“The critic criticized, if dealt with in the worst fashion of his own
class, must be pronounced a mere monster, ‘seeking whom he may devour;’
and, therefore, to be hunted and slain as speedily as possible, and
stuffed for the museum, where he may be regarded with due horror, but in
safety. But if dealt with after the best fashion of his class, a very
honourable and beneficent office is assigned him, and he is warned
only--though zealously--against its perversions. A judicial chair in the
kingdom of human thought, filled by a man of true integrity,
comprehensiveness, and delicacy of spirit, is a seat of terror and
praise, whose powers are at once most fostering to whatever is good,
most repressive of whatever is evil.... The critic, in his office of
censurer, has need so much to controvert, expose, and punish, because of
the abundance of literary faults; and as there is a right and a wrong
side in warfare, so there will be in criticism. And as when soldiers are
numerous, there will be not a few who are only tolerable, if even that,
so of critics. But then the critic is more than the censurer; and in his
higher and happier aspect appears before us and serves us, as the
discoverer, the vindicator, and the eulogist of excellence.”
But resisting the temptation to quote further from Mr. Lynch’s book on
this matter of Criticism, which seemed the natural point of contact by
which the Reviewer could lay hold on the book, he would pass on with the
remark that his duty in the present instance is of the nobler and better
sort--nobler and better, that is, with regard to the object, for duty in
the man remains ever the same--namely, the exposition of excellence, and
not of its opposite. Mr. Lynch is a man of true insight and large heart,
who has already done good in the world, and will do more; although,
possibly, he belongs rather to the last class of writers described by
himself, in the extract I am about to give from this same essay, than to
any of the preceding:--
“Some of the best books are written avowedly, or with evident
consciousness of the fact, for the select public that is constituted by
minds of the deeper class, or minds the more advanced of their time.
Such books may have but a restricted circulation and limited esteem in
their own day, and may afterwards extend both their fame and the circle
of their readers. Others of the best books, written with a pathos and a
power that may be universally felt, appeal at once to the common
humanity of the world, and get a response marvellously strong and
immediate. An ordinary human eye and heart, whose glances are true,
whose pulses healthy, will fit us to say of much that we read--This is
good, that is poor. But only the educated eye and the experienced heart
will fit us to judge of what relates to matters veiled from ordinary
observation, and belonging to the profounder region of human thought and
emotion. Powers, however, that the few only possess, may be required to
paint what everybody can see, so that everybody shall say, How
beautiful! how like! And powers adequate to do this in the finest manner
will be often adequate to do much more--may produce, indeed, books or
pictures, whose singular merit only the few shall perceive, and the many
for awhile deny, and books or pictures which, while they give an
immediate and pure pleasure to the common eye, shall give a far fuller
and finer pleasure to that eye that is the organ of a deeper and more
cultivated soul. There are, too, men of _peculiar_ powers, rare and
fine, who can never hope to please the large public, at least of their
own age, but whose writings are a heart’s ease and heart’s joy to the
select few, and serve such as a cup of heavenly comfort for the earth’s
journey, and a lamp of heavenly light for the shadows of the way.”
One other extract from the general remarks on Books in this essay, and
we will turn to another:--
“In all our estimation of the various qualities of books, if it be true
that our reading assists our life, it is true also that our life assists
our reading. If we let our spirit talk to us in undistracted moments--if
we commune with friendly, serious Nature, face to face, often--if we
pursue honourable aims in a steady progress--if we learn how a man’s
best work falls below his thought, yet how still his failure prompts a
tenderer love of his thought--if we live in sincere, frank relations
with some few friends, joying in their joy, hearing the tale and sharing
the pain of their grief, and in frequent interchange of honest,
household sensibility--if we look about us on character, marking
distinctly what we can see, and feeling the prompting of a hundred
questions concerning what is out of our ken:--if we live thus, we shall
be good readers and critics of books, and improving ones.”
