Matthew Arnold (1)
Essays in Criticism. By Matthew Arnold, Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1865.
Mr. Arnold's Essays in Criticism come to American readers with a reputation already made, -- the reputation of a charming style, a great deal of excellent feeling, and an almost equal amount of questionable reasoning. It is for us either to confirm the verdict passed in the author's own country, or to judge his work afresh. It is often the fortune of English writers to find mitigation of sentence in the United States.
The Essays contained in this volume are on purely literary subjects; which is for us, by itself, a strong recommendation. English literature, especially contemporary literature, is, compared with that of France and Germany, very poor in collections of this sort. A great deal of criticism is written, but little of it is kept; little of it is deemed to contain any permanent application. Mr. Arnold will doubtless find in this fact -- if indeed he has not already signalized it -- but another proof of the inferiority of the English to the Continental school of criticism, and point to it as a baleful effect of the narrow practical spirit which animates, or, as he would probably say, paralyzes, the former. But not only is his book attractive as a whole, from its exclusively literary character; the subject of each essay is moreover particularly interesting. The first paper is on the function of Criticism at the present time; a question, if not more important, perhaps more directly pertinent here than in England. The second, discussing the literary influence of Academies, contains a great deal of valuable observation and reflection in a small compass and under an inadequate title. The other essays are upon the two De Gurins, Heinrich Heine, Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment, Joubert, Spinoza, and Marcus Aurelius. The first two articles are, to our mind, much the best; the next in order of excellence is the paper on Joubert; while the others, with the exception, perhaps, of that on Spinoza, are of about equal merit.
Mr. Arnold's style has been praised at once too much and too little. Its resources are decidedly limited; but if the word
His Preface is a striking example of the intelligent amiability which animates his style. His two leading Essays were, on their first appearance, made the subject of much violent contention, their moral being deemed little else than a wholesale schooling of the English press by the French programme. Nothing could have better proved the justice of Mr. Arnold's remarks upon the "provincial" character of the English critical method, than the reception which they provoked. He now acknowledges this reception in a short introduction, which admirably reconciles smoothness of temper with sharpness of wit. The taste of this performance has been questioned; but wherever it may err, it is assuredly not in being provincial; it is essentially civil. Mr. Arnold's amiability is, in our eye, a strong proof of his wisdom. If he were a few degrees more short-sighted, he might have less equanimity at his command. Those who sympathize with him warmly will probably like him best as he is; but with such as are only half his friends, this freedom from party passion, from what is after all but a lawful professional emotion, will argue against his sincerity. For ourselves, we doubt not that Mr. Arnold possesses thoroughly what the French call the courage of his opinions. When you lay down a proposition which is forthwith controverted, it is of course optional with you to take up the cudgels in its defence. If you are deeply convinced of its truth, you
For Mr. Arnold's critical feeling and observation, used independently of his judgment, we profess a keen relish. He has these qualities, at any rate, of a good critic, whether or not he have the others, -- the science and the logic. It is hard to say whether the literary critic is more called upon to understand or to feel. It is certain that he will accomplish little unless he can feel acutely; although it is perhaps equally certain that he will become weak the moment that he begins to "work," as we may say, his natural sensibilities. The best critic is probably he who leaves his feelings out of account, and relies upon reason for success. If he actually possesses delicacy of feeling, his work will be delicate without detriment to its solidity. The complaint of Mr. Arnold's critics is that his arguments are too sentimental. Whether this complaint is well founded, we shall hereafter inquire; let us determine first what sentiment has done for him. It has given him, in our opinion, his greatest charm and his greatest worth. Hundreds of other critics have stronger heads; few, in England at least, have more delicate perceptions. We regret that we have not the space to confirm this assertion by extracts. We must refer the reader to the book itself, where he will find on every page an illustration of our meaning. He will find one, first of all, in the apostrophe to the University of Oxford,
In the first and most important of his Essays Mr. Arnold puts forth his views upon the actual duty of criticism. They may be summed up as follows. Criticism has no concern with the practical; its function is simply to get at the best thought which is current, -- to see things in themselves as they are, -- to be disinterested. Criticism can be disinterested, says Mr. Arnold,
"by keeping from practice; by resolutely following the law of its own nature, which is to be a free play of the mind on all subjects which it touches, by steadily refusing to lend itself to any of those ulterior political, practical considerations about ideas which plenty of people will be sure to attach to them, which perhaps ought often to be attached to them, which in this country, at any rate, are certain to be attached to them, but which criticism has really nothing to do with. Its business is simply to know the best that is known and thought in the world, and, by in its turn making this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas. Its business is to do this with inflexible honesty, with due ability; but its business is to do no more, and to leave alone all questions of practical consequences and applications, -- questions which will never fail to have due prominence given to them." We used just now a word of which Mr. Arnold is very fond, -- a word of which the general reader may require an
We may here remark, that Mr. Arnold's statement of his principles is open to some misinterpretation, -- an accident against which he has, perhaps, not sufficiently guarded it. For many persons the word practical is almost identical with the word useful, against which, on the other hand, they erect the word ornamental. Persons who are fond of regarding these two terms as irreconcilable, will have little patience with Mr. Arnold's scheme of criticism. They will look upon it as an organized preference of unprofitable speculation to common sense. But the great beauty of the critical movement advocated by Mr. Arnold is that in either direction its range of action is unlimited. It deals with plain facts as well as with the most exalted fancies; but it deals with them only for the sake of the truth which is in them, and not for your sake, reader, and that of your party. It takes high ground, which is the ground of theory. It does not busy itself with consequences, which are all in all to you. Do not suppose that it for this reason pretends to ignore or to undervalue consequences; on the contrary, it is because it knows that consequences are inevitable that it leaves them alone. It cannot do two things at once; it cannot serve two masters. Its business is to make truth generally accessible, and not to apply it. It is only on condition of having its hands free, that it can make truth generally accessible. We said just now that its duty was, among other things, to exalt, if possible, the importance of the ideal. We should perhaps have said the intellectual; that is, of the principle of understanding things. Its business is to urge the claims of all things to be understood. If this is its function in England, as Mr. Arnold represents, it seems to us that it is doubly its function in this country. Here is no lack of votaries of the practical, of experimentalists, of empirics. The tendencies of our civilization are certainly not such as foster a preponderance of morbid speculation. Our national
If we have not touched upon the faults of Mr. Arnold's volume, it is because they are faults of detail, and because, when, as a whole, a book commands our assent, we do not incline to quarrel with its parts. Some of the parts in these Essays are weak, others are strong; but the impression which they all combine to leave is one of such beauty as to make us forget, not only their particular faults, but their particular merits. If we were asked what is the particular merit of a given essay, we should reply that it is a merit much less common at the present day than is generally supposed, -- the merit which pre-eminently characterizes Mr. Arnold's poems, the merit, namely, of having a subject. Each essay is about something. If a literary work now-a- days start with a certain topic, that is all that is required of it; and yet it is a work of art only on condition of ending with that topic, on condition of being written, not from it, but to it. If the average modern essay or poem were to wear its title at the close, and not at the beginning, we wonder in how many cases the reader would fail to be surprised by it. A book or an article is looked upon as a kind of Staubbach waterfall, discharging itself into infinite space. If we were questioned as to the merit of Mr. Arnold's book as a whole, we should say that it lay in the fact that the author takes high ground. The manner of his Essays is a model of what criticisms should be. The foremost English critical journal, the Saturday Review, recently disposed of a famous writer by saying, in a parenthesis, that he had done nothing but write nonsense all his life. Mr. Arnold does not pass judgment in parenthesis. He is too much of an artist to use leading propositions for merely literary purposes. The consequence is, that he says a few things in such a way as that almost in spite of ourselves we remember them, instead of a
The American publishers have enriched this volume with the author's Lectures on Homer, and with his French Eton. The Lectures demand a notice apart; we can only say here that they possess all the habitual charm of Mr. Arnold's style. This same charm will also lend an interest to his discussion of a question which bears but remotely upon the subject of education in this country.
North American Review, July 1865
It seems perhaps hardly fair that while Matthew Arnold is in America and exposed to the extremity of public attention
Neither of these consequences, however, would alter the fact that to an American in England, and indeed to any stranger, the author of the Essays in Criticism, of Friendship's Garland, of Culture and Anarchy, of the verses on Heine's grave, and of innumerable other delightful pages, speaks more directly than any other contemporary English writer, says more of these things which make him the visitor's intellectual companion, becomes in a singular way nearer and dearer. It is for this reason that it is always in order for such a visitor to join in a commemoration of the charming critic. He discharges an office so valuable, a function so delicate, he interprets,
He is both a poet and a critic, but it is perhaps, primarily, because he is a representative of the critical spirit -- apart from the accident of his having practised upon the maternal breast, as it were -- that the sojourner, the spectator, has a kindness for the author of so many happy formulas, the propagator of so many capital instances. He, too, is necessarily critical, whatever his ultimate conclusion or reconciliation, and he takes courage and confidence from the sight of this brilliant writer, who knowing English life so much better than he can ever hope to do, is yet struck with so many of the same peculiarities, and makes so many of the same reflections. It is not the success of the critical effort at large that is most striking to-day to the attentive outsider; it is not the flexibility of English taste, the sureness of English judgment, the faculty of reproducing in their integrity the impressions made by works of art and literature, that most fixes the attention of those who look to see what the English mind is about. It may appear odd that an American should make this remark, proceeding as he does from a country in which high discernment in such matters has as yet only made a beginning. Superior criticism, in the United States, is at present not written; it is, like a great many superior things, only spoken; therefore I know not why a native of that country should take note of the desuetude of this sort of accomplishment in England, unless it
The union of this element with the other parts of his mind, his love of literature, of perfect expression, his interest in life at large, constitutes perhaps the originality of his character as a critic, and it certainly (to my sense) gives him that seriousness in which he has occasionally been asserted to be wanting. Nothing can exceed the taste, the temperance, with which he handles religious questions, and at the same time nothing can exceed the impression he gives of really caring for them. To his mind the religious life of humanity is the most important thing in the spectacle humanity offers us, and he holds that a due perception of this fact is (in connection with other lights) the measure of the acuteness of a critic, the wisdom of a poet. He says in his essay on Marcus Aurelius an admirable thing -- "The paramount virtue of religion is that it has lighted up morality;" and such a phrase as that shows the extent to which he feels what he speaks of. To say that this feeling, taken in combination with his love of letters, of beauty, of all liberal things, constitutes an originality is not going too far, for the religious sentiment does not always render the service of opening the mind to human life at large. Ernest Renan, in
If it were the purpose of these few pages to give in the smallest degree a history of Mr. Arnold's literary career, I ought promptly to have spoken of his Poems -- I ought to enumerate his works in their order. It was by his Poems that I first knew and admired him, and many such readers -- early or late admirers -- will have kept them in a very safe corner of memory. As a poet, Matthew Arnold is really singular; he takes his place among the most fortunate writers of our day who have expressed themselves in verse, but his place is somewhat apart. He has an imagination of his own, but he is less complete, less inevitable, as he says in his essay on Wordsworth that that poet said of Goethe, than the others. His form at moments is less rich than it might be, and the Wordsworthian example may perhaps be accused here and there of having sterilized him. But this limited, just a little precarious, character of his inspiration adds to his value for people who like the quality of rareness in their pleasures, like sometimes to perceive just a little the effort of the poet, like to hear him take breath. It reminds them of the awkwardness of line which we see in certain charming painters of early schools (not that Mr. Arnold is early!) and which seems a condition of their grace and a sign of their freshness. Splendour, music, passion, breadth of movement and rhythm we find in him in no great abundance; what we do find is high distinction of feeling (to use his own word), a temperance, a kind of modesty of expression, which is at the same time an artistic resource -- the complexion of his work; and a remarkable faculty for touching the chords which connect our feelings with the things that others have done and spoken. In other
It was, as every one remembers, in the essay on The Function of Criticism at the Present Time, and that on The Literary Influence of Academies, that, in 1864, Mr. Arnold first appeared in the character in which since then he has won so much fame, and which he may really be said to have invented; that of the general critic, the commentator of English life, the observer and expostulator, the pleader with the Dissenters, the genial satirist. His manner, since this light, sweet prelude, has acquired much amplitude and confidence; but the suggestiveness, the delightful temper were there from the first. Those who have been enjoying Mr. Arnold these twenty years will remember how fresh and desirable his voice sounded at that moment; if since then the freshness has faded a little we must bear in mind that it is through him and through him only that we have grown familiar with certain ideas and terms which now form part of the common stock of allusion. When he began his critical career there were various things that needed immensely to be said and that no one appeared sufficiently detached, sufficiently independent and impartial to say. Mr. Arnold attempted to say them, and succeeded -- so far as the saying goes -- in a manner that left nothing to be desired. There is, of course, another measure of success in regard to such an attempt -- the question of how far the critic
English Illustrated Magazine, January
1884
Sir Samuel Baker (2)
Ismail a: A Narrative of the Expeditions to Central Africa for the Suppression of the Slave Trade, organized by Ismail, Khedive of Egypt. By Sir Samuel Baker, Pasha, etc. New York: Harper & Bros., 1875.
Sir Samuel Baker's narrative, except for its extreme redundancy as a piece of book-making, reads like the story of a new Cortez or Pizarro. The Khedive furnished him a military force of upwards of two thousand men, with artillery in proportion, and apparently unlimited funds for the purchase of supplies, including all the materials for constructing iron steamers, and was, Sir Samuel Baker affirms, sincere in wishing for the success of the expedition; but he was extremely ill- seconded by all his officials and local functionaries. These people did everything to make it abortive. The expedition on leaving Cairo must have presented the appearance of some vast fantastic squadron out of Spenser or Ariosto -- the dusky soldiers of every shade clad in crimson and white, the group of fair Englishmen headed by the stalwart Pasha and his devoted wife, and the great baggage-train of strange machinery and gaudy presents and bribes for the savages. The whole force and its impedimenta were easily transported to Khartum, the last outpost of civilization on the upper Nile; but after leaving this place its troubles began and lasted with little intermission for more than two years. The first year (1870) was passed in struggling with the so- called "sudd" of the great river -- the floating islands of vegetation with which the stream in certain latitudes is choked. It forms itself into masses so compact and resistant that the work of forcing a passage is about tantamount to digging a canal. The party dug its canals in vain, the boats wriggled through impossible places only to find themselves confronted with the absolute solidification of the stream, and had to retrace their course with all possible speed, lest their canals should solidify behind them. They erected a little city of canvas by the river side, and waited till the next year brought back high water. Another trial met with better success, and they at last found their way along tangled threads of water, through a series of bewildering lakes (like a string of scattered beads) until Sir Samuel
We cannot of course follow the expedition in detail; but it arranges itself in three or four broad masses. These are subdivided into innumerable episodes and incidents; for Sir Samuel Baker is a very minute historian. There is of course a fair share of sporting episodes, though of these the author is somewhat chary, as he pretends to speak only of what befell him in his official capacity. But his shots apparently were as marvellous as ever; he picks out the soft spot of his victim to within a hair's-breadth, and his bullet keeps the appointment. There are various arrests and overhaulings of slave-trading and kidnapping parties, with immediate emancipation of the victims, and, on one occasion, wholesale marriage of the women to his own Abyssinian soldiers. Then there are the fighting episodes, which are intensely interesting, and in which Sir Samuel Baker comes out, as the phrase is, very strong. These pages constitute the originality of the present volume, which on several other points contains less curious information than its predecessors. Owing to the author's remaining of necessity in the populous regions there are fewer wild-beast stories; though, indeed, this hardly matters, for the natives were, for the most part, as perfect wild beasts as the steadiest nerves could have cared to encounter.
Sir Samuel Baker made a long halt at Gondokoro, in the country of the Baris, a race whom his utmost forbearance and tact were utterly powerless to propitiate. It was living on pins and needles, but every one, on the whole, seems to have done his duty, and the Baris, in their thousands, were at last soundly thrashed by the English Pasha and his handful. It was
Here the term of Sir Samuel Baker's commission approached, and he was obliged soon to set out on his laborious return to Khartum. We have been able to give but the scantiest outline of his narrative, which we cordially commend to all admirers of men of action. We have said nothing of his operations against the slave-traders, which were as energetic as opportunity allowed, and which effected, in particular, the arrest of Abou Saood, the principal agent of the horrible traffic. He comes and goes, throughout the narrative, as the evil genius of the expedition and the blight of all Sir Samuel Baker's beneficent projects. Sir Samuel sent him to Cairo to be tried for his crimes; but he admits that the grand fault of his expedition was that, once having caught him, he did not summarily shoot him. Abou Saood was acquitted, released, and sent back to the White Nile. Sir Samuel Baker had done a great deal in the way of "annexing," and another Englishman, Colonel Gordon, was subsequently sent to Equatorial Africa to emphasize the solemnity. As yet it is a matter of unfurling the Ottoman flag and stealing the likely young people. Was the Khedive sincere, or did he merely wish to make an impression of philanthropic zeal upon the European
Nation, February 4,
1875
William Black (3)
The Portrait: a Weekly Photograph and Memoir
We have before us copies of two new English periodicals which made their appearance on the 1st of March. One of these is entitled the Portrait: a Weekly Photograph and Memoir. It forms the second number of the publication, and is devoted to Mr. William Black, the novelist, of whom it contains a very neatly-executed photograph, a biographical notice from the author's own hand, and a facsimile of two pages of the MS. of `Madcap Violet,' Mr. Black's latest production. It seems a little unexpected, from the point of view of a fastidious taste, that Mr. Black should himself be his exhibitor in the publication of which we speak; but there seem to be no logical reasons to oppose to it. His little autobiography, moreover, is brief and graceful. We learn from it that he was born in Glasgow in 1841, and, after having embarked in local journalism, went up in 1864 to London, where he was for a while editor of two weekly journals, and whence he was despatched in 1866 as correspondent of a daily paper at the seat of the Prusso-Austrian War. As to this last episode, however, Mr. Black says that his nearest glimpse of fighting was seeing the corpses on the field of Kniggrtz. He enumerates his novels, mentions the difficulty many people have in pronouncing the title of `A Princess of Thule,' and affirms that `Madcap Violet' "undoubtedly contains the best work of which I am capable." He adds that he has been urged by his friends to try something more serious. "Perhaps I shall satisfy them in time. Perhaps I shall end as I began -- with a series of suggestions for a better government of the universe. In fact, I have now in my eye a scheme. But we will not anticipate."
Nation, March 22, 1877
The reception which, as we observe, Mr. Black's new novel has met with in England is an excellent illustration
But the weak point of the tale is the figure of the heroine; for here, as it strikes us, Mr. Black has passed beside the mark; and done so with a deliberateness that requires some special explanation. Gertrude White is not in the least the study of an actress, nor indeed, as it seems to us, the study of anything at all. The author had an admirable chance; nothing could have been more dramatic than to bring out the contrast
Nation, December 19,
1878
Mary Elizabeth Braddon (4)
Aurora Floyd. By Mary Elizabeth Braddon. New York: American News Company, 1865.
