Taine, also
protests
that you do preach too much.
Letters to Dead Authors - Andrew Lang
LETTERS
TO
DEAD AUTHORS
BY
ANDREW LANG
[Picture: Decorative graphic]
LONDON
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
1886
_All rights reserved_
* * * * *
TO
MISS THACKERAY
THESE EXERCISES
IN THE ART OF DIPPING
ARE DEDICATED
* * * * *
PREFACE.
SIXTEEN of these Letters, which were written at the suggestion of the
Editor of the “St. James’s Gazette,” appeared in that journal, from which
they are now reprinted, by the Editor’s kind permission. They have been
somewhat emended, and a few additions have been made. The Letters to
Horace, Byron, Isaak Walton, Chapelain, Ronsard, and Theocritus have not
been published before.
The gem on the title-page, now engraved for the first time, is a red
cornelian in the British Museum, probably Græco-Roman, and treated in an
archaistic style. It represents Hermes Psychagogos, with a Soul, and has
some likeness to the Baptism of Our Lord, as usually shown in art.
Perhaps it may be post-Christian. The gem was selected by Mr. A. S.
Murray.
It is, perhaps, superfluous to add that some of the Letters are written
rather to suit the Correspondent than to express the writer’s own taste
or opinions. The Epistle to Lord Byron, especially, is “writ in a manner
which is my aversion. ”
CONTENTS.
PAGE
I. TO W. M. THACKERAY 1
II. TO CHARLES DICKENS 10
III. TO PIERRE DE RONSARD 22
IV. TO HERODOTUS 34
V. EPISTLE TO MR. ALEXANDER POPE 46
VI. TO LUCIAN OF SAMOSATA 55
VII. TO MAÎTRE FRANÇOYS RABELAIS 66
VIII. TO JANE AUSTEN 75
IX. TO MASTER ISAAK WALTON 86
X. TO M. CHAPELAIN 98
XI. TO SIR JOHN MAUNDEVILLE, KT. 110
XII. TO ALEXANDRE DUMAS 119
XIII. TO THEOCRITUS 130
XIV. TO EDGAR ALLAN POE 140
XV. TO SIR WALTER SCOTT, BART. 152
XVI. TO EUSEBIUS OF CÆSAREA 162
XVII. TO PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 173
XVIII. TO MONSIEUR DE MOLIÈRE, VALET DE CHAMBRE DU ROI 184
XIX. TO ROBERT BURNS 195
XX. TO LORD BYRON 205
XXI. TO OMAR KHAYYÂM 216
XXII. TO Q. HORATIUS FLACCUS 223
I.
_To W. M. Thackeray_.
SIR,—There are many things that stand in the way of the critic when he
has a mind to praise the living. He may dread the charge of writing
rather to vex a rival than to exalt the subject of his applause. He
shuns the appearance of seeking the favour of the famous, and would not
willingly be regarded as one of the many parasites who now advertise each
movement and action of contemporary genius. “Such and such men of
letters are passing their summer holidays in the Val d’Aosta,” or the
Mountains of the Moon, or the Suliman Range, as it may happen. So
reports our literary “Court Circular,” and all our _Précieuses_ read the
tidings with enthusiasm. Lastly, if the critic be quite new to the world
of letters, he may superfluously fear to vex a poet or a novelist by the
abundance of his eulogy. No such doubts perplex us when, with all our
hearts, we would commend the departed; for they have passed almost beyond
the reach even of envy; and to those pale cheeks of theirs no
commendation can bring the red.
You, above all others, were and remain without a rival in your many-sided
excellence, and praise of you strikes at none of those who have survived
your day. The increase of time only mellows your renown, and each year
that passes and brings you no successor does but sharpen the keenness of
our sense of loss. In what other novelist, since Scott was worn down by
the burden of a forlorn endeavour, and died for honour’s sake, has the
world found so many of the fairest gifts combined? If we may not call
you a poet (for the first of English writers of light verse did not seek
that crown), who that was less than a poet ever saw life with a glance so
keen as yours, so steady, and so sane? Your pathos was never cheap, your
laughter never forced; your sigh was never the pulpit trick of the
preacher. Your funny people—your Costigans and Fokers—were not mere
characters of trick and catch-word, were not empty comic masks. Behind
each the human heart was beating; and ever and again we were allowed to
see the features of the man.
Thus fiction in your hands was not simply a profession, like another, but
a constant reflection of the whole surface of life: a repeated echo of
its laughter and its complaint. Others have written, and not written
badly, with the stolid professional regularity of the clerk at his desk;
you, like the Scholar Gipsy, might have said that “it needs heaven-sent
moments for this skill. ” There are, it will not surprise you, some
honourable women and a few men who call you a cynic; who speak of “the
withered world of Thackerayan satire;” who think your eyes were ever
turned to the sordid aspects of life—to the mother-in-law who threatens
to “take away her silver bread-basket;” to the intriguer, the sneak, the
termagant; to the Beckys, and Barnes Newcomes, and Mrs. Mackenzies of
this world. The quarrel of these sentimentalists is really with life,
not with you; they might as wisely blame Monsieur Buffon because there
are snakes in his Natural History. Had you not impaled certain noxious
human insects, you would have better pleased Mr. Ruskin; had you confined
yourself to such performances, you would have been more dear to the
Neo-Balzacian school in fiction.
