Dr. John Brown's pleasant story has become well known, of the countryman
who, being asked to account for the gravity of his dog, replied, 'Oh,
sir! life is full of sairiousness to him--he can just never get eneugh o'
fechtin'.' Something of the spirit of this saddened dog seems lately to
have entered into the very people who ought to be freest from it--our men
of letters. They are all very serious and very quarrelsome. To some of
them it is dangerous even to allude. Many are wedded to a theory or
period, and are the most uxorious of husbands--ever ready to resent an
affront to their lady. This devotion makes them very grave, and possibly
very happy after a pedantic fashion. One remembers what Hazlitt, who was
neither happy nor pedantic, has said about pedantry:
'The power of attaching an interest to the most trifling or painful
pursuits is one of the greatest happinesses of our nature. The common
soldier mounts the breach with joy, the miser deliberately starves
himself to death, the mathematician sets about extracting the cube-
root with a feeling of enthusiasm, and the lawyer sheds tears of
delight over _Coke upon Lyttleton_. He who is not in some measure a
pedant, though he may be a wise, cannot be a very happy man.'
Possibly not; but then we are surely not content that our authors should
be pedants in order that they may be happy and devoted. As one of the
great class for whose sole use and behalf literature exists--the class of
readers--I protest that it is to me a matter of indifference whether an
author is happy or not. I want him to make me happy. That is his
office. Let him discharge it.
I recognise in this connection the corresponding truth of what Sydney
Smith makes his Peter Plymley say about the private virtues of Mr.
Perceval, the Prime Minister:
'You spend a great deal of ink about the character of the present
Prime Minister. Grant all that you write--I say, I fear that he will
ruin Ireland, and pursue a line of policy destructive to the true
interests of his country; and then you tell me that he is faithful to
Mrs. Perceval, and kind to the Master Percevals. I should prefer that
he whipped his boys and saved his country.'
We should never confuse functions or apply wrong tests. What can books
do for us? Dr. Johnson, the least pedantic of men, put the whole matter
into a nutshell (a cocoanut shell, if you will--Heaven forbid that I
should seek to compress the great Doctor within any narrower limits than
my metaphor requires!), when he wrote that a book should teach us either
to enjoy life or endure it. 'Give us enjoyment!' 'Teach us endurance!'
Hearken to the ceaseless demand and the perpetual prayer of an ever
unsatisfied and always suffering humanity!
How is a book to answer the ceaseless demand?
Self-forgetfulness is of the essence of enjoyment, and the author who
would confer pleasure must possess the art, or know the trick, of
destroying for the time the reader's own personality. Undoubtedly the
easiest way of doing this is by the creation of a host of rival
personalities--hence the number and the popularity of novels. Whenever a
novelist fails his book is said to flag; that is, the reader suddenly (as
in skating) comes bump down upon his own personality, and curses the
unskilful author. No lack of characters and continual motion is the
easiest recipe for a novel, which, like a beggar, should always be kept
'moving on.' Nobody knew this better than Fielding, whose novels, like
most good ones, are full of inns.
When those who are addicted to what is called 'improving reading' inquire
of you petulantly why you cannot find change of company and scene in
books of travel, you should answer cautiously that when books of travel
are full of inns, atmosphere, and motion, they are as good as any novel;
nor is there any reason in the nature of things why they should not
always be so, though experience proves the contrary.
The truth or falsehood of a book is immaterial. George Borrow's _Bible
in Spain_ is, I suppose, true; though now that I come to think of it, in
what is to me a new light, one remembers that it contains some odd
things. But was not Borrow the accredited agent of the British and
Foreign Bible Society? Did he not travel (and he had a free hand) at
their charges? Was he not befriended by our minister at Madrid, Mr.
Villiers, subsequently Earl of Clarendon in the peerage of England? It
must be true; and yet at this moment I would as lief read a chapter of
the _Bible in Spain_ as I would _Gil Blas_; nay, I positively would give
the preference to Don Jorge.
