and was, I think, unreasonably angry because a number of readers,
his own mother included, failed to see that he was in fun. Yet all
his life this mocking critic cherished in his secret soul of souls a
real affection for those hysterical old romances which had been the
delight of his boyhood, and which were even then rapidly disappearing
before the cold scorn of an enlightened world. Miss Austen, in Sense
and Sensibility, had impaled emotionalism on the fine shafts of her
delicate satire, and Macaulay was Miss Austen’s sworn champion; but
nevertheless he contrived to read and reread Mrs. Meek’s and Mrs.
Cuthbertson’s marvelous stories, until he probably knew them better
than he did Emma or Northanger Abbey. When an old edition of Santa
Sebastiano was sold at auction in India, he secured it at a fabulous
price,--Miss Eden bidding vigorously against him,--and he occupied
his leisure moments in making a careful calculation of the number of
fainting-fits that occur in the course of the five volumes. There are
twenty-seven in all, so he has recorded, of which the heroine alone
comes in for eleven, while seven others are distributed among the male
characters. Mr. Trevelyan has kindly preserved for us the description
of a single catastrophe, and we can no longer wonder at anybody’s
partiality for the tale, when we learn that “one of the sweetest smiles
that ever animated the face of mortal man now diffused itself over the
countenance of Lord St. Orville, as he fell at the feet of Julia in a
death-like swoon.” Mr. Howells would doubtless tell us that this is
not a true and accurate delineation of real life, and that what Lord
St. Orville should have done was to have simply wiped the perspiration
off his forehead, after the unvarnished fashion of Mr. Mavering, in
April Hopes. But Macaulay, who could mop his own brow whenever he felt
so disposed, and who recognized his utter inability to faint with a
sweet smile at a lady’s feet, naturally delighted in Mrs. Cuthbertson’s
singularly accomplished hero. Swooning is now, I fear, sadly out of
date. In society we no longer look upon it as a pleasing evidence
of feminine propriety, and in the modern novel nothing sufficiently
exciting to bring about such a result is ever permitted to happen.
But in the good old impossible stories of the past it formed a very
important element, and some of Mrs. Radcliffe’s heroines can easily
achieve twenty-seven fainting-fits by their own unaided industry. They
faint at the most inopportune times and under the most exasperating
circumstances: when they are running away from banditti, or hiding
from cruel relatives, or shut up by themselves in gloomy dungeons,
with nobody to look after and resuscitate them. Their trembling limbs
are always refusing to support them just when a little activity is
really necessary for safety, and, though they live in an atmosphere
of horrors, the smallest shock is more than they can endure with
equanimity. In the Sicilian Romance, Julia’s brother, desiring to speak
to her for a minute, knocks gently at her door, whereupon, with the
most unexpected promptness, “she shrieked and fainted;” and as the key
happens to be turned on the inside, he is obliged to wait in the hall
until she slowly regains her consciousness.
Nothing, however, can mar the decorous sentimentality which these
young people exhibit in all their loves and sorrows. Emily the
forlorn “touched the chords of her lute in solemn symphony,” when the
unenviable nature of her surroundings might reasonably have banished
all music from her soul; Theodore paused to bathe Adeline’s hand
with his tears, in a moment of painful uncertainty; and Hippolitus,
who would have scorned to be stabbed like an ordinary mortal,
“received a sword through his body,”--precisely as though it were a
present,--“and, uttering a deep sigh, fell to the ground,” on which,
true to her principles, “Julia shrieked and fainted.” We read of the
Empress Octavia swooning when Virgil recited to her his description
of the death of Marcellus; and we know that Shelley fainted when he
heard Cristabel read; but Mrs. Radcliffe’s heroines, though equally
sensitive, are kept too busy with their own disasters to show this
sympathetic interest in literature. Their adventures strike us now
as being, on the whole, more amusing than thrilling; but we should
remember that they were no laughing matter to the readers of fifty
years ago. People did not then object to the interminable length of a
story, and they followed its intricate windings and counter-windings
with a trembling zest which we can only envy. One of the earliest
recollections of my own childhood is a little book depicting the
awful results of Mrs. Radcliffe’s terror-inspiring romances upon
the youthful mind; a well-intentioned work, no doubt, but which
inevitably filled us with a sincere desire to taste for ourselves of
these pernicious horrors. If I found them far less frightful than I
had hoped, the loss was mine, and the fault lay in the matter-of-fact
atmosphere of the modern nursery; for does not the author of the now
forgotten Pursuits of Literature tell us that the Mysteries of Udolpho
is the work of an intellectual giant?--“a mighty magician, bred and
nourished by the Florentine muses in their sacred solitary caverns,
amid the pale shrines of Gothic superstition, and in all the dreariness
of enchantment.”