You are accused of never having drawn a good woman who was not a doll,
but the ladies that bring this charge seldom remind us either of Lady
Castlewood or of Theo or Hetty Lambert. The best women can pardon you
Becky Sharp and Blanche Amory; they find it harder to forgive you Emmy
Sedley and Helen Pendennis. Yet what man does not know in his heart that
the best women—God bless them—lean, in their characters, either to the
sweet passiveness of Emmy or to the sensitive and jealous affections of
Helen? ’Tis Heaven, not you, that made them so; and they are easily
pardoned, both for being a very little lower than the angels and for
their gentle ambition to be painted, as by Guido or Guercino, with wings
and harps and haloes. So ladies have occasionally seen their own faces
in the glass of fancy, and, thus inspired, have drawn Romola and
Consuelo. Yet when these fair idealists, Mdme. Sand and George Eliot,
designed Rosamund Vincy and Horace, was there not a spice of malice in
the portraits which we miss in your least favourable studies?
That the creator of Colonel Newcome and of Henry Esmond was a snarling
cynic; that he who designed Rachel Esmond could not draw a good woman:
these are the chief charges (all indifferent now to you, who were once so
sensitive) that your admirers have to contend against. A French critic,
M. Taine, also protests that you do preach too much. Did any author but
yourself so frequently break the thread (seldom a strong thread) of his
plot to converse with his reader and moralise his tale, we also might be
offended. But who that loves Montaigne and Pascal, who that likes the
wise trifling of the one and can bear with the melancholy of the other,
but prefers your preaching to another’s playing!
Your thoughts come in, like the intervention of the Greek Chorus, as an
ornament and source of fresh delight. Like the songs of the Chorus, they
bid us pause a moment over the wider laws and actions of human fate and
human life, and we turn from your persons to yourself, and again from
yourself to your persons, as from the odes of Sophocles or Aristophanes
to the action of their characters on the stage. Nor, to my taste, does
the mere music and melancholy dignity of your style in these passages of
meditation fall far below the highest efforts of poetry. I remember that
scene where Clive, at Barnes Newcome’s Lecture on the Poetry of the
Affections, sees Ethel who is lost to him. “And the past and its dear
histories, and youth and its hopes and passions, and tones and looks for
ever echoing in the heart and present in the memory—these, no doubt, poor
Clive saw and heard as he looked across the great gulf of time, and
parting and grief, and beheld the woman he had loved for many years. ”
_For ever echoing in the heart and present in the memory_: who has not
heard these tones, who does not hear them as he turns over your books
that, for so many years, have been his companions and comforters? We
have been young and old, we have been sad and merry with you, we have
listened to the midnight chimes with Pen and Warrington, have stood with
you beside the death-bed, have mourned at that yet more awful funeral of
lost love, and with you have prayed in the inmost chapel sacred to our
old and immortal affections, _à léal souvenir_! And whenever you speak
for yourself, and speak in earnest, how magical, how rare, how lonely in
our literature is the beauty of your sentences! “I can’t express the
charm of them” (so you write of George Sand; so we may write of you):
“they seem to me like the sound of country bells, provoking I don’t know
what vein of music and meditation, and falling sweetly and sadly on the
ear. ” Surely that style, so fresh, so rich, so full of surprises—that
style which stamps as classical your fragments of slang, and perpetually
astonishes and delights—would alone give immortality to an author, even
had he little to say. But you, with your whole wide world of fops and
fools, of good women and brave men, of honest absurdities and cheery
adventurers: you who created the Steynes and Newcomes, the Beckys and
Blanches, Captain Costigan and F. B. , and the Chevalier Strong—all that
host of friends imperishable—you must survive with Shakespeare and
Cervantes in the memory and affection of men.
II.
_To Charles Dickens_.
SIR,—It has been said that every man is born a Platonist or an
Aristotelian, though the enormous majority of us, to be sure, live and
die without being conscious of any invidious philosophic partiality
whatever. With more truth (though that does not imply very much) every
Englishman who reads may be said to be a partisan of yourself or of Mr.
Thackeray. Why should there be any partisanship in the matter; and why,
having two such good things as your novels and those of your
contemporary, should we not be silently happy in the possession? Well,
men are made so, and must needs fight and argue over their tastes in
enjoyment. For myself, I may say that in this matter I am what the
Americans do _not_ call a “Mugwump,” what English politicians dub a
“superior person”—that is, I take no side, and attempt to enjoy the best
of both.
It must be owned that this attitude is sometimes made a little difficult
by the vigour of your special devotees. They have ceased, indeed, thank
Heaven! to imitate you; and even in “descriptive articles” the touch of
Mr. Gigadibs, of him whom “we almost took for the true Dickens,” has
disappeared. The young lions of the Press no longer mimic your less
admirable mannerisms—do not strain so much after fantastic comparisons,
do not (in your manner and Mr. Carlyle’s) give people nick-names derived
from their teeth, or their complexion; and, generally, we are spared
second-hand copies of all that in your style was least to be commended.
But, though improved by lapse of time in this respect, your devotees
still put on little conscious airs of virtue, robust manliness, and so
forth, which would have irritated you very much, and there survive some
press men who seem to have read you a little (especially your later
works), and never to have read anything else. Now familiarity with the
pages of “Our Mutual Friend” and “Dombey and Son” does not precisely
constitute a liberal education, and the assumption that it does is apt
(quite unreasonably) to prejudice people against the greatest comic
genius of modern times.
On the other hand, Time is at last beginning to sift the true admirers of
Dickens from the false. Yours, Sir, in the best sense of the word, is a
popular success, a popular reputation. For example, I know that, in a
remote and even Pictish part of this kingdom, a rural household, humble
and under the shadow of a sorrow inevitably approaching, has found in
“David Copperfield” oblivion of winter, of sorrow, and of sickness. On
the other hand, people are now picking up heart to say that “they cannot
read Dickens,” and that they particularly detest “Pickwick. ” I believe
it was young ladies who first had the courage of their convictions in
this respect. “Tout sied aux belles,” and the fair, in the confidence of
youth, often venture on remarkable confessions. In your “Natural History
of Young Ladies” I do not remember that you describe the Humorous Young
Lady. {13} She is a very rare bird indeed, and humour generally is at a
deplorably low level in England.