Miss Aurora Floyd, as half the world knows, was a young lady who got into no end of trouble by marrying her father's groom. We had supposed that this adventure had long ago become an old story; but here is a new edition of her memoirs to prove that the public has not done with her yet. We would assure those individuals who look with regret upon this assumption by a "sensation" novel of the honors of legitimate fiction, that the author of "Aurora Floyd" is an uncommonly clever person. Her works are distinguished by a quality for which we can find no better name than "pluck;" and should not pluck have its reward wherever found? If common report is correct, Miss Braddon had for many years beguiled the leisure moments of an arduous profession -- the dramatic profession -- by the composition of fictitious narrative. But until the publication of "Lady Audley's Secret" she failed to make her mark. To what secret impulse or inspiration we owe this sudden reversal of fortune it is difficult to say; but the grim determination to succeed is so apparent in every line of "Lady Audley's Secret," that the critic is warranted in conjecturing that she had at last become desperate. People talk of novels with a purpose; and from this class of works, both by her patrons and her enemies, Miss Braddon's tales are excluded. But what novel ever betrayed a more resolate purpose than the production of what we may call Miss Braddon's second manner? Her purpose was at any hazard to make a hit, to catch the public ear. It was a difficult task, but audacity could accomplish it. Miss Braddon accordingly resorted to extreme measures, and created the sensation novel. It is to this audacity, this courage of despair, as manifested in her later works, that we have given the name of pluck. In these works it has settled down into a quiet determination not to let her public get ahead of her. A writer who has suddenly leaped into a popularity greatly disproportionate to his merit, can only retain his popularity by observing a strictly respectful attitude to his readers. This has been Miss
She had been preceded in the same path by Mr. Wilkie Collins, whose "Woman in White," with its diaries and letters and its general ponderosity, was a kind of nineteenth century version of "Clarissa Harlowe." Mind, we say a nineteenth century version. To Mr. Collins belongs the credit of having introduced into fiction those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors. This innovation gave a new impetus to the literature of horrors. It was fatal to the authority of Mrs. Radcliffe and her everlasting castle in the Apennines. What are the Apennines to us, or we to the Apennines? Instead of the terrors of "Udolpho," we were treated to the terrors of the cheerful country-house and the busy London lodgings. And there is no doubt that these were infinitely the more terrible. Mrs. Radcliffe's mysteries were romances pure and simple; while those of Mr. Wilkie Collins were stern reality. The supernatural, which Mrs. Radcliffe constantly implies, though she generally saves her conscience, at the eleventh hour, by explaining it away, requires a powerful imagination in order to be as exciting as the natural, as Mr. Collins and Miss Braddon, without any imagination at all, know how to manage it. A good ghost-story, to be half as terrible as a good murder-story, must be connected at a hundred points with the common objects of life. The best ghost-story probably ever written -- a tale published some years ago in "Blackwood's Magazine" -- was constructed with an admirable understanding of this principle. Half of its force was derived from its prosaic, commonplace, daylight accessories. Less delicately terrible, perhaps, than the vagaries of departed spirits, but to the full as interesting, as the modern novel reader understands the word, are the numberless possible forms of human malignity. Crime, indeed, has always been a theme for dramatic poets; but with the old poets its dramatic interest lay in the fact that it compromised the criminal's moral repose. Whence else is the interest of Orestes and
We have said that although Mr. Collins anticipated Miss Braddon in the work of devising domestic mysteries adapted to the wants of a sternly prosaic age, she was yet the founder of the sensation novel. Mr. Collins's productions deserve a more respectable name. They are massive and elaborate constructions -- monuments of mosaic work, for the proper mastery of which it would seem, at first, that an index and note- book were required. They are not so much works of art as works of science. To read "The Woman in White," requires very much the same intellectual effort as to read Motley or Froude. We may say, therefore, that Mr. Collins being to Miss Braddon what Richardson is to Miss Austen, we date the novel of domestic mystery from the former lady, for the same reason that we date the novel of domestic tranquillity from the latter. Miss Braddon began by a skilful combination of bigamy, arson, murder, and insanity. These phenomena are
The great public, in the first place, is made up of a vast number of little publics, very much as our Union is made up of States, and it is necessary to consider which of these publics is Miss Braddon's. We can best define it with the half of a negative. It is that public which reads nothing but novels, and yet which reads neither George Eliot, George Sand, Thackeray, nor Hawthorne. People who read nothing but novels are very poor critics of human nature. Their foremost desire is for something new. Now, we all know that human
Nation, November 9,
1865
Rupert Brooke (5)
PREFACE TO RUPERT BROOKE'S
LETTERS FROM AMERICA
Nothing more generally or more recurrently solicits us, in the light of literature, I think, than the interest of our learning how the poet, the true poet, and above all the particular one with whom we may for the moment be concerned, has come into his estate, asserted and preserved his identity, worked out his question of sticking to that and to nothing else; and has so been able to reach us and touch us as a poet, in spite of the accidents and dangers that must have beset this course. The chances and changes, the personal history of any absolute genius, draw us to watch his adventure with curiosity and inquiry, lead us on to win more of his secret and borrow more of his experience ( mean, needless to say, when we are at all critically minded); but there is something in the clear safe arrival of the poetic nature, in a given case, at the point of its free and happy exercise, that provokes, if not the cold impulse to challenge or cross-question it, at least the need of understanding so far as possible how, in a world in which difficulty and disaster are frequent, the most wavering and flickering of all fine flames has escaped extinction. We go back, we help ourselves to hang about the attestation of the first spark of the flame, and like to indulge in a fond notation of such facts as that of the air in which it was kindled and insisted on proceeding, or yet perhaps failed to proceed, to a larger combustion, and the draughts, blowing about the world, that were either, as may have happened, to quicken its native force or perhaps to extinguish it in a gust of undue violence. It is naturally when the poet has emerged unmistakably clear, or has at a happy moment of his story seemed likely to, that our attention and our suspense in the matter are most intimately engaged; and we are at any rate in general beset by the impression and haunted by the observed law, that the growth and the triumph of the faculty at its finest have been positively in proportion to certain rigours of circumstance.
It is doubtless not indeed so much that this appearance has been inveterate as that the quality of genius in fact associated with it is apt to strike us as the clearest we know. We think of Dante in harassed exile, of Shakespeare under sordidly professional stress, of Milton in exasperated exposure and material darkness; we think of Burns and Chatterton, and Keats and Shelley and Coleridge, we think of Leopardi and Musset and Emily Bront and Walt Whitman, as it is open to us surely to think even of Wordsworth, so harshly conditioned by his spareness and bareness and bleakness -- all this in reference to the voices that have most proved their command of the ear of time, and with the various examples added of those claiming, or at best enjoying, but the slighter attention; and their office thus mainly affects us as that of showing in how jostled, how frequently arrested and all but defeated a hand, the torch could still be carried. It is not of course for the countrymen of Byron and of Tennyson and Swinburne, any more than for those of Victor Hugo, to say nothing of those of Edmond Rostand, to forget the occurrence on occasion of high instances in which the dangers all seemed denied and only favour and facility recorded; but it would take more of these than we can begin to set in a row to purge us of that prime determinant, after all, of our affection for the great poetic muse, the vision of the rarest sensibility and the largest generosity we know kept by her at their pitch, kept fighting for their life and insisting on their range of expression, amid doubts and derisions and buffets, even sometimes amid stones of stumbling quite self-invited, that might at any moment have made the loss of the precious clue really irremediable. Which moral, so pointed, accounts assuredly for half our interest in the poetic character -- a sentiment more unlikely than not, I think, to survive a sustained succession of Victor Hugos and Rostands, or of Byrons, Tennysons and Swinburnes. We quite consciously miss in these bards, as we find ourselves rather wondering even at our failure to miss it in Shelley, that such "complications" as they may have had to reckon with were not in general of the cruelly troublous order, and that no stretch of the view either of our own "theory of art" or of our vivacity of passion as making trouble, contributes perceptibly the required savour of the pathetic. We cling, critically
Rupert Brooke, young, happy, radiant, extraordinarily endowed and irresistibly attaching, virtually met a soldier's death, met it in the stress of action and the all but immediate presence of the enemy; but he is before us as a new, a confounding and superseding example altogether, an unprecedented image, formed to resist erosion by time or vulgarisation by reference, of quickened possibilities, finer ones than ever before, in the stuff poets may be noted as made of. With twenty reasons fixing the interest and the charm that will henceforth abide in his name and constitute, as we may say, his legend, he submits all helplessly to one in particular which is, for appreciation, the least personal to him or inseparable from him, and he does this because, while he is still in the highest degree of the distinguished faculty and quality, we happen to feel him even more markedly and significantly "modern." This is why I speak of the mixture of his elements as new, feeling that it governs his example, put by it in a light which nothing else could have equally contributed -- so that Byron for instance, who startled his contemporaries by taking for granted scarce one of the articles that formed their comfortable faith and by revelling in almost everything that made them idiots if he himself was to figure as a child of truth, looks to us, by any such measure, comparatively plated over with the impenetrable rococo of his own day. I speak, I hasten to add, not of Byron's volume, his flood and his fortune, but of his really having quarrelled with the temper and the accent of his age still more where they might have helped him to expression than where he but flew in their face. He hugged his pomp, whereas our unspeakably fortunate young poet of to-day, linked like him also, for consecration of the final romance, with the isles of Greece, took for his own the whole of the poetic consciousness he was born
What it first and foremost really comes to, I think, is the fact that at an hour when the civilised peoples are on exhibition, quite finally and sharply on show, to each other and to the world, as they absolutely never in all their long history have been before, the English tradition (both of amenity and of energy, I naturally mean), should have flowered at once into a specimen so beautifully producible. Thousands of other sentiments are of course all the while, in different connections, at hand for us; but it is of the exquisite civility, the social instincts of the race, poetically expressed, that I speak; and it would be hard to overstate the felicity of his fellow-countrymen's being able just now to say: "Yes, this, with the imperfection of so many of our arrangements, with the persistence of so many of our mistakes, with the waste of so much of our effort and the weight of the many- coloured mantle of time that drags so redundantly about us, this natural accommodation of the English spirit, this frequent extraordinary beauty of the English aspect, this finest saturation of the English intelligence by its most immediate associations, tasting as they mainly do of the long past, this ideal image of English youth, in a word, at once radiant and reflective, are things that appeal to us as delightfully exhibitional beyond a doubt, yet as drawn, to the last fibre, from the very wealth of our own conscience and the very force of our own history. We haven't, for such an instance of our genius, to reach out to strange places or across other, and otherwise productive, tracts; the exemplary instance himself has well-nigh as a matter
Rupert Brooke, at any rate, the charmed commentator may well keep before him, simply did all the usual English things -- under the happy provision of course that he found them in his way at their best; and it was exactly most delightful in him that no inordinate expenditure, no anxious extension of the common plan, as "liberally" applied all about him, had been incurred or contrived to predetermine his distinction. It is difficult to express on the contrary how peculiar a value attached to his having simply "come in" for the general luck awaiting any English youth who may not be markedly inapt for the traditional chances. He could in fact easily strike those who most appreciated him as giving such an account of the usual English things -- to repeat the form of my allusion to them -- as seemed to address you to them, in their very considerable number indeed, for any information about him that might matter, but which left you wholly to judge whether they seemed justified by their fruits. This manner about them, as one may call it in general, often contributes to your impression that they make for a certain strain of related modesty which may on occasion be one of their happiest effects; it at any rate, in days when my acquaintance with them was slighter, used to leave me gaping at the treasure of operation, the far recessional perspectives, it took for granted and any offered demonstration of the extent or the mysteries of which seemed unthinkable just in proportion as the human resultant testified in some one or other of his odd ways to their influence. He might not always be, at any rate on first acquaintance, a resultant explosively human, but there was in any case one reflection he could always cause you to make: "What a wondrous system it indeed must be which insists on flourishing to all appearance under such an absence of advertised or even of confessed relation to it as would do honour to a vacuum produced by an air-pump!" The formulation, the approximate expression of what the system at large might or
Rupert Brooke made them revive as soon as one began to know him, or in other words made one want to read back into him each of his promoting causes without exception, to trace to some source in the ambient air almost any one, at a venture, of his aspects; so precious a loose and careless bundle of happy references did that inveterate trick of giving the go-by to over-emphasis which he shared with his general kind fail to prevent your feeling sure of his having about him. I think the liveliest interest of these was that while not one of them was signally romantic, by the common measure of the great English amenity, they yet hung together, reinforcing and enhancing each other, in a way that seemed to join their hands for an incomparably educative or civilising process, the great mark of which was that it took some want of amenability in particular subjects to betray anything like a gap. do not mean of course to say that gaps, and occasionally of the most flagrant, were made so supremely difficult of occurrence; but only that the effect, in the human resultants who kept these, and with the least effort, most in abeyance, was a thing one wouldn't have had different by a single shade. I am not sure that such a case of the recognisable was the better established by the fact of Rupert's being one of the three sons of a house-master at Rugby, where he was born in 1887 and where he lost his father in 1910, the elder of his brothers having then already died and the younger being destined to fall in battle at the allied Front, shortly after he himself had succumbed; but the circumstance speak of gives a peculiar and an especially welcome consecration to that perceptible play in him of the inbred "public school" character the bloom of which his short life had too little time to remove and which one wouldn't for the world not have been disposed to note, with everything else, in the beautiful complexity of his attributes. The fact was that if one liked him -- and I may as well say at once that few young men, in our time, can have gone through life under a greater burden, more easily carried and kept in its place, of being liked -- one liked absolutely everything
He went from Rugby to Cambridge, where, after a while, he carried off a Fellowship at King's, and where, during a short visit there in "May week," or otherwise early in June 1909, I first, and as was to find, very unforgettingly, met him. He reappears to me as with his felicities all most promptly divinable, in that splendid setting of the river at the "backs"; as to which indeed I remember vaguely wondering what it was left to such a place to do with the added, the verily wasted, grace of such a person, or how even such a person could hold his own, as who should say, at such a pitch of simple scenic perfection. Any difficulty dropped, however, to the reconciling vision; for that the young man was publicly
I owe to his intimate and devoted friend Mr Edward Marsh the communication of many of his letters, these already gathered into an admirable brief memoir which is yet to appear and which will give ample help in the illustrative way to the pages to which the present remarks form a preface, and which are collected from the columns of the London evening journal in which they originally saw the light. The "literary baggage" of his short course consists thus of his two slender volumes of verse and of these two scarcely stouter sheafs of correspondence; (note- ch5-1, see page 769) -- though I should add that the hitherto unpublished letters enjoy the advantage of a commemorative and interpretative commentary, at the Editor's hands, which will have rendered the highest service to each matter. That even these four scant volumes tell the whole story, or fix the whole image, of the fine young spirit they are concerned with we certainly hold back from allowing; his case being in an extraordinary degree that of a creature on whom the gods had smiled their brightest and half of whose manifestation therefore was by the simple act of presence and of direct communication. He did in fact specialise, to repeat my term; only since, as one reads him, whether in verse or in prose, that distinguished readability seems all the specialisation one need invoke, so when the question was of the gift that made of his face to face address a circumstance so complete in itself as apparently to cover all the ground, leaving no margin either, an activity to the last degree justified appeared the only name for one's impression. The moral of all which is doubtless that these brief, if at the same time very numerous, moments of his quick career formed altogether as happy a time, in as happy a place, to be born to as the student of the human drama has ever caught sight of -- granting always, that is, that some actor of the scene has been thoroughly up to his part.
That, then, was the way the imagination followed him with its luxury of confidence: he was doing everything that could be done in the time (since this was the modernest note), but performing each and every finest shade of these blest acts with a poetic punctuality that was only matched by a corresponding social sincerity. I recall perfectly my being sure of it all the while, even if with little current confirmation beyond that supplied by his first volume of verse; and the effect of the whole record is now to show that such a conclusion was quite extravagantly right. He was constantly doing all the things, and this with a reckless freedom, as it might be called, that really dissociated the responsibility of the precious character from anything like conscious domestic coddlement to a point at which no troubled young singer, none, that is, equally
Just there was the luck attendant of the coincidence of his course with the moment at which the proceeding hither and yon to the tune of almost any "happy thought," and in the interest of almost any branch of culture or invocation of response that might be more easily improvised than not, could positively strike the observer as excessive, as in fact absurd, for the formation of taste or the enrichment of genius, unless the principle of these values had in a particular connection been subjected in advance to some challenge or some test. Why should it take such a flood of suggestion, such a luxury of acquaintance and contact, only to make superficial specimens? Why shouldn't the art of living inward a little more, and thereby of digging a little deeper or pressing a little further,
Whatever Berlin or Munich, to speak of them only, could do or fail to do for him, how can one not rejoice without reserve in the way he felt what he did feel as poetic reaction of the liveliest and finest, with the added interest of its often
No detail of Mr Marsh's admirable memoir may I allow myself to anticipate. I can only announce it as a picture, with all the elements in iridescent fusion, of the felicity that fairly dogged Rupert's steps, as we may say, and that never allowed him to fall below its measure. We shall read into it even more relations than nominally appear, and every one of them again a flourish, every one of them a connection with his time, a
It was into these conditions, thickening and thickening, in their comparative serenity, up to the eleventh hour, that the War came smashing down; but of the basis, the great garden ground, all green and russet and silver, all a tissue of distinguished and yet so easy occasions, so improvised extensions, which they had already placed at his service and that of his extraordinarily amiable and constantly enlarged "set" for the exercise of their dealing with the rest of the happy earth in punctuating interludes, it is the office of our few but precious documents to enable us to judge. The interlude that here concerns us most is that of the year spent in his journey round a considerable part of the world in 1913 -- 14, testifying with a charm that increases as he goes to that quest of unprejudiced culture, the true poetic, the vision of the life of man, which was to prove the liveliest of his impulses. It was not indeed under the flag of that research that he offered himself for the Army almost immediately after his return to England -- and even if when a young man was so essentially a poet we need see no act in him as a prosaic alternative. The misfortune of this set of letters from New York and Boston, from Canada and Samoa, addressed, for the most part, to a friendly London evening journal is, alas, in the fact that they are of so moderate a quantity; for we make him out as steadily more vivid and delightful while his opportunity grows. He is touching at first, inevitably quite juvenile, in the measure of his good faith; we feel him not a little lost and lonely and stranded in the New York pandemonium -- obliged to throw himself upon sky-scrapers and the overspread blackness pricked out in a flickering fury of imaged advertisement for want of some more interesting view of character and manners. We long to take him by the hand and show him finer lights -- eyes of but meaner range, after all, being adequate to the gape at the vertical business blocks and the lurid sky-clamour for more dollars. We feel in a manner his sensibility
What we note in particular is that he likes, to all appearance, many more things than he doesn't, and how superlatively he is struck with the promptitude and wholeness of the American welcome and of all its friendly service. What it is but too easy, with the pleasure of having known him, to read into all this is the operation of his own irresistible quality, and of the state of felicity he clearly created just by appearing as a party to the social relation. He moves and circulates to our vision as so naturally, so beautifully undesigning a weaver of that spell, that we feel comparatively little of the story told even by his diverted report of it; so much fuller a report would surely proceed, could we appeal to their memory, their sense of poetry, from those into whose ken he floated. It is impossible not to figure him, to the last felicity, as he comes and goes, presenting himself always with a singular effect both of suddenness and of the readiest rightness; we should always have liked to be there, wherever it was, for the justification of our own fond confidence and the pleasure of seeing it unfailingly spread and spread. The ironies and paradoxes of his verse, in all this record, fall away from him; he takes to direct observation and accepts with perfect good-humour any hazards of contact, some of the shocks of encounter proving more muffled for him than might, as I say, have been
He was caught up of course after the shortest interval by the strong rush of that general inspiration in which at first all differences, all individual relations to the world he lived in, seemed almost ruefully or bewilderedly to lose themselves. The pressing thing was of a sudden that youth was youth and genius community and sympathy. He plunged into that full measure of these things which simply made and spread itself as it gathered them in, made itself of responses and faiths and understandings that were all the while in themselves acts of curiosity, romantic and poetic throbs and wonderments, with reality, as it seemed to call itself, breaking in after a fashion that left the whole past pale, and that yet could flush at every turn with meanings and visions borrowing their expression
Rupert, who had joined the Naval Brigade, took part in the rather distractedly improvised -- as it at least at the moment appeared -- movement for the relief of the doomed Antwerp, but was, later on, after the return of the force so engaged, for a few days in London, whither he had come up from camp in Dorsetshire, briefly invalided; thanks to which accident I had on a couple of occasions my last sight of him. It was all auspiciously, well-nigh extravagantly, congruous; nothing certainly could have been called more modern than all the elements and suggestions of his situation for the hour, the very spot in London that could best serve as a centre for vibrations the keenest and most various; a challenge to the
So I remember irrepressibly thinking and feeling, unspeakably apprehending, in a word; and so the whole exquisite exhalation of his own consciousness in the splendid sonnets,
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1916
(note-ch5-1) There remain also to be published a book on John
Webster and a prose play in one act. -- E.M.
Stopford A. Brooke (6)
Theology in the English Poets. By the Rev. Stopford A. Brooke, M.A. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1875.
Under this title, Mr. Stopford Brooke publishes a series of lectures upon Cowper, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Burns -- lectures delivered to his London congregation on Sunday afternoons. The greater part of the volume is devoted to Wordsworth, who is treated of in eight out of the fifteen chapters. Mr. Brooke enjoys much reputation as an eloquent preacher of the extremely liberal school, and these discourses afford evidence both of his eloquence and of his liberality. They strike us as rather too fluent and redundant -- the common fault of clerical writing; but they contain a good deal of sensible criticism and of suggestive moral analysis. Mr. Brooke does not always clinch his argument very sharply, but the sentiment of his remarks is usually excellent. His moral perceptions are, indeed, more acute than his literary, and he rather too readily forgives a poor verse on the plea of a fine thought. He gives us a great many passages from Wordsworth -- the most prosaic of poets as well as the most poetic -- in which the moral flavor has apparently reconciled him to the flatness of the form more effectually than it will do most readers. The author's aim has been to construct the religious belief of the poets from their works; but this aim, as he advances, rather loses itself. His "theology" merges itself in general morality -- in any considerations not merely literary. With the exception of Cowper, indeed, we should say that none of the poets we have named had, properly, a theology; their principal dogma was that it is the privilege of poets to be vague. Coleridge, indeed, as a philosopher, "went in," as the phrase is, for the supreme sanctity of the Church of England; but Coleridge as a poet, in so far as he is now read or remembered, had little to say about creeds and churches. In a poet so vast and suggestive as Wordsworth we may find a hint of almost any view of the origin and destiny of mankind that one is disposed to look for; and we think that the author has made the stages and subdivisions of the poet's intellectual history rather too rigid and definite. Of
Mr. Brooke glances first at the theological element in English poetry before Cowper. "The devotional element which belonged to Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and some of the Puritan poets, died away in the critical school which began with Dryden and ended with Pope. The `Religio Laici' of Dryden is partly a reproduction of the scholastic theology, partly an attack on the Deists, and it does not contain one single touch of personal feeling towards God." The author recognizes Pope's devoutness of heart; but he illustrates this same absence of the personal accent in his verse. To that of Cowper three things belonged: "Passion, the personal element, and the expression of doctrine." It is puzzling, at first, to be called upon to attribute "passion" to Cowper. Theological he was -- terribly, fatally theological -- but of how admirably he humanized his theology these lines, quoted by Mr. Brooke, are an example. Mr. Brooke contrasts them, for passion and personal feeling, with one of those familiar fine passages from Pope, in which the rhythm is that of the pendulum, and the philosophy so bent on keeping on terms with the epigram, that one loses half one's faith in its consistency. They seem to us extremely touching:
"I was a stricken deer that left the herd
Long since -- with many an arrow deep infixed
My panting side was charged when I withdrew
To seek a tranquil death in distant shades.
There was I found by one who had Himself
Been hurt by the archers. In His side He bore
And in His hands and feet the cruel scars.
With gentle force soliciting the darts
He drew them forth, and healed and bade me live."
Mr. Brooke writes at some length on the poetry of Man and the poetry of Nature as the later poets of the last century handled them, and makes several very good points. They underwent a very similar development -- a transition from the abstract to the concrete, from the conventional to the real, the general to the individual; except that Man, at the poet's hands, rather anticipated Nature. What the French would call "intimate" human poetry was fairly established by Goldsmith, with the help, later, of Crabbe; but Nature, as we look at her nowadays, did not really receive anything like her dues until Wordsworth began to set the chords a-murmuring. If the history of that movement toward a passionate scrutiny of Nature, which has culminated in England, in our day, with Tennyson and Browning, could be scientifically written, we imagine it would be found to throw a great deal of light on the processes of the human mind. It has at least drawn into its service an incalculable amount of ingenuity, of imagination, of intellectual force. There are descriptive phrases and touches in Tennyson and Browning which represent, on this subject, an extraordinary accumulation of sentiment, a perfect entanglement of emotion, which give the key, as it were, to a civilization. Mr. Brooke quotes from "The Ancient Mariner" several examples of Coleridge's subtlety of observation of natural phenomena, which are peculiarly striking in a writer of his loosely reflective cast. But, what with Wordsworth and Shelley and Keats, subtlety of observation was then in the air; and Wordsworth himself, moreover, is a proof that observation feeding on Nature, and meditation feeding on itself, are processes which may very well go forward in company. Mr. Brooke gives us as the last word of Coleridge's theology, after many vagaries:
"Oh! sweeter than the marriage feast,
'Tis sweeter far to me
To walk together to the kirk
In a goodly company!"
Of Wordsworth, Mr. Brooke writes diffusely -- too diffusely, we think, for discretion; for there are reasons in the nature of things why a prolonged commentary on the author of the "Prelude" and the "Excursion" should have an air of superfluity. He is himself so inordinately diffuse that to elaborate his meaning and lead it through further developments is to double the liability to irritation in the reader. He ought to be treated like a vast enclosed section of landscape, into which the reader may be turned to ramble at his pleasure. The critic may give us a few hints -- he may hand us the key; but we should advise his making his bow at the gate. In the fine places we wish to be alone for solemnity's sake; and in the dull ones, for mortification's. Mr. Brooke, who is evidently a most zealous and familiar student of the poet, undertakes to relate the complete history of his poetical development on the moral side. It is, of course, an interesting story, though it rather drags at times, and though its conclusion is, as Mr. Brooke admits, an anti-climax. The conservatism into which Wordsworth stiffened in the latter half of his career was essentially prosaic, and the "Sonnets to Order" read really like sonnets to order in another sense. But one is thankful for the opportunity of dipping into him again on any terms; for the sake of a few scattered lines of Wordsworth at his best, one would make one's way through a more importunate commentary than Mr. Brooke's. For Wordsworth at his best certainly soars at an altitude which the imagination nowhere else so serenely and naturally reaches. There could surely be no better example of the moral sublime than the lines to Toussaint L'Ouverture:
"Thou hast left behind
Powers that will work for thee, -- air, earth, and skies;
There's not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget thee; thou hast great allies:
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And love, and man's unconquerable mind."
This is very simple, but it is magnificently strong, and the verses, beyond their intrinsic beauty, have for us now the value of carrying an assurance that they have played a part and rendered service -- been a stimulus and an inspiration -- to many readers. The author has, of course, much to say on Wordsworth's almost fathomless intimacy with Nature, and he quotes these lines in illustration of that imaginative force which had expanded, through years of open-air brooding and musing, to its amplest reach. Wordsworth is speaking of London and its vast human interest, which, to his mind, seemed filled
"With impregnations like the Wilds
In which my early feelings had been nursed --
Bare hills and valleys, full of caverns, rocks,
And audible seclusions, dashing lakes,
Echoes and waterfalls and pointed crags,
That into music touch the passing wind."
The author mentions elsewhere, among Wordsworth's inimitable descriptive touches, his saying of a lonely mountain lake:
"There sometimes doth a leaping fish
Send through the tarn a lonely cheer."
That alone seems to us, in trivial parlance, worth the price of the volume. It is fair to Mr. Brooke to transcribe a specimen of his criticism; the following seems to us a favorable one:
"Our greatest poet since Milton was as religious as Milton, and in both I cannot but think the element of grandeur of style, which belongs so pre-eminently to them, flowed largely from the solemn simplicity and the strength which a dignified and unbigoted faith in great realities beyond this world gave to the order of their thoughts. Coleridge was flying from one speculation to another all his life. Scott had no vital joy in his belief, and it did not interpenetrate his poetry. Byron believed in fate more than in
Mr. Brooke intends, apparently, to take up the other poets in turn. Tennyson and Browning, as he says, are full of theology; and in the many-colored transcendental fumes and vapors of Shelley the theological incense mounts with varying density. But with Byron and Keats it will take some shrewdness to discover it. In treating of the theology of Byron, indeed, Mr. Brooke would have a subject worthy of all his ingenuity.
Nation, January 21,
1875
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (7)
Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, addressed to R. H. Horne. With Comments on Contemporaries. Ed. S. R. Townshend Mayer. London: R. Bentley & Son, 1877.
The form of this work is a trifle singular, Mr. Horne officiating as editor to Mrs. Browning, and Mr. Mayer rendering the same service to Mr. Horne -- though it would not seem that the latter gentleman, who is a literary veteran, stood in need of a sponsor. Mr. Horne, whom the readers of the poetry of forty years ago will remember as the author of a quasi-philosophic epic entitled `Orion,' which enjoyed at that period considerable popularity, sustained a correspondence with Mrs. Browning during the early years of her celebrity -- the years immediately preceding her marriage. These letters he lately published in certain magazines with a slight connecting narrative. They are here republished, supplemented by two or three chapters of literary reminiscence by Mr. Horne, and garnished with an occasional note by Mr. Mayer -- the result being a decidedly entertaining book. As nothing in the way of a memoir of the lady who may fairly be spoken of as the first of the world's women-poets had hitherto been published, and as no other letters from her hand had, to our knowledge, ever been given to the world, these two volumes will be held by her admirers to have a biographical value -- perhaps even to supply in some degree a sensible want. We may add that they will be read with hardly less pleasure by Mrs. Browning's colder critics.
The letters are very charming and altogether to the author's honor. Mr. Horne's own observations, moreover, are frequently interesting, and characterized by much raciness of style. The correspondents never met face to face, and their topics are almost wholly "intellectual" and literary, Mrs. Browning alluding to no personal affairs except her extreme ill-health, to which, moreover, her allusions have the highest degree of cheerfulness and serenity. The letters run from 1839 to 1846, the date of her marriage and her removal to Italy, in pursuit (in some measure successful) of stronger health. During these years Miss Barrett was wholly confined to her sick-room, lying on her sofa "wrapped in Indian shawls" (Mr.
"Mr. Kenyon calls me his `omnivorous cousin.' I read without principle. I have a sort of unity, indeed, but it amalgamates instead of selecting -- do you understand? When I had read the Hebrew Bible from Genesis to Malachi, right through, and was never stopped by the Chaldee" -- if Mrs. Browning means this literally, by the way, it is a very considerable achievement for a sick and lonely young girl -- "and the Greek poets and Plato right through from end to end, I passed as thoroughly through the flood of all possible and impossible British and foreign novels and romances, with slices of metaphysics laid thick between the sorrows of the multitudinous Celestinas. It is only useful knowledge and the multiplication-table I never tried hard at. And now - - what now? Is that matter of exultation? Alas! no. Do I boast of my omnivorousness of reading, even apart from the romances? Certainly, no! -- never except in joke. It's against my theories and ratiocinations, which take upon themselves to assert that we all generally err by reading too much and out of proportion to what we think. I should be wiser, I am persuaded, if I had not read half as much -- should have had stronger and better exercised faculties, and should stand higher in my own appreciation. The fact is that the ne plus ultra of intellectual indolence is this reading of books. It comes next to what the Americans call `whittling.'"
Miss Barrett had a particular passion for novels, and one of the most charming passages in these letters, which, in spite of its length, we shall venture to quote, is a eulogy of the reading of fiction. She had a very high opinion of Bulwer, and rendered more liberal justice to George Sand, Victor Hugo, and Balzac than was to have been expected from a quiet young English lady of thirty years ago. She thinks that the French novelists of that period present a much more brilliant front than the English. But here is the passage in question, which sustains what we said above about her "gayety":
"O that love of story-telling! It may be foolish, to be sure; it leads one into waste of time and strong excitement, to be sure; still, how pleasant it is! How full of enchantment and dream-time gladnesses! What a pleasant accompaniment to one's lonely coffee-cup in the morning or evening to hold a little volume in the left hand and read softly along how Lindoro saw Monimia over the hedge, and what he said to her! After breakfast we have other matters to do, grave business matters -- poems to write upon Eden or essays on Carlyle. . . . But everybody must attend to a certain proportion of practical affairs of life, and Lindoro and Monimia bring us ours. And then, if Monimia behaves pretty well, what rational satisfaction we have in settling her at the end of the book! No woman who speculates and practises on her own account has half the satisfaction in securing an establishment that we have with our Monimias -- nor should have, let it be said boldly. Did we not divine it would end so, albeit ourselves and Monimia were weeping together at the end of the second volume? Even to the middle of the third, when Lindoro was sworn at for a traitor by everybody in the book, may it not be testified gloriously of us that we saw through him? . . . What, have you known nothing, Mr. Editor, of these exaltations?"
The only person, in addition to the correspondents, who plays a prominent part in these letters is Miss Mitford, the intimate friend of both parties, and to whom Mr. Horne devotes several pages of recollections. It will be remembered that in the admirable collection of Miss Mitford's own letters
Nation, February 15,
1877
Robert Browning (8)
The Inn Album. By Robert Browning. London: Smith & Elder; Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co., 1875.
This is a decidedly irritating and displeasing performance. It is growing more difficult every year for Mr. Browning's old friends to fight his battles for him, and many of them will feel that on this occasion the cause is really too hopeless, and the great poet must himself be answerable for his indiscretions. Nothing that Mr. Browning writes, of course, can be vapid; if this were possible, it would be a much simpler affair. If it were a case of a writer "running thin," as the phrase is, there would be no need for criticism; there would be nothing in the way of matter to criticise, and old readers would have no heart to reproach. But it may be said of Mr. Browning that he runs thick rather than thin, and he need claim none of the tenderness granted to those who have used themselves up in the service of their admirers. He is robust and vigorous; more so now, even, than heretofore, and he is more prolific than in the earlier part of his career. But his wantonness, his wilfulness, his crudity, his inexplicable want of secondary thought, as we may call it, of the stage of reflection that follows upon the first outburst of the idea, and smooths, shapes, and adjusts it -- all this alloy of his great genius is more sensible now than ever. `The Inn Album' reads like a series of rough notes for a poem -- of hasty hieroglyphics and symbols, decipherable only to the author himself. A great poem might perhaps have been made of it, but assuredly it is not a great poem, nor any poem whatsoever. It is hard to say very coherently what it is. Up to a certain point, like everything of Mr. Browning's, it is highly dramatic and vivid, and beyond that point, like all its companions, it is as little dramatic as possible. It is not narrative, for there is not a line of comprehensible, consecutive statement in the two hundred and eleven pages of the volume. It is not lyrical, for there is not a phrase which in any degree does the office of the poetry that comes lawfully into the world -- chants itself, images itself, or lingers in the memory. "That bard's a Browning; he neglects the form!" one of the characters exclaims with irresponsible
Two gentlemen have been playing cards all night in an inn- parlor, and the peep of day finds one of them ten thousand pounds in debt to the other. The tables have been turned, and the victim is the actual victor. The elder man is a dissolute and penniless nobleman, who has undertaken the social education of the aspiring young heir of a great commercial fortune, and has taught him so well that the once ingenuous lad knows more than his clever master. The young man has come down into the country to see his cousin, who lives, hard by at the Hall, with her aunt, and with whom his aristocratic preceptor recommends him, for good worldly reasons, to make a match. Infinite discourse, of that formidable full-charged sort that issues from the lips of all Mr. Browning's characters, follows the play, and as the morning advances the two gentlemen leave the inn and go for a walk. Lord K. has meanwhile related to his young companion the history of one of his own earlier loves -- how he had seduced a magnificent young woman, and she had fairly frightened him into offering her marriage. On learning that he had meant to go free if he could, her scorn for him becomes such that she rejects his offer of reparation (a very fine stroke) and enters into wedlock with a "smug, crop-haired, smooth-chinned sort of curate- creature." The young man replies that he himself was once in love with a person that quite answers to this description, and then the companions separate -- the pupil to call at the
"A tiger-flash, yell, spring and scream: halloo!
Death's out and on him, has and holds him -- ugh!"
The effect is of course augmented if the reader is careful to make the "ugh!" rhyme correctly with the "halloo!" The lady takes poison, which she carries on her person and which operates instantaneously, and the young man's cousin, re-entering the room, has a sufficiently tremendous surprise.
The whole picture indefinably appeals to the imagination. There is something very curious about it and even rather arbitrary, and the reader wonders how it came, in the poet's mind, to take exactly that shape. It is very much as if he had worked backwards, had seen his dnouement first, as a mere picture -- the two corpses in the inn- parlor, and the young man and his cousin confronted above them -- and then had traced back the possible motives and sources. In looking for these Mr. Browning has of course encountered a vast number of deep discriminations and powerful touches of portraitures. He deals with human character as a chemist with his acids and alkalies, and while he mixes his colored fluids in a way that surprises the profane, knows perfectly well what he is about. But there is too apt to be in his style that hiss and sputter and evil aroma which characterize the proceedings of the laboratory. The idea, with Mr. Browning, always tumbles out into the world in some grotesque hind-foremost manner; it is like an unruly horse backing out of his stall, and stamping and plunging as he comes. His thought knows no simple stage -- at the very moment of its birth it is a terribly complicated affair. We frankly confess, at the risk of being accused of deplorable levity of mind, that we have found this want of clearness of explanation, of continuity, of at least superficial verisimilitude, of the smooth, the easy, the agreeable, quite fatal to our enjoyment of `The Inn Album.' It is all too argumentative, too curious and recondite. The people talk too much in long set speeches, at a moment's notice, and the anomaly so common in Browning, that the talk of the women is even more rugged and insoluble than that of the men, is here greatly exaggerated. We are reading neither prose nor poetry; it is too real for the ideal, and too ideal for the real. The author of `The Inn Album' is not a writer to whom we care to pay trivial compliments, and it is not a trivial complaint to say
Nation, January 20, 1876
The lovers of a great poet are the people in the world who are most to be forgiven a little wanton fancy about him, for they have before them, in his genius and work, an irresistible example of the application of the imaginative method to a thousand subjects. Certainly, therefore, there are many confirmed admirers of Robert Browning to whom it will not have failed to occur that the consignment of his ashes to the great temple of fame of the English race was exactly one of those occasions in which his own analytic spirit would have rejoiced and his irrepressible faculty for looking at human events in all sorts of slanting colored lights have found a signal opportunity. If he had been taken with it as a subject, if it had moved him to the confused yet comprehensive utterance of which he was the great professor, we can immediately guess at some of the sparks he would have scraped from it, guess how splendidly, in the case, the pictorial sense would have intertwined itself with the metaphysical. For such an occasion would have lacked, for the author of "The Ring and the Book," none of the complexity and convertibility that were dear to him. Passion and ingenuity, irony and solemnity, the impressive and the unexpected, would each have forced their way through; in a word, the author would have been sure to take the special, circumstantial view (the inveterate mark of all his speculation) even of so foregone a conclusion as that England should pay her greatest honor to one of her greatest poets. At any rate, as they stood in the Abbey on Tuesday last those of his admirers and mourners who were disposed to profit by his warrant for inquiring curiously, may well have let their fancy range, with its muffled step, in the direction which his fancy would probably not have shrunk from following, even perhaps to the dim corners where humor and the whimsical lurk. Only, we hasten to add, it would
One part of it on such an occasion is, of course, irresistible -- the sense that these honors are the greatest that a generous nation has to confer, and that the emotion that accompanies them is one of the high moments of a nation's life. The attitude of the public, of the multitude, at such hours, is a great expansion, a great openness to ideas of aspiration and achievement; the pride of possession and of bestowal, especially in the case of a career so complete as Mr. Browning's, is so present as to make regret a minor matter. We possess a great man most when we begin to look at him through the glass plate of death; and it is a simple truth, though containing an apparent contradiction, that the Abbey never strikes us so benignantly as when we have a valued voice to commit to silence there. For the silence is articulate after all, and in worthy instances the preservation great. It is the other side of the question that would pull most the strings of irresponsible reflection -- all those conceivable postulates and hypotheses of the poetic and satiric mind to which we owe the picture of how the bishop ordered his tomb in St. Praxed's. Macaulay's "temple of silence and reconciliation" -- and none the less perhaps because he himself is now a presence there -- strikes us, as we stand in it, not only as local but as social -- a sort of corporate company; so thick, under its high arches, its dim transepts and chapels, is the population of its historic names and figures. They are a company in possession, with a high standard of distinction, of immortality, as it were; for there is something serenely inexpugnable even in the position of the interlopers. As they look out, in the rich dusk, from the cold eyes of statues and the careful identity of tablets, they seem, with their converging faces, to scrutinize decorously the claims of each new recumbent glory, to ask each other how he is to be judged as an accession. How difficult to banish the idea that Robert Browning would have enjoyed prefiguring and disintegrating the mystifications, the reservations, even perhaps the slight buzz of scandal in the Poets' Corner, to which his own obsequies might give rise! Would not his great relish, in so characteristic an interview with this crucible, have been his perception of the bewildering
It is as classics on one ground and another -- some members of it perhaps on that of not being anything else -- that the numerous assembly in the Abbey holds together, and it is as a tremendous and incomparable modern that the author of "Men and Women" takes his place in it. He introduces to his predecessors a kind of contemporary individualism which surely for many a year they had not been reminded of with any such force. The tradition of the poetic character as something high, detached, and simple, which may be assumed to have prevailed among them for a good while, is one that Browning has broken at every turn; so that we can imagine his new associates to stand about him, till they have got used to him, with rather a sense of failing measures. A good many oddities and a good many great writers have been entombed in the Abbey; but none of the odd ones have been so great and none of the great ones so odd. There are plenty of poets whose right to the title may be contested, but there is no poetic head of equal power -- crowned and recrowned by almost importunate hands -- from which so many people would withhold the distinctive wreath. All this will give the marble phantoms at the base of the great pillars and the definite personalities of the honorary slabs something to puzzle out until, by the quick operation of time, the mere fact of his lying there among the classified and protected makes even Robert Browning lose a portion of the bristling surface of his actuality.
For the rest, judging from the outside and with his contemporaries, we of the public can only feel that his very modernness -- by which we mean the all-touching, all-trying spirit of his work, permeated with accumulations and playing with knowledge -- achieves a kind of conquest, or at least of extension, of the rigid pale. We cannot enter here upon any account either of that or of any other element of his genius, though surely no literary figure of our day seems
But the illustrious whom he rejoins may be reassured, as they will not fail to discover: in so far as they are representative it will clear itself up that, in spite of a surface unsuggestive of marble and a reckless individualism of form, he is quite as representative as any of them. For the great value of Browning is that at bottom, in all the deep spiritual and human essentials, he is unmistakably in the great tradition -- is, with all his Italianisms and cosmopolitanisms, all his victimization by societies organized to talk about him, a magnificent example of the best and least dilettantish English spirit. That constitutes indeed the main chance for his eventual critic, who will have to solve the refreshing problem of how, if subtleties be not what the English spirit most delights in, the author of, for instance, "Any Wife to Any Husband" made them his perpetual pasture and yet remained typically of his race. He was, indeed, a wonderful mixture of the universal and the alembicated. But he played with the curious and the special, they never submerged him, and it was a sign of his robustness that he could play to the end. His voice sounds loudest, and also clearest, for the things that, as a race, we like best -- the fascination of faith, the acceptance of life, the respect for its mysteries, the endurance of its charges, the vitality of the will, the validity of character, the beauty of action, the seriousness, above all, of the great human passion. If Browning had spoken for us in no other way, he ought to have been made sure of, tamed, and chained as a classic, on account of the extraordinary beauty of his treatment of the special relation between man and woman. It is a complete and splendid picture of the matter, which somehow places it at the same time in the region of conduct and responsibility. But when we talk of Robert Browning's speaking "for us," we go to the end of our privilege, we say all. With a sense of security, perhaps even a certain complacency, we leave our sophisticated modern conscience, and perhaps even our heterogeneous modern vocabulary, in his charge among the illustrious. There will possibly be moments in which these things will seem to us to have widened the allowance, made the high
The Speaker, January 4, 1890
Reprinted in Essays in London and Elsewhere, 1893
If on such an occasion as this -- even with our natural impulse to shake ourselves free of reserves -- some sharp choice between the dozen different aspects of one of the most copious of our poets becomes a prime necessity, though remaining at the same time a great difficulty, so in respect to the most voluminous of his works the admirer is promptly held up, as we have come to call it; finds himself almost baffled by alternatives. "The Ring and the Book" is so vast and so essentially gothic a structure, spreading and soaring and branching at such a rate, covering such ground, putting forth such pinnacles and towers and brave excrescences, planting its transepts and chapels and porticos, its clustered hugeness or inordinate muchness, that with any first approach we but walk vaguely and slowly, rather bewilderedly, round and round it, wondering at what point we had best attempt such entrance as will save our steps and light our uncertainty, most enable us to reach our personal chair, our indicated chapel or shrine, when once within. For it is to be granted that to this inner view the likeness of the literary monument to one of the great religious gives way a little, sustains itself less than in the first, the affronting mass; unless we simply figure ourselves, under the great roof, looking about us through a splendid thickness and dimness of air, an accumulation of spiritual presences or unprofaned mysteries, that makes our impression heavily general -- general only -- and leaves us helpless for reporting on particulars. The particulars for our purpose have thus their identity much rather in certain features of the twenty faces -- either of one or of another of these -- that the structure turns to the outer day and that we can, as it were, sit down before and consider at our comparative ease. I say
From far back, from my first reading of these volumes, which took place at the time of their disclosure to the world, when I was a fairly young person, the sense, almost the pang, of the novel they might have constituted sprang sharply from them; so that I was to go on through the years almost irreverently, all but quite profanely if you will, thinking of the great loose and uncontrolled composition, the great heavy-hanging cluster of related but unreconciled parts, as a fiction of the so-called historic type, that is as a suggested study of the manners and conditions from which our own have more or less traceably issued, just tragically spoiled -- or as a work of art, in other words, smothered in the producing. To which I hasten to add my consciousness of the scant degree in which such a fresh start from our author's documents, such a re-projection of them, wonderful documents as they can only have been, may claim a critical basis. Conceive me as simply astride of my different fancy, my other dream, of the matter -- which bolted with me, as I have said, at the first alarm.
Browning worked in this connection literally upon documents; no page of his long story is more vivid and splendid
The one definite forecast for this product would have been that it should figure for its producer as a poem -- as if he had simply said, "I embark at any rate for the Golden Isles"; everything else was of the pure incalculable, the frank voyage of adventure. To what extent the Golden Isles were in fact to be reached is a matter we needn't pretend, I think, absolutely to determine; let us feel for ourselves and as we will about it -- either see our adventurer, disembarked bag and baggage and in possession, plant his flag on the highest eminence within his circle of sea, or, on the other hand, but watch him approach and beat back a little, tack and turn and stand off, always fairly in sight of land, catching rare glimpses and meeting strange airs, but not quite achieving the final coup that annexes the group. He returns to us under either view all scented and salted with his measure of contact, and that for the moment is enough for us -- more than enough for me at any rate, engaged for your beguilement in this practical relation of snuffing up what he brings. He brings, however one puts it, a detailed report, which is but another word for a story; and it is with his story, his offered, not his borrowed one -- a very different matter -- that am concerned. We are probably most of us so aware of its general content that if I sum this up I may do so briefly. The Book of the Florentine rubbish-heap is the full account (as full accounts were conceived in those days) of the trial before the Roman courts, with inquiries and judgments by the Tuscan authorities intermixed, of a certain Count Guido Franceschini of Arezzo, decapitated, in company with four confederates -- these latter hanged -- on February 22, 1698, for the murder of his young wife Pompilia Comparini and her ostensible parents, Pietro and Violante of that ilk.
The circumstances leading to this climax were primarily his marriage to Pompilia, some years before, in Rome -- she being then but in her thirteenth year -- under the impression, fostered in him by the elder pair, that she was their own child
That is the bundle of facts, accompanied with the bundle of proceedings, legal, ecclesiastical, diplomatic and other, on the facts, that our author, of a summer's day, made prize of; but our general temptation, as I say -- out of which springs this question of the other values of character and effect, the other completeness of picture and drama, that the confused whole might have had for us -- is a distinctly different thing. The difference consists, you see, to begin with, in the very breath of our poet's genius, already, and so inordinately, at play on them from the first of our knowing them. And it consists in the second place of such an extracted sense of the whole, which becomes, after the most extraordinary fashion, bigger by the extraction, immeasurably bigger than even the most cumulative weight of the mere crude evidence, that our choice of how to take it all is in a manner determined for us: we can only take it as tremendously interesting, interesting not only in itself but with the great added interest, the dignity and authority and beauty, of Browning's general perception
I admit that my faith in my particular contention would be a degree firmer and fonder if there didn't glimmer through our poet's splendid hocus-pocus just the hint of one of those flaws that sometimes deform the fair face of a subject otherwise generally appealing or promising -- of such a subject in especial as may have been submitted to us, possibly even with the pretension to impose it, in too complete a shape. The idea but half hinted -- when it is a very good one -- is apt to contain the germ of happier fruit than the freight of the whole branch, waved at us or dropped into our lap, very often proves. This happens when we take over, as the phrase is, established data, take them over from existing records and under some involved obligation to take them as they stand. That drawback rests heavily for instance on the so- called historic fiction -- so beautiful a case it is of a muddlement of terms -- and is just one of the eminent reasons why the embarrassed Muse of that form, pulled up again and again, and the more often the fine intelligence invokes her, by the need of a superior harmony which shall be after all but a superior truth, catches up her flurried skirts and makes her saving dash for some gap in the hedge of romance. Now the flaw on this so intensely expressive face, that of the general donne of the fate of Pompilia, is that amid the variety of forces at play about
The first thing we do is to cast about for some centre in our field; seeing that, for such a purpose as ours, the subject might very nearly go a-begging with none more definite than the author has provided for it. I find that centre in the embracing consciousness of Caponsacchi, which, coming to the rescue of our question of treatment, of our search for a point of control, practically saves everything, and shows itself moreover the only thing that can save. The more we ask of any other part of our picture that it shall exercise a comprehensive function, the more we see that particular part inadequate; as inadequate even in the extraordinarily magnified range of spirit and reach of intelligence of the atrocious Franceschini as in the sublime passivity and plasticity of the childish Pompilia, educated to the last point though she be indeed by suffering, but otherwise so untaught that she can neither read
What remains with us all this time, none the less, is the effect of magnification, the exposure of each of these figures, in its degree, to that iridescent wash of personality, of temper and faculty, that our author ladles out to them, as the copious share of each, from his own great reservoir of spiritual health, and which makes us, as have noted, seek the reason of a perpetual anomaly. Why, bristling so with references to him rather than with references to each other or to any accompanying set of circumstances, do they still establish more truth and beauty than they sacrifice, do they still, according to their chance, help to make "The Ring and the Book" a great living thing, a great objective mass? I brushed by the answer a moment ago, I think, in speaking of the development in Pompilia
We have in the whole thing, at any rate, the element of action which is at the same time constant picture, and the element of picture which is at the same time constant action; and with a fusion, as the mass moves, that is none the less effective, none the less thick and complete, from our not owing it in the least to an artful economy. Another force pushes its way through the waste and rules the scene, making wrong things right and right things a hundred times more so -- that breath of Browning's own particular matchless Italy which takes us full in the face and remains from the first the felt rich coloured air in which we live. The quantity of that atmosphere that he had to give out is like nothing else in English poetry, any more than in English prose, that I recall; and since I am taking these liberties with him, let me take one too, a little, with the fruit of another genius shining at us here in association -- with that great placed and timed prose fiction which we owe to George Eliot and in which her projection of the stage and scenery is so different a matter. Curious enough this difference where so many things make for identity -- the quantity of talent, the quantity of knowledge, the high equality (or almost) of culture and curiosity, not to say of "spiritual life." Each writer drags along a far-sweeping train, though indeed Browning's spreads so considerably furthest; but his stirs up, to my vision, a perfect cloud of gold-dust, while hers, in "Romola," by contrast, leaves the air about as clear, about as white, and withal about as cold, as before she had benevolently entered it. This straight saturation of our author's, this prime assimilation of the elements for which the name of Italy stands, is a single splendid case, however; I can think of no second one that is not below it -- if we take it as supremely expressed in those of his lyrics and shorter dramatic monologues that it has most helped to inspire. The Rome and Tuscany of the early 'fifties had become for him so at once a medium, a bath of the senses and perceptions, into which he could sink, in which he could unlimitedly soak, that wherever he might be touched afterwards he gave out some effect of that immersion. This places him to my mind quite apart, makes the rest of our poetic record of a similar experience comparatively pale and abstract. Shelley and Swinburne -- to name only his compeers -- are, I know, a
The old Florence of the late spring closes round us; the hand of Italy is at once, with the recital of the old-world litter of Piazza San Lorenzo, with that of the great glare and of the great shadow- masses, heavy upon us, heavy with that strange weight, that mixed pressure, which is somehow, to the imagination, at once a caress and a menace. Our poet kicks up on the spot and at short notice what I have called his cloud of gold-dust. I can but speak for myself at least -- something that I want to feel both as historic and esthetic truth, both as pictorial and moral interest, something that will repay my fancy tenfold if I can but feel it, hovers before me, and I say to myself that, whether or no a great poem is to come off, I will be hanged if one of the vividest of all stories and one of the sharpest of all impressions doesn't. I beckon these things on, I follow them up, I so desire and need them that I of course, by my imaginative collaboration, contribute to them -- from the moment, that is, of my finding myself really in relation to the great points. On the other hand, as certainly, it has taken the author of the first volume, and of the two admirable chapters of the same -- since I can't call them cantos -- entitled respectively "Half-Rome" and "The Other Half-Rome," to put me in relation; where it is that he keeps me more and more, letting the closeness of my state, it must be owned, occasionally drop, letting the finer call on me even, for bad quarters-of-an-hour, considerably languish, but starting up before me again in vivid authority if I really presume to droop or stray. He takes his wilful way with me, but I make it my own, picking over and over as I have said, like some lingering talking pedlar's client, his great unloosed pack; and thus it is that by
It might have been such but for two reasons -- counting only the principal ones; one of these our fact that we see it so, I repeat, in Browning's inordinately-coloured light, and the other -- which is indeed perhaps but another face of the same -- that, with whatever limitations, it gives us in the rarest manner three characters of the first importance. I hold three a great many; I could have done with it almost, I think, if there had been but one or two; our rich provision shows you at any rate what I mean by speaking of our author's performance as above all a preparation for something. Deeply he felt that with the three -- the three built up at us each with an
"None of your abnegation of revenge!
Fly at me frank, tug where I tear again!
Away with the empty stare! Be holy still,
And stupid ever! Occupy your patch
Of private snow that's somewhere in what world
May now be growing icy round your head,
And aguish at your foot-print -- freeze not me!"
I have spoken of the enveloping consciousness -- or call it just the struggling, emerging, comparing, at last intensely living conscience -- of Caponsacchi as the indicated centre of our situation or determinant of our form, in the matter of the excellent novel; and know of course what such an indication lets me in for, responsibly speaking, in the way of a rearrangement of relations, in the way of liberties taken. To lift our subject out of the sphere of anecdote and place it in the sphere of drama, liberally considered, to give it dignity by extracting its finest importance, causing its parts to flower together into some splendid special sense, we supply it with a large lucid reflector, which we find only, as I have already noted, in that mind and soul concerned in the business that have at once the highest sensibility and the highest capacity, or that are, as we may call it, most admirably agitated. There is the awkward fact, the objector may say, that by our record the mind and soul in question are not concerned till a given hour, when many things have already happened and the climax is almost in sight; to which we reply, at our ease, that we simply don't suffer that fact to be awkward. From the moment I am taking liberties I suffer no awkwardness; I
The direct relation -- always to Pompilia -- is made, at Arezzo, as we know, by Franceschini himself; preparing his
What is equally apt for poetic or for the other, indeed, is the thing for which we feel "The Ring and the Book" preponderantly done -- it is at least what comes out clearest, comes out as straightest and strongest and finest, from Browning's genius -- the exhibition of the great constringent relation between man and woman at once at its maximum and as the relation most worth while in life for either party; an exhibition forming quite the main substance of our author's message. He has dealt, in his immense variety and vivacity, with other relations, but on this he has thrown his most living weight; it remains the thing of which his own rich experience most convincingly spoke to him. He has testified to it as charged to the brim with the burden of the senses, and has testified to it as almost too clarified, too liberated and sublimated, for traceable application or fair record; he has figured it as never too much either of the flesh or of the spirit for him, so long as the possibility of both of these is in each, but always and ever as the thing absolutely most worth while. It is in the highest and rarest degree clarified and disengaged for Caponsacchi and Pompilia; but what their history most concludes to is how ineffably it was, whatever happened, worth while. Worth while most then for them or
Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, London, 1912
Revised for the Quarterly Review, July 1912
Reprinted in Notes on Novelists,
London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1914
Frederick G. Burnaby (9)
A Ride to Khiva. Travels and Adventures in Central Asia. By Fred. Burnaby. London: Cassell, Petter & Galpin; New York: Harper & Bros., 1876.
Captain Burnaby's stout volume is what the French would call a book de circonstance. At a moment when the absorbing question in England is the degree of confidence in the Russian Government which may be consistent with patriotism this jovial and enterprising officer in the Guards offers a practical contribution to the discussion. His conclusion is very simple and definite: Not a grain of confidence, says Captain Burnaby. He is a very honest and straightforward, if not a highly philosophic, advocate of the policy of unlimited mistrust. He detests the Russian Government, thinks meanly of the nation, and while he holds that England has been already all but fatally outwitted and defied by Russia in Central Asia, deems that the English could still easily beat the Russians if they would try. His book offers a very entertaining image of a thoroughly English type of man -- the robust, conservative, aristocratic soldier, opaque in intellect but indomitable in muscle, who has "done" the world in general in a series of shooting- excursions, and who takes his stand, with a sort of physical tenacity, upon the faith that, by the eternal fitness of things, England must be the longest-armed power in the world. The way in which he started upon his journey to Khiva is extremely characteristic. He was at Khartum, on the White Nile, "having just returned from a visit to Colonel Gordon, Sir Samuel Baker's successor," when he read in an old newspaper that the Government of the Czar had lately forbidden all foreigners to travel in Russian Asia, and that an Englishman trying to do so had been turned back. The idea of an Englishman being turned back anywhere, or from anything, was too much for Captain Burnaby, and the circumstance in question seemed to him a cogent reason for proceeding directly to the prohibited districts. In fact, there was a slight delay in the execution of his project. "The following autumn the Carlist War was going on, so I went to Spain." Captain Burnaby does not inform us on which side his sympathies were enlisted in that struggle; but the reader
Captain Burnaby treats of all the Russian officials, indeed of the Russians in general, with whom he came into contact, in a vein of irony which, if not remarkable for delicacy, has about it too much of the author's characteristic good-humor to be malignant. He succeeded in getting to Khiva -- a good part of his road to which city two Americans, Messrs. Schuyler and MacGahan, had explored before him. He relates his journey in detail -- with too much detail, for some of it is rather trivial. We have not the space to keep him company, but we can recommend his narrative. Rarely, surely, has the English specialty -- the pursuit of the Anglo-Saxon ideal of pleasure under difficulties -- been more surprisingly illustrated. Encased in a mountainous accumulation of furs and sheepskins, Captain Burnaby travelled for a month over the frozen steppes, by sleigh, on horseback and on camel- back, herding with filthy Tartars and Kirghiz, passing nights in the open air, snow-bound and frost-bound, with the thermometer at 40x below zero, and on one occasion narrowly escaping the loss of his arms through freezing. Of Tartar manners and customs, and in especial of Tartar dirt, he gives many entertaining illustrations. The standard of cleanliness must of necessity be modified, however, in a temperature in which even an officer of the Guards is unable to undress for several weeks. Such appears to have been Captain Burnaby's hard
Captain Burnaby stayed but three days at Khiva, and returned home across the steppes at short notice. His expedition was quite an escapade, and rather a snapping of his fingers at the Russian authorities; but it must be said that he does not pretend to have discovered any particularly startling "atrocities" on the track of the Russian advance into Asia. His book contains excellent maps, and an appendix illustrating the history of that advance, and expressing in lively terms his own sense of its minatory character with regard to British India. Captain Burnaby holds that it must be stopped, and stopped by force, and that the sooner the force is brought to bear the better. We may add that when this event comes about, the side which boasts the services of Captain Burnaby will have a very valiant champion.
Nation, March 29,
1877
George Gordon, Lord Byron (10)
Memoir of the Rev. Francis Hodgson, B. D., with Numerous Letters from Lord Byron and Others. By his Son, the Rev. T. P. Hodgson, M. A. London: Macmillan, 1879.
Mr. Hodgson has written his father's life upon a very unusual plan, for which he makes apologies in his preface. The apologies, however, were not strictly necessary, for the book is an interesting one, more so, perhaps, than if it had been composed in the manner usually followed in such cases. The late Archdeacon Hodgson was a genial and accomplished scholar, a man of the world, and an indefatigable versifier; but he was not a brilliant writer, and our loss is not great, in the fact that his letters have for the most part not been preserved. His son and biographer lays before us, in default of any specimens of his own share in his correspondence, a selection from the letters that he received from his friends. These were numerous, for Francis Hodgson had the good fortune to inspire a great deal of affection and confidence. His chief claim to the attention of posterity resides in the fact that he was an early and much-trusted intimate of Lord Byron. A good many of Byron's letters to him were printed by Moore, to whom, however, Hodgson surrendered but a portion of this correspondence. His son here publishes a number of new letters, together with a great many communications from Mrs. Leigh, the poet's sister, and two or three from Lady Byron. All this portion of these volumes is extremely interesting, and constitutes, indeed, their principal value. It throws a clearer, though by no means a perfectly clear, light upon the much-discussed episode of the separation between Byron and his wife, and upon the character of his devoted sister. The book contains, besides, a series of letters from Hodgson's Eton and Cambridge friends, and in its latter portion a variety of extracts from his correspondence with such people as Lord Denman (Chief Justice of England, who presided at the trial of Queen Caroline, and incurred the bitter animosity of George IV.), James Montgomery, the late Herman Merivale, the late Duke of Devonshire, and the charming Mrs. Robert Arkwright, who figures in the lately published memoirs of Fanny Kemble. The picture of Hodgson's youth and early
Mrs. Leigh wrote to him at the time of Byron's marriage, in which she felt great happiness, that her brother had "said that in all the years that he had been acquainted with you he never had had a moment's disagreement with you: `I have quarreled with Hobhouse, with everybody but Hodgson,' were his own words." Byron's letters and allusions to his friend quite bear out this declaration, and they present his irritable and passionate nature in the most favorable light. He had a great esteem for Hodgson's judgment, both in literature and in life, and he defers to it with a docility which is touching in a spoiled young nobleman who, on occasion, can make a striking display of temper. Mr. Hodgson gives no definite account of the origin of his father's acquaintance with Byron -- he simply says that their intimacy, which in 1808 had become complete, had "doubtless been formed previously,
"I believe the nature of Lord B.'s mind to be most benevolent," she says in answer to Hodgson's appeal. "But there may have been circumstances (I would hope the consequences, not the causes of mental disorder) which would render an original tenderness of conscience the motive of desperation, even of guilt, when self-esteem had been forfeited too far." And in reply to Hodgson's request, made on Byron's behalf,
Even if the inference we speak of were valid, it would be very profitless to inquire further as regards Byron's unforgivable sin; we are convinced that, if it were ascertained, it would be, to ingenuous minds, a great disappointment. The reader of these volumes will readily assent to Mr. Hodgson's declaration that they offer a complete, virtual exoneration of Mrs. Leigh. The simple, touching, pious letters addressed to her brother's friend at the time of Byron's death and of the arrival of his remains in England, strongly contribute to this effect; as does also the tone in which she speaks of Lady Byron's estrangement from her, which took place very suddenly some years after the separation. The tone is that of a person a good deal mystified and even wounded.
North American Review, April
1879
Verney Lovett Cameron (11)
Across Africa. By Verney Lovett Cameron, C.B., D.C.L. London: Daldy, Isbister & Co.; New York: Harper & Bros., 1877.
Like most narratives of African travel, Captain Cameron's two volumes are the record of a really heroic achievement. When he arrived at Katombla on the west coast, upwards of two years after having left Zanzibar, he was greeted by a French resident who had come out to meet him, having a hamper of provisions, and who "instantly opened a bottle to drink to the honor of the first European who had ever succeeded in crossing tropical Africa from east to west." This was a slender symbol of the recognition which Captain Cameron's fortitude and perseverance may properly claim. In the map which accompanies his book, his path, with all its weary sinuosities, is traced in a red line across the huge continent, and when we reflect that it was followed for the greater part on foot (for the donkeys with which the expedition started succumbed to fatigue and inanition at a comparatively early stage of the journey), we cannot but take a higher view of the possible "grit" of human nature. Captain Cameron went to Africa in the autumn of 1872, under the auspices of the English Geographical Society, to organize an expedition which should place itself in communication with Dr. Livingstone and under his command, for the further prosecution of his researches. Captain Cameron, as commander in the navy, had had some observation of the iniquities of the African slave-trade, and he was eager to do something, indirectly, at least, which should lead to its being trampled out. It must be said that in this respect the benefits of his journey will have been very indirect, as he had not the good fortune, like Sir Samuel Baker, to be backed by a khedive and accompanied by a small army. He saw much of the horrors of slave-capture, but he saw them in perfect helplessness, and was obliged even to associate and travel in company with the slave-traders. This must have been not the least of the hardships of a journey fertile in miseries. Captain Cameron started from the east coast with two companions, Messrs. Dillon and Murphy, and a large body -- apparently,
Captain Cameron's narrative, made up from his journals, is a plain, unvarnished, and extremely detailed account of everything that befell him and his party during his march of twenty months. The number of details and of small incidents mentioned in his pages is perhaps almost wearying to the reader, who marvels at the author's clear recollection of things which succeeded each other during weeks and months of monotonous obstruction and exhaustion; a wonder not lessened by the reflection that the author, in writing his book, has had his notes to depend upon. Note-taking must often have been for Captain Cameron a decidedly difficult process. Readers scantily versed in the mysteries of African geography (which latterly, indeed, have been elucidated to a degree very surprising to the ordinary reader) receive an impression that African exploration is, at the time, the most thankless even of those pursuits of which it is admitted that their reward is in the treasure which the virtuous man lays up for himself. To some of these pursuits a certain amount of incidental sport is attached; there is a grain of compensation to a pound of hardship. But unless one has converted one's mind into a large Geographical Society's map of the "black continent," so that one can regard each new squalid village that one arrives at from the point of view of an enthusiastic filler-in of the blank spaces on the chart, it is hard to see what is the immediate entertainment of a period of African wandering. The people, apparently, are detestable -- filthy, stingy, mercenary, false, cruel, and devoted to making every step of advance impossible to you; the climate is in the highest degree baleful, and the "sport," in Captain Cameron's pages, makes no great figure -- though this may be because he was not a professed Nimrod, or was, most of the time, too weary to chase his game. He speaks of the scenery as being often of very great beauty, but the nature of African travel is hardly such as to put one into a mood for enjoying the charms of landscape.
Of direct hostility from the natives Captain Cameron, considering that he had not a very strong party, appears to have met very much less than might have been supposed. Only once or twice was he shot at with arrows, and this scrimmage speedily subsided. Wild beasts also play a very slender part in his narrative. He sees a leopard tumble out of a tree with a monkey in his clutches, and, so long as he kept his donkeys, the hyenas were prone to get at them at night and tear them to pieces; but Captain Cameron seems to have had, in this line, few adventures of the classic sort. During a long halt at Unyanyembe, about half way between the east coast and the great lake Tanganyika, he received news of the death of Doctor Livingstone, and on this one of his two companions, deeming that the raison d'tre of the enterprise had failed, determined to retrace his steps. They had all been extremely ill and delirious with fever, and when the scroll reached them upon which Jacob Wainwright, Livingstone's sometime companion, had inscribed the statement of his death -- Wainwright knew of an expedition having left Zanzibar and
It is out of our power to give any detailed account of the rest -- that is, the greater part of Captain Cameron's narrative. His difficulties constantly increased from the fact that his medium of exchange -- certain bales of cloth, which he dealt out yard by yard, in payment for food, lodging, wages of men, and such assistance as was rendered him -- very rapidly diminished. He had been unable to bring enough cloth with him to last a journey of twenty months, and he arrived at his goal in a state of almost absolute starvation. In February, 1874, a year after his start, and "fifteen years and five days from the time Burton discovered it," Captain Cameron's eyes rested on "vast Tanganyika." Here, at Kawele, near Ujiji, he got possession of Dr. Livingstone's papers, which were in the keeping of a worthy Arab who had been living as a trader in this part of Africa ever since 1842. The number of traders -- Arab, negro, Portuguese (under this denomination a great many base half-castes appear to cluster) encountered by Captain Cameron is very striking, and gives one a sense of tropical Africa being able to boast of a going to and fro of "bagmen" hardly inferior to that which may be observed in the most advanced Christian countries. The author obtained boats at Ujiji and devoted about two months to making the tour of Lake Tanganyika; and then, resuming his journey on the further side of it, he joined a large caravan of traders for the purpose of passing through the formidable Manyuema country in their company -- the people of Manyuema being cannibals and abominable wretches generally. "Not only do they eat the bodies of enemies killed in battle, but also of people who die of disease. They prepare the corpses by leaving them in running water until they are nearly putrid, and then devour them without any further cooking. They also eat all sorts of carrion, and their odor is very foul and revolting." Captain Cameron spent upwards of a month at Nyangwe, on the "mighty Lualaba," which he believes to be one of the headwaters of the
Captain Cameron waited many weeks -- from October to January -- at the capital of a potentate called Kasongo, a monster of cruelty, who was abroad extending his conquests, and whom the author did not feel at liberty to pass by without an interview. So he lingered, week after week, expecting Kasongo's return; finding some society, however, in an Arab trader settled in what, in a Christian country, would be called the neighborhood. Kasongo at last returned, bragged horribly of his achievements, and proclaimed himself a god -- a light in which he is apparently regarded by his subjects, who allow him to cut off their hands, ears, and noses for his amusement. His massacres and mutilations are incredible. Cruelty is in the manners of Urua, Kasongo's country. Witness this account of the usual burial of a chief, which is worth quoting:
"Their first proceeding is to divert the course of a stream, and in its bed to dig an enormous pit, the bottom of which is then covered with living women. At one end a woman is placed on her hands and knees, and upon her back the dead chief, covered with his beads and other treasures, is seated, being supported on either side by one of his wives, while his second wife sits at his feet. The earth is then shovelled in on them, and all the women are buried alive, with the exception of the second wife. To her custom is more merciful than to her companions, and grants her the privilege of being killed before the huge grave is filled in. This being completed, a number of male slaves -- sometimes forty or fifty -- are slaughtered, and the blood poured over the grave, after which the river is allowed to resume its course."
The account of the last weeks of Captain Cameron's march is of extreme, and indeed of exciting, interest. He had thrown away everything but his instruments and papers, to lighten himself and his men; he was in rags, and he had nothing to buy food with. His men, within a hundred and fifty miles of their journey's end, collapsed and broke down utterly; whereupon he picked out a few of the best, whom he persuaded to
Nation, April 5, 1877
Elizabeth Rundle Charles (12)
Hearthstone Series: Chronicles of the Schnberg-Cotta Family; The Early Dawn: Sketches of Christian Life in England in the Olden Time; Sketches of the United Brethren of Bohemia and Moravia; Diary of Mrs. Kitty Trevylyan; A Story of the Times of Whitefield and the Wesleys. 3 vols. New York: Tibbals & Whiting, 1865; Mary, the Handmaid of the Lord. New York: M. W. Dodd, 1865.
The wide circulation obtained by this work and its successors we attribute to their clever interfusion, and, indeed, we might almost say confusion, of history and fiction with religion. They offer neither the best history, the best piety, nor the best fiction, but they appeal to a public which has long since become reconciled to compromise -- that extensive public, so respectable in everything but its literary taste, which patronizes what is called "Sunday reading." We do not propose to examine the theory of this branch of literature. It is an implicitly accepted fact. We propose simply to offer a few remarks upon the works before us as its fruit.
The foremost property of the school to which these works belong is an attempted, and, to a certain degree, successful, compromise between the interests of youth and those of maturity, between the serious and the trivial. This, indeed, is the mark of a vast proportion of the efforts of modern book-making -- efforts which in their aggregate may be regarded as an attempt to provide a special literature for women and children, to provide books which grown women may read aloud to children without either party being bored. Books of this class never aim at anything so simple as merely to entertain. They frequently contain, as in the present case, an infusion of religious and historical information, and they in all cases embody a moral lesson. This latter fact is held to render them incompetent as novels; and doubtless, after all, it does, for of a genuine novel the meaning and the lesson are infinite; and here they are carefully narrowed down to a special precept.
It would be unjust to deny that these semi-developed novels are often very charming. Occasionally, like the "Heir of Redclyffe," they almost legitimate themselves by the force of genius. But this only when a first-rate mind takes the matter in hand. By a first-rate mind we here mean a mind which (since its action is restricted beforehand to the shortest gait,
The "Chronicles" present a kind of tabular view of the domestic pursuits of a group of growing boys and girls, contemoraries
The author's whole tone is the tone of the retrospective present. She anticipates throughout the judgments of posterity. Morally, her young chroniclers are of the nineteenth century, or they at least have had access to it. The subjects of great revolutions are like the rank and file of great armies, they are all unconscious of the direction and force of the movement to which they contribute. Our civil war has taught us, among so many other valuable lessons, the gross natural blindness -- that is, we are bound in reason to believe, the clear spiritual insight -- of great popular impulses. It has intimated that if these were of men only they would often miscarry for very shame. But men's natural deserts are frequently at variance with their spiritual needs; and they are allowed to execute the divine plan not only by their own petty practices, but on their own petty
Nation, September 14, 1865
Winifred Bertram" is, in our judgment, much better than the author's preceding work: it is in fact an excellent
In spite of this defect, it is very evident that it has been the author's aim to advocate a thoroughly healthy scheme of piety. She had determined to supersede the old-fashioned doctrinal tales on their own ground; to depict a world in which religious zeal should be compatible, in very young persons, with sound limbs and a lively interest in secular pastimes; in which the practice of religious duties should be but the foremost condition of a liberal education. This world of Miss Winifred Bertram is, accordingly, a highly accomplished one. It recalls those fine houses with violet window-panes, in whose drawing- rooms even the humblest visitors are touched with a faint reflection of the purple. Sin and sorrow assume a roseate hue. Candid virtue wears the beautiful blush of modesty. We have seen how the little girl above quoted gets "help" from Homer and Shakespeare. So every one about her is engaged in helping and being helped. She herself is the grand centre of assistance, in virtue, we presume, of her being in direct receipt of this favor from the great sources just mentioned. She walks through these pages shedding light and bounty, counsel and comfort; preaching, prescribing, and chiding. She makes as pretty a figure as you could wish; but she is, to our mind, far too good to be true. As the heroine of a fairy tale she would be admirable, but as a member of this working- day world she is almost ridiculous. She is a nose
But there is a great deal in these pages which is evidently meant for the parents of the little boys and girls who read them. There is, for instance, the episode of the conversion of Mrs. O'Brien from elegant carelessness, and heedlessness of her opportunities for beneficence, to an ingenious and systematic practice of philanthropy. We have no doubt that many idle women with plenty of money may derive considerable
Nation, February 1, 1866
Dutton Cook (13)
Book of the Play. Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character. By Dutton Cook. London: Sampson Low & Co., 1876.
Mr. Dutton Cook has made in these two pretty volumes a very readable compilation of theatrical anecdote and gossip -- a sort of literature which has flourished among us, some persons may be inclined to say, even more brilliantly than, for many years, the stage itself. The appetite for this species of information seems great, even among people who go little to the play, especially when it relates to a period not immediately contemporaneous. Indeed, the faculty among the public at large for reading stories about Betterton and Garrick, Cibber and Macklin, Mrs. Oldfield and Mrs. Bracegirdle, seems well-nigh infinite. We might have imagined that all the stories had been told and told many times over; but it appears that the stock is inexhaustible, and the prestige of these extremely defunct artists unabated. And it is a singular point, too, that we may peruse their somewhat frivolous records -- the record of their tipsiness and their impudence, their makeshifts and their mutual fisticuffs -- without the sense of degradation, as we may almost call it, with which we con the paragraphs in the Sunday papers about the "stars" of our own period. The actors of the last century appear somehow to belong to a superior race, and their very futilities to be more or less a part of literature. They are the mere echoes of names, the shadows of shadows, and yet our imagination offers them on easy terms an honorable reality. How much, according to our present taste, they deserve the honor we shall never know; but Mr. Dutton Cook helps us to realize that the stage itself, until within the last forty years or so, was a tolerably inelegant and dingy institution. He has a happy quotation from Thackeray -- any quotation from Thackeray, anywhere, is sure to seem happy -- about the tallow candles of the past:
"In speaking of the past I think that the night-life of society a hundred years ago was rather a dark life. . . . Horrible guttering tallow smoked and stunk in passages. . . .
If such dulness prevailed in the "saloons" of the nobility, we may be sure that the playhouses were not more brilliant; and we may picture Mrs. Siddons, for instance, sweeping through the rant of Belvidera or Statira in a sort of narrow, dusky booth, illumined by what Thackeray calls "the abominable mutton of our youth." It may be argued, and very plausibly, that these sordid conditions only threw into relief the intellectual side of the actor's art; but Mr. Cook, in his chapter upon "Benefits," reminds us of a practice which could hardly be said to be elevating -- the custom of an actor calling upon possible spectators to solicit the purchase of tickets for his "bespeak." He quotes from some one who had seen the great Siddons, "in an old red cloak," walking up and down both sides of a provincial street, and stopping at every house for this purpose. In such a spectacle there seems at first something pitiful, but a consistent admirer of past glories might maintain that this practice is really a proof that actors in the last century were more "genteel" than nowadays, inasmuch as few members of the theatrical profession, as it is actually constituted, could probably acquit themselves gracefully of an "interview" of the kind we allude to. Among interviews of this nature (though it owes its reality to fiction, not to history) Mr. Cook recalls the visit of Miss Snevellicci to the citizens of Portsmouth, accompanied by Nicholas Nickleby "and, for propriety's sake, by the Infant Phenomenon."
Mr. Cook's chapters are almost wholly anecdotical, though, the condition of the English stage being what it is, they would have perhaps gained by the infusion of a somewhat more critical tone. (The author, we believe, was for some time theatrical critic to one of the prominent London journals.) But Mr. Cook has contented himself with collecting a multitude of odd facts about the material accessories and accidents
Nation, February 8,
1877
Hubert Crackanthorpe (14)
HUBERT CRACKANTHORPE
Hubert Crackanthorpe, some months before his death, took part in a demonstration of the literary spirit which, however modest its object, singularly attained its mark. He joined forces with two other young men of letters, to offer, with a brief but emphasized compliment, to an older writer with whose work the three had been impressed, a substantial token of esteem. The older writer, the more surprised and touched as he was singularly unused to such approaches, found himself, by his emotion on this occasion, brought so much closer to each participant as to have on the spot the sense of a fresh interest, a curiosity quickened and warmed. Nothing could appeal to him more -- if only to arrive at the luxury of a perception of what they might have appreciated in the results of his endeavour -- than to gather from a nearer view what they too were doing and intending, and see, in short, what figure, in other work, might be made by conceptions akin to those to which, in his own way, he had obscurely sacrificed. He almost dreamed, for a fleeting hour, of recognizing in this process of his own, if he might call it such, a source of direct influence; almost dreamed of tasting that purest pleasure the artist can know, the sight of an impulse, an emulation communicated, of sympathy, of intellectual assent literally fructifying and putting forth. This was an experience so promising that it took at first perhaps too much for granted, overlooked, at any rate, the inevitable frustrations of time. One of the first effects of it could only be an increase of the pleasanter parts, the whole reckless relish, of responsibility. That, in turn, intensified, simplified the prospect and, as what Hubert Crackanthorpe in especial had most strikingly offered was the generosity of his youth, brushed away any visions of limits or lapses. There remained the sense of a relation formed and from which there was much more to come; but before scarce anything could come, arrived, with violence, the young man's sudden death, anticipating opportunities and bringing with it specific regrets. So it became a question of reading into what he had done and intended other things still
To read over what he has left -- four small volumes -- is to be freshly struck with the peculiar degree in which, in his imagination, in his tone, an almost extreme maturity is mingled with an equally unmistakable betrayal of the fewness of his years and -- I scarce know what to call it but -- the juvenility of his candour. That is the aspect that is difficult to render, so much does it constitute his troubled individual note -- a note so rare in England, in the present generation, among tellers of tales, that the critic is conscious of no frequent exercise, no acquired suppleness, in trying to fix it. There is of course a very eminent case in which, in somewhat altered proportions, the mixture I allude to, the air of anticipated experience, shines out with a great light; but no note, in that extraordinary composition, could well be less to be spoken of as troubled. No element assuredly in the artistic temperament of Mr. Rudyard Kipling but operates with the ease and exactitude of an alarum-clock set to the hour. For the rest, in the field of fiction, is what we are mainly conscious of not, on the whole, a good deal more the crudity of old hands than the antiquity of new? We seem to see in Hubert Crackanthorpe not only a very interesting, but a positively touching case of what may be called reaction against an experience of puerilities judged, frankly, inane, and a proportionate search, on his own responsibility and his own ground, for some artistic way of marking the force of the reaction. Something in his pages appears to tell us that he entertained
This only proves that our individual perception of human accidents insists on its perversities and may even disconcert our friends; and suggests, moreover, that Crackanthorpe's was probably in some degree determined by a prompt suspicion of the superior interest, for the artistic purpose, of almost anything that is not grossly obvious. Was not the grossly obvious, more or less, what he had inevitably been brought up to -- the pleasant furniture of an easy, happy young
This eye for the Bohemian panorama was too fresh to be as searching as he might fondly hope, but it helped three or four of his tales to arrive at a brief, hard, controlled intensity, an excellent felicity of dreariness. The best of these small things, however, are not those of the flare of the Strand, of the hustle of the London pavement and the rebound of the gaslight from the wet; to the appetite of the artist in him what, apparently, had most savour was the sweetness and the sadness, above all in France, of strong country aspects, of the sharp, homely, sunny foreignness of simple, local folk and out-of-the- way places. A few such aspects he has happily played with in the half- dozen vivid little chapters that accompany Sentimental Studies, each of the briefest, but each, by studied selection and compression -- The White Maize, Saint-P, Etienne Mattou, Gaston Lalanne's Child -- a small, sharp, bright picture. In this line, had he lived, he would have gone, I suspect, much further: he is at his best in the absolutely episodic, reaching his safest limits in such a happy intelligence of the artistic essential as Battledore and Shuttlecock -- in which, most, unless it be also in Trevor Perkins, the effect aimed at is seized and rounded, the touch too much, the touch beside the matter above all, exactly avoided. In the tiny collection of "Vignettes" he sounds again the note of his joy in the French country and in working the impression down to a few square inches of water-colour, framed, as it were, with a narrow line and suspended on a quiet wall. "All day
To allude to the "joy" of most of his pages, however, is to come back rather to the anomaly, as I at first felt it, of what was absent from these few and broken experiments, to the predominance of the consciousness of the cruelty of life, the expression, from volume to volume, of the deep insecurity of things; and to come back, as well, to my own slight mystification at the irreconcilability of his bright, tender type, as it were, and his persistently melancholy tone -- from which I sought an issue in the easy supposition that nothing is more frequent in clever young men than a premature attitude and a precipitate irony, and that this member of his generation differed from many others, those especially of the prose pen, only in the degree of his emphasis and his finish. His production was scant, his personality modest, and one argued, all round, on but a handful of signs. That was the case at least till suddenly, in the light of his death, the whole proportion and perspective appeared so to alter that friendly remembrance, moving backward, dropped the mere explanation of juvenility of posture and left it to merge itself, with compunction, in the thought of instincts and fears of a deeper colour -- left it to give way, as if for reparation, to his own young vision of fate.
Last Studies, by Hubert Crackanthorpe
London: William Heinemann, 1897
Dinah Maria Mulock Craik (15)
A Noble Life. By the Author of John Halifax, Gentleman. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1866.
Noble lives have always been a sort of specialty with the author of "John Halifax." Few novelists, in this age of sympathy with picturesque turpitude, have given us such flattering accounts of human nature, or have paid such glowing tributes to virtue. "John Halifax" was an attempt to tell the story of a life perfect in every particular; and to relate, moreover, every particular of it. The hero was a sort of Sir Charles Grandison of the democracy, faultless in manner and in morals. There is something almost awful in the thought of a writer undertaking to give a detailed picture of the actions of a perfectly virtuous being. Sir Charles Grandison, with his wig and his sword, his high heels, his bows, his smiles, his Johnsonian compliments, his irreproachable tone, his moderation, his reverence, his piety, his decency in all the relations of life, was possible to the author, and is tolerable to the reader, only as the product of an age in which nature was represented by majestic generalizations. But to create a model gentleman in an age when, to be satisfactory to the general public, art has to specify every individual fact of nature; when, in order to believe what we are desired to believe of such a person, we need to see him photographed at each successive stage of his proceedings, argues either great courage or great temerity on the part of a writer, and certainly involves a system of bold cooperation on the reader's side. We cannot but think that, if Miss Mulock had weighed her task more fairly, she would have shrunk from it in dismay. But neither before nor after his successful incarnation was John Halifax to be weighed or measured. We know of no scales that will hold him, and of no unit of length with which to compare him. He is infinite; he outlasts time; he is enshrined in a million innocent breasts; and before his awful perfection and his eternal durability we respectfully lower our lance. We have, indeed, not the least inclination to laugh at him; nor do we desire to speak with anything but respect of the spirit in which he and his numerous brothers and sisters have been
The volume before us contains the story of an unfortunate man who, born to wealth and honors, is rendered incompetent, by ill-health and deformity, to the simplest offices of life, but whose soul shines the brighter for this eclipse of his body. Orphaned, dwarfed, crippled, unable to walk, to hold a fork, a book, or a pen, with body enough to suffer acutely, and yet with so little that he can act only through servants upon the objects nearest to him, he contrives, nevertheless, to maintain a noble equanimity, to practise a boundless charity, and to achieve a wide intellectual culture. Such is Miss Mulock's noble life, and this time, at least, we do not contest her epithet. We might cite several examples to illustrate that lively predilection for cripples and invalids by which she has always been distinguished; but we defer to this generous idiosyncracy. It is no more than right that the sickly half of humanity should have its chronicler; and as far as the Earl of Cairnforth is concerned, it were a real loss to the robust half that he should lack his poet. For we cannot help thinking that, admirable as the subject is, the author has done it fair justice, and that she has appreciated its great opportunities. She has handled it delicately and wisely, both as judged by its intrinsic merits and, still more, as judged by her own hitherto revealed abilities. She has told her story simply, directly, and forcibly, with but a moderate tendency to moralize, and quite an artistic perception of the inherent value of her facts. A profound sense of the beauty of the theme impels us to say that of course there
Good story-tellers, however, are not so plentiful as that we should throw aside a story because it is told with only partial success. When was more than approximate justice ever done a great subject? In view of this general truth, we gladly commend Miss Mulock as fairly successful. Assuredly, she has her own peculiar merits. If she has not much philosophy nor much style, she has at least feeling and taste. If she does not savor of the classics, neither does she savor of the newspapers. If, in short, she is not George Eliot on the one hand, neither is she Miss Braddon on the other. Where a writer is so transparently a woman as she and the last-named lady betray themselves to be, it matters more than a little what kind of woman she is. In the face of this circumstance, the simplicity, the ignorance, the want of experience, the innocent false guesses and inferences, which, in severely critical moods, are almost ridiculous, resolve themselves into facts charming and even sacred, while the masculine cleverness, the social omniscience, which satisfy the merely intellectual exactions, become an almost revolting spectacle. Miss Mulock is kindly, somewhat
Nation, March 1, 1866
Oswald John Frederick Crawfurd (16)
Travels in Portugal. By John Latouche. New York: G. P. Putnam & Sons, 1875.
The first thing to be desired in a book of travels is that the ground traversed should be little known; that it should be worth knowing is quite a secondary affair. Of more importance than this is the author's cleverness, which should be of such an order as to dissimulate, when need be, the barrenness of his theme. These two main requisites Mr. Latouche very happily combines. Portugal is of course not such a terra incognita as Afghanistan, but it lies fairly well out of the beaten track of travel, and we are not aware that it is as yet included in any of Mr. Cook's great programmes. Mr. Latouche has made an exceptionally agreeable, in fact, a very charming, book about it. And yet, upon his showing, it does not appear that Portugal is especially well worth seeing, or that the tourist world is greatly the loser by leaving it alone. It is true that Mr. Latouche pretends to speak only of the more untrodden portions of the country, holding, as he does, that enough has been said about the highways and the commoner resorts. An entertaining account of these has lately been published by Lady Jackson in her `Fair Lusitania,' and Mr. Latouche engages chiefly to describe what Lady Jackson has not touched. It may be added -- Mr. Latouche can afford the concession -- that the author's weak point is the description of scenery. He has evidently an eye for the landscape, but he has not the art of sketching it very vividly -- his phrase is but scantily pictorial; so that often he fails to give a very definite idea of what the traveller gains by visiting certain places, the truth being that he finds his remuneration in the picturesqueness of the scenery. Yet for all this Mr. Latouche is eminently readable. Intelligent, observant, humorous, with plenty of general as well as of particular information, and with an unusual talent for putting himself in the place of other people, and judging them sympathetically and imaginatively, he is always an irreproachable companion. The main fault of his book is a certain want of method and of definiteness. It is a record partly of a residence -- apparently a long one -- and partly of a journey. It is not always obvious when
Mr. Latouche entered Portugal from the northwest corner, travelling on horseback across the Spanish frontier. He gives an account of a wonderful horse which he picked up at Vigo, and which carried him bravely over the northern mountains to Braganza on the eastern frontier. The decayed city and castle of Braganza give their name to the reigning dynasty of Portugal, but they appear to have impressed Mr. Latouche with nothing so much as the strong Jewish type of their inhabitants. This leads him into a digression -- his digressions are frequent, but always interesting -- upon the Portuguese Jews in general. The influx of Jews into the kingdom when the persecutions of Ferdinand and Isabella compelled them to leave Spain was very great; and in Portugal they found a modus vivendi which, though still hard, was easier than the Spanish rule. Vast numbers of them, however, passed on to Holland, where, says Mr. Latouche, the Portuguese Jews have always formed the cream of the great Hebrew plutocracy of Amsterdam. In another line, Baruch Spinosa was by descent a Portuguese Israelite. Many Jews, however, remained in Portugal and embraced Christianity, and Mr. Latouche affirms that their blood flows very freely at this day in the Portuguese upper classes. It was formerly thought safe to call any Jew of a certain type a Portuguese, and Mr. Latouche seems to think it safe to call any Portuguese a Jew.
From Braganza the author struck diagonally through the
Nation, October 21,
1875
Charles Dickens (17)
Our Mutual Friend. By Charles Dickens. New York: Harper Brothers, 1865.
Our Mutual Friend" is, to our perception, the poorest of Mr. Dickens's works. And it is poor with the poverty not of momentary embarrassment, but of permanent exhaustion. It is wanting in inspiration. For the last ten years it has seemed to us that Mr. Dickens has been unmistakably forcing himself. "Bleak House" was forced; "Little Dorritt" was labored; the present work is dug out as with a spade and pickaxe. Of course -- to anticipate the usual argument -- who but Dickens could have written it? Who, indeed? Who else would have established a lady in business in a novel on the admirably solid basis of her always putting on gloves and tieing a handkerchief round her head in moments of grief, and of her habitually addressing her family with "Peace! hold!" It is needless to say that Mrs. Reginald Wilfer is first and last the occasion of considerable true humor. When, after conducting her daughter to Mrs. Boffin's carriage, in sight of all the envious neighbors, she is described as enjoying her triumph during the next quarter of an hour by airing herself on the door-step "in a kind of splendidly serene trance," we laugh with as uncritical a laugh as could be desired of us. We pay the same tribute to her assertions, as she narrates the glories of the society she enjoyed at her father's table, that she has known as many as three copper-plate engravers exchanging the most exquisite sallies and retorts there at one time. But when to these we have added a dozen more happy examples of the humor which was exhaled from every line of Mr. Dickens's earlier writings, we shall have closed the list of the merits of the work before us. To say that the conduct of the story, with all its complications, betrays a long-practised hand, is to pay no compliment worthy the author. If this were, indeed, a compliment, we should be inclined to carry it further, and congratulate him on his success in what we should call the manufacture of fiction; for in so doing we should express a feeling that has attended us throughout the book. Seldom, we reflected, had we read a book so intensely written, so little seen, known, or felt.
In all Mr. Dickens's works the fantastic has been his great resource; and while his fancy was lively and vigorous it accomplished great things. But the fantastic, when the fancy is dead, is a very poor business. The movement of Mr. Dickens's fancy in Mrs. Wilfer and Mr. Boffin and Lady Tippins, and the Lammles and Miss Wren, and even in Eugene Wrayburn, is, to our mind, a movement lifeless, forced, mechanical. It is the letter of his old humor without the spirit. It is hardly too much to say that every character here put before us is a mere bundle of eccentricities, animated by no principle of nature whatever. In former days there reigned in Mr. Dickens's extravagances a comparative consistency; they were exaggerated statements of types that really existed. We had, perhaps, never known a Newman Noggs, nor a Pecksniff, nor a Micawber; but we had known persons of whom these figures were but the strictly logical consummation. But among the grotesque creatures who occupy the pages before us, there is not one whom we can refer to as an existing type. In all Mr. Dickens's stories, indeed, the reader has been called upon, and has willingly consented, to accept a certain number of figures or creatures of pure fancy, for this was the author's poetry. He was, moreover, always repaid for his concession by a peculiar beauty or power in these exceptional characters. But he is now expected to make the same concession with a very inadequate reward. What do we get in return for accepting Miss Jenny Wren as a possible person? This young lady is the type of a certain class of characters of which Mr. Dickens has made a specialty, and with which he has been accustomed to draw alternate smiles and tears, according as he pressed one spring or another. But this is very cheap merriment and very cheap pathos. Miss Jenny Wren is a poor little dwarf, afflicted, as she constantly reiterates, with a "bad back" and "queer legs," who makes doll's dresses, and is for ever pricking at those with whom she converses, in the air, with her needle, and assuring them that she knows their "tricks and their manners." Like all Mr. Dickens's pathetic characters, she is a little monster; she is deformed, unhealthy, unnatural; she belongs to the troop of hunchbacks, imbeciles, and precocious children who have carried on the sentimental business in all Mr.
Mr. Dickens goes as far out of the way for his wicked people as he does for his good ones. Rogue Riderhood, indeed, in the present story, is villanous with a sufficiently natural villany; he belongs to that quarter of society in which the author is most at his ease. But was there ever such wickedness as that of the Lammles and Mr. Fledgeby? Not that people have not been as mischievous as they; but was any one ever mischievous in that singular fashion? Did a couple of elegant swindlers ever take such particular pains to be aggressively inhuman? -- for we can find no other word for the gratuitous distortions to which they are subjected. The word humanity strikes us as strangely discordant, in the midst of these pages; for, let us boldly declare it, there is no humanity here. Humanity is nearer home than the Boffins, and the Lammles, and the Wilfers, and the Veneerings. It is in what men have in common with each other, and not in what they have in distinction. The people just named have nothing in common with each other, except the fact that they have nothing in common with mankind at large. What a world were this world if the world of "Our Mutual Friend" were an honest reflection of it! But a community of eccentrics is impossible. Rules alone are consistent with each other; exceptions are inconsistent. Society is maintained by natural sense and natural feeling. We cannot conceive a society in which these principles are not in some manner represented. Where in these pages are the depositaries of that intelligence without which the movement of life would cease? Who represents nature? Accepting half of Mr. Dickens's persons as intentionally grotesque, where are those exemplars of sound humanity who should afford us the proper measure of their companions' variations? We ought not, in justice to the author, to seek them among his weaker -- that is, his mere conventional -- characters; in John Harmon, Lizzie Hexam, or Mortimer Lightwood; but we assuredly cannot find them among his stronger -- that is, his artificial creations. Suppose we take Eugene Wrayburn and Bradley Headstone. They occupy a halfway position between the habitual probable of nature and the
Nation, December 21,
1865
Benjamin Disraeli (18)
Lothair. By The Right Honorable B. Disraeli. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1870.
Of the several reviews of "Lothair" which we have read, all have seemed to us to fail of justice in one important particular. Each of the reviewers had evidently read the book in the light of a deep aversion to the author's political character. Not one of them had made an attempt to estimate it on its own merits. It was all savagely negative criticism. The fewer kindly critics, on the other hand, have spoken, we imagine, at the prompting of a stubborn a priori enthusiasm and out of the fulness of political sympathy. There is so little profit in criticism of this temper, that we Americans may happily rejoice in the remoteness of the author's political presence and action. It concerns us chiefly that "Lothair" is decidedly amusing. We should call it interesting at once, were it not that we feel this to be in a measure a consecrated, a serious word, and that we cannot bring ourselves to think of "Lothair" as a serious work. It is doubtless not as amusing as it might be, with the same elements and a little firmer handling; but it is pleasant reading for a summer's day. The author has great cleverness, or rather he has a great deal of small cleverness. In great cleverness there must be an element of honest wisdom, we like to imagine, such as "Lothair" is fatally without. Still, he has cleverness enough to elicit repeatedly the reader's applause. A certain cleverness is required for getting into difficulties, for creating them and causing them to bristle around you; and of this peril-seeking faculty Mr. Disraeli possesses an abundant measure. Out of his difficulties he never emerges, so that in the end his talent lies gloriously entombed and enshrined in a vast edifice of accumulated mistakes. The reader persists, however, like a decent chief mourner at a funeral, and patiently waits till the last sod is thrown, till the last block is laid. He puts away the book with an indefinable sense of self-defeated power. Power enough there has been to arouse in his mind the feeling of attention, but not enough to awaken a single genuine impulse of satisfaction. A glance at the character of Mr. Disraeli's "difficulties" will illustrate our meaning. Lothair is a young nobleman
The author, however, has attempted greater things than this. A hero implies a heroine; in this case we have three, whose various forms of relation to the hero are happily enough conceived. The Church of Rome, in the person of Cardinal Grandison, having marked him for her own, we are invited to see what part the world shall play in contesting or confirming her influence. We have, in the first place, Lady Corisande, the lovely daughter of a mighty duke, a charming girl and a good Protestant; in the second, we have Miss Arundel, equally lovely, and a keen Papist; and lastly, we have the "divine Theodora," an Italian patriot, married, oddly enough, to a "gentleman of the South" of our own country. Corisande appeals to the young nobleman on behalf of his maternal faith and his high responsibilities; Miss Arundel of course operates in subtle sympathy with the Cardinal; and the "divine Theodora" (delicious title!) complicates matters admirably by seducing the young man into the service of Garibaldi. Such a bountiful admeasurement of womankind makes us only regret the more the provoking immateriality of Lothair. He walks through his part, however, to the fall of the curtain. He assists with Theodora at the battle of Mentana, where they are both wounded, the latter mortally. She survives long enough to extract from her young adorer a promise to resist the allurements of Romanism. But being nursed into convalescence by Miss Arundel, and exposed in his debilitated condition to the machinations of purple monsignori, he becomes so utterly demoralized, so enfeebled in will and bewildered in intellect, that to recover command of his senses he is obliged to fly secretly from Rome. From this point the interest of the story expires. The hero is conducted to the East, but to no very obvious purpose. We hear no more of the Romish conspirators. Miss Arundel goes into a cloister. Lothair returns to England and goes to stay at the residence of Lady Corisande's ducal parents. He goes with the young lady into her garden and offers her his hand, which she of course accepts; a very pretty episode, with which the book concludes.
If it can be said to have a ruling idea, that idea is of course to reveal the secret encroachments of the Romish Church. With what accuracy and fidelity these are revealed we are not prepared to say; with what eloquence and force the reader
Atlantic Monthly, August 1870
Lady Lucie Duff-Gordon (19)
Letters from Egypt, etc. By Lady Duff Gordon. London and New York: Macmillan & Co., 1875.
Lady Duff Gordon's letters may certainly rank among the most delightful in our language. They deserve to become classical. This was apparent when the first series was published, a few years since, and we may say it with equal emphasis on closing the present volume. The letters here contained were written during the last four years of the author's life, beginning on Christmas day 1865, and ending in the summer of 1869. She died at Cairo, in July of this latter year. She had spent seven years upon the Nile, and had become familiar with the river, the localities, and the people in a way that few travellers had ever done. Why and how this was her letters from Egypt abundantly show. They are introduced, here, by a short Memoir, written, with charming simplicity and in the best taste, by her daughter, and they are followed by a collection of letters written from the Cape of Good Hope during the winter of 1862 -- 63. She had gone off alone to this distant region on the same sad errand which subsequently led her to Egypt -- with the view of benefiting health. Her last years were spent in a struggle with consumption, which brought her life to a premature close. These letters from the Cape are also extremely entertaining, and if they are less so than those written in Egypt, it is the fault of the subject and not of the writer; for they show the same acute observation, the same strong intelligence, the same genial, sympathetic turn of mind, the same wit and fancy, and, above all, the same happy, easy, natural vividness of style. Like all the best writing of this kind, Lady Duff Gordon's letters are interesting not only for what they tell us of her subjects, but for what they tell us of herself. She was not only a "superior" woman in the usual sense of the word, but a thoroughly charming one: we read between the lines, and feel flattered by the sense of intimacy which we gather there. She was the product, evidently, of fine influences implanted in a grateful soil. She was born and brought up in a circle in which the intellectual tone, the standard of culture, was very high, and she strikes us as a woman
"A. seems to doubt whether he will come," she says in one of her letters, "and to fear that M. will be bored. Was I different to other children and young people, or has the race changed? When I was of M.'s age I should have thought any one mad who talked of a Nile voyage as possibly a bore, and would have embarked in a washing-tub if any would have offered to take me, and that with rapture. All romance and all curiosity, too, seems dead and gone. Even old and sick, and not very happily placed, I still cannot understand the idea of not being amused and interested. If M. wishes to see the Nile," she adds (M. was her young son), "let him come, because it is worth seeing; but if he is only to be sent because of me, let it alone. I know I am oppressive company now, and am apt, like Mr. Woodhouse in `Emma,' to say: `Let us all have some gruel.'" Lady Duff Gordon herself never ceased, to the last, to be amused and interested. Her life in Egypt was an exile (she spent her summers -- the torrid African
Lady Duff Gordon writes almost exclusively about Egypt and the people and things that surround her. Her allusions to what is going on in Europe are rare and brief; we do not know whether she made no others, or whether such passages have been omitted. She expatiates on the small details of her daily life, introduces all her acquaintances (always with the happiest vividness), and keeps giving news of her innumerable servants, pensioners, and visitors. We cannot deny ourselves the pleasure of quoting, in spite of its length, a passage about one of her friends. It is an excellent specimen of her style, and an example of what we mean by her being naturally an admirable writer:
"I have been much amused, lately, by a new acquaintance who, in romances of the last century, would be called an `Arabian Sage.' Sheykh Abdurrachman lives in a village half a day's journey off, and came over to visit me and to doctor me according to the science of Galen and Avicenna. Fancy a tall, thin, graceful man, with a gray beard and liquid eyes, absorbed in studies of the obsolete kind, a doctor of theology, law, medicine, and astronomy. We spent ten days in arguing and questioning; I consented to swallow a potion or two, which he made up before me, of very innocent materials. My friend is neither a quack nor superstitious, and two hundred years ago would have been a better physician than most in Europe. Indeed, I would rather swallow his physic now than that of many an M.D. I found him, like all the learned theologians I have known, extremely liberal and tolerant. You can conceive nothing more interesting and curious than the conversation of a man learned and intelligent, and utterly ignorant of all modern Western science. If I was pleased with him, he was enchanted with me, and swore by God that I was a Mufti indeed, and that a man could nowhere spend time so delightfully as in conversation with me. He said he had been acquainted with two or three Englishmen who had pleased him much, but
That is an attractive figure delightfully sketched, and it is one of many pictures, all freely and happily touched. In the singular medley of Dutch, English, Germans, Malays, and blackamoors who constituted society on the southernmost tip of Africa, Lady Duff Gordon found subjects of a very much less delicate picturesqueness; but her letters from Capetown and from the Dutch settlements of the inland country, where she visited, are extremely curious and entertaining. Even during the long, squalid voyage out, she writes charmingly. "Next day we got light wind S.W. (which ought to be S.E. trades), and the weather has been, beyond all description, lovely ever since. Cool, but soft, sunny, and bright, in short, perfect; only the sky is so pale. Last night the sunset was a vision of loveliness, a sort of Pompadour paradise; the sky
Nation, June 17, 1875
George du Maurier (20)
GEORGE DU MAURIER
If we should never, as the ancients had it, count a man happy till he dies, so, doubtless, we should never call a man clever so long as he has not written a novel. We had tasted George du Maurier's talent, we had applauded his pen, for many a year, and had ended by feeling familiar with their exercise and range, only to find at last that we had been judging them on half the evidence. The penetrating instrument to which we owe so large a mass of consistent pictorial satire suddenly puts forth a second point and dips it into literary ink. This is a great comfort for a friendly commentator who has accepted afresh the responsibility of speech. I have so repeatedly expressed my appreciation of Mr. Du Maurier as a various draughtsman, as a painter in black and white, that I should now have little left to say had he not kindly put new ground under my feet -- ground firm enough to sustain a very jubilant step. From the moment he, in the common phrase, takes to writing, it is possible once more to write about him.
This was not at all clear in advance, for one must confess to a general mistrust of literary efforts that are not efforts, and of tardy coquetries with fresh objects of conquest. It is not more easy to start at fifty-five than at twenty-five, and the grammar of any liberal art is not a study to be postponed. Difficult is it, in a word, at any time of life to master a mutinous form and express an uncommon meaning. The case therefore demands some attention when people begin to dash off brilliant novels in the afternoon of existence. That attention generally discovers the fact that the performance is more seeming than real, and that the question has been answered only by being, as the phrase is, begged -- sometimes with a touching unconsciousness, sometimes with a brazen assurance. The grammar, as I have called it, on these queer occasions, is so far from having been learned that the very alphabet has not even been suspected. What, above all, has not been suspected is the difficulty of the problem, or, in other words, its complexity. I hasten to add that I am far from making a matter-of- course reproach of this happy indifference
Even if Peter Ibbetson were less charming a thing, I scarcely see how it could fail to be interesting to those readers, fit though few, to whom the reasons of their likings come as much home as the likings themselves. There are people who don't enjoy enough till they know why they enjoy, and critics so oddly constituted that their sensation amuses them still more even than the work that produces that sensation. These critics, so often reviled for being "subjective," ought to join hands around Mr. Du Maurier and dance in a ring, so beautiful a chance does he put before them for the exercise of their subjectivity. The critics of the ancient type, those who take their stand on the laws and the suitabilities, must in the presence of his experiments in fiction feel that support abruptly give way, and find themselves with no comfortable precedent for being so happy with him. The laws are virtually so out of the question, and the suitabilities are so of the special case, that if we appeal to them we have only to close the book. What is in the question, what the special case demands, is simply the revelation of an individual nature. Mr. Du Maurier
The color and shape of this author's world are reflected, without a break, from his sense of human and personal beauty. In this sense resides the motive force of his work, and it would offer on Mr. Du Maurier's part materials for a longer and more curious study than I have space for. It is only the next "plastic" artist who shall have it in the same rare and exquisite, and, above all, in the same absorbing or intimate degree, who will be able equally, on trying his hand at a novel, to dispense with some of the novelist's precautions; for the talisman in question is precisely that "grace" which has given the author of Trilby his security, or, as I should say, if it didn't sound a little invidious, his impunity. Every one remembers the subject of Peter Ibbetson, a subject of purely fanciful essence, in which the author has achieved the miracle of redeeming from its immemorial dreariness that dream-world of the individual which, if it had not definitely succumbed to social reprobation, would still be the bugbear of the breakfast table. We all know how wide a berth we usually give other people's dreams; but who has not been thankful for those of Gogo Pasquier and the Duchess Mimsey? The beauty, the tenderness of the commerce of which they are the vehicle, the exquisite passion of which the happy couple's success in "dreaming true" gives us the
The reader who would fain ask himself how it is that our author's vision succeeds in being so blissfully exclusive, such a reader ends by perceiving, I think, that this is because it is intensely a vision of youth and of the soul of youth. Every thing and every one is not only beautiful for him; it is also divinely young. Turn over his work in Punch, in HARPER'S, as far back as you please, and you will find almost only sons and daughters of the gods, splendid young people in the prime of their six or seven feet. This admirable Trilby promises to be, quite as much as its predecessor, a poem in honor of the long leg and the twentieth year. In the twentieth year the glamour is glorious; in the tenth it is even greater. The historian of Gogo Pasquier and of the overgrown Mimsey oscillates between these periods. He revels in happy retrospect and can't tear himself away from his childhood. From his, I hasten to add, no more can the subjugated reader, however systematically that reader may avert himself from his own. Was there ever a more delightfully dusty haze, like
It is, perhaps, not indiscreet of me, taking advantage of a private revelation, to mention that as Trilby goes on, Trilby will offer a still better example of the fantastic heated and humanized. The subject is an absolute "find," and if the author brings it happily into port (as his delightful start seems to promise), every reader will feel that we have a fine new inventor. Nothing, of course, would induce me to be more communicative than this; but, speaking on the evidence already before the public, it is inevitable to say that the book promptly reveals a faculty more assured and a conception
Harper's Weekly, April 14, 1894
I should perhaps feel I had known George du Maurier almost too late in life -- too late, I mean, for dividing unequally with some older friends the right to speak of him -- were it not for two or three circumstances that somewhat correct the fear. One of these -- I mention it first -- is simply that I knew him, after all, for a number of years that might, alas, but too well have been bettered, yet that has still left me a sense of attachment and reminiscence greater than the space at my command. Another resides in the fact of his having, very late, precisely -- so late as to constitute a case quite apart -- become the subject of the adventure that was to give him his largest and most dramatic identity for his largest and most candid public. His greater renown began with his commencing novelist, and our acquaintance dated, am happy to say, from long before that. The main reason, however, for the charming impression of going back with him personally and to a distance is just the one that was to prove the key to half the sympathy that pressed round the final extension of his field: his frank, communicative interest in his own experience, his past, present and future, as a ground of intercourse, and his happy gift for calling up a response to it. He was the man in the world as to whom one could most feel, even as, in some degree, a junior, that not having known him all one's own did not in the least prevent one's having known him all his life. Of the so many pleasant things his friendship consisted of none was pleasanter, for a man of imagination in particular, than this constant beguiled admission, through his talk, his habits of remembrance, his genius for recollection and evocation, to the succession of his other days -- to the peopled, pictured previous time that was already a little the historic and pathetic past, that one had, at any rate, for one's self, just somewhat ruefully missed, but that he still held, as it
If there were but one word to be sounded about him, none would in every particular play so well the part of key-note as the word personal; it would so completely cover all the ground of all his sympathies and aptitudes. Its general application to them needs of course to be explained -- which I may not despair, presently, of attempting: specifically, at any rate, it helps to express the degree in which all converse with him was concretely animated and, as I have called it, peopled -- peopled like a "crush," a big London party; say even, as the closest possible comparison, the one fullest of the particular echoes most haunting his talk, the particular signs most marking his perceptions and tastes, like some soire, heterogeneous, universal, and as such the least bit bohemian of an aesthetic, a not too primly academic, Institution. He was, frankly, not critical; he positively disliked criticism -- and not with the common dislike of possible exposure to depreciation. He disliked the "earnest" attitude, and we often disagreed (it only made us more intimate,) about what it does for enjoyment; I regarding it as the very gate or gustatory mouth of pleasure, and he willing enough indeed to take it for a door, but a door closed in one's face. However, no man could have liked more to like or more not to, and we often came out by roads of very different adventure at the very same finger-post. His sense of things had always been, and had essentially to be, some lively emotion about them -- just this love or just this hate; and he was full of accumulated, inspiring experience because he was full of feelings, admirations, affections, repulsions. The world was, very simply, divided for him into what was beautiful and what was ugly, and especially into what looked so, and so far as these divisions were -- with everything they opened out to -- a complete account of the matter,
The origin of my acquaintance with him has, in the oddest way in the world, become so blurred by subsequent coats of color that I am only clear about its reaching down from some nineteen years back and from one of those multitudinous private parties of the early days of the Grosvenor Gallery, then in its pristine lustre and resoundingly original, which have not since, so far as I have been able to observe, been equalled as a medium or a motive for varied observation and easy converse.
It is enough that I got the impression, at that first period, that those were his happiest and steadiest years, the time of an artist's life when his tide is high and his gatherings-in are many. These things were all so present in his talk that, for the particular sort of inquiring animal one might happen to be, it had a high and constant value: a value that sprang from the source I have already glanced at, his admirably sociable habit of abounding in the sense of his own history and his own feelings, his memories, sympathies, contacts, observations, adventures. I recall this idiosyncrasy to remind myself of the elements of biography -- if there were room to treat them -- that it yielded; but what most appears in it, I think, as I look back, is the perception of a matter that was to do more than any one other to make a felicity of intercourse. This was nothing less than the rare chance of meeting a temperament in which the French strain was intermixed with the English in a manner so capricious and so curious and yet so calculated to keep its savor to the end. I say the French with the English as I might say the English with the French: there was at any rate as much in the case of mystification as of refreshment. There would indeed be a great deal more than this to say in the event of following up the scent of all that the question holds out. I can follow it only a part of the way -- the course has too many obstructions. As turn over, none the less, this particular memory of our friend it protrudes there, his lively duality, as almost by itself a possible little peg to hang a complete portrait. One of the things for which the way is barred, I fear, would be a confession of the degree to which, on the part of one of his friends, free and close communication really found indispensable that possession of the window that looked over the Channel, the French initiation, the French side to the mind and the French habit to the tongue. Born in Paris, in 1834, of a French father and an English mother -- on March 6, to be exact, and in a house, in the old Champs Elyses, that has long since disappeared -- he spent in France the early time as to which, in his latest years, he was to take us so vividly, so sentimentally into his confidence; with a
A part of the interest of knowing him in France might have come from the aid to a point of view that the Englishman in him would certainly have been prompt to lend; in England, at any rate, the good Englishman that he was more than excellently resigned to be was not a little lighted by the torch that the Frenchman in him could hold up. have never known, I think -- and in these days we know many -- an international mixture less susceptible of analysis save on some basis of saying, in summary fashion, that all impulse, in him, was of one race, and all reflection of another. But that simplifies too much, even with an attempt to remain subtle by leaving the mystified reader to put the signs on the right sides. We at all events encounter the international mixture mainly in the form of the cosmopolite, which is the last term in the world to be applied to Du Maurier. In the cosmopolite we much more effectually separate the parts; the successive coats come off -- with a good stiff pull at least -- like the successive disguises of a prestidigitator. We find Paris under London, and Florence under Paris, and Petersburg under Florence, and very little -- it is, no doubt, often brought home to us -- under anything. Du Maurier's French accent was, in the oddest way in the world, the result of an almost passionate acceptance of the insular. To be mild with him I used to tell him he could afford that; and to be severe I used to tell him he had sacrificed his birthright. By just so much as it was a luxury -- or, for complete rapprochement, a necessity -- to feel in
He was ever accessible to pleasantry on the subject -- on what subject, indeed, was he not? -- of this question of quantity, of his liking a great amount at once, so to speak, of the type and the physique he thought the right ones. He liked them, frankly, in either sex, gigantic, and had all the courage of his opinion in respect to the stature of women. The English form, at any rate, to his imagination, was above all a great length and a great straightness, a towering brightness which owed none of its charm to sinuosity, though possibly owing much of it to good-humor. If one had to have but a sole type, this was doubtless the type in which most peace was to be found and from which most was to be derived; a peace that we both still tasted even after discussion of the more troubled bliss that might be drawn from a shifting scale. It is noticeable throughout his work -- as to which observe that I am moved freely to confound picture with text and text with picture -- that it is almost only the ugly people who are small and the small people who are ugly. Allow him the total scale and he achieves the fullest variety of type; in other words he beautifully masters the innumerable different ways that our poor humanity has worked out of receiving the
He saw, then, as a friend could accuse him, a beauty in every bush -- that is if we reckon the bushes mainly as the vegetation of his dreams. The representation of these was what, after all, his work really came to in its long, fullest time, the time during which its regularity and serenity, all made up of the free play of all his feelings, rendered his company delightful and his contentment contagious -- things as to which my participation is full of remembered hours and pleasant pictures. What he by no means least communicated was the love of the place that had its own contribution to make, the soothing, amusing, simplifying, sanitary Hampstead, so dull but so desirable, so near but so far, that enriched the prosperous middle years with its Bank Holidays and its sunsets. I see it mainly in the light of Sunday afternoons, a friendly glow that sinks to a rosy west and draws out long shadows of walkers on the Heath. It is a jumble of recollections of old talkative wanderings, of old square houses in old high-walled gardens, of great trees and great views, of objects consecrated by every kind of repetition, that of the recurrent pilgrimage and of my companion's inexhaustible use of them. The Hampstead scenery made, in Punch, his mountains and valleys, his backgrounds and foregrounds, a surprising deal, at all times, of his variously local color. I like, for this reason, as well as for others, the little round pond where the hill is highest, the folds of the rusty Heath, the dips and dells and ridges, the scattered nooks and precious bits, the old red walls and jealous gates, the old benches in the right places and even the young couples in the wrong. Nothing was so completely in the right place as the group of Scotch firs that in many a Punch had produced for August or September a semblance of the social deer-forest, unless it might be the dome of St. Paul's, which loomed, far away, through the brown breath of London. But if I speak of the part played in this intercourse by frequencies of strolling wherever the strollable turned up, no passages are pleasanter or more numerous than those of the seasons in which, year after year -- with a year sometimes ruefully omitted -- he had, for three months, a house in London, and a Sunday or, as in
The particular matter I refer to as helping all objects and all neighborhoods to minister and stimulate was simply that love of life, as a spectacle and a study, which was the largest result of his passion for what I have called the personal, and on which, on my own side, equally an observer and a victim, I could meet him in unbounded intimacy. This was much of the ground of an intimacy that for many years was in its way a peculiar luxury; the good fortune of an associated play of mind -- over the mystery, the reality, the drollery, the irony of things -- with a man who, by a happy chance, was neither a stock-broker, nor a banker, nor a lawyer, nor a politician, nor a parson, nor a horse-breaker, nor a golfer, nor a journalist, nor even, and above all, of my own especial craft, from some of the members of which, in the line of play of mind, had fondly expected much only to find they had least to give and were in fact almost more boutonn than any one else. I scarce know if I can express better the pleasure and profit of this long and easy commerce than by saying that of all familiar friends George du Maurier was quite the least boutonn. There was nothing that belonged to life and character and the passions and predicaments of men that didn't interest him and that he was not ready to look at either as frankly or as fancifully as the mood or the occasion might require. It was not in this quarter, quite swept clear, of course, of the conventional, that it was most inevitable to see him as the Englishman undefiled. He had all a Frenchman's love of speculation and reflection, and I scarce remember, in all the years of this kind of converse with him, any twist or turn -- certainly on
He was endlessly amusing as to how this habit, in all the Punch time, had to be fed, and how the Bayswater Road, for instance, and all the immediate public things of London could feed it. It was fed from the windows of his house, from the top of his omnibuses (which he adored), from the stories of his friends, from his strolls in the Park, of which he never tired, and from the parties he sometimes went to and of which he tired directly. Touching to me always was the obligation that lay upon him, as a constant memento, to keep supplied, and supplied with an idea, with a gayety, with a composition -- or rather with two ideas, with two gayeties, with two compositions -- the insatiable little mouth that gaped every Wednesday. It was in connection with this when, between six and eight, before the lamp-lit meal, we took a turn together and the afternoons, at the winter's end, grew longer, but still with dusk enough for the lighted shop-fronts to lend a romantic charm to Westbourne Grove and for houses in devious by-streets to show dimly as haunts remembered and extinct, that I perceived, almost with gratulations, how few secrets against him, after all, the accident of his youth had built up. His sight was beyond any other I had known, and, whatever it had lost, what it had kept was surprising. He had been turned out originally with a wondrous apparatus, an organ worthy of one of those heroes whom he delighted to endow with superfine senses; this never ceased to strike me in all companionship. He had, in a word, not half, but double or quadruple the optical reach of other people. always thought I valued the use of my eyes and that I noticed and observed; but the manner in which, when out with him, I mainly exercised my faculty was by remarking how constantly and how easily his own surpassed it. I recall a hundred examples of this which are a part of the pleasantness of memory -- echoes of sociable saunterings in those airy,
His great resignation was that from an early time, the time of his taking up the succession of Leech, he had seen, as a
Wherever I turn, in recollection, I find some fresh instance of the truth on which any coherent account of him must rest, the truth of his having been moved almost only by impressions that could come to him in a personal form and as to which his reaction could have the personal pitch. If he loved even the art of a painter like Millais the more because Millais
It is something of a clew in something of a labyrinth -- a complexity, I mean, of impression and reminiscence -- to find almost any path of commemoration that I can follow losing itself in the general image of his surrender to what I have called the great beauty-question. Every road led him to Rome -- to some more assured and assuaged outlook upon something that could feed more and more his particular perception of the lovable and the admirable, a faculty that I scarce know how to describe but as a positive tenderness of the visual sense. It was in nothing more striking than in its marked increase as he grew older, an increase beautifully independent of the perturbed conditions of sight accompanying his last few years and his latest pictorial work, and vividly enough indicated, I think, in every chapter of The Martian. The difficulty is that to refer to the preoccupations and circumstances of his final time is to refer to matters as to which, from the moment he began to write, he put himself, in the field, in advance of any other reporter. I have, for instance, no friendlier notes, as I may call them, than sundry remembrances of that deeply delectable Whitby to which he returned with a frequency that was half a cry of fondness and half a confession of despair, until, in the last summer of his life, he found himself braving once too often, on a pious theory of its perfection, its interminable hills and its immitigable blasts. He has spoken of these things and others in the book in which, of the series, he speaks, think -- and most intimately and irrepressibly -- of the greatest number; so that I can only come afterwards with a brief and ineffectual stroke. Therefore I glance but for a moment at the perpetual service they rendered, in Punch, to his summer and autumn work,
I see him as well, perhaps, indeed, on a very different platform in a very different place; as to which, however, a connection with the great beauty-question is none the less traceable for being roundabout. This was the rostrum at Prince's Hall, a pleasant Piccadilly eminence where I remember, one evening of the late spring, when London was distracted with engagements, sitting, uplifted and exposed, in the company of several of his distinguished friends, behind a not imperceptibly bored and even pathetic figure -- a figure representing for the hour familiarly, sociably, quite in the manner of the books that had begun to come, though not yet to show what they could do, both one of the faculties as to which he had ever left us least in doubt and another that we might, later on, quite have felt foolish for not having, on that occasion, seen in the fulness of its reach. The occasion was that of his delivering in London -- where it was heard, believe, but two or three times -- a lecture on the general subject of his connection with Punch, an entertainment that he had constructed in conformity with that deep and admirable sense, beautiful and touching, as I have already said, in its constant ingenuities and patiences, for the stones, no matter how heavy, the p re de famille must never leave unturned. There come back to me, in respect to this episode, reflections not a few, but only one of which, however, I shall permit myself fully to articulate. He had, like most people in the world, his reasons for wishing to make money, to make it on a scale larger than a flow of fortune, long established, which could still be an object of envy to workers in a drier soil; and at that time his eyes were inevitably dim to eventual monstrosities of "circulation." Peter Ibbetson, if I mistake not, was already out; but Peter Ibbetson had of course felt the mysterious decree that a man's most charming work shall never, vulgarly speaking, be his most remunerative. This exquisite production had naturally not taken the measure of the foot of the Anglo-Saxon colossus, though that robust member was to try afterwards, in the attitude of the proud sisters in the tale of the glass slipper, to get it on by a good deal of pulling. He loved his lecture, I think, as little as possible; but it was taken
There is clearly in the three books some warrant of fact and of memory for everything he gives; so that this constant veracity leads us to read him personally, at every turn, straight into the story, or certainly into the margin, and so cultivate with peculiar success the art of interlining. We can perfectly make out the detail of the annals of his early time with the aid of the history of Peter -- perfectly, at least, save in so far as the history of Barty and the history of Trilby's young man (that is, of the principal one,) constitute a rich re-enforcement. I have read with even more reflection than the author perhaps desired to provoke the volume devoted by Mr. Felix Moscheles (note-ch20-1, see page 906) to their common experience of Flanders and Germany; as to which, again, what most strikes me is the way in which our friend himself has been beforehand with any gleaner. There is more of the matter in question in The Martian than resides even in the sketches reproduced by Mr. Moscheles; a period from the two records of which, at any rate, and with side-lights from Peter and Trilby, we reconstruct an image pathetic enough, though bristling with jokes, of the impecunious and stricken young man of genius who at that time didn't know if he were English or French, a chemist or a painter, possible or impossible, blind or seeing, alive or dead: putting it all, too, in the setting of the little old thrifty, empty, sketchable Flemish town -- for I glance at Malines in particular -- with the grass-grown, empty streets, the priests, the monks, the bells and the bguinages that, seen in a twilight of uncertainty and dread, were to hang in his gallery, for the remaining years, a series of sharp vignettes. I have no space to follow these footsteps; but in reading over the novels I am none the less struck with the degree in which the author is personally all there. Everything in him, everything one remembers him by and knew him by and most liked him for, is literally, is intensely there; every sign of his taste and his temper, every note of his experience and his talk. His talk is so much the whole of the matter that the books come as near as possible to reading as if a report of it had been taken down at various times by an emissary behind the door, some herald
Let me not now, however, after an emphatic assertion of the former of these features of it, appear to pretend to speak with any closeness of criticism of the other. I have re-read the three novels with exactly the consequence I looked for -- a fresh enjoyment of everything in them that is air and color and contact, and a fresh revival of the great puzzlement by which the bewildered author himself, with whom it was a frequent pleasure to discuss it, was the first to be overtaken and overwhelmed. Why did the public pounce on its prey with a spring so much more than elephantine? Why, as the object of such circumgyrations, was he singled out as no man had ever been? The charm his work might offer was not less conceivable to himself than to others, but he passed away, I think, with a sigh that was a practical relinquishment of the vain effort to probe the mystery of its "success." The charm was one thing and the success quite another, and the number of links missing between the two was greater than his tired spirit could cast about for. The case remains, however; it is one of the most curious of our time; and there might be some profit in carrying on an inquiry which could only lead him, at the last, in silence, to turn his face to the wall. But I may not go further in speculation than I may go in attempting to utter the response that rises again as I finger the books. The first of them remains my most particular pleasure, for it seems to me
I check myself again, of necessity, in the impulse to analyze and linger, to do anything but re-echo indiscriminately two
To speak of the close of Du Maurier's life is, frankly, think, to speak almost altogether of some of the strange consequences of such a triumph. They came to be, as a whole, so much beyond any sane calculation that they laid a heavy hand on his sense of beauty and proportion. He had let loose the elements, and they did violence to his nerves. To see much of him at this time was to receive the impression of assisting at an unsurpassable example of what publicity organized in the perfection to which our age has brought it can do and can undo. It was indeed a drama -- of prodigious strides -- in which all the effects of all the causes went on merrily enough. For a familiar friend, indeed, the play had begun far back, begun in the old easy moments of one's first conversational glimpse of the pleasant fabulosities that he carried in his head and that it diverted him -- with no suspicion of their value -- to offer as harmless specimens of wool-gathering. No companion of his walks and talks can have failed to be struck with the number of stories that he had, as it were, put by; none either can have failed to urge him to take them down from the shelf, to take down especially two or three which will never be taken down now. The fantastic was much in them all, and, speaking quite for myself, they dazzled me with the note of invention. He had worked them out in such detail that they were ready in many a case to be served as they stood. That was peculiarly true of a wonderful history that occupied, at Hampstead, I remember, years ago, on a summer day, the whole of an afternoon ramble. It may be because the absent, as I have hinted, is apt, for some dispositions, to have a merit beyond the present; I can at any rate scarce help thinking that with this intricate little romance he would have supremely "scored." A title would not have been obvious, but there would have been food for wonder in the career of a pair of lovers who had been changed into Albatrosses, and the idea of whose romantic adventures in the double consciousness
It was strange enough and sad enough that his vitality began to fail at the very hour at which his situation expanded; and I say this without imputing to him any want of lucidity as to what, as he often said, it all meant. I must not overdo the coincidence of his diminished relish for life and his unprecedented "boom," but as I see them together I find small difficulty in seeing them rather painfully related. What see certainly is that no such violence of publicity can leave untroubled and unadulterated the sources of the production in
Du Maurier felt so much, in a word, in the whole business, the want of proportion between effect and cause that he could only shake his head sadly under the obvious suggestion of a friend that he had simply to impose on the public the same charge as the public imposed. Were it not for a fear of making it sound like the spirit of observation gone mad, I should venture to remark that no one of my regrets in the face of the event is greater, perhaps, than for the loss of the spectacle of his chance to watch the success of such an effort. We talked of these things in the first months, talked of them till the conditions quite oppressively changed and the best way to treat them appeared much rather by talking of quite other things. I think of him then as silent about many altogether, and also as, from the beginning of this complication of indifference and pressure, of weariness and fame, more characteristically and humorously mild. He was never so gentle as in all the irritating time. The collapse of his strength seemed, at the last, sudden, and yet there had been signs enough, on looking back, of an ebbing tide. I have no kinder memory of the charming superseded Hampstead than, on the clear, cool nights, the gradual shrinkage, half tacit, half discussed, of his old friendly custom of seeing me down the hill. The hill, for our parting, was long enough to make a series of stages that
Harper's New Monthly Magazine, September 1897
In Bohemia with Du Maurier, London, 1897.
George Eliot (21)
Felix Holt, the Radical. By George Eliot. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1866.
Better, perhaps, than any of George Eliot's novels does "Felix Holt" illustrate her closely wedded talent and foibles. Her plots have always been artificial -- clumsily artificial -- the conduct of her story slow, and her style diffuse. Her conclusions have been signally weak, as the reader will admit who recalls Hetty's reprieve in "Adam Bede," the inundation of the Floss, and, worse than either, the comfortable reconciliation of Romola and Tessa. The plot of "Felix Holt" is essentially made up, and its development is forced. The style is the same lingering, slow-moving, expanding instrument which we already know. The termination is hasty, inconsiderate, and unsatisfactory -- is, in fact, almost an anti-climax. It is a good instance of a certain sagacious tendency to compromise which pervades the author's spirit, and to which her novels owe that disproportion between the meagre effect of the whole and the vigorous character of the different parts, which stamp them as the works of a secondary thinker and an incomplete artist. But if such are the faults of "Felix Holt," or some of them, we hasten to add that its merits are immense, and that the critic finds it no easy task to disengage himself from the spell of so much power, so much brilliancy, and so much discretion. In what other writer than George Eliot could we forgive so rusty a plot, and such langueurs of exposition, such a disparity of outline and detail? or, we may even say, of outline and outline -- of general outline and of particular? so much drawing and so little composition? In compensation for these defects we have the broad array of those rich accomplishments to which we owe "Adam Bede" and "Romola." First in order comes the firm and elaborate delineation of individual character, of which Tito, in "Romola," is a better example than the present work affords us. Then comes that extensive human sympathy, that easy understanding of character at large, that familiarity with man, from which a novelist draws his real inspiration, from which he borrows all his ideal lines and hues, to which he appeals for a blessing on his fictitious process, and to which he owes it
As a story "Felix Holt" is singularly inartistic. The promise of the title is only half kept. The history of the hero's opinions is made subordinate to so many other considerations, to so many sketches of secondary figures, to so many discursive amplifications of incidental points, to so much that is clear and brilliant and entertaining, but that, compared with this central object, is not serious, that when the reader finds the book drawing to a close without having, as it were, brought Felix Holt's passions to a head, he feels tempted to pronounce it a failure and a mistake. As a novel with a hero there is no doubt that it is a failure. Felix is a fragment. We find him a Radical and we leave him what? -- only "utterly married;" which is all very well in its place, but which by itself makes no conclusion. He tells his mistress at the outset that he was "converted by six weeks' debauchery." These very dramatic antecedents demanded somehow a group of consequents
It is as a broad picture of midland country life in England,
A great deal of high praise has been given to "Felix Holt," and a great deal more will be given still; a great many strong words will be used about the author. But we think it of considerable importance that these should at least go no further than they have already gone. It is so new a phenomenon for an English novelist to exhibit mental resources which may avail him in other walks of literature; to have powers of thought at all commensurate with his powers of imagination, that when a writer unites these conditions he is likely to receive excessive homage. There is in George Eliot's writings a tone of sagacity, of easy penetration, which leads us to believe that she would be the last to form a false estimate of her works, together with a serious respect for truth which convinces us that she would lament the publication of such an estimate. In our opinion, then, neither "Felix Holt," nor "Adam Bede," nor "Romola," is a master-piece. They have none of the inspiration, the heat, nor the essential simplicity of such a work. They belong to a kind of writing in which the English tongue has the good fortune to abound -- that clever, voluble, bright-colored novel of manners which began with the present century under the auspices of Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen. George Eliot is stronger in degree than either of these writers, but she is not different in kind. She brings to her task a richer mind, but she uses it in very much the same way. With a certain masculine comprehensiveness which they lack, she is eventually a feminine -- a delightfully feminine -- writer. She has the microscopic observation, not a myriad of whose keen notations are worth a single one of those great synthetic guesses with which a real master attacks the truth, and which, by their occasional occurrence in the stories of Mr. Charles Reade (the much abused "Griffith Gaunt" included), make him, to our mind, the most readable of living English novelists, and prove him a distant kinsman of Shakespeare. George Eliot has the exquisitely good taste on a small scale, the absence of taste on a large (the vulgar plot of "Felix Holt" exemplifies this deficiency),
Nation, August 16, 1866
The critic's first duty in the presence of an author's collective works is to seek out some key to his method, some utterance of his literary convictions, some indication of his ruling theory. The amount of labor involved in an inquiry of this kind will depend very much upon the author. In some cases the critic will find express declarations; in other cases he will have to content himself with conscientious inductions. In a writer so fond of digressions as George Eliot, he has reason to expect that broad evidences of artistic faith will not be wanting. He finds in "Adam Bede" the following passage: --
"Paint us an angel if you can, with a floating violet robe and a face paled by the celestial light; paint us yet oftener a Madonna, turning her mild face upward, and opening her arms to welcome the divine glory; but do not impose on us any aesthetic rules which shall banish from the region of art those old women scraping carrots with their work- worn hands, -- those heavy clowns taking holiday in a dingy pot-house, - - those rounded backs and stupid weather-beaten faces that have bent over the spade and done the rough work of the world, -- those homes with their tin cans, their brown pitchers, their rough curs, and their clusters of onions. In this world there are so many of these common, coarse people, who have no picturesque, sentimental wretchedness. It is so needful we should remember their existence, else we may happen to leave them quite out of our religion and philosophy, and frame lofty theories which only fit a world of extremes. . . . . . There are few prophets in the world, -- few sublimely beautiful women, -- few heroes. I can't afford to give all my love and reverence to
But even in the absence of any such avowed predilections as these, a brief glance over the principal figures of her different works would assure us that our author's sympathies are with common people. Silas Marner is a linen-weaver, Adam Bede is a carpenter, Maggie Tulliver is a miller's daughter, Felix Holt is a watchmaker, Dinah Morris works in a factory, and Hetty Sorrel is a dairy-maid. Esther Lyon, indeed, is a daily governess; but Tito Melema alone is a scholar. In the "Scenes of Clerical Life," the author is constantly slipping down from the clergymen, her heroes, to the most ignorant and obscure of their parishioners. Even in "Romola" she consecrates page after page to the conversation of the Florentine populace. She is as unmistakably a painter of bourgeois life as Thackeray was a painter of the life of drawing-rooms.
Her opportunities for the study of the manners of the solid lower classes have evidently been very great. We have her word for it that she has lived much among the farmers, mechanics, and small traders of that central region of England which she has made known to us under the name of Loamshire. The conditions of the popular life in this district in that already distant period to which she refers the action of most of her stories -- the end of the last century and the beginning
The first work which made the name of George Eliot generally known, contains, to my perception, only a small number of the germs of her future power. From the "Scenes of Clerical Life" to "Adam Bede" she made not so much a step as a leap. Of the three tales contained in the former work, I think the first is much the best. It is short, broadly descriptive, humorous, and exceedingly pathetic. "The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton" are fortunes which clever story-tellers with a turn for pathos, from Oliver Goldsmith downward, have found of very good account, -- the fortunes of a hapless clergyman of the Church of England in daily contention with the problem how upon eighty pounds a year to support a wife and six children in all due ecclesiastical gentility. "Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story," the second of the tales in question, I cannot hesitate to pronounce a failure. George Eliot's pictures of drawing- room life are only interesting when they are linked or related to scenes in the tavern parlor, the dairy, and the cottage. Mr. Gilfil's love- story is enacted entirely in the drawing-room, and in consequence it is singularly deficient in force and reality. Not that it is vulgar, -- for our author's good taste never forsakes her, -- but it is thin, flat, and trivial. But for a certain family likeness in the use of language and the rhythm of the style, it would be hard to believe that these pages are by the same hand as "Silas Marner." In "Janet's Repentance," the last and longest of the three clerical stories, we return to middle life, -- the life represented by the Dodsons in "The Mill on the Floss." The subject of this tale might almost be qualified by the French epithet scabreux. It would be difficult for what is called realism to go further than in the adoption of a heroine stained with the vice of intemperance.
To a certain extent, I think "Silas Marner" holds a higher place than any of the author's works. It is more nearly a masterpiece; it has more of that simple, rounded, consummate aspect, that absence of loose ends and gaping issues, which marks a classical work. What was attempted in it, indeed, was within more immediate reach than the heart- trials of Adam Bede and Maggie Tulliver. A poor, dull-witted, disappointed Methodist cloth-weaver; a little golden-haired foundling child; a well-meaning, irresolute country squire, and his patient, childless wife; -- these, with a chorus of simple, beer-loving villagers, make up the dramatis personae. More than any of its brother-works, "Silas Marner," I think, leaves upon the mind a deep impression of the grossly material life of agricultural England in the last days of the old rgime, -- the days of full-orbed Toryism, of Trafalgar and of Waterloo, when the invasive spirit of French domination threw England back upon a sense of her own insular solidity, and made her for the time doubly, brutally, morbidly English. Perhaps the best pages in the work are the first thirty, telling the story of poor Marner's disappointments in friendship and in love, his unmerited disgrace, and his long, lonely twilight-life at Raveloe, with the sole companionship of his loom, in which his muscles moved "with such even repetition, that their pause seemed almost as much a constraint as the holding of his breath." Here, as in all George Eliot's books, there is a middle
"`Some folks 'ud say that was a fine beast you druv in yesterday, Bob?'
"The butcher, a jolly, smiling, red-haired man, was not disposed to answer rashly. He gave a few puffs before he spat, and replied, `And they would n't be fur wrong, John.'
"After this feeble, delusive thaw, silence set in as severely as before.
"`Was it a red Durham?' said the farrier, taking up the thread of discourse after the lapse of a few minutes.
"The farrier looked at the landlord, and the landlord looked at the butcher, as the person who must take the responsibility of answering.
"`Red it was,' said the butcher, in his good-humored husky treble, -- `and a Durham it was.'
"`Then you need n't tell me who you bought it of,' said the farrier, looking round with some triumph; `I know who it is has got the red Durhams o' this country-side. And she 'd a white star on her brow, I 'll bet a penny?'
"`Well; yes -- she might,' said the butcher, slowly, considering that he was giving a decided affirmation. `I don't say contrairy.'
"`I knew that very well,' said the farrier, throwing himself back defiantly; `if I don't know Mr. Lammeter's cows, I should like to know who does, -- that's all. And as for the cow you bought, bargain or no bargain, I 've been at the drenching of her, -- contradick me who will.'
"The farrier looked fierce, and the mild butcher's conversational spirit was roused a little.
"`I 'm not for contradicking no man,' he said; `I 'm for
"`Well, its the cow as I drenched, whatever it is,' pursued the farrier, angrily; `and it was Mr. Lammeter's cow, else you told a lie when you said it was a red Durham.'
"`I tell no lies,' said the butcher, with the same mild huskiness as before; `and I contradick none, -- not if a man was to swear himself black; he 's no meat of mine, nor none of my bargains. All I say is, its a lovely carkiss. And what I say I 'll stick to; but I 'll quarrel wi' no man.'
"`No,' said the farrier, with bitter sarcasm, looking at the company generally; `and p'rhaps you did n't say the cow was a red Durham; and p'rhaps you did n't say she 'd got a star on her brow, -- stick to that, now you are at it.'"
Matters having come to this point, the landlord interferes ex officio to preserve order. The Lammeter family having come up, he discreetly invites Mr. Macey, the parish clerk and tailor, to favor the company with his recollections on the subject. Mr. Macey, however, "smiled pityingly in answer to the landlord's appeal, and said: `Ay, ay; I know, I know: but I let other folks talk. I 've laid by now, and gev up to the young uns. Ask them as have been to school at Tarley: they 've learn't pernouncing; that 's came up since my day.'"
Mr. Macey is nevertheless persuaded to dribble out his narrative; proceeding by instalments, and questioned from point to point, in a kind of Socratic manner, by the landlord. He at last arrives at Mr. Lammeter's marriage, and how the clergyman, when he came to put the questions, inadvertently transposed the position of the two essential names, and asked, "Wilt thou have this man to be thy wedded wife?" etc.
"`But the partic'larest thing of all,' pursues Mr. Macey, `is, as nobody took any notice on it but me, and they answered straight off "Yes," like as if it had been me saying "Amen" i' the right place, without listening to what went before.'
"`But you knew what was going on well enough, did n't you, Mr. Macey? