It would be absurd to suppose that it will not seem clear, to whatever
readers this little book may find here, that one of the principal
characters of the Dialogue is a man for whom we all, I think, feel more
interest, admiration, and respect than any other among us. That this
is so in reality, I must beg to deny, and I hope that, when I state
that I neither have myself, nor know anyone who has, the honour of
his acquaintance—nay, that I have never even _seen_ him—I hope that I
shall stand acquitted of all charges of personality. As for the other
characters, there will too, I daresay, be found people ready to declare
who are the originals, and to explain everything which is inconsistent
with their theory by ascribing it to designed mystification on the part
of the Author. For this, it seems, is an occupation like another. The
Author believes that so much of a man’s life as is public belongs to
the public, and is at the fair use of the public’s literary analysts,
_videlicet_ the critics, and that it is by no means an unfair use, to
take such a life and freely present it in that individual form which
it actually has to us in our moments of imagination and reflection. It
seems, then, to him foolish, in considering, (to take it in the form of
a well-known example), a book like D’Israeli’s “Lothair” or “Endymion,”
to be trying to identify the characters with actual men. D’Israeli simply
uses as much of actual men and actual events as he requires for his
criticism of the time he is portraying, and is careless of the rest. I
see here no attempt at mystification. I simply see an artist picking out
the choicest materials he has to hand.
As regards both the Dialogue and the Essays, I would like to point out
that they are professedly didactic, and, as such, are of course cast
into the form which I believe most calculated to achieve their object.
I am sure that I have neither the intention nor the wish to impugn the
competency of the australian Press to deal with things australian. I am
myself a member, a very humble member of it, and am quite ready to do
myself the sincere pleasure of praising it. At the same time I cannot
blind myself to the fact that its criticism is not (let us say) ideal.
The “business of criticism,” says the first of living critics, “is simply
_to know the best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its
turn making this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas_.”
Well now, I cannot, I say, look upon this australian Press, of which I
am so humble a member, as the creator of such a current; and, (I will
make a clean breast of it at once!), bright and charming as I have always
found him in the “Echoes of the Week” and places of like resort, I have
viewed the triumphal approach of Mr. Sala to us, and his even more
triumphal progress among us, with (as someone will presently be saying
of me)—“with a jaundiced eye.” And why? The truth, the real truth, is,
(May I be forgiven for saying so?), that I do not believe that even Mr.
Sala can help us australian pressmen, (since I dare to place myself in a
company which includes such stupendous personages as “The Vagabond” and
the Editor of the Melbourne _Herald_), to create that “current of true
and fresh ideas” to which we have alluded. Truth, alas, is the private
property of no man—not even of Mr. George Augustus Sala. And I confess
to finding myself at the point of wishing that, even for mere variety’s
sake, we should hear more than we do of the ideas of such personages as
Goethe, Emerson, Renan, Arnold, and so on: writers, of course, familiar
to us all, and whom I, at any rate, must still continue to consider
as not wholly exhausted. They may not have the depth of thought, the
accuracy of detail, the exquisite tact of expression which distinguish
the genial _littérateur_, and make his work, as one of my fellow pressmen
said the other day, “epoch-making,” but I really do still continue—I
_must_ still continue—to think that, despite all these disadvantages,
they are still capable of helping us a little to that critical haven
where our souls would be—to the source of “a current of true and fresh
ideas.”
_September, 1885._