No More Learning

The three pieces, which together extend to a
hundred and forty of the large pages above referred to, are much
more than 'imaginary conversations in metre'; they form, in fact,
a historical novel, thrown into conversational dramatic form with
all the redundances of the novel as they may seem from the
dramatic point of view. Sometimes, the treatment approaches
more nearly to the fashion of an actable play scene; sometimes, to
that of a chapter of Scott or Dumas turned into verse and put in
action instead of narration. And this hybrid character is main-
tained, almost continuously, in the pieces that follow: more than a
dozen in number, though always shorter, and sometimes much
shorter, than the Neapolitan set. The merits and defects of the
form, and its instances, as well as a still more interesting subject,
the relative merit of the prose and verse, will be better discussed
when we come to the prose itself. It may be enough to say here
that, in this new handling, Landor at last discovers the source of
that interest which he had failed to attain in Gebir and Count
Julian.
It may be matter for question whether this interest is equally
maintained in his more numerous but, both as individuals and in
the mass, less bulky Hellenics, of which there are some fifty, spread,
in point of composition, over a large part of his life. They were
above called idylls, and, according to Greek practice, they strictly
deserve the name. As such, they are entitled to use or disuse the
dramatic or, at least, the dialogic form at pleasure; and they avail
themselves of the privilege. Thus, one of the best known, Coresus
and Callirrhoe, is a continuous narrative; another, Menelaus and
Helen, has both dialogue and action.
There is no doubt, however, that, except to very peculiar, and,
perhaps, rather factitious, taste, there is something wanting in these
longer poetical works by Landor. They excite esteem very com-
monly, except when he tries humour or argument; satisfaction and
admiration, sometimes; transport, hardly ever save by occasional
flashes, mostly of mere description. It was, perhaps, much for
1
1


## p. 213 (#237) ############################################

IX]
213
Landor's Shorter Poems
a
Landor to condescend to the admission that his 'Cenci' scenes
do not challenge comparison with Shelley’s ‘noble tragedy’; but
the comparison forces itself all the more unfortunately, while the
preface in which it occurs closes with a piece of that miss-fire
irony of which Landor was unluckily prodigal. In reading Acts
and Scenes and Hellenics, one finds, and in re-reading them one
expects, hardly any jewels five words long. ' A few pieces of
the beautiful elaborate, but too often lifeless, description which
finds a better home in the prose occur ; but nothing (if it be not
rash to judge so positively of so wide a field) equal to the best
things in Gebir. The situations are often-in fact, usually—well
selected; the composition, both in the lower and the higher senses
of that word in different arts, is frequently admirable, the execu-
tion correct and creditable; but the total effect is too often cold?
It is not that Landor is by any means a stickler for what is
commonly called propriety. His situations are not seldom of the
luscious kind, and, though never guilty of coarseness, he is occa-
sionally chargeable with innuendo. But, in aiming at passion, he
too often only attains sentiment. The feeling may be there; in
some cases, it certainly is ; but it is too often birth-strangled in
the expression, partly by an attempt at classical restraint, which,
as pointed out above, is not really natural to the writer, and partly
by the singular verbosity also glanced at, which, in a way, is the
escapement' and compensation for this restraint. There are
comparatively few of Landor's longer pieces in which he does not,
as it were, hold overflow meetings—which he addresses partly
with repetitions and partly with ekings of what he has said before?
The advantage, to such a poet, of shorter and, in some cases,
definitely limited forms can hardly be over-estimated; and it is
enhanced not merely by that blend of classic and romantic which
has been noticed, but by a further blend-to some extent conse-
quential—of eighteenth and nineteenth century touch which is
more noticeable in Landor than in almost any of his companions.
They, for the most part—even Wordsworth, even Scott-grew out
of one strain into the other; Landor kept the mixture. He is
1 The very best of the exceptions is, perhaps, the beautiful and almost wellknown
Hamadryad, which is faultless throughout and contains one of Landor's very finest
single lines,
And the axe shone behind him in their eyes,
where picture, sound and hidden, as well as obvious, meaning are marvellously com-
bined.
2 In fact, to use his own words against him (see above p. 210, note 2), if, in Gebir, he had
boiled away too much,' he certainly, in some of these pieces, . boiled away too little. '


## p. 214 (#238) ############################################

214 The Landors, Leigh Hunt, De Quincey (CH.
thus able, in his best so-called epigrams and elsewhere, to observe
the neatness and clear outline of eighteenth century occasional
pieces, while suffusing it with the later colour and diffusing over it
the later atmosphere. A little piece, which comes quite early in
the collection of 1846 and which was probably written nearly
half a century earlier, for it is one of the Ianthe poems,
Pleasure, why thus desert the heart,
exhibits this combination remarkably; while it has much to do
with the extraordinary charm of the two little masterpieces Rose
Aylmer and Dirce. But, through all these mote-like poems
and poemlets, the total number of which comes not so very far
short of a thousand, though there may be triviality, false wit,
dulness and other faults here and there, there is always the chance
of coming across that flash and glow of the opal which Landor
has in a special manner and measure, which is the dearest of
delights to true lovers of poetry and over which he retained com-
mand, in these short pieces, almost to his death. Some, even of
these pieces, such as Gunlaug (an early attempt) and Guidone
and Lucia, may almost be called long, running to five hundred
lines or so; and there are numerous pages which only just, or do
not quite, suffice for a poem. But the scale runs down to single
couplets, even single lines, and a greater number of the con-
stituents does not exceed from half a score to a score of
lines. Here, the drawbacks of Landor's larger pieces, to a great
.
extent, disappear. A considerable number of these smaller pieces
are, of course, trivial; but their smallness makes the triviality at
once apparent, and they can be passed over without the dis-
appointed and disappointing labour which the conscientious reader
of a longer piece undergoes. The miniature jewels above referred
to, the larger but almost throughout admirable odes to Words-
worth and Southey, a positive majority of the Ianthe pieces
(which would deserve isolation in a separate but complete sheaf,
for they have a distinctive quality rare in the vast harvest of love
poetry), the Browning sonnet, still, perhaps, the best thing on its
subject and in its kind after seventy years, are all consummate;
and there are many to add. To the last, in Dry Sticks, he retained
that strange occasional command of perfect phrase which was his
special merit and privilege, and of which almost his greatest single
example is the famous
Beyond the arrows, views and shouts of men
in Count Julian.
Seldom or never on pages facing each other in the published work