The second and third of these essays are on Biography and Fiction
respectively and principally; treating, however, of collateral subjects
as well. Deep is the relation between the life shadowed forth in a
biography, and the life in a man’s brain which he shadows forth in a
fiction--when that fiction is of the highest order, and written in love,
is beheld even by the writer himself with reverence. Delightful, surely,
it must be; yes, awful too, to read to-day the embodiment of a man’s
noblest thought, to follow the hero of his creation through his
temptations, contests, and victories, in a world which likewise is--
“All made out of the carver’s brain;”
and to-morrow to read the biography of this same writer. What of his own
ideal has he realized? Where can the life-fountain be detected within
him which found issue to the world’s light and air, in this ideal self?
Shall God’s fiction, which is man’s reality, fall short of man’s
fiction? Shall a man be less than what he can conceive and utter? Surely
it will not, cannot end thus. If a man live at all in harmony with the
great laws of being--if he will permit the working out of God’s idea in
him, he must one day arrive at something greater than what now he can
project and behold. Yet, in biography, we do not so often find traces of
those struggles depicted in the loftier fiction. One reason may be that
the contest is often entirely within, and so a man may have won his
spiritual freedom without any outward token directly significant of the
victory; except, if he be an artist, such expression as it finds in
fiction, whether the fiction be in marble, or in sweet harmonies, or in
ink. Nor can we determine the true significance of any living act; for
being ourselves within the compass of the life-mystery, we cannot hold
it at arm’s length from us and look at its lines of configuration. Nor
of a life can we in any measure determine the success by what we behold
of it. It is to us at best but a truncated spire, whose want of
completion may be the greater because of the breadth of its base, and
its slow taper, indicating the lofty height to which it is intended to
aspire. The idea of our own life is more than we can embrace. It is not
ours, but God’s, and fades away into the infinite. Our comprehension is
finite; we ourselves infinite. We can only trust in God and do the
truth; then, and then only, is our life safe, and sure both of
continuance and development.
But the reviewer perhaps too often merely steals his author’s text and
writes upon it; or, like a man who lies in bed thinking about a dream
till its folds enwrap him and he sinks into the midst of its visions, he
forgets his position of beholding, and passes from observation into
spontaneous utterance. What says our author about “biography,
autobiography, and history?” This lecture has pleased the reviewer most
of the four. Reading it in a lonely place, under a tree, with wide
fields and slopes around, it produced on his mind the two effects which
perhaps Mr. Lynch would most wish it should produce--namely, first, a
longing to lead a more true and noble life; and, secondly, a desire to
read more biography. Nor can he but hope that it must produce the same
effect on every earnest reader, on every one whose own biography would
not be altogether a blank in what regards the individual will and
spiritual aim.
“In meditative hours, when we blend despair of ourself with complaint of
the world, the biography of a man successful in this great business of
living is as the visit of an angel sent to strengthen us. Give the
soldier his sword, the farmer his plough, the carpenter his hammer and
nails, the manufacturer his machines, the merchant his stores, and the
scholar his books; these are but implements; the man is more than his
work or tools. How far has he fulfilled the law of his being, and
attained its desire? Is his life a whole; the days as threads and as
touches; the life, the well-woven garment, the well-painted picture?
Which of two sacrifices has he offered--the one so acceptable to the
powers of dark worlds, the other so acceptable to powers of bright
ones--that of soul to body, or that of body to soul? Has he slain what
was holiest in him to obtain gifts from Fashion or Mammon? Or has he, in
days so arduous, so assiduous, that they are like a noble army of
martyrs, made burnt-offering of what was secondary, throwing into the
flames the salt of true moral energy and the incense of cordial
affections? We want the work to show us by its parts, its mass, its
form, the qualities of the man, and to see that the man is perfected
through his work as well as the work finished by his effort.”