Nobody can sit down to read Borrow's books without as completely
forgetting himself as if he were a boy in the forest with Gurth and
Wamba.
Borrow is provoking, and has his full share of faults, and, though the
owner of a style, is capable of excruciating offences. His habitual use
of the odious word 'individual' as a noun-substantive (seven times in
three pages of _The Romany Rye_) elicits the frequent groan, and he is
certainly once guilty of calling fish the 'finny tribe.' He believed
himself to be animated by an intense hatred of the Church of Rome, and
disfigures many of his pages by Lawrence-Boythorn-like tirades against
that institution; but no Catholic of sense need on this account deny
himself the pleasure of reading Borrow, whose one dominating passion was
_camaraderie_, and who hob-a-nobbed in the friendliest spirit with priest
and gipsy in a fashion as far beyond praise as it is beyond description
by any pen other than his own. Hail to thee, George Borrow! Cervantes
himself, Gil Blas, do not more effectually carry their readers into the
land of the Cid than does this miraculous agent of the Bible Society, by
favour of whose pleasantness we can, any hour of the week, enter
Villafranca by night, or ride into Galicia on an Andalusian stallion
(which proved to be a foolish thing to do), without costing anybody a
_peseta_, and at no risk whatever to our necks--be they long or short.
Cooks, warriors, and authors must be judged by the effects they produce:
toothsome dishes, glorious victories, pleasant books--these are our
demands. We have nothing to do with ingredients, tactics, or methods. We
have no desire to be admitted into the kitchen, the council, or the
study. The cook may clean her saucepans how she pleases--the warrior
place his men as he likes--the author handle his material or weave his
plot as best he can--when the dish is served we only ask, Is it good?
when the battle has been fought, Who won? when the book comes out, Does
it read?
Authors ought not to be above being reminded that it is their first duty
to write agreeably--some very disagreeable men have succeeded in doing
so, and there is therefore no need for anyone to despair. Every author,
be he grave or gay, should try to make his book as ingratiating as
possible. Reading is not a duty, and has consequently no business to be
made disagreeable. Nobody is under any obligation to read any other
man's book.
Literature exists to please--to lighten the burden of men's lives; to
make them for a short while forget their sorrows and their sins, their
silenced hearths, their disappointed hopes, their grim futures--and those
men of letters are the best loved who have best performed literature's
truest office. Their name is happily legion, and I will conclude these
disjointed remarks by quoting from one of them, as honest a parson as
ever took tithe or voted for the Tory candidate, the Rev. George Crabbe.
Hear him in _The Frank Courtship_:--
'"I must be loved;" said Sybil; "I must see
The man in terrors, who aspires to me:
At my forbidding frown his heart must ache,
His tongue must falter, and his frame must shake;
And if I grant him at my feet to kneel,
What trembling fearful pleasure must he feel:
Nay, such the raptures that my smiles inspire,
That reason's self must for a time retire."
"Alas! for good Josiah," said the dame,
"These wicked thoughts would fill his soul with shame;
He kneel and tremble at a thing of dust!
He cannot, child:"--the child replied, "He must."'
Were an office to be opened for the insurance of literary reputations, no
critic at all likely to be in the society's service would refuse the life
of a poet who could write like Crabbe. Cardinal Newman, Mr. Leslie
Stephen, Mr. Swinburne, are not always of the same way of thinking, but
all three hold the one true faith about Crabbe.
But even were Crabbe now left unread, which is very far from being the
case, his would be an enviable fame--for was he not one of the favourite
poets of Walter Scott, and whenever the closing scene of the great
magician's life is read in the pages of Lockhart, must not Crabbe's name
be brought upon the reader's quivering lip?
To soothe the sorrow of the soothers of sorrow, to bring tears to the
eyes and smiles to the cheeks of the lords of human smiles and tears, is
no mean ministry, and it is Crabbe's.