own bats." For these reasons I only talk humbly of
literature as an interested professional observer. When the philosopher
Square spoke of religion, he meant the true religion, and when he said
the true religion he indicated the Protestant religion, and by the
Protestant religion he meant the religion of the Church of England. In
the same way if I venture a few remarks on English literature I mean
modern English literature, and by modern English literature I mean
modern English novels.
We are indeed quite destitute of poets. As Henry V is said by a French
chronicler to have ennobled all his army on the eve of Agincourt, so
perhaps it might be well to make all our poets poets-laureate
[laughter]--there must be a sip for each of them in the butt of malmsey
or sack. But when the general public says "literature" the general
public means fiction.
Now, though I have some optimistic remarks to end with, it does appear
to myself that the British novel suffers from diverse banes or curses.
The first is the spread of elementary education. Too many naturally
non-literary people of all ranks are now goaded into acquiring a
knowledge of the invention of Cadmus. When nobody could read, except
people whose own literary nature impelled them to learn, better books
were written, because the public, if relatively few, was absolutely fit.
Secondly, these new educated people insist on our national cursed
"actuality." They live solely in the distracted moment, whereas true
literature lives in the absolute; in the past that perhaps never was
present, and that is eternal; "lives in fantasy."
Shakespeare did not write plays about contemporary problems. The Greek
dramatists deliberately chose their topics in the tales of Troy and
Thebes and Atreus's line. The very Fijians, as Mr. Paisley Thomson
informs us, "will tell of gods and giants and canoes greater than
mountains and of women fairer than the women of these days, and of
doings so strange that the jaws of the listeners fall apart." They do
not deal with "problems" about the propriety of cannibalism or the
casuistry of polygamy [Laughter.] The Athenians fined for his
_modernité_ the author of a play on the fall of Miletus because he
reminded them of their misfortunes. But many of our novelists do nothing
but remind us of our misfortunes. Novels are becoming tracts on parish
councils, free love and other inflammatory topics [laughter], and the
reason of this ruin is that the vast and the naturally non-literary
majority can now read, and of course can only read about the actual,
about the noisy wrangling moment. This is the bane of the actual.
Of course I do not maintain that contemporary life is tabooed against
novelists, but if novels of contemporary life are to be literature, are
to be permanent, that life must either be treated in the spirit of
romance and fantasy as by Balzac and the colossally fantastic Zola; or
in the spirit of humor as by Charles de Bernard, Fielding, Thackeray,
Dickens. The thrifty plan of giving us sermons, politics, fiction, all
in one stodgy sandwich [laughter] produces no permanent literature,
produces but temporary "Tracts for the Times."
Fortunately we have among us many novelists--young ones luckily--who are
true to the primitive and eternal Fijian canons of fiction. [Laughter.]
We have Oriental romance from the author of "Plain Tales from the
Hills." We have the humor and tenderness--certainly not Fijian I
admit--which produced the masterpiece, "A Window in Thrums." We have the
adventurous fancy that gives us "A Gentleman of France," "The Master of
Ballantrae," "Micah Clarke," "The Raiders," "The Prisoner of Zenda," and
the truly primeval or troglodyte imagination which, as we read of a
fight between a knob-nosed Kaffir dwarf and a sacred crocodile, brings
us in touch with the first hearers of Heracles's or Beowulf's or
Grettir's deeds, "so strange that the jaws of the listeners fall apart."
Thus we possess outlets for escape from ourselves and from to-day. We
can still dwell now and then in the same air of pleasure as our fathers
have breathed since the days of Homer.
Such are the rather intolerant ideas of a bookworm who by no means
grudges the pleasure which other readers receive from what does not
please him to enthusiasm. And pleasure, not edification, is the end of
all art. We are all pleased when we write; the public of one enthusiast
every author enjoys, and the literary men who depreciate the joys of
their own art or profession may not be consciously uncandid, but they
are decidedly perverse. [Laughter and applause.]