## p. 215 (#239) ############################################

ix]
215
Imaginary Conversations
of a man between eighty and ninety can one find two such opposed
pieces as the admirable monostich of A Sensible Girl's Reply to
Moore's “ Our couch shall be roses all spangled with dew"
It would give me rheumatics: and so it would you
(the best joke as well as one of the last that he ever made), and the
contrast:
Ah Southey, how we stumble on through life
Among the broken images of dreams
Not one of them to be raised up again.
Yet it must have been later still, so far as the time of compo-
sition went, that he wrote Rose the Third and other beautiful
things. In fact, selections from Landor have not, perhaps, even yet
done full justice to his poetry; though there is hardly any poet
who requires selection so much.
It is, however, undoubtedly, as a writer of prose that Landor is
most generally known, so far as he can be said to be generally
known at all; and it was in prose that the most copious and indi-
vidual products of his genius were supplied even to his most
critical admirers. Imaginary Conversations did not begin to be
published" till he was past the middle of his unusually long life;
but he was untiring in the production of them to the very last,
and their bulk is very considerable indeed, especially if we include
Pericles and A spasia and The Pentameron of right and The Citation
and Examination of Shakespeare of grace. Their subjects are of
the most varied nature possible-ranging from Greek to actually
contemporary matters, and Landor, at least, endeavours to make
the treatments as various. It has been pointed out already that his
verse Acts and Scenes have much of the character of verse-novels,
and, in Imaginary Conversations, which include a good deal of
action as well as conversation, the absence of the restraints of verse
is accompanied naturally enough by a still wider expatiation in
both speech and incident. The result very often, if not always,
gives the same restoration of interest which has been already
noticed. Tragedy and comedy, history and imagination, scenery
and sentiment, all are made to come in, and, to enhance the
attraction, Landor endeavours, after a fashion which, indeed, had
been essayed by others, especially by De Quincey in Confessions
of an English Opium Eater, to throw over large parts of his work
1 He had tried something of the kind once or twice earlier; but the crystallising
touch' seems to have been given by a casual observation in one of Southey's letters as
to his own Colloquies.


## p. 216 (#240) ############################################

216 The Landors, Leigh Hunt, De Quincey (CH.
1
1
a charm of elaborate prose style emulating the most ambitious
efforts of the poet. In poetry itself, he had been almost rigidly
eighteenth century in form if not quite in diction. He had
actually deprecated, in his correspondence with Southey, the
adoption of any but familiar and consecrated metrical forms, not
merely as regarded exotic and archaic devices, classical metres,
and so forth, but even as concerned new stanza-combinations of
already recognised line-forms. But, in prose, he summoned to his
aid every device of rhythm, colour, word-value, sound-concert and
other helps that rhetoric and prosody itself, used in the most
general way, could give him. There was no longer, as in his
verse, any effort to 'boil away,' to 'cart off loads' of matter likely
to be attractive to the general: there was, on the other hand,
evident effort to 'let everything go in,' to 'load every rift with ore. '
The effect, from the point of view last suggested especially, was
a triumphant success, except in the eyes of those who, reversing
Landor's position, held, as to prose, the same views which he held
as to verse, and disliked lavish and gorgeous ornament in it.
More beautiful things—from the famous 'dreams' which some-
times fill pages, to the little phrases, clauses and passages which
occur constantly-are not to be found in literature, ancient or
modern, English or foreign. Some have gone so far as to insist
that there are none so beautiful ; a position which a critic whose
memory is fairly full and his judgment fairly catholic will be slow
to accept, and which is itself, perhaps, essentially uncritical. In
their own way, they are perfect, and that is enough.
When, however, we leave this charming quality of style, it is
not so easy to keep to the path of simple eulogy. There are few
more curious instances of difference of opinion in the history of
literary criticism, though it shows many such, than the varying
estimates of Landor's humour. There are those, sometimes men
of renown, who find it 'exquisite'; there are others, not perhaps
by any means very limited in their appreciation of this elusive but
important quality, who are seldom, if ever, able to enjoy it at all-
who think it, from The Citation and Examination of Shakespeare
down to the conversation entitled The Duke de Richelieu, Sir Fire-
brace Cotes, Lady G. and Mr Normanby, the most depressing ex-
hibition that ever a man of genius made of himself, to whom it seems
forced, trivial, at best schoolboyish, at worst almost, if not quite,
vulgar. Appreciation of his sentiment does not, perhaps, swing the
pendulum through so enormous an arc, but it occupies a sufficiently
wide one in its variety, as may be seen from the fact that what some
1


## p. 217 (#241) ############################################

IX]
217
Landor's Criticism
of his greatest admirers call 'girlish,' others, no less enthusiastic
on the whole, style 'missish,' a difference slight in word, formidable
in sense. Few, even of these partisans, have ranked his reason-
ing powers high, and still fewer, even of those who, in a way,
sympathise with him politically, have shown much eagerness to
accept him as a mouthpiece of their own political views. He
seems-and this is one of the legacies of the century of his birth,
to have spoken of religious and ecclesiastical matters without the
slightest real conception of what these matters mean; and, in his
miscellaneous utterances, especially on contemporary subjects,
there is a perpetual atmosphere of 'fling,' through which the
missiles dart and hurtle as if from a dozen different quarters at
once, with a result which recalls all attributes of chaos-noise,
darkness, confusion. The escapes from this--in themselves not
always quite continuous-provided by Pericles and Aspasia,
by the Boccaccio and Petrarca pieces, Euthymedes and, for-
tunately, not a few others, may, perhaps, acquire an additional
character of paradises from their association with this Tartarus or
Limbo; but the critical historical estimate can hardly neglect the
latter. There is probably no part of Landor's work, not even the
long poems, which has been less read than bis chiefly critical
miscellanies in prose; and, though the general reader, perhaps, is
not to be blamed for his neglect, the student will not pass them
by except to his great loss. It is true that nowhere does that
uncritical quality which accompanies Landor when he is most
critical more distinctly appear, whether it be in more general
matters, such as his spelling reform crotchet, or in direct comment
on individual books and authors. But, just as in Poems and
Conversations you are never without hope and seldom without
satisfaction of beauty, so, here, you need never despair of luminous
flashes of critical utterance. In short, you are driven to say that
while there is hardly in the whole of literature an author so
difficult to read through without constant dissatisfaction, so there
is none whom it is so necessary to read through in order to
judge him fairly and enjoy him intelligently.
The result of such a reading to those who look first to form
and expression can hardly but be satisfactory; to those who look
no further, if there be any such, few writers can be Landor's
rivals. But there is still another split of opinion between his
.
actual admirers as to the positive value of his matter. Some have
gone so far-while, of course, admitting the extreme unwisdom
of Landor's conduct—as to allow his literary work, when not


## p. 218 (#242) ############################################

218 The Landors, Leigh Hunt, De Quincey [CH. .
expressive of mere irritation, crotchet, or prejudice, the supreme
merit of wisdom' itself. Some have called him a great thinker,
though a feeble reasoner in support of his thoughts ; and he has
actually been credited with having uttered more delicate
aphorisms of human nature than anyone except Shakespeare.
It is true that there may have been latent guile in the adjective
delicate,' covertly, though not openly, narrowing the compliment.
Yet, there is no doubt that high intellectual and moral value is
attributed to Landor by some. Others, prepared to go almost
the furthest lengths possible in admiration of his expression at
its best, find it impossible to rank him very high in these other
respects. They do not share the vulgar objection to the common-
place and obvious; they know that the greatest things in prose
and poetry alike are commonplaces on which the writer has thrown
(to use Coleridge's consummate image) the special moonlight or
sunlight of his own thought and treatment, thus differentiating
and subliming them. But this is what they rarely, if ever, find
in Landor. There is exquisite expression, but it is seldom more
than the expression, exquisite indeed, but without halo or aura,
of what may almost be called copy-book truths or drawing-book
pictures. He has scores of true, tender, touching, charming things
on death and love and youth and age on the one side, and, in
his sober moments, not a little commonsense on the other. He
has almost always at hand, if not actually present, perfection of
expression. But, for acuteness of practical intellect dividing joint
and marrow, and shattering fallacy, you will never find in him
anything like Johnson's 'You do not know, Sir, that he is guilty
till the judge has decided’; nor, for the disclosure of poetic
altitudes and abysses, will you find anything like
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep,
or
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence.
Indeed, though Landor lived to receive the homage of Swinburne,
his schoolboy walks had taken him past the house where still
lingered the daughter of Addison; and, outrageous though the
statement may seem, there is still much in him which reminds
one more of Pope than of Shakespeare or Wordsworth.
It would be negligent in such a place as the present to take
no notice of some, at least, of the opinions which have existed
in reference to this remarkable writer. His own more than


## p. 219 (#243) ############################################

IX] History of Landor's Reputation
219
6
mmer
werd
sufficiently quoted remark (which is, perhaps, not subject to the
charge of mixed metaphor sometimes brought against it)' has not
been quite so exactly fulfilled as is also commonly said ; for, in his
sense, he ‘dined' very early, and the guests, though certainly few,
were as certainly select. From Southey's eulogies, which were,
however, often accompanied by judicious warnings, some deductions
must, no doubt, be made. They had entered too early into a quite
uncorrupt and very interesting but rather disabling mutual admi-
ration society of practically unlimited liability; and, with some
strong differences, there was too great a sympathy between them
for perfectly achromatic judgment. You and I,' said a very
distinguished man of letters of a later generation to one not quite
80 eminent, 'ought not to review each other. ' But Southey was
by no means Landor's only admirer, nor were Southey and
De Quincey alone in the condemnation above referred to;
Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Lamb, Shelley, Leigh Hunt, with
whatever minor differences, joined in the admiration, and the only
first-rate dissident, whose dissent was chequered by not a little
eulogy, was the certainly unsurpassed but wayward and somewhat
incalculable spirit of Hazlitt. In the middle generation of the
nineteenth century ‘all the wits were there,' in the same sense,
from Tennyson and Browning, Carlyle and Dickens downwards.
Later still, the unmeasured laudation of Swinburne and the less
exuberant and unqualified but almost as high estimate of Sir Sidney
Colvin followed ; and there is no sign of much alteration in the
youngest opinion. For the vulgus never: for the clerus surely'
has been the almost hackneyed but well-justified summary. In
such cases, there is always a temptation either to join the chorus
or to take the equally easy but even less commendable line of
more or less paradoxical disparagement. In the foregoing estimate,
a strenuous endeavour, based on long acquaintance and frequently
revised impression, has been made to keep the difficult and
dangerous middle way of strict criticism.
The quality in Landor which repels, or, at least, fails to attract,
some readers, except from the side of pure form, was well, if
almost accidentally, pointed out by a critic hardly professional, at
least as regards English literature, but exceptionally scholarly, and
2
9
1•I shall dine late but the room will be well lighted and the guests few but select. '
? It is rather unfortunate that the complete correspondence between the two has
never been published. Forster supplied not a few of the lacunae in Cuthbert Southey's
and J. W. Warter's collections but left much out or gave it only in summary; and,
even had he been more liberal, the disjecta membra of the three storehouses would have
been hard to put together.


## p. 220 (#244) ############################################

220 The Landors, Leigh Hunt, De Quincey [CH.
6
not in the least given to carping—the late Lewis Campbell, who
complained of his ‘aloofness and unreality. ' It is only in the apices
of his poetry, such as Rose Aylmer and in a few passages of his
prose, such as the purple passages of the 'dreams,' the scholar
episode of The Citation and Examination of Shakespeare and a
few others, where these peculiarities are overcome by genuine
passion? or, in one way or another, positively suit the subject, that
Landor escapes a certain artificiality. Another very happy phrase
of Campbell, applied to Landor's friend Dickens? , emphatically does
not apply, except on these rarest occasions, to Landor himself.
His characters are never exactly "human effluences,' they are
effluences of books and of a fantastic individual combination of
scholarly taste and wilful temperament. His aloofness is not the
poetic aloofness which Matthew Arnold adumbrates in the famous
passage of Resignation-a critical but, at the same time, sympa-
thetic contemplativeness—for, except in relation to literature, and
even largely as to that, he is nothing if not uncritical ; while even
his sympathies, which are often keen, are so twisted and tossed by
whims and crazes and crotchets of all kinds that they are never to
be depended on. That his humour is even more uncertain has
been said already. When any lover of style and form remembers
not merely his great show pieces but the smaller patches—the
stripes of purple,' as Quintilian would say, woven into all the prose,
and not sparingly scattered over the verse—he is apt to pronounce
Landor one of the mightiest of magicians; and so, at these times,
he is. But he is a Prospero with a most imperfect and intermittent
command over his Ariel, and, perhaps, always better suited to
uttermost isles of fancy than to the Milans of the actual world.
But, if Landor only occasionally escaped the charge of being
an insufficient Prospero, the title 'Ariel of criticism,' which has
actually been applied to Leigh Hunt, is far more unfortunate.
This excess of honour seems to have been suggested by a certain
lightness (which he undoubtedly possessed, but which is an
ambiguous term) and by his unquestionable habit of flitting from
subject to subject. But Hunt, in more ways than one, was by no
means a 'delicate' spirit, if he was a spirit at all, and he was
frequently trivial, which Ariel never was. He had, however, gifts
much above those of the average man-of-letters-of-all-work to
6
1 There is such, undoubtedly, in Essex and Spenser.
2 • Dickens's shreds and patches, if not human beings are human effluences-
åroppolai' (Memorials of Lewis Campbell, p. 396).
>


## p. 221 (#245) ############################################

IX] Leigh Hunt as an Influence 221
His very
whose class he undoubtedly belongs ; he managed to do some
things, both in verse and in prose, which have a curious attraction
in their own way; he was a great benefactor by opening walks of
delight in the lower but quite respectable paradises of miscella-
neous literature; and, as an origin, or at least a maker of fresh
starts, in more than one literary department and fashion, he has
historical interest, superior to that possessed by some greater
executants, and never, perhaps, yet quite fairly allowed him. To
no single man is the praise of having transformed the eighteenth
century magazine, or collection of light miscellaneous essays, into
its subsequent form due so much as to Hunt. Allowing for the
undeniable truth that if a certain thing has to be done, evolu-
tionary fate always finds some one to do it, it may still be said
that, without Hunt, Sketches by Box would have been a kind
of Melchisedec, and Household Words improbable.
enemies in Blackwood owed him royalty a hundred years ago, and
it is doubtful whether even the most infallible and self-reliant
youth of the twentieth century, when it writes articles of the
'middle' style, and even, sometimes, of the purely critical, is not
similarly, though less directly, indebted to Hunt.
His influence on pure criticism and on poetry was not very great,
but in neither was it negligible. In verse, he had, beyond doubt,
the credit of being the first deliberately to desert the stopped
decasyllabic couplet which had reigned over the whole eighteenth
century and the latter part of the seventeenth, revising the over-
run of the Jacobeans and first Carolines. Keats may not have
learnt the change from Hunt only, but from the originals as well;
yet this does not lessen Hunt's importance. Hunt himself may
have been open to censure in his enjoyment of the revival, but
that is another question. In criticism, he has the merit, which
Macaulay long ago assigned to him, of a most unusual and, at the
time, almost unique catholicity, which was not alloyed (as, to some
extent, perhaps, it was in Lamb) by the presence of mere caprice,
and (as it still more certainly was in that admirable critic) by a sort
of complementary exclusiveness. Hunt could not only like both
Spenser and Dryden, both Addison and the great early seven-
teenth century dramatists, he could also expatiate into those
foreign literatures which, at the time (putting aside the new fashion
for German), were much less known than they had been. Except
Dante, who, for the most part, flew over his head, and who, when
he came nearer, brushed, as by wings, Hunt's prejudices in positive
religion heavily, it is difficult to name any great, or even good,