Perhaps the highest moral height which a man can reach, and at the same
time the most difficult of attainment, is the willingness to be
_nothing_ relatively, so that he attain that positive excellence which
the original conditions of his being render not merely possible, but
imperative. It is nothing to a man to be greater or less than
another--to be esteemed or otherwise by the public or private world in
which he moves. Does he, or does he not, behold, and love, and live, the
unchangeable, the essential, the divine? This he can only do according
as God hath made him. He can behold and understand God in the least
degree, as well as in the greatest, only by the godlike within him; and
he that loves thus the good and great, has no room, no thought, no
necessity for comparison and difference. The truth satisfies him. He
lives in its absoluteness. God makes the glow-worm as well as the star;
the light in both is divine. If mine be an earth-star to gladden the
wayside, I must cultivate humbly and rejoicingly its green earth-glow,
and not seek to blanch it to the whiteness of the stars that lie in the
fields of blue. For to deny God in my own being is to cease to behold
him in any. God and man can meet only by the man’s becoming that which
God meant him to be. Then he enters into the house of life, which is
greater than the house of fame. It is better to be a child in a green
field than a knight of many orders in a state ceremonial.
“One biography may help conjecture or satisfy reason concerning the
story of a thousand unrecorded lives. And how few even of the deserving
among the multitude can deserve, as ‘dear sons of memory,’ to be shrined
in the public heart. Few of us die unwept, but most of us unwritten. We
shall find a grave--less certainly a tombstone--and with much less
likelihood a biographer. Those ‘bright particular’ stars that at evening
look towards us from afar, yet still are individual in the distance, are
at clearest times but about a thousand; but the milky lustre that runs
through mid heaven is composed of a million million lights, which are
not the less separate because seen undistinguishably. Absorbed, not
lost, in the multitude of the unrecorded, our private dear ones make
part in this mild, blissful shining of the ‘general assembly,’ the great
congregation of the skies. Thus the past is aglow with the unwritten,
the nameless. The leaders, sons of fame, conspicuous in lustre, eminent
in place; these are the few, whose great individuality burns with
distinct, starry light through the dark of ages. Such stars, without the
starry way, would not teach us the vastness of heaven; and the ‘way,’
without these, were not sufficient to gladden and glorify the night with
pomp of Hierarchical Ascents of Domination.”
There are many passages in this essay with which the reviewer would be
glad to enrich his notice of the book, but limitation of space, and
perhaps justice to the essay itself, which ought to be read in its own
completeness, forbid. Mr. Lynch looks to the heart of the matter, and
makes one put the question--“Would not a biography written by Mr. Lynch
himself be a valuable addition to this kind of literature?” His would
not be an interesting account of outward events and relationships and
progress, nor even a succession of revelations of inward conditions, but
we should expect to find ourselves elevated by him to a point of view
from which the life of the man would assume an artistic individuality,
as it were an isolation of existence; for the supposed author could not
choose for his regard any biography for which this would be impossible;
or in which the reticulated nerves of purpose did not combine the whole,
with more or less of success, into a true and remarkable unity. One
passage more from this essay,--
“Biography, then, makes life known to us as more wealthy in character,
and much more remarkable in its every-day stories, than we had deemed
it. Another good it does us is this. It introduces us to some of our
most agreeable and stimulative friendships. People may be more
beneficially intimate with one they never saw than even with a neighbour
or brother. Many a solitary, puzzled, incommunicative person, has found
society provided, his riddle read, and his heart’s secret, that longed
and strove for utterance, outspoken for him in a biography. And both a
love purer than any yet entertained may be originated, and a pure but
ungratified love already existing, find an object, by the visit of a
biography. In actual life you see your friend to-day, and will see him
again to-morrow or next year; but in the dear book, you have your friend
and all his experiences at once and ever. He is with you wholly, and may
be with you at any time. He lives for you, and has already died for you,
to give finish to the meaning, fulness, and sanctity, to the comfort of
his days. He is mysteriously above as well as before you, by this fact,
that he has died. Thus your intimate is your superior, your solace, but
your support, too, and an example of the victory to which he calls you.