Hence come all sorts of mischief, arisen since you left us; and it may be
said that inordinate philanthropy, genteel sympathy with Irish murder and
arson, Societies for Badgering the Poor, Esoteric Buddhism, and a score
of other plagues, including what was once called Æstheticism, are all,
primarily, due to want of humour. People discuss, with the gravest
faces, matters which properly should only be stated as the wildest
paradoxes. It naturally follows that, in a period almost destitute of
humour, many respectable persons “cannot read Dickens,” and are not
ashamed to glory in their shame. We ought not to be angry with others
for their misfortunes; and yet when one meets the _crétins_ who boast
that they cannot read Dickens, one certainly does feel much as Mr. Samuel
Weller felt when he encountered Mr. Job Trotter.
How very singular has been the history of the decline of humour! Is
there any profound psychological truth to be gathered from consideration
of the fact that humour has gone out with cruelty? A hundred years ago,
eighty years ago—nay, fifty years ago—we were a cruel but also a humorous
people. We had bull-baitings, and badger-drawings, and hustings, and
prize-fights, and cock-fights; we went to see men hanged; the pillory and
the stocks were no empty “terrors unto evil-doers,” for there was
commonly a malefactor occupying each of these institutions. With all
this we had a broad-blown comic sense. We had Hogarth, and Bunbury, and
George Cruikshank, and Gilray; we had Leech and Surtees, and the creator
of Tittlebat Titmouse; we had the Shepherd of the “Noctes,” and, above
all, we had _you_.
From the old giants of English fun—burly persons delighting in broad
caricature, in decided colours, in cockney jokes, in swashing blows at
the more prominent and obvious human follies—from these you derived the
splendid high spirits and unhesitating mirth of your earlier works. Mr.
Squeers, and Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp, and all the Pickwickians, and Mr.
Dowler, and John Browdie—these and their immortal companions were reared,
so to speak, on the beef and beer of that naughty, fox-hunting,
badger-baiting old England, which we have improved out of existence. And
these characters, assuredly, are your best; by them, though stupid people
cannot read about them, you will live while there is a laugh left among
us. Perhaps that does not assure you a very prolonged existence, but
only the future can show.
The dismal seriousness of the time cannot, let us hope, last for ever and
a day. Honest old Laughter, the true _lutin_ of your inspiration, must
have life left in him yet, and cannot die; though it is true that the
taste for your pathos, and your melodrama, and plots constructed after
your favourite fashion (“Great Expectations” and the “Tale of Two Cities”
are exceptions) may go by and never be regretted. Were people simpler,
or only less clear-sighted, as far as your pathos is concerned, a
generation ago? Jeffrey, the hard-headed shallow critic, who declared
that Wordsworth “would never do,” cried, “wept like anything,” over your
Little Nell. One still laughs as heartily as ever with Dick Swiveller;
but who can cry over Little Nell?
Ah, Sir, how could you—who knew so intimately, who remembered so
strangely well the fancies, the dreams, the sufferings of childhood—how
could you “wallow naked in the pathetic,” and massacre holocausts of the
Innocents? To draw tears by gloating over a child’s death-bed, was it
worthy of you? Was it the kind of work over which our hearts should
melt? I confess that Little Nell might die a dozen times, and be
welcomed by whole legions of Angels, and I (like the bereaved fowl
mentioned by Pet Marjory) would remain unmoved.
She was more than usual calm,
She did not give a single dam,
wrote the astonishing child who diverted the leisure of Scott. Over your
Little Nell and your Little Dombey I remain more than usual calm; and
probably so do thousands of your most sincere admirers. But about matter
of this kind, and the unseating of the fountains of tears, who can argue?
Where is taste? where is truth? What tears are “manly, Sir, manly,” as
Fred Bayham has it; and of what lamentations ought we rather to be
ashamed? _Sunt lacrymæ rerum_; one has been moved in the cell where
Socrates tasted the hemlock; or by the river-banks where Syracusan arrows
slew the parched Athenians among the mire and blood; or, in fiction, when
Colonel Newcome says _Adsum_, or over the diary of Clare Doria Forey, or
where Aramis laments, with strange tears, the death of Porthos. But over
Dombey (the Son), or Little Nell, one declines to snivel.
When an author deliberately sits down and says, “Now, let us have a good
cry,” he poisons the wells of sensibility and chokes, at least in many
breasts, the fountain of tears. Out of “Dombey and Son” there is little
we care to remember except the deathless Mr. Toots; just as we forget the
melodramatics of “Martin Chuzzlewit. ” I have read in that book a score
of times; I never see it but I revel in it—in Pecksniff, and Mrs. Gamp,
and the Americans. But what the plot is all about, what Jonas did, what
Montagu Tigg had to make in the matter, what all the pictures with plenty
of shading illustrate, I have never been able to comprehend. In the same
way, one of your most thorough-going admirers has allowed (in the licence
of private conversation) that “Ralph Nickleby and Monk are too steep;”
and probably a cultivated taste will always find them a little
precipitous.
“Too steep:”—the slang expresses that defect of an ardent genius, carried
above itself, and out of the air we breathe, both in its grotesque and in
its gloomy imaginations. To force the note, to press fantasy too hard,
to deepen the gloom with black over the indigo, that was the failing
which proved you mortal. To take an instance in little: when Pip went to
Mr. Pumblechook’s, the boy thought the seedsman “a very happy man to have
so many little drawers in his shop. ” The reflection is thoroughly
boyish; but then you add, “I wondered whether the flower-seeds and bulbs
ever wanted of a fine day to break out of those jails and bloom. ” That
is not boyish at all; that is the hard-driven, jaded literary fancy at
work.
“So we arraign her; but she,” the Genius of Charles Dickens, how
brilliant, how kindly, how beneficent she is! dwelling by a fountain of
laughter imperishable; though there is something of an alien salt in the
neighbouring fountain of tears. How poor the world of fancy would be,
how “dispeopled of her dreams,” if, in some ruin of the social system,
the books of Dickens were lost; and if The Dodger, and Charley Bates, and
Mr. Crinkle, and Miss Squeers and Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp, and Dick
Swiveller were to perish, or to vanish with Menander’s men and women! We
cannot think of our world without them; and, children of dreams as they
are, they seem more essential than great statesmen, artists, soldiers,
who have actually worn flesh and blood, ribbons and orders, gowns and
uniforms. May we not almost welcome “Free Education”? for every
Englishman who can read, unless he be an Ass, is a reader the more for
you.
P. S. —Alas, how strangely are we tempered, and how strong is the national
bias! I have been saying things of you that I would not hear an enemy
say. When I read, in the criticism of an American novelist, about your
“hysterical emotionality” (for he writes in American), and your “waste of
verbiage,” I am almost tempted to deny that our Dickens has a single
fault, to deem you impeccable!
III.
_To Pierre de Ronsard_
(PRINCE OF POETS)
MASTER AND PRINCE OF POETS,—As we know what choice thou madest of a
sepulchre (a choice how ill fulfilled by the jealousy of Fate), so we
know well the manner of thy chosen immortality. In the Plains Elysian,
among the heroes and the ladies of old song, there was thy Love with thee
to enjoy her paradise in an eternal spring.
_Là du plaisant Avril la saison immortelle_
_Sans eschange le suit_,
_La terre sans labour, de sa grasse mamelle_,
_Toute chose y produit_;
_D’enbas la troupe sainte autrefois amoureuse_,
_Nous honorant sur tous_,
_Viendra nous saluer, s’estimant bien-heureuse_
_De s’accointer de nous_.
There thou dwellest, with the learned lovers of old days, with Belleau,
and Du Bellay, and Baïf, and the flower of the maidens of Anjou. Surely
no rumour reaches thee, in that happy place of reconciled affections, no
rumour of the rudeness of Time, the despite of men, and the change which
stole from thy locks, so early grey, the crown of laurels and of thine
own roses. How different from thy choice of a sepulchre have been the
fortunes of thy tomb!
I will that none should break
The marble for my sake,
Wishful to make more fair
My sepulchre!
So didst thou sing, or so thy sweet numbers run in my rude English.
Wearied of Courts and of priories, thou didst desire a grave beside thine
own Loire, not remote from
The caves, the founts that fall
From the high mountain wall,
That fall and flash and fleet,
With silver feet.
Only a laurel tree
Shall guard the grave of me;
Only Apollo’s bough
Shall shade me now!
Far other has been thy sepulchre: not in the free air, among the field
flowers, but in thy priory of Saint Cosme, with marble for a monument,
and no green grass to cover thee. Restless wert thou in thy life; thy
dust was not to be restful in thy death. The Huguenots, _ces nouveaux
Chrétiens qui la France ont pillée_, destroyed thy tomb, and the warning
of the later monument,
ABI, NEFASTE, QUAM CALCUS HUMUM SACRA EST,
has not scared away malicious men. The storm that passed over France a
hundred years ago, more terrible than the religious wars that thou didst
weep for, has swept the column from the tomb. The marble was broken by
violent hands, and the shattered sepulchre of the Prince of Poets gained
a dusty hospitality from the museum of a country town. Better had been
the laurel of thy desire, the creeping vine, and the ivy tree.
Scarce more fortunate, for long, than thy monument was thy memory. Thou
hast not encountered, Master, in the Paradise of Poets, Messieurs
Malherbe, De Balzac, and Boileau—Boileau who spoke of thee as _Ce poète
orgueilleux trébuché de si haut_!
Taine, also protests that you do preach too much. Did any author but
yourself so frequently break the thread (seldom a strong thread) of his
plot to converse with his reader and moralise his tale, we also might be
offended. But who that loves Montaigne and Pascal, who that likes the
wise trifling of the one and can bear with the melancholy of the other,
but prefers your preaching to another’s playing!
Your thoughts come in, like the intervention of the Greek Chorus, as an
ornament and source of fresh delight. Like the songs of the Chorus, they
bid us pause a moment over the wider laws and actions of human fate and
human life, and we turn from your persons to yourself, and again from
yourself to your persons, as from the odes of Sophocles or Aristophanes
to the action of their characters on the stage. Nor, to my taste, does
the mere music and melancholy dignity of your style in these passages of
meditation fall far below the highest efforts of poetry. I remember that
scene where Clive, at Barnes Newcome’s Lecture on the Poetry of the
Affections, sees Ethel who is lost to him. “And the past and its dear
histories, and youth and its hopes and passions, and tones and looks for
ever echoing in the heart and present in the memory—these, no doubt, poor
Clive saw and heard as he looked across the great gulf of time, and
parting and grief, and beheld the woman he had loved for many years. ”
_For ever echoing in the heart and present in the memory_: who has not
heard these tones, who does not hear them as he turns over your books
that, for so many years, have been his companions and comforters? We
have been young and old, we have been sad and merry with you, we have
listened to the midnight chimes with Pen and Warrington, have stood with
you beside the death-bed, have mourned at that yet more awful funeral of
lost love, and with you have prayed in the inmost chapel sacred to our
old and immortal affections, _à léal souvenir_! And whenever you speak
for yourself, and speak in earnest, how magical, how rare, how lonely in
our literature is the beauty of your sentences! “I can’t express the
charm of them” (so you write of George Sand; so we may write of you):
“they seem to me like the sound of country bells, provoking I don’t know
what vein of music and meditation, and falling sweetly and sadly on the
ear. ” Surely that style, so fresh, so rich, so full of surprises—that
style which stamps as classical your fragments of slang, and perpetually
astonishes and delights—would alone give immortality to an author, even
had he little to say. But you, with your whole wide world of fops and
fools, of good women and brave men, of honest absurdities and cheery
adventurers: you who created the Steynes and Newcomes, the Beckys and
Blanches, Captain Costigan and F. B. , and the Chevalier Strong—all that
host of friends imperishable—you must survive with Shakespeare and
Cervantes in the memory and affection of men.