## p. 222 (#246) ############################################

222 The Landors, Leigh Hunt, De Quincey (CH.
6
writer whom he did not, so far as he could, appreciate, and his
famous recognition of the greatness of the Beatrice-Joanna and De
Flores part of Middleton's Changeling, is only the best known of
numerous good hits, where others, even Lamb, had missed. Even the
prejudices just mentioned did not mislead him to the same extent as
that to which they misled others of his contemporaries on both
sides, and, here again, he may be said to have been almost more
important as an influence than as a practitioner. But his actual
practice in all three directions—as poet, as critic and as 'mis-
cellanist'-has merit, and, in the latter two cases, volume, which
demand less general and more particular examination.
Hunt's poetical production, considering the length of his life
and the fluency of his pen, was not very extensive. When, some
dozen years before his death, he was asked or permitted by Moxon
to issue his Poetical Works in a small pocket volume, he got
together rather less than three hundred pages, but closely printed
and containing, perhaps, nine or ten thousand lines. It does not,
indeed, include one of his very best things—the fine sonnet with at
least one magnificent line,
The laughing queen that caught the world's great hands,
which he wrote in competition with Keats and Shelley and by
which he beat both these, his otherwise immeasurable betters.
But everything else by which he is best known and to be known is
here, The Story of Rimini, re-written but by no means improved ;
Abou ben Adhem, which, in the milder form of 'high seriousness,'
has few superiors of its scale, and the delightful rondeau, Jenny
kissed me, of which the same may be said in respect of graceful
mixture of sentiment and jest; the unequal but, in part, excellent
Man, Fish and Spirit, and, perhaps, a few more.
It must, however, be a somewhat exceptional taste of, rather,
appetite which would desiderate a larger body of Leigh Hunt's
verse. The few things highly praised above are very few, and, taken
with their company, they have a singular air of being out of it,
of having come there by some caprice of the muses. Rimini has
the historical value already assigned to it and more; for, besides
its versification, it gives other ‘patterning' to easy verse-narrative.
But the tone of it—if not, as was pretended at the time, immoral-
is mawkishly sentimental, the language trivial and slipshod and
the whole style what Persius meant by delumbe and in labris
natans. The choice of subject, after Dante, could hardly have
been more unfortunate, and Hunt showed the same insensibility
to an almost equal danger in choosing that of Hero and Leander.


## p. 223 (#247) ############################################

1xIX
] Leigh Hunt's Merits and Defects 223
The Palfrey is a pleasant enough variation, in the lighter octo-
syllable revived by Coleridge and Scott, of the old fabliau, and it
is, perhaps, unfair to The Glove that its triviality should have
provoked, and have been exposed by, Browning's opposition piece.
But this same triviality is everywhere in Hunt; and, in The Feast
of the Poets and that of the Violets (poetesses), it unfortunately
comes very near to vulgarity. It is, however, lifted out of this
by the serious purpose of Captain Sword and Captain Pen.
Some, especially those who share its anti-militarist spirit, have
held this to be the best thing for combined quantity and quality
that Hunt did in verse. Others differ; not merely antipathetically.
But actual triviality-not mere lightness of subject and treat-
ment as in the pseudo-Anacreon; and in some of the medieval poets,
especially Latin; or, again, in Johannes Secundus and Herrick and
Prior and Moore and many later poets but—triviality in the
proper sense, the triviality of the rags and straws that flit about
the common objects of literature, is fatal to poetry; and there is,
let it be repeated for the last time, far too much of this in Hunt's
verse. It is not absent from his prose; but it is much less
essentially fatal there, and, though he has in prose, perhaps, nothing
quite so good as the few best things of his verse, he has an
immensely larger proportion comparatively, and a very consider-
able bulk positively, of good and pleasant matter. The above-
mentioned merit of teaching the miscellaneous essay to cast the
once bright and graceful, but now wrinkled, faded and shabby,
skin of The Spectator form can hardly be exaggerated. He was
not so fortunate or so wise in adopting, in common with most of
his contemporaries, the abuse of the editorial 'we'-a thing not,
indeed, unsuitable to formal, and rather solemn, discussion, but
frequently irritating, if not absurd, in light discursive writing. Of
this same light discursive writing, however, Hunt was really a
master and even-in virtue of his precursorship especially, but not
solely—a great master. Nothing is easier than to show that Cole-
ridge, Hazlitt, Lamb, Landor, De Quincey and others, had qualities
which Hunt had not; but it may be questioned whether any one
of them had quite his faculty-the faculty of the born journalist
and book maker-of tackling almost any subject that presented
itself in a fairly adequate, and not seldom quite attractive, fashion.
He showed it in dozens (literally) of papers and books, from The
Reflector to The Old Court Suburb, the list of his achievements
including some remarkable tours de force such as that New Tatler
which he wrote single-handed for some eighteen months.
It is,


## p. 224 (#248) ############################################

224 The Landors, Leigh Hunt, De Quincey (CH.
again, easy to say that of this facile, gossipy, superficial way of
writing we have had enough and too much ; that it underlies
Ben Jonson's sentence on its first examples three hundred years
ago as being a 'flashy thing’; that the two hundred years which
saw comparatively little of it were happier than the succeeding
hundred which has seen a great deal. Yet it is certain that, as
Hunt restarted and refashioned the style, it has done very little
harm. It has, perhaps, done some good; and, beyond all question,
it has brought about a good deal of not disgraceful pleasure.
The man whose name can be put in such a sentence deserves
that the sentence should be recorded in history.
The singular mixture of merits and defects which has made it
necessary to tread the critical middle way with special care in the
case of the two preceding writers extends, also, to the third. With
De Quincey, indeed, we return to a higher general level than that
to which we have had to descend in order to consider Leigh Hunt.
Yet, though even Hunt's poetical altitudes are not of the highest
or loneliest, the things which have been referred to make him a
poet, if not a great poet, for moments; while De Quincey not only
never accomplished poetry but, as was noticed in the earlier part
of this chapter, indulged in something perilously like blasphemy of
it. For, to say that you might have been such a poet as your
neighbours when those neighbours are such as were De Quincey's,
and that you did not choose to be, comes perilously near the unfor-
givable. But his prose soars into regions which Hunt could never
have reached so far as form goes; while its matter, with inequali-
ties, again perilous, in some respects, keeps an altogether higher
level of intellect, scholarship, taste and so forth, than Hunt's
pleasant chatter could attain. But De Quincey's literary history, so
far as public acknowledgment goes, has been curious and contrasts
rather remarkably with that of his two fellows here. Beginning
distinctly late, Confessions of an English Opium Eater gave him,
with all good judges, a very high position which he never wholly lost.
But he did not follow it up with any substantive work; for some
time, he wrote hardly anything, and scattered what he produced
in miscellaneous and, most often, anonymous publications; and, till
very near the close of his long life, he held a curious and rather
anomalous position as a sort of amateur or freelance hovering on
the outskirts of literature and 'picqueering,' as they would have
said in Dryden's time, on the subject in brilliant but desultory
raids. Not till near the close did he attempt 'collection. '


## p. 225 (#249) ############################################

IX]
2 25
De Quincey's Popularity
There are probably not many experienced judges of the ways
of the public in regard to literature who would not have been
somewhat doubtful as to the success of collection and publica-
tion, in an unusually large number of volumes, of articles, scarcely
ever connected in subject, dealing, not unfrequently, with matters
not obviously popular, spread in composition over a period in
which public taste had altered not a little, and pervaded by all
sorts of tricks and mannerisms of style and thought. But the
' fifties,' after a period in which criticism had not commanded
much favour and in which it had not, perhaps, deserved much,
were recovering their appetite for it; and De Quincey, what-
ever subject he touched, was nothing if not critical, though, as
a literary critic of individuals, he was very untrustworthy. More-
over, the frequent presence in his writing of the most elaborately
ornamental passages appealed to tastes which he had himself
been one of the first to excite, and which had been steadily
growing. The scheme—first of a selection in four volumes, then
of a collection in twenty-was not interrupted by his death; and
settled down, an almost unique occurrence in English literature,
into other collections of sixteen and fourteen, which were again and
again reprinted. It has been said, probably without exaggeration,
that there was no writer more popular than De Quincey with clever
boys of upper school and lower college age, from about 1855
for twenty or five-and-twenty years onward. For the succeeding
period of about the same length there has been, perhaps, something
of a reaction, or, at any rate, something of desuetude. W. E. Henley
was fond of attacking our author as 'Thomas De Sawdust,' not
a very brilliant nickname, though too much in De Quincey's
own worst style. The humour of such things as the once famous
On Murder has gone out of fashion. But, De Quincey has
never lost a high reputation, though there have been some dissi-
dences among estimates of him as a writer of ornate prose; and
there are those who, admitting serious faults in him, decline to
rest his merits merely on his prose of this kind, while joining in
the fullest admiration of its qualities.
These merits are undeniable, save by those who object to ornate
prose altogether; but the consideration of them has been some-
times unluckily disturbed by unnecessary and invidious comparison.
Although there is no form of criticism which the present writer
dislikes so much or of which he has so low an opinion as that
which endeavours to class writers in order of merit, it would
perhaps be affectation, and would almost certainly be unsatisfactory
15
6
E. L XII.
CH. IX.


## p. 226 (#250) ############################################

226 The Landors, Leigh Hunt, De Quincey (CH.
>
to the reader, if no notice were taken here of the attempts, some-
times made by persons of distinction, to pit Landor against De
Quincey, and award the first and second class to one or the other
as the case may be.
According to the system here preferred they
are both in the first class of this special subject. If it is probable
-it may not be quite certain—that De Quincey could not have
written the finest passages of the Dream of Boccaccio, it is a
mere fact that Landor never wrote anything like the best
passages of Our Ladies of Sorrow. His imagination was too
precise; it had not the ‘hues of sunset and eclipse' which De
Quincey could command. On the other hand, there is what may
be called a dewiness, a freshness of talk about natural objects in
him which De Quincey has never reached; and he was incapable
(at least when he was not trying to be humourous) of the false
notes and glaring contrasts of colour in which De Quincey some-
times indulged. They are, in short, stars differing, not in amount,
but in kind or constitution of glory. The details of this difference
in rhythm, in diction and in various other rhetorical particulars
are too minute and would require too much technical expatiation
to be dealt with fully here. But it may be generally said, in supple-
ment to the comparisons as little odious as possible put above,
that De Quincey's music is more complicated and sometimes more
definitely of the bravura kind than Landor's, that his diction
(though Landor does not by any means disdain foreign and
specially technical-botanic terms) is more composite; and that, in
accordance with the stronger purely romantic strain in him (though
he was, perhaps, except in the point of Latin versemaking, a better
scholar than Landor), he seems more often to aim at the vague
suggestion, Landor at the precise expression of thought and image.
Although, however, it would be most absurd to deny that this
mastery of ornate prose is De Quincey's chief claim to a high
position in our literature, it would be almost equally unjust to admit
it as the only one or even as the only one of importance. The
defects which chequer even this merit to some extent, and the
others to a much greater, will be faithfully dealt with; the merits
themselves demand the more distinct insistence, because, as has
been said, there has, of late, been something of a tendency to
neglect, if not to deny, them. They were, indeed, extraordinary
qualifications for what has been called 'polygraphy. ' De Quincey's
reading was very wide, and, though it was sometimes desultory,
it was by no means always so. His interests, though in life he
was apt to seem an abstracted and unpractical creature, ranged


## p. 227 (#251) ############################################

IX
ix] De Quincey's Merit in Substance 227
a
nl
far beyond books. Metaphysics and political economy, verbal
criticism of the most minute kind and public events of all sorts,
from the Williams murders to the Crimean war and the Indian
mutiny; history ancient and modern, with all its 'fringes' of manners,
and so forth; contemporary biography; criticism of the more
general and abstract kind; all these and many more formed the
farrago of De Quincey's books and articles. Despite his exces-
sive, and often unlucky, activity in his own and other people's
business, some who knew Landor best, and admired him most,
have doubted whether he was not always more or less absorbed
by his own fancies, his very activities being disastrously excited
and affected by the breaking off of his dreams. De Quincey, who
passed through life like a kind of shadow, was constantly occupied
with most unshadowlike surroundings, though no one would dream
n better where he or his opium-chose.
Extreme variety of subject is, therefore, even if we confine the
word subject to its lowest meaning, at least as characteristic of De
Quincey's works as of Hunt's and Landor's prose; in other ways, it is
greater. His application of intellectual strength to most things that
he touches differentiates him from the triviality of Hunt and the
temperamental uniformity of Landor; the scale of his essays is far
more ambitious than that of Hunt, and he escapes what, after
a time, becomes the rather artificial, if not positively monotonous,
form of the conversation. To this must be added the strange
alternations of his handling from the most intricate and some
would say) wiredrawn logicalities to the loftiest flights of rhetoric;
the curious glancing habit of mind which indulges itself in endless
divagation, again less trivial than Hunt's, but almost as active;
the stores of out of the way knowledge; the quaint attitudes of
thought and fancy. Those who, in the days of rather idle
theorising on aesthetics, insisted on the pleasures of "unexpected-
ness,' ought to have found them in De Quincey to an unparalleled
extent, while the unexpected things include not seldom the
nuggets or, rather, pockets of golden style referred to, and others
of thought original and forcibly put.
His counterbalancing faults are, indeed, not small. The greatest
of them all must, indeed, force itself upon almost any reader who
has been gifted with, or has acquired, any critical faculty. It
is what has been called, in words not easy to better, "an un-
conquerable tendency to rigmarole. It has been admitted that
De Quincey's unexpectedness and divagation are often sources of
pleasure; but it cannot be denied that they are often, also, sources
9
5
15-2