That was the way that critics used to write, and nobody dreamed of
laughing at them. When Letitia Elizabeth Landon poured forth her soul
in the most melancholy of verses, all London stopped to listen and to
pity.
“There is no truth in love, whate’er its seeming,
And Heaven itself could scarcely seem more true.
Sadly have I awakened from the dreaming
Whose charmed slumber, false one, was of you,”
wrote this healthy and heart-whole young woman; and Lord Lytton has
left us an amusing account of the sensation that such poems excited.
He and his fellow-students exhausted their ingenuity in romantic
speculations concerning the unknown singer, and inscribed whole reams
of fervid but indifferent stanzas to her honor. “There was always,”
he says, “in the reading-room of the Union, a rush every Saturday
afternoon for the Literary Gazette, and an impatient anxiety to hasten
at once to that corner of the sheet which contained the three magical
letters L. E. L. All of us praised the verse, and all of us guessed
the author. We soon learned that it was a female, and our admiration
was doubled, and our conjectures tripled.” When Francesca Carrara
appeared, it was received with an enthusiasm never manifested for
Pride and Prejudice, or Persuasion, and romantic young men and women
reveled in its impassioned melancholy. What a pattering of tear-drops
on every page! The lovely heroine--less mindful of her clothes than
Mrs. Pullet--looks down and marks how the great drops have fallen like
rain upon her bosom. “Alas!” she sighs, “I have cause to weep. I must
weep over my own changefulness, and over the sweetest illusions of my
youth. I feel suddenly grown old. Never more will the flowers seem so
lovely, or the stars so bright. Never more shall I dwell on Erminia’s
deep and enduring love for the unhappy Tancred, and think that I too
could so have loved. Ah! in what now can I believe, when I may not even
trust my own heart?” Here, at least, we have unadulterated sentiment,
with no traces in it of that “mean and jocular life” which Emerson so
deeply scorned, and for which the light-minded readers of to-day have
ventured to express their cheerful and shameless preference.
Emotional literature, reflecting as it does the tastes and habits of
a dead past, should not stand trial alone before the cold eyes of the
mocking present, where there is no sympathy for its weakness and no
clue to its identity. A happy commonplaceness is now acknowledged to
be, next to brevity of life, man’s best inheritance; but in the days
when all the virtues and vices flaunted in gala costume, people were
hardly prepared for that fine simplicity which has grown to be the
crucial test of art. Love, friendship, honor, and courage were as real
then as now, but they asserted themselves in fantastic ways, and with
an ostentation that we are apt to mistake for insincerity. When Mrs.
Katharine Philips founded her famous Society of Friendship, in the
middle of the seventeenth century, she was working earnestly enough
for her particular conception of sweetness and light. It is hard not
to laugh at these men and women of the world addressing each other
solemnly as the “noble Silvander” and the “dazzling Polycrete;” and it
is harder still to believe that the fervent devotion of their verses
represented in any degree the real sentiments of their hearts. But
Orinda, whose indefatigable exertions held the society together, meant
every word she said, and credited the rest with similar veracity.
“Lucasia, whose harmonious state
The Spheres and Muses only imitate,”
is for her but a temperate expression of regard; and we find her
writing to Mrs. Annie Owens--a most unresponsive young Welsh-woman--in
language that would be deemed extravagant in a lover:--
“I did not live until this time
Crowned my felicity,
When I could say without a crime,
I am not thine, but thee.”
One wonders what portion of her heart the amiable Mr. Philips was
content to occupy.
Frenchwomen of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries found their
principal amusement in contracting, either with each other or with
men, those highly sentimental friendships which were presumably free
from all dross of earthly passion, and which rested on a shadowy basis
of pure intellectual affinity. Mademoiselle de Scudéry delighted in
portraying this rarefied intercourse between congenial souls, and the
billing and cooing of Platonic turtle-doves fill many pages of her
ponderous romances. Sappho and Phaon, in the Grand Cyrus, “told each
other every particular of their lives,” which must have been a little
tedious at times and altogether unnecessary, inasmuch as we are assured
that “the exchange of their thoughts was so sincere that all those in
Sappho’s mind passed into Phaon’s, and all those in Phaon’s came into
Sappho’s.” Conversation under these circumstances would be apt to lose
its zest for ordinary mortals, who value the power of speech rather as
a disguise than as an interpretation of their real convictions; but
it was not so with this guileless pair. “They understood each other
without words, and saw their whole hearts in each other’s eyes.”