II.
_To Charles Dickens_.
SIR,—It has been said that every man is born a Platonist or an
Aristotelian, though the enormous majority of us, to be sure, live and
die without being conscious of any invidious philosophic partiality
whatever. With more truth (though that does not imply very much) every
Englishman who reads may be said to be a partisan of yourself or of Mr.
Thackeray. Why should there be any partisanship in the matter; and why,
having two such good things as your novels and those of your
contemporary, should we not be silently happy in the possession? Well,
men are made so, and must needs fight and argue over their tastes in
enjoyment. For myself, I may say that in this matter I am what the
Americans do _not_ call a “Mugwump,” what English politicians dub a
“superior person”—that is, I take no side, and attempt to enjoy the best
of both.
It must be owned that this attitude is sometimes made a little difficult
by the vigour of your special devotees. They have ceased, indeed, thank
Heaven! to imitate you; and even in “descriptive articles” the touch of
Mr. Gigadibs, of him whom “we almost took for the true Dickens,” has
disappeared. The young lions of the Press no longer mimic your less
admirable mannerisms—do not strain so much after fantastic comparisons,
do not (in your manner and Mr. Carlyle’s) give people nick-names derived
from their teeth, or their complexion; and, generally, we are spared
second-hand copies of all that in your style was least to be commended.
But, though improved by lapse of time in this respect, your devotees
still put on little conscious airs of virtue, robust manliness, and so
forth, which would have irritated you very much, and there survive some
press men who seem to have read you a little (especially your later
works), and never to have read anything else. Now familiarity with the
pages of “Our Mutual Friend” and “Dombey and Son” does not precisely
constitute a liberal education, and the assumption that it does is apt
(quite unreasonably) to prejudice people against the greatest comic
genius of modern times.
On the other hand, Time is at last beginning to sift the true admirers of
Dickens from the false. Yours, Sir, in the best sense of the word, is a
popular success, a popular reputation. For example, I know that, in a
remote and even Pictish part of this kingdom, a rural household, humble
and under the shadow of a sorrow inevitably approaching, has found in
“David Copperfield” oblivion of winter, of sorrow, and of sickness. On
the other hand, people are now picking up heart to say that “they cannot
read Dickens,” and that they particularly detest “Pickwick. ” I believe
it was young ladies who first had the courage of their convictions in
this respect. “Tout sied aux belles,” and the fair, in the confidence of
youth, often venture on remarkable confessions. In your “Natural History
of Young Ladies” I do not remember that you describe the Humorous Young
Lady. {13} She is a very rare bird indeed, and humour generally is at a
deplorably low level in England.
Hence come all sorts of mischief, arisen since you left us; and it may be
said that inordinate philanthropy, genteel sympathy with Irish murder and
arson, Societies for Badgering the Poor, Esoteric Buddhism, and a score
of other plagues, including what was once called Æstheticism, are all,
primarily, due to want of humour. People discuss, with the gravest
faces, matters which properly should only be stated as the wildest
paradoxes. It naturally follows that, in a period almost destitute of
humour, many respectable persons “cannot read Dickens,” and are not
ashamed to glory in their shame. We ought not to be angry with others
for their misfortunes; and yet when one meets the _crétins_ who boast
that they cannot read Dickens, one certainly does feel much as Mr. Samuel
Weller felt when he encountered Mr. Job Trotter.
How very singular has been the history of the decline of humour! Is
there any profound psychological truth to be gathered from consideration
of the fact that humour has gone out with cruelty? A hundred years ago,
eighty years ago—nay, fifty years ago—we were a cruel but also a humorous
people. We had bull-baitings, and badger-drawings, and hustings, and
prize-fights, and cock-fights; we went to see men hanged; the pillory and
the stocks were no empty “terrors unto evil-doers,” for there was
commonly a malefactor occupying each of these institutions. With all
this we had a broad-blown comic sense. We had Hogarth, and Bunbury, and
George Cruikshank, and Gilray; we had Leech and Surtees, and the creator
of Tittlebat Titmouse; we had the Shepherd of the “Noctes,” and, above
all, we had _you_.
From the old giants of English fun—burly persons delighting in broad
caricature, in decided colours, in cockney jokes, in swashing blows at
the more prominent and obvious human follies—from these you derived the
splendid high spirits and unhesitating mirth of your earlier works. Mr.
Squeers, and Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp, and all the Pickwickians, and Mr.
Dowler, and John Browdie—these and their immortal companions were reared,
so to speak, on the beef and beer of that naughty, fox-hunting,
badger-baiting old England, which we have improved out of existence. And
these characters, assuredly, are your best; by them, though stupid people
cannot read about them, you will live while there is a laugh left among
us. Perhaps that does not assure you a very prolonged existence, but
only the future can show.