His end, or her end, is our own in view, and the flagging spirit
revives. We see the goal, and gird our loins anew for the race. Or,
speaking of things minor, there is fresh prospect of the game, there is
companionship in the hunt, and spirit for the winning. Such biography,
too, is a mirror in which we see ourselves; and we see that we may trim
or adorn, or that the plain signs of our deficient health or ill-ruled
temper may set us to look for, and to use the means of improvement. But
such a mirror is as a water one; in which first you may see your face,
and which then becomes for you a bath to wash away the stains you see,
and to offer its pure, cool stream as a restorative and cosmetic for
your wrinkles and pallors. And what a pleasure there will be sometimes
as we peruse a biography, in finding another who is so like
ourself--saying the same things, feeling the same dreads, and shames, and
flutterings; hampered and harassed much as poor self is. Then, the
escapes of such a friend give us hope of deliverance for ourself; and
his better, or if not better, yet rewarded, patience, freshens our eye
and sinews, and puts a staff into our hand. And certain seals of
impossibility that we had put on this stone, and on that, beneath which
our hopes lay buried, are by this biography, as by a visiting angel,
effectually broken, and our hopes arise again. Our view of life becomes
more complete because we see the whole of his, or of hers. We view life,
too, in a more composed, tender way. Wavering faith, in its chosen
determining principles, is confirmed. In quiet comparison of ourselves
with one of our own class, or one who has made the mark for which we are
striving, we are shamed to have done no better, and stirred to attempt
former things again, or fresh ones in a stronger and more patient
spirit.”
It is, indeed, well with him who has found a friend whose spirit touches
his own and illuminates it.
“I missed him when the sun began to bend;
I found him not when I had lost his rim;
With many tears I went in search of him,
Climbing high mountains which did still ascend,
And gave me echoes when I called my friend;
Through cities vast and charnel-houses grim,
And high cathedrals where the light was dim;
Through books, and arts, and works without an end--
But found him not, the friend whom I had lost.
And yet I found him, as I found the lark,
A sound in fields I heard but could not mark;
I found him nearest when I missed him most,
I found him in my heart, a life in frost,
A light I knew not till my soul was dark.”
Next to possessing a true, wise, and victorious friend seated by your
fireside, it is blessed to have the spirit of such a friend
embodied--for spirit can assume any embodiment--on your bookshelves. But
in the latter case the friendship is all on one side. For full
friendship your friend must love you, and know that you love him. Surely
these biographies are not merely spiritual links connecting us in the
truest manner with past times and vanished minds, and thus producing
strong half friendships. Are they not likewise links connecting us with
a future, wherein these souls shall dawn upon ours, rising again from
the death of the past into the life of our knowledge and love? Are not
these biographies letters of introduction, forwarded, but not yet
followed by him whom they introduce, for whose step we listen, and whose
voice we long to hear; and whom we shall yet meet somewhere in the
Infinite? Shall I not one day, “somewhere, somehow,” clasp the large
hand of Novalis, and, gazing on his face, compare his features with
those of Saint John?
The essay on light literature must be left to the spontaneous
appreciation of those who are already acquainted with this book, or who
may be induced, by the representations here made, to become acquainted
with it. Before proceeding to notice the first essay in the little
volume, namely, that on Poetry, its subject suggests the fact of the
publication of a second edition of the Memorials of Theophilus Trinal,
by the same author, a portion of which consists of interspersed poems.
These are of true poetic worth; and although in some cases wanting in
rhythmic melody, yet in most of these cases they possess a wild and
peculiar rhythm of their own. The reviewer knows of some whose hearts
this book has made glad, and doubtless there are many such.