As for the great wave of emotionalism that followed in Rousseau’s
train, it was a pure make-believe, like every other sentiment that
bubbled on the seething surface of French society. Avarice and honor
alone were real. To live like a profligate and to die like a hero were
the two accomplishments common to every grand seigneur in the country.
For the rest, there was a series of fads,--simplicity, benevolence,
philosophy, passion, asceticism; Voltaire one day, Rousseau the next;
Arcadian virtues and court vices jumbled fantastically together; the
cause of the people on every tongue, and the partridges hatching in the
peasant’s corn; Marie Antoinette milking a cow, and the infant Madame
Royale with eighty nurses and attendants; great ladies, with jewels in
their hair, on their bosoms, and on their silken slippers, laboriously
earning a few francs by picking out gold threads from scraps of
tarnished bullion; everybody anxiously asking everybody else, “What
shall we do to be amused?” and the real answer to all uttered long
before by Louis XIII., “Venez, monsieur, allons-nous ennuyer ensemble.”
Day and night are not more different than this sickly hothouse
pressure and the pure emotion that fired Scott’s northern blood, as
he looked on the dark rain-swept hills till his eyes grew bright with
tears. “We sometimes weep to avoid the disgrace of not weeping,” says
Rochefoucauld, who valued at its worth the facile sentimentality of his
countrymen. Could he have lived to witness M. de Latour’s hysterical
transports on finding Rousseau’s signature and a crushed periwinkle
in an old copy of the Imitatio, the great moralist might see that his
bitter truths have in them a pitiless continuity of adjustment, and fit
themselves afresh to every age. What excitation of feeling accompanied
the bloody work of the French Revolutionists! What purity of purpose!
What nobility of language! What grandeur of device! What bottled
moonshine everywhere! The wicked old world was to be born anew, reason
was to triumph over passion; and self-interest, which had ruled men for
six thousand years, was to be suddenly eradicated from their hearts.
When the patriots had finished cutting off everybody else’s head,
then the reign of mutual tenderness would begin; the week--inestimable
privilege!--would hold ten days instead of seven; and Frimaire and
Floréal and Messidor would prove to the listening earth that the very
names of past months had sunk into merited oblivion. Father Faber says
that a sense of humor is a great help in the spiritual life; it is
an absolute necessity in the temporal. Had the Convention possessed
even the faintest perception of the ridiculous, this friendly instinct
would have lowered their sublime heads from the stars, stung them into
practical issues, and moderated the absurd delusions of the hour.
At present, however, the new disciples of “earnestness” are trying
hard to persuade us that we are too humorous, and that it is the
spirit of universal mockery which stifles all our nobler and finer
emotions. We would like to believe them, but unhappily it is only to
exceedingly strenuous souls that this lawless fun seems to manifest
itself. The rest of us, searching cheerfully enough, fail to discover
its traces. If we are seldom capable of any sustained enthusiasm,
it is rather because we yawn than because we laugh. Unlike Emerson,
we are glad to be amused, only the task of amusing us grows harder
day by day; and Justin McCarthy’s languid heroine, who declines to
get up in the morning because she has so often been up before, is but
an exhaustive instance of the inconveniences of modern satiety. When
we read of the Oxford students beleaguering the bookshops in excited
crowds for the first copies of Rokeby and Childe Harold, fighting over
the precious volumes, and betting recklessly on their rival sales,
we wonder whether either Lord Tennyson’s or Mr. Browning’s latest
effusions created any such tumult among the undergraduates of to-day,
or wiled away their money from more legitimate subjects of speculation.