The dismal seriousness of the time cannot, let us hope, last for ever and
a day. Honest old Laughter, the true _lutin_ of your inspiration, must
have life left in him yet, and cannot die; though it is true that the
taste for your pathos, and your melodrama, and plots constructed after
your favourite fashion (“Great Expectations” and the “Tale of Two Cities”
are exceptions) may go by and never be regretted. Were people simpler,
or only less clear-sighted, as far as your pathos is concerned, a
generation ago? Jeffrey, the hard-headed shallow critic, who declared
that Wordsworth “would never do,” cried, “wept like anything,” over your
Little Nell. One still laughs as heartily as ever with Dick Swiveller;
but who can cry over Little Nell?
Ah, Sir, how could you—who knew so intimately, who remembered so
strangely well the fancies, the dreams, the sufferings of childhood—how
could you “wallow naked in the pathetic,” and massacre holocausts of the
Innocents? To draw tears by gloating over a child’s death-bed, was it
worthy of you? Was it the kind of work over which our hearts should
melt? I confess that Little Nell might die a dozen times, and be
welcomed by whole legions of Angels, and I (like the bereaved fowl
mentioned by Pet Marjory) would remain unmoved.
She was more than usual calm,
She did not give a single dam,
wrote the astonishing child who diverted the leisure of Scott. Over your
Little Nell and your Little Dombey I remain more than usual calm; and
probably so do thousands of your most sincere admirers. But about matter
of this kind, and the unseating of the fountains of tears, who can argue?
Where is taste? where is truth? What tears are “manly, Sir, manly,” as
Fred Bayham has it; and of what lamentations ought we rather to be
ashamed? _Sunt lacrymæ rerum_; one has been moved in the cell where
Socrates tasted the hemlock; or by the river-banks where Syracusan arrows
slew the parched Athenians among the mire and blood; or, in fiction, when
Colonel Newcome says _Adsum_, or over the diary of Clare Doria Forey, or
where Aramis laments, with strange tears, the death of Porthos. But over
Dombey (the Son), or Little Nell, one declines to snivel.
When an author deliberately sits down and says, “Now, let us have a good
cry,” he poisons the wells of sensibility and chokes, at least in many
breasts, the fountain of tears. Out of “Dombey and Son” there is little
we care to remember except the deathless Mr. Toots; just as we forget the
melodramatics of “Martin Chuzzlewit. ” I have read in that book a score
of times; I never see it but I revel in it—in Pecksniff, and Mrs. Gamp,
and the Americans. But what the plot is all about, what Jonas did, what
Montagu Tigg had to make in the matter, what all the pictures with plenty
of shading illustrate, I have never been able to comprehend. In the same
way, one of your most thorough-going admirers has allowed (in the licence
of private conversation) that “Ralph Nickleby and Monk are too steep;”
and probably a cultivated taste will always find them a little
precipitous.
“Too steep:”—the slang expresses that defect of an ardent genius, carried
above itself, and out of the air we breathe, both in its grotesque and in
its gloomy imaginations. To force the note, to press fantasy too hard,
to deepen the gloom with black over the indigo, that was the failing
which proved you mortal. To take an instance in little: when Pip went to
Mr. Pumblechook’s, the boy thought the seedsman “a very happy man to have
so many little drawers in his shop. ” The reflection is thoroughly
boyish; but then you add, “I wondered whether the flower-seeds and bulbs
ever wanted of a fine day to break out of those jails and bloom. ” That
is not boyish at all; that is the hard-driven, jaded literary fancy at
work.
“So we arraign her; but she,” the Genius of Charles Dickens, how
brilliant, how kindly, how beneficent she is! dwelling by a fountain of
laughter imperishable; though there is something of an alien salt in the
neighbouring fountain of tears. How poor the world of fancy would be,
how “dispeopled of her dreams,” if, in some ruin of the social system,
the books of Dickens were lost; and if The Dodger, and Charley Bates, and
Mr. Crinkle, and Miss Squeers and Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp, and Dick
Swiveller were to perish, or to vanish with Menander’s men and women! We
cannot think of our world without them; and, children of dreams as they
are, they seem more essential than great statesmen, artists, soldiers,
who have actually worn flesh and blood, ribbons and orders, gowns and
uniforms. May we not almost welcome “Free Education”? for every
Englishman who can read, unless he be an Ass, is a reader the more for
you.
P. S. —Alas, how strangely are we tempered, and how strong is the national
bias! I have been saying things of you that I would not hear an enemy
say. When I read, in the criticism of an American novelist, about your
“hysterical emotionality” (for he writes in American), and your “waste of
verbiage,” I am almost tempted to deny that our Dickens has a single
fault, to deem you impeccable!
III.
_To Pierre de Ronsard_
(PRINCE OF POETS)
MASTER AND PRINCE OF POETS,—As we know what choice thou madest of a
sepulchre (a choice how ill fulfilled by the jealousy of Fate), so we
know well the manner of thy chosen immortality. In the Plains Elysian,
among the heroes and the ladies of old song, there was thy Love with thee
to enjoy her paradise in an eternal spring.
_Là du plaisant Avril la saison immortelle_
_Sans eschange le suit_,
_La terre sans labour, de sa grasse mamelle_,
_Toute chose y produit_;
_D’enbas la troupe sainte autrefois amoureuse_,
_Nous honorant sur tous_,
_Viendra nous saluer, s’estimant bien-heureuse_
_De s’accointer de nous_.
There thou dwellest, with the learned lovers of old days, with Belleau,
and Du Bellay, and Baïf, and the flower of the maidens of Anjou. Surely
no rumour reaches thee, in that happy place of reconciled affections, no
rumour of the rudeness of Time, the despite of men, and the change which
stole from thy locks, so early grey, the crown of laurels and of thine
own roses. How different from thy choice of a sepulchre have been the
fortunes of thy tomb!
I will that none should break
The marble for my sake,
Wishful to make more fair
My sepulchre!
So didst thou sing, or so thy sweet numbers run in my rude English.
Wearied of Courts and of priories, thou didst desire a grave beside thine
own Loire, not remote from
The caves, the founts that fall
From the high mountain wall,
That fall and flash and fleet,
With silver feet.
Only a laurel tree
Shall guard the grave of me;
Only Apollo’s bough
Shall shade me now!
Far other has been thy sepulchre: not in the free air, among the field
flowers, but in thy priory of Saint Cosme, with marble for a monument,
and no green grass to cover thee. Restless wert thou in thy life; thy
dust was not to be restful in thy death. The Huguenots, _ces nouveaux
Chrétiens qui la France ont pillée_, destroyed thy tomb, and the warning
of the later monument,
ABI, NEFASTE, QUAM CALCUS HUMUM SACRA EST,
has not scared away malicious men. The storm that passed over France a
hundred years ago, more terrible than the religious wars that thou didst
weep for, has swept the column from the tomb. The marble was broken by
violent hands, and the shattered sepulchre of the Prince of Poets gained
a dusty hospitality from the museum of a country town. Better had been
the laurel of thy desire, the creeping vine, and the ivy tree.
Scarce more fortunate, for long, than thy monument was thy memory. Thou
hast not encountered, Master, in the Paradise of Poets, Messieurs
Malherbe, De Balzac, and Boileau—Boileau who spoke of thee as _Ce poète
orgueilleux trébuché de si haut_!
These gallant gentlemen, I make no doubt, are happy after their own
fashion, backbiting each other and thee in the Paradise of Critics. In
their time they wrought thee much evil, grumbling that thou wrotest in
Greek and Latin (of which tongues certain of them had but little skill),
and blaming thy many lyric melodies and the free flow of thy lines. What
said M. de Balzac to M. Chapelain? “M. de Malherbe, M. de Grasse, and
yourself must be very little poets, if Ronsard be a great one. ” Time has
brought in his revenges, and Messieurs Chapelain and De Grasse are as
well forgotten as thou art well remembered. Men could not always be deaf
to thy sweet old songs, nor blind to the beauty of thy roses and thy
loves. When they took the wax out of their ears that M. Boileau had
given them lest they should hear the singing of thy Sirens, then they
were deaf no longer, then they heard the old deaf poet singing and made
answer to his lays. Hast thou not heard these sounds? have they not
reached thee, the voices and the lyres of Théophile Gautier and Alfred de
Musset? Methinks thou hast marked them, and been glad that the old notes
were ringing again and the old French lyric measures tripping to thine
ancient harmonies, echoing and replying to the Muses of Horace and
Catullus. Returning to Nature, poets returned to thee. Thy monument has
perished, but not thy music, and the Prince of Poets has returned to his
own again in a glorious Restoration.
Through the dust and smoke of ages, and through the centuries of wars we
strain our eyes and try to gain a glimpse of thee, Master, in thy good
days, when the Muses walked with thee. We seem to mark thee wandering
silent through some little village, or dreaming in the woods, or
loitering among thy lonely places, or in gardens where the roses blossom
among wilder flowers, or on river banks where the whispering poplars and
sighing reeds make answer to the murmur of the waters. Such a picture
hast thou drawn of thyself in the summer afternoons.
Je m’en vais pourmener tantost parmy la plaine,
Tantost en un village, et tantost en un bois,
Et tantost par les lieux solitaires et cois.
J’aime fort les jardins qui sentent le sauvage,
J’aime le flot de l’eau qui gazoüille au rivage.
Still, methinks, there was a book in the hand of the grave and learned
poet; still thou wouldst carry thy Horace, thy Catullus, thy Theocritus,
through the gem-like weather of the _Renouveau_, when the woods were
enamelled with flowers, and the young Spring was lodged, like a wandering
prince, in his great palaces hung with green:
Orgueilleux de ses fleurs, enflé de sa jeunesse,
Logé comme un grand Prince en ses vertes maisons!
Thou sawest, in these woods by Loire side, the fair shapes of old
religion, Fauns, Nymphs, and Satyrs, and heard’st in the nightingale’s
music the plaint of Philomel. The ancient poets came back in the train
of thyself and of the Spring, and learning was scarce less dear to thee
than love; and thy ladies seemed fairer for the names they borrowed from
the beauties of forgotten days, Helen and Cassandra. How sweetly didst
thou sing to them thine old morality, and how gravely didst thou teach
the lesson of the Roses! Well didst thou know it, well didst thou love
the Rose, since thy nurse, carrying thee, an infant, to the holy font,
let fall on thee the sacred water brimmed with floating blossoms of the
Rose!
Mignonne, allons voir si la Rose,
Qui ce matin avoit desclose
Sa robe de pourpre au soleil,
A point perdu ceste vespree
Les plis de sa robe pourpree,
Et son teint au votre pareil.
And again,
La belle Rose du Printemps,
Aubert, admoneste les hommes
Passer joyeusement le temps,
Et pendant que jeunes nous sommes,
Esbattre la fleur de nos ans.
In the same mood, looking far down the future, thou sangest of thy lady’s
age, the most sad, the most beautiful of thy sad and beautiful lays; for
if thy bees gathered much honey ’twas somewhat bitter to taste, like that
of the Sardinian yews. How clearly we see the great hall, the grey lady
spinning and humming among her drowsy maids, and how they waken at the
word, and she sees her spring in their eyes, and they forecast their
winter in her face, when she murmurs “’Twas Ronsard sang of me. ”
Winter, and summer, and spring, how swiftly they pass, and how early time
brought thee his sorrows, and grief cast her dust upon thy head.