The essay on Poetry is itself poetic throughout in its expression. And
how else shall Poetry be described than by Poetry? What form shall
embrace and define the highest? Must it not be self-descriptive as
self-existent? For what man is to this planet, what the eye is to man
himself, Poetry is to Literature. Yet one can hardly help wishing that
the poetic forms in this Essay were fewer and less minute, and the whole
a little more scientific; though it is a question how far we have a
right to ask for this. As you open it, however, the pages seem
absolutely to sparkle, as if strewn with diamond sparks. It is no dull,
metallic, surface lustre, but a shining from within, as well as from the
superficies. Still one cannot deny that fancy is too prominent in Mr.
Lynch’s writings. It is true that his Fancy is the fairy attendant on
his Imagination, which latter uses the former for her own higher ends;
and that there is little or no _mere_ fancy to be found in his books;
for if you look below the surface-form you find a truth. But it were to
be desired that the Truth clothed herself always in the living forms of
Imagination, and thus walked forth amongst her worshippers, looking on
them from living eyes, rather than that she should show herself through
the windows of fancy. Sometimes there may be an offence against taste,
as in page 20; sometimes an image may be expanded too much, and
sometimes the very exuberance of imaginative fancy (if the combination
be correct) may lead to an association of images that suggests
incongruity. Still the essay is abundantly beautiful and true. The
poetical quotations are not isolated, or exposed to view as specimens,
but are worked into the web of the prose like the flowers in the damask,
and do their part in the evolution of the continuous thought.
“If poetry, as light from the heart of God, is for our heart, that we
may brighten and distinguish individual things; if it is to transfigure
for us the round, dusk world as by an inner radiance; if it is to
present human life and history as Rembrandt pictures, in which darkness
serves and glorifies light; if, like light, formless in its essence, all
things shapen towards the perfection of their forms under its influence;
if, entering as through crevices in single beams, it makes dimmest
places cheerful and sacred with its golden touch: then must the heart of
the Poet in which this true light shineth be as a hospice on the
mountain pathways of the world, and his verse must be the lamp seen from
far that burns to tell us where bread and shelter, drink, fire, and
companionship, may be found; and he himself should have the
mountaineer’s hardiness and resolution. From the heart as source, to the
heart in influence, Poetry comes. The inward, the upward, and the
onward, whether we speak of an individual or a nation, may not be
separated in our consideration. Deep and sacred imaginative meditations
are needed for the true earthward as well as for the heavenward progress
of men and peoples. And Poetry, whether old or new, streaming from the
heart moved by the powerful spirit of love, has influence on the heart
public and individual, and thence on the manners, laws, and institutions
of nations. If Poesy visit the length and breadth of a country after
years unfruitfully dull, coming like a showery fertilizing wind after
drought, the corners and the valley-hidings are visited too, and these
perhaps she now visits first, as these sometimes she has visited only.
For miles and for miles, the public corn, the bread of the nation’s
life, is bettered; and in our own endeared spot, the roses, delight of
our individual eye and sense, yield us more prosperingly their colour
and their fragrance. For the universal sunshine which brightens a
thousand cities, beautifies ten thousand homesteads, and rejoices ten
times ten thousand hearts. And as rains in the mid season renew for
awhile the faded greenness of spring; and trees in fervent summers, when
their foliage has deepened or fully fixed its hue, bedeck themselves
through the fervency with bright midsummer shoots; so, by Poetry are the
youthful hues of the soul renewed, and truths that have long stood
full-foliaged in our minds, are by its fine influences empowered to put
forth fresh shoots. Thus age, which is a necessity for the body, may be
warded off as a disease from the soul, and we may be like the old man in
Chaucer, who had nothing hoary about him but his hairs--
“‘Though I be hoor I fare as doth a tree
That blosmeth er the fruit ywoxen be,
The blosmy tree n’ is neither drie ne ded:
I feel me nowhere hoor, but on my head.
Min herte and all my limmes ben as grene
As laurel through the yere is for to sene.’”