Lord Holland, when asked by Murray for his opinion of Old Mortality,
answered indignantly, “Opinion! We did not one of us go to bed last
night! Nothing slept but my gout.” Yet Rokeby and Childe Harold are
both in sad disgrace with modern critics, and Old Mortality stands
gathering dust upon our bookshelves. Mr. Howells, who ought to know,
tells us that fiction has become a finer art in our day than it was
in the days of our fathers, and that the methods and interests we
have outgrown can never hope to be revived. So if the masterpieces
of the present, the triumphs of learned verse and realistic prose,
fail to lift their readers out of themselves, like the masterpieces
of the past, the fault must be our own. We devote some conscientious
hours to Parleyings with Certain People of Importance, and we are
well pleased, on the whole, to find ourselves in such good company;
but it is a pleasure rich in the temperance that Hamlet loved, and
altogether unlikely to ruffle our composure. We read The Bostonians
and The Rise of Silas Lapham with a due appreciation of their minute
perfections; but we go to bed quite cheerfully at our usual hour, and
are content to wait an interval of leisure to resume them. Could Daisy
Miller charm a gouty leg, or Lemuel Barker keep us sleepless until
morning? When St. Pierre finished the manuscript of Paul and Virginia,
he consented to read it to the painter, Joseph Vernet. At first the
solitary listener was loud in his approbation, then more subdued, then
silent altogether. “Soon he ceased to praise; he only wept.” Yet Paul
and Virginia has been pronounced morbid, strained, unreal, unworthy
even of the tears that childhood drops upon its pages. But would Mr.
Millais or Sir Frederick Leighton sit weeping over the delightful
manuscripts of Henry Shorthouse or Mr. Louis Stevenson? Did the last
flicker of genuine emotional enthusiasm die out with George Borrow,
who lived at least a century too late for his own convenience? When
a respectable, gray-haired, middle-aged Englishman takes an innocent
delight in standing bare-headed in the rain, reciting execrable Welsh
verses on every spot where a Welsh bard might, but probably does not,
lie buried, it is small wonder that the “coarse-hearted, sensual,
selfish Saxon”--we quote the writer’s own words--should find the
spectacle more amusing than sublime. But then what supreme satisfaction
Mr. Borrow derived from his own rhapsodies, what conscious superiority
over the careless crowd who found life all too short to study the
beau ties of Iolo Goch or Gwilym ab Ieuan! There is nothing in the
world so enjoyable as a thorough-going monomania, especially if it be
of that peculiar literary order which insures a broad field and few
competitors. In a passionate devotion to Welsh epics or to Provençal
pastorals, to Roman antiquities or to Gypsy genealogy, to the most
confused epochs of Egyptian history or the most private correspondence
of a dead author,--in one or other of these favorite specialties our
modern students choose to put forth their powers, and display an
astonishing industry and zeal.
There is a story told of a far too cultivated young man, who, after
professing a great love for music, was asked if he enjoyed the opera.
He did not. Oratorios were then more to his taste. He did not care
for them at all. Ballads perhaps pleased him by their simplicity. He
took no interest in them whatever. Church music alone was left. He had
no partiality for even that. “What is it you _do_ like?” asked his
questioner, with despairing persistency; and the answer was vouchsafed
her in a single syllable, “Fugues.” This exclusiveness of spirit may
be detrimental to that broad catholicity on which great minds are
nourished, but it has rare charms for its possessor, and, being within
the reach of all, grows daily in our favor. French poets, like Gautier
and Sully Prudhomme, have been content to strike all their lives upon a
single resonant note, and men of far inferior genius have produced less
perfect work in the same willfully restricted vein. The pressure of the
outside world sorely chafes these unresponsive natures; large issues
paralyze their pens. They turn by instinct from the coarseness, the
ugliness, the realness of life, and sing of it with graceful sadness
and with delicate laughter, as if the whole thing were a pathetic or
a fantastic dream. They are dumb before its riddles and silent in its
uproar, standing apart from the tumult, and letting the impetuous
crowd--“mostly fools,” as Carlyle said--sweep by them unperceived.
Herrick is their prototype, the poet who polished off his little
glittering verses about Julia’s silks and Dianeme’s ear-rings when all
England was dark with civil war. But even this armed neutrality, this
genuine and admirable indifference, cannot always save us from the
rough knocks of a burly and aggressive world. The revolution, which he
ignored, drove Herrick from his peaceful vicarage into the poverty and
gloom of London; the siege of Paris played sad havoc with Gautier’s
artistic tranquillity, and devoured the greater part of his modest
fortune. We are tethered to our kind, and may as well join hands in
the struggle. Vexation is no heavier than _ennui_, and “he who lives
without folly,” says Rochefoucauld, “is hardly so wise as he thinks.”
CURIOSITIES OF CRITICISM.