## p. 228 (#252) ############################################

228 The Landors, Leigh Hunt, De Quincey [CH.
>
of irritation-sometimes of positive boredom. He does not even
wait for fresh game to cross the track of his original and proper
quarry: he is constantly and deliberately going out of his way to
seek and start it right and left. Too often, also, this divagation
takes the form of a jocularity which appears to irritate some
persons almost always, and which, perhaps, few, when they have
attained to years of discretion, can invariably enjoy. His taste is
by no means infallible; he has some curious prejudices; and, though
the protest against his treatment of personalities is not, perhaps,
wholly justified, there is, certainly, too frequent reason for it.
Nevertheless, it should be impossible for anyone who takes
a really historical and impartial view of English literature, and
who, without that excessive classing' of individuals deprecated
above, appreciates comparison of them, to put De Quincey far below
the highest rank in that literature, if he does not exactly attain to it.
Lacking Landor's poetic gift, he may be considered not his equal;
if Landor's poetry were barred, he might, with more variety of
minor faults, undertake, at least, an equal fight on points of form,
and have the odds on his side in point of intellectual quality. To
the moral side of psychology, De Quincey did not pay much atten-
tion, though there is nothing in the least immoral about him.
But his intellectual force was extraordinary, though it was so
much divided and so little brought to bear on any single subject
or group of subjects that it never accomplished any tangible
result worthy of itself. Intellectually, he was by far the greatest
of the three men already noticed in this chapter; as an artist, at
bis best and in his own particular line, he has hardly a superior.
At least a postscript to this chapter should, in such a history
as the present, remind readers of what is too often forgotten, that
the fame of Walter Savage Landor, inadequate to his merits as it
is sometimes thought, has been able to overshadow, in no just
degree, that of his younger brother, Robert Eyres Landor.
Robert's obscurity was, indeed, partly his own fault; for the
fallentis semita vitae of a country parsonage was his deliberate
and strictly maintained choice; he made little effort (none for
a long time) to protest against the attribution of his early play
The Count Arezzi to Byron, and of his later story The Fawn of
Sertorius, to his brother Walter; and he is believed to have
destroyed most of the copies of the three other plays which came
between-The Earl of Brecon, Faith's Fraud and The Ferry-
man. Earlier than this, in 1828, he had written and published


## p. 229 (#253) ############################################

]
IX
Robert Lanaor's Impious Feast 229
a poem, The Impious Feast ; and, later than the latest, he gave
another prose work, The Fountain of Arethusa. But all his books
are rare, and, of the few people who have read him, most, perhaps,
know only The Fawn of Sertorius, a prose story blending delight-
ful fantasy with learning, and a genuinely tragic touch. All good
judges who have been acquainted with the works of the two
brothers seem to have acknowledged the remarkable family like-
ness, involving no 'copying. ' In verse, Robert did not, perhaps,
'
possess either what have been called above the opal flashes of his
brother's most ambitious attempts or the exquisite finish of his
finest epigrams; and his prose is less ornate. But, for what Dante
calls gravitas sententiae, and for phrase worthy of it, he is,
probably, Walter's superior. It must be admitted that this family
likeness includes- perhaps involves -a somewhat self-willed
eccentricity. The Impious Feast (Belshazzar's) is mainly written
(with a preface defending the form) in what may be called, in all
seriousness, rimed blank verse—or, in other words, verse con-
structed on the lines of a blank verse paragraph but with rimes—
completed at entirely irregular intervals, and occasionally tipped
or sandwiched with an Alexandrine. The book is so far from
.
common that a specimen may be given:
Still in her native glory unsubdued,
And indestructible for force or time
That first of mightiest cities, mistress, queen,
Even as of old earth's boast and marvel, stood;
Imperious, inaccessible, sublime:
If changed she might be all that she had been.
No conscious doubts abased her regal eye,
Rest had not made it weak, but more serene;
Those who repelled her power, revered her majesty.
Full at her feet wealth's largest fountain streamed;
Dominion crowned her head; on either side
Were sceptred power and armed strength; she seemed
Above mischance imperishably high;
Though half the nations of the earth defied,
They raged, but could not harm her-fierce disdain
Beheld the rebel kingdoms storm in vain.
What were their threats to her-Bel's daughter and his pride?
Whether this irregular cymbal-accompaniment of rime pleases or
displeases in a poem of some six or seven thousand lines-varied only
by occasional lyric interludes, sometimes fully strophic in form-
must depend much, if not wholly, on individual taste. But the
poem, though it has not the craggy splendour of Gebir, is, at least,
as good as Southey's non-lyrical epics, and superior to almost all
those of the lesser poets mentioned elsewhere.


## p. 230 (#254) ############################################

230 The Landors, Leigh Hunt, De Quincey [CH. IX
The Fawn of Sertorius has real charm and interest; its prose
companion will certainly surprise and may disappoint, though
there are good things in it. The Fountain of Arethusa consists-
after a preliminary narrative, lively enough in matter and picture,
of a journey from the depths of a Derbyshire cavern to the Other
end of Nowhere—of two volumes of dialogue, rather resembling
Southey’s Colloquies than the fraternal Conversations, between
a certain Antony Lugwardine and divers great men of antiquity,
especially Aristotle and Cicero, the talk being more or less framed
by a continuation of the narrative, both in incident and descrip-
tion. The general scheme is, of course, familiar enough, and so are
some of the details, including the provision of a purely John Bull
companion who cannot, like his friend Lugwardine, speak Latin or
Greek, and who is rather cruelly killed at the end to make a dying
fall. The often-tried contrast of ancient and modern thought
and manners presents the usual opportunities for criticism. But
the whole is admirably written and gives abundant proof that
Robert's humour (as, indeed, we could guess from his letters
printed by Forster) was of a somewhat surer kind than Walter's,
while his description is sometimes hardly less good though never
quite so elaborate. The chapter of the recovery of his farm by
the peasant Spanus after his delivery of the fawn to Sertorius is
a perfect example of the Landorian method, permeated by an
economy of attractions which is hardly to be matched in the works
of the more famous brother. That, like almost all classical novels,
the book is somewhat overloaded with Charicles-and-Gallus de-
tail, is the only fault, and the passion of the end is real and deep.
So it is in the three curious plays (two tragedies and a tragicomic
'drama') of 1841, while their versification, if deficient in lissome-
ness, is of high quality, and supplies numerous striking short
passages somewhat resembling Scott's 'old play' fragment-
mottoes. But, on the other hand, the diction and phrasing are
among the obscurest in English-concealing, rather than revealing,
the thought, motive and even action of the characters. Robert
Landor, in short, is a most interesting instance of a 'strong
nativity' defrauded of its possible developments, certainly by an
unduly recluse life, perhaps by other causes which we do not know.
In the case of hardly any other English author would it be more
desirable to see, in one of his own phrases, 'what nature first
meant [him] to be till some misadventure interposed? '
1 Words already quoted, though not with the application given above, in Oliver
Elton's Survey of English Literature, 1780—1830, vol. II, p. 46, the only good
recent notice of Robert's work with which the present writer is acquainted.