Adieu ma Lyre, adieu fillettes,
Jadis mes douces amourettes,
Adieu, je sens venir ma fin,
Nul passetemps de ma jeunesse
Ne m’accompagne en la vieillesse,
Que le feu, le lict et le vin.
Wine, and a soft bed, and a bright fire: to this trinity of poor
pleasures we come soon, if, indeed, wine be left to us. Poetry herself
deserts us; is it not said that Bacchus never forgives a renegade? and
most of us turn recreants to Bacchus. Even the bright fire, I fear, was
not always there to warm thine old blood, Master, or, if fire there were,
the wood was not bought with thy book-seller’s money. When autumn was
drawing in during thine early old age, in 1584, didst thou not write that
thou hadst never received a sou at the hands of all the publishers who
vended thy books? And as thou wert about putting forth thy folio edition
of 1584, thou didst pray Buon, the bookseller, to give thee sixty crowns
to buy wood withal, and make thee a bright fire in winter weather, and
comfort thine old age with thy friend Gallandius. And if Buon will not
pay, then to try the other booksellers, “that wish to take everything and
give nothing. ”
Was it knowledge of this passage, Master, or ignorance of everything
else, that made certain of the common steadfast dunces of our days speak
of thee as if thou hadst been a starveling, neglected poetaster, jealous
forsooth of Maître Françoys Rabelais? See how ignorantly M. Fleury
writes, who teaches French literature withal to them of Muscovy, and hath
indited a Life of Rabelais. “Rabelais était revêtu d’un emploi
honorable; Ronsard était traité en subalterne,” quoth this wondrous
professor. What! Pierre de Ronsard, a gentleman of a noble house,
holding the revenue of many abbeys, the friend of Mary Stuart, of the Duc
d’Orléans, of Charles IX. , _he_ is _traité en subalterne_, and is jealous
of a frocked or unfrocked _manant_ like Maître Françoys! And then this
amazing Fleury falls foul of thine epitaph on Maître Françoys and cries,
“Ronsard a voulu faire des vers méchants; il n’a fait que de méchants
vers. ” More truly saith M. Sainte-Beuve, “If the good Rabelais had
returned to Meudon on the day when this epitaph was made over the wine,
he would, methinks, have laughed heartily. ” But what shall be said of a
Professor like the egregious M. Fleury, who holds that Ronsard was
despised at Court? Was there a party at tennis when the king would not
fain have had thee on his side, declaring that he ever won when Ronsard
was his partner? Did he not give thee benefices, and many priories, and
call thee his father in Apollo, and even, so they say, bid thee sit down
beside him on his throne? Away, ye scandalous folk, who tell us that
there was strife between the Prince of Poets and the King of Mirth.
Naught have ye by way of proof of your slander but the talk of Jean
Bernier, a scurrilous, starveling apothecary, who put forth his fables in
1697, a century and a half after Maître Françoys died. Bayle quoted this
fellow in a note, and ye all steal the tattle one from another in your
dull manner, and know not whence it comes, nor even that Bayle would none
of it and mocked its author. With so little knowledge is history
written, and thus doth each chattering brook of a “Life” swell with its
tribute “that great Mississippi of falsehood,” Biography.
IV.
_To Herodotus_.
TO Herodotus of Halicarnassus, greeting. —Concerning the matters set forth
in your histories, and the tales you tell about both Greeks and
Barbarians, whether they be true, or whether they be false, men dispute
not little but a great deal. Wherefore I, being concerned to know the
verity, did set forth to make search in every manner, and came in my
quest even unto the ends of the earth. For there is an island of the
Cimmerians beyond the Straits of Heracles, some three days’ voyage to a
ship that hath a fair following wind in her sails; and there it is said
that men know many things from of old: thither, then, I came in my
inquiry. Now, the island is not small, but large, greater than the whole
of Hellas; and they call it Britain. In that island the east wind blows
for ten parts of the year, and the people know not how to cover
themselves from the cold. But for the other two months of the year the
sun shines fiercely, so that some of them die thereof, and others die of
the frozen mixed drinks; for they have ice even in the summer, and this
ice they put to their liquor. Through the whole of this island, from the
west even to the east, there flows a river called Thames: a great river
and a laborious, but not to be likened to the River of Egypt.
The mouth of this river, where I stepped out from my ship, is exceedingly
foul and of an evil savour by reason of the city on the banks. Now this
city is several hundred parasangs in circumference. Yet a man that
needed not to breathe the air might go round it in one hour, in chariots
that run under the earth; and these chariots are drawn by creatures that
breathe smoke and sulphur, such as Orpheus mentions in his “Argonautica,”
if it be by Orpheus. The people of the town, when I inquired of them
concerning Herodotus of Halicarnassus, looked on me with amazement, and
went straightway about their business—namely, to seek out whatsoever new
thing is coming to pass all over the whole inhabited world, and as for
things old, they take no keep of them.
Nevertheless, by diligence I learned that he who in this land knew most
concerning Herodotus was a priest, and dwelt in the priests’ city on the
river which is called the City of the Ford of the Ox. But whether Io,
when she wore a cow’s shape, had passed by that way in her wanderings,
and thence comes the name of that city, I could not (though I asked all
men I met) learn aught with certainty. But to me, considering this, it
seemed that Io must have come thither. And now farewell to Io.
To the City of the Priests there are two roads: one by land; and one by
water, following the river. To a well-girdled man, the land journey is
but one day’s travel; by the river it is longer but more pleasant. Now
that river flows, as I said, from the west to the east. And there is in
it a fish called chub, which they catch; but they do not eat it, for a
certain sacred reason.