There is a growing tendency on the part of literary men to resent what
they are pleased to consider the unwarrantable interference of the
critic. His ministrations have probably never been sincerely gratifying
to their recipients; Marsyas could hardly have enjoyed being flayed by
Apollo, even though he knew his music was bad; and worse, far worse,
than the most caustic severity are the few careless words that dismiss
our cherished aspirations as not even worthy of the rueful dignity
of punishment. But in former days the victim, if he resented such
treatment at all, resented it in the spirit of Lord Byron, who, roused
to a healthy and vigorous wrath,
“expressed his royal views
In language such as gentlemen are seldom known to use,”
and by a comprehensive and impartial attack on all the writers of his
time proved himself both able and willing to handle the weapons that
had wounded him. On the other side, those authors whose defensive
powers were of a less prompt and efficient character ventured no nearer
to a quarrel than--to borrow a simile of George Eliot’s--a water-fowl
that puts out its leg in a deprecating manner can be said to quarrel
with a boy who throws stones. Southey, who of all men entertained the
most comfortable opinion of his own merits, must have been deeply
angered by the treatment Thalaba and Madoc received from the Edinburgh
Review; yet we cannot see that either he or his admirers looked upon
Jeffrey in any other light than that of a tyrannical but perfectly
legitimate authority. Far nobler victims suffered from the same bitter
sting, and they too nursed their wounds in a decorous silence.
But it is very different to-day, when every injured aspirant to the
Temple of Fame assures himself and a sympathizing public, not that a
particular critic is mistaken in his particular case, which we may
safely take for granted, but that all critics are necessarily wrong
in all cases, through an abnormal development of what the catechism
terms “darkness of the understanding and a propensity to evil.” This
amiable theory was, I think, first advanced by Lord Beaconsfield, who
sorely needed some such emollient for his bruises. In Lothair, when
that truly remarkable artist Mr. Gaston Phœbus, accompanied by his
sister-in-law Miss Euphrosyne Cantacuzene,--Heaven help their unhappy
sponsors!--reveals to his assembled guests the picture he has just
completed, we are told that his air “was elate, and was redeemed from
arrogance only by the intellect of his brow. ‘To-morrow,’ he said,
‘the critics will commence. You know who the critics are? The men who
have failed in literature and art.’” If Lord Beaconsfield thought
to disarm his foes by this ingenious device, he was most signally
mistaken; for while several of the reviews were deferentially hinting
that perhaps the book might not be so very bad as it seemed, Blackwood
stepped alertly to the front, and in a criticism unsurpassed for
caustic wit and merciless raillery held up each feeble extravagance to
the inextinguishable laughter of the world. Even now, when few people
venture upon the palatial dreariness of the novel itself, there is no
better way of insuring a mirthful hour than by re-reading this vigorous
and trenchant satire.
Quite recently two writers, one on either side of the Atlantic, have
echoed with superfluous bitterness their conviction of the total
depravity of the critic. Mr. Edgar Fawcett, in The House on High
Bridge, and Mr. J. R. Rees, in The Pleasures of a Book-Worm, seem
to find the English language painfully inadequate for the forcible
expression of their displeasure. Mr. Fawcett considers all critics
“inconsistent when they are not regrettably ignorant,” and fails to
see any use for them in an enlightened world. “It is marvelous,” he
reflects, “how long we tolerate an absurdity of injustice before
suddenly waking up to it. And what can be a more clear absurdity than
that some one individual caprice, animus, or even honest judgment
should be made to influence the public regarding any new book?”
Moreover, he has discovered that the men and women who write the
reviews are mere “underpaid vendors of opinions,” who earn their
breakfasts and dinners by saying disagreeable things about authors,
“their superiors beyond expression.” But it is only fair to remind
Mr. Fawcett that no particular disgrace is involved in earning one’s
breakfasts and dinners. On the contrary, hunger is a perfectly
legitimate and very valuable incentive to industry. “God help the bear,
if, having little else to eat, he must not even suck his own paws!”
wrote Sir Walter Scott, with good-humored contempt, when Lord Byron
accused him of being a mercenary poet; and we probably owe the Vicar
of Wakefield, The Library, and Venice Preserved to their authors’
natural and unavoidable craving for food. Besides, if the reviewers are
underpaid, it is not so much their fault as that of their employers,
and their breakfasts and dinners must be proportionately light. When
Milton received five pounds for Paradise Lost, he was probably the
most underpaid writer in the whole history of literature, yet Mr. Mark
Pattison seems to think that this fact redounds to his especial honor.