## p. 231 (#255) ############################################

CHAPTER X
JANE AUSTEN
The literary descent of Jane Austen's fiction is plain to trace.
Its ancestors were the work of Defoe, the Roger de Coverly papers
in The Spectator, the fiction of Fielding and of Richardson, the
poems of Cowper and the poetical tales of Crabbe. It belongs to
the movement towards naturalism and the study of common
life and character, without intrusion of the romantic and the
heroic, which prevailed in England in the closing years of the
eighteenth century. An impetus, together with a narrowing of
its scope, was given to it by Fanny Burney. Of Fanny Burney,
it was written in a previous volume of this History that she
created the novel of home life. Jane Austen read her novels
(in her twenty-first year (1796) she subscribed to Camilla);
and, to them, with the works of Crabbe and Cowper, must be
allowed an important share in determining the direction that her
genius took. She could not, it might be said, have written other-
wise than she did ; but, from Fanny Burney, she may well have
learned how much could be achieved in the novel of home life,
and how well worth while was the chronicling of such 'small
beer. Living a quiet and retired life, she found her material
in beer even smaller than Fanny Burney's, and her fine instinct
moved her to keep to it. There is more oddity and nodosity of
humourous character in Fanny Burney's novels than in Jane
Austen's, to provide a relief from the main object. As Fanny
Burney refined upon Smollett, so Jane Austen refined upon
her; and, working rigidly within the limits of what she recog-
nised as the proper field of her talents, she produced novels
that came nearer to artistic perfection than any others in the
English language.
There was nothing of the literary woman in the external
affairs of her life and its conduct. Born on 16 December 1775, at
Steventon in Hampshire, of which her father was rector, and
dying at Winchester on 18 July 1817, she passed the intervening


## p. 232 (#256) ############################################

232
[CH.
Jane Austen
years almost entirely in the country. She lived with her family in
Bath from 1801 to 1806, and at Southampton from 1806 to 1809.
Later, she paid occasional visits to London, where she went not
a little to the play ; but she never moved in ‘literary circles,' was
never ‘lionised' and never drew much advantage from personal
contact with other people of intellect. The moment of her
greatest worldly exaltation occurred, probably, on 13 November
1815, when, by order of the prince regent, his librarian, J. S. Clarke,
showed her over the library of Carlton house, and intimated
that she might dedicate her next novel to his royal highness.
A few months later, Clarke, now chaplain and private English
secretary to prince Leopold of Coburg, wrote to her suggest-
ing that another novel should be dedicated to the prince, and
adding that'any historical romance, illustrative of the history of
the august House of Cobourg, would just now be very interesting. '
Jane Austen replied :
You are very, very kind in your hints as to the sort of composition which
might recommend me at present, and I am fully sensible that an historical
romance, founded on the House of Saxe Cobourg, might be much more to
the purpose of profit or popularity than such pictures of domestic life in
country villages as I deal in. But
no more write a romance than
an epic poem. I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance
under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for
me to keep it up, and never relax into laughing at myself or at other people,
I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No,
I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way, and though I may
never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in
any other.
The letter is full of touches characteristic of its author; but
the immediate point is Jane Austen's consciousness of her limits.
Living a quiet life in the country or at Bath, she kept her eyes
steadily upon the comedy and character about her? ; and, writing
her novels in the common sitting-room of the family, or in the
room which she shared with her beloved sister Cassandra, she gave
herself no airs.
Jane Austen was not a great or an adventurous reader. She
told her niece that she regretted not having read more and written
less in her younger days. She appears to have read what people
in general were reading. Her admiration for Crabbe inspired a
characteristically playful jest about her intending to become his
wife; Richardson she studied closely. For the most part, she
6
? Compare, with this letter, the amusing Plan of a novel, according to hints from
various quarters,' printed in Austen-Leigh, W. and R. A. , Jane Austen, pp. 337 ff.


## p. 233 (#257) ############################################

x]
233
Early Tales
read, like other people, the current novels and poems. But,
whatever she read, she turned to account-largely, it must be
admitted, through her shrewd sense of humour. The aim of
making fun of other novels underlay the first work which she
completed and sold, Northanger Abbey ; and burlesque and
parody appear to have been the motives of most of the stories
which she wrote while she was a young girl. They are extant in
manuscript; and we are told that they
are of a slight and flimsy texture, and are generally intended to be non-
sensical. . . . However puerile the matter, they are always composed in pure
simple English, quite free from the over-ornamented style which might be
expected from so young a writer.
Others of these early stories were seriously intended ; and the
opening of one of them, Kitty, or The Bower, has the very manner
of the opening of her published novels.
The transition from these earliest efforts to her published work
may be found in an unfinished story, which the author refrained
from making public, but which was printed by J. E. Austen-Leigh
in the second edition (1871) of his Memoir of Jane Austen.
Somewhere, so far as can be ascertained, between 1792 and 1796,
when Jane Austen was between seventeen and twenty-one years
old, she wrote this fragment, Lady Susan. The influence of
Richardson upon its form is clear; the tale is written in letters.
Possibly, too, Fanny Burney's Evelina may have provided a hint
for the situation of a young girl, Frederica. The chief character,
Lady Susan Vernon, is a finished and impressive study of a very
wicked woman—a cruel and utterly selfish schemer. Jane Austen
left the tale unfinished, possibly because she found that Lady Susan
was too wicked to be consonant with her own powers of character-
drawing ; possibly, because she felt hampered (brilliant letter-
writer though she was in her own person, and in the persons of her
creation) by the epistolary form. In either case, we see at work
that severe artistic self-judgment which is one of the chief causes
of her power. About the same time, she completed Elinor and
Marianne, a first sketch for Sense and Sensibility, which, like
Lady Susan, was written in letters. The author did not offer it
for publication, and never afterwards attempted the epistolary
form of novel.
Jane Austen was twenty-one when she began, in 1796, the
earliest of her published works, the novel then called First
Impressions, but new-named Pride and Prejudice on its publica-
tion, in a revised form, in 1813. In 1797, her father offered the


## p. 234 (#258) ############################################

234
[CH.
Jane Austen
manuscript to Cadell, the London publisher, who promptly
declined to consider it. First Impressions had been completed
some three months when Jane Austen began to write Sense and
Sensibility. This novel appears to have been left unfinished for
some thirteen years, or, if finished, to have been left unrevised;
for it was not till April 1811 that it was in the hands of the
printer, and it was published in the autumn of that year, the title-
page stating that it was written By a Lady. This was the first
of Jane Austen's books to be published. Its success was im-
mediate. In 1798, she began to write Susan, which was the
first draft of Northanger Abbey. This, too, she put by for some
years. In 1803, she sold it to a London publisher, who did not
issue it; in 1809, she tried in vain to secure publication ; in 1816,
she succeeded in recovering the manuscript. She then, perhaps,
worked upon it further ; yet, she was still doubtful whether she
; ,
should publish it or not, and, at last, it was posthumously published
in two volumes in 1818, at the same time as Persuasion'. In 1803
or 1804 (according to the only piece of evidence-the dates in
the water-marks of the paper on which it is written), Jane Austen
began a story that she never finished; it was published under the
title The Watsons, by J. E. Austen-Leigh in the second edition
(1871) of his Memoir. He suggests that
the author became aware of the evil of having placed her heroine too low, in
such a position of poverty and obscurity as, though not necessarily connected
with vulgarity, has a sad tendency to degenerate into it-
a suggestion which displays little appreciation of the spirit of
Jane Austen's work, and is at variance with the facts of the story.
Emma Watson, though poor, is gentle-born; and the only hint
of vulgarity to be observed in the tale is furnished by an im-
pertinent peer, Lord Osborne, and a hardened flirt in good
circumstances, Tom Musgrave. It appears to have been the
author's intention that the heroine should ultimately marry a
refined and intelligent clergyman, whose character, together with
that of Henry Tilney, might have served to counteract the im-
pression produced by that of Mr Collins and of Mr Elton.
After 1803, or 1804, there came a gap of several years in Jane
Austen's literary work. It was not till 1812 that she began
Mansfield Park, which was finished in June 1813, and published
in or about May 1814. Emma was begun in January 1814,
1 On the writing and publication of Northanger Abbey, see Austen-Leigh, W. and
R. A. , Jane Austen, pp. 96–97, 174–5, 230—4, 333, 336, 337.


## p. 235 (#259) ############################################

x]
Northanger Abbey
235
finished in March 1815 and published in December 1815. Per-
suasion, the last-written of her published works, was begun in
the spring or summer of 1815 and finished in July 1816. The
manuscript was still in her hands at her death in 1817; and was
posthumously published in two volumes in 1818. In January
1817, she began to write a new novel, but, after the middle of
March, could work no more. Various reasons have been assigned
for the gap in her literary production between 1803 or 1804 and
1812. It will be noticed that, from 1812 to 1816, she worked
steadily; and further significance of the dates mentioned above is
her reluctance to publish anything that had not undergone long
meditation and revision.
Of the six published novels, Northanger Abbey is, probably,
that which comes nearest to being Jane Austen's earliest work.
Finished before 1803, it may have been revised after she recovered
the manuscript in 1816; but it seems unlikely that it received
80 complete a revision as did Pride and Prejudice and Sense and
Sensibility. In the 'Advertisement by the Authoress,' which
prefaced the book on its publication, Jane Austen writes :
The public are entreated to bear in mind that thirteen years have passed
since it was finished, many more since it was begun, and that during
that period places, manners, books, and opinions have undergone consider-
able changes.
The novel paints the world of 1803, not that of 1816.
It has,
moreover, features that distinguish it from the other published
works. It is linked to the earlier stories, in which Jane Austen
made fun of the sensational and romantic novels then popular.
As the source of Joseph Andrews was the desire to ridicule
Pamela, so the source of Northanger Abbey was the desire to
ridicule such romantic tales as The Mysteries of Udolpho by
Mrs Radcliffe ; and, as Joseph Andrews developed into something
beyond a parody, so did Northanger Abbey. Secondly, there is a
youthful gaiety, almost jollity, about the work, a touch of some-
thing very near to farce, which appears in none of the other novels.
Catherine Morland, again, may not be the youngest of Jane
Austen's heroines (Marianne Dashwood and Fanny Price were
certainly younger); but the frank girlishness which makes her
delightful gives the impression of being more in tune with the
author's spirit than the more critically studied natures of
Marianne and Fanny. Be that as it may, Northanger Abbey
has more in it of the spirit of youthfulness than any of the other
novels. Its idea was, apparently, intended to be the contrast


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236
[CH.
Jane Austen
between a normal, healthy-natured girl and the romantic heroines
of fiction; and, by showing the girl slightly affected with romantic
notions, Jane Austen exhibits the contrast between the world as
it is and the world as imagined by the romancers whom she
wished to ridicule. The first paragraph of the first chapter,
in telling us what Catherine Morland was, tells us, with delicate
irony, what she was not; dwelling, in every line, upon the ex-
traordinary beauty and ability of romantic heroines. As the
story goes on, we learn that a girl may completely lack this
extraordinary beauty and ability without falling into the opposite
extremes. At Bath, Catherine Morland comes into contact with
silly and vulgar people, the Thorpes ; and the contrast makes her
candour and right feeling shine all the brighter; while, under the
educative influence of wellbred people with a sense of humour,
the Tilneys, she develops quickly. Staying at the Tilneys' house,
she is cured of her last remnant of romantic folly ; and, on
leaving her, we are confident that she will make Henry Tilney
a sensible and charming wife. Jane Austen's sound and lively
sense, her Greek feeling for balance and proportion, are not less
clear in Northanger Abbey than in the other novels. None of the
others, moreover, gives so clear an impression of the author's enjoy-
ment in writing her story. The scenes of amusement at Bath, the
vulgarity and insincerity of Isabella Thorpe, the broader comedy
of her brother, the ironic talk of Henry Tilney, all are executed
with high-spirited gusto; and we may believe that Jane Austen
loved the simple-minded, warm-hearted girl, whom she tenderly
steers between the rocks into harbour.
With Sense and Sensibility, we revert to the chronological
order of publication. Elinor and Marianne, a first sketch of the
story, written in the form of letters, appears to have been read
aloud by Jane Austen to her family about 1795 ; in the autumn of
1797, she began to write the novel in its present form ; and, after
laying it aside for some years, she prepared it for publication in
1809, when, after several changes of abode, she had settled at
Chawton in Hampshire. Begun before Northanger Abbey, it
lacks the youthful spirit of that novel, while betraying, in a
different manner, the inexperience of its author. In construction
and characterisation, it is the weakest of Jane Austen's novels.
The hearty, vulgar Mrs Jennings, her bearish son-in-law,
Mr Palmer, her silly daughter, Mrs Palmer, provide comedy, it is
true; but this comedy is mere. comic relief '-a separate matter
;
from the story; and it is not fitted to the story with perfect


## p. 237 (#261) ############################################

CH.
237
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Sense and Sensibility
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ness of the Steele sisters are all a little exaggerated, as if Jane
Austen's desire to make her point had interfered with her
complete control of her material. It is, to some extent, the same
with Mrs Dashwood and her two elder daughters. Anxiety to
demonstrate that strong feelings are not incompatible with self-
restraint, and to show the folly of an exaggerated expression of
sentiment, has resulted in a touch of something like acerbity in
the treatment of Mrs Dashwood and Marianne (suggesting that
Jane Austen was personally angry with them), and in a too rarely
dissipated atmosphere of reproof about Elinor. The spirit of
pure comedy is not so constant in Sense and Sensibility as in any
other novel that Jane Austen wrote; though the second chapter,
which describes the famous discussion between John Dashwood
and his wife, is, perhaps, the most perfect to be found in any
of her novels.
Jane Austen’s next novel, Pride and Prejudice, published in
1813, is her most brilliant work. The wit in it sparkles. She
herself thought that it needed more relief. She wrote to her
sister, Cassandra, with a characteristic couching of sober sense in
playful exaggeration :
The work rather too light, and bright, and sparkling; it wants shade;
it wants to be stretched out here and there with a long chapter of sense, if
it could be had; if not, of solemn specious nonsense, about something
unconnected with the story; an essay on writing, a critique on Walter Scott,
or the history of Buonoparte, on anything that would form a contrast, and
bring the reader with increased delight to the playfulness and epigrammatism
of the general style.
She did not perceive, perhaps, how the story gains in gravity and
quiet when it comes to the change in Elizabeth Bennet's feeling
for Darcy. This part of the book offers a foretaste of the sym-
pathetic understanding which, later, was to give its peculiar
charm to Persuasion; and, besides supplying the needed relief
to the flashing wit with which Jane Austen reveals her critical
insight into people with whom she did not sympathise, it
affords a signal example of her subtle method. The story is
seen almost wholly through the eyes of Elizabeth Bennet; yet,
without moving from this standpoint, Jane Austen contrives to
show what was happening, without Elizabeth's knowledge, in
Elizabeth's mind. To a modern reader, the great blot on the
book is the author's neglect to lift Darcy sufficiently above
the level of aristocratic brutality: it has constantly to be
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238
[CH.
Jane Austen
remembered that, in Jane Austen's day and social class, birth and
fortune were regarded with more respect than they are now.
Darcy's pride was something other than snobbishness; it was
the result of a genuinely aristocratic consciousness of merit,
acting upon a haughty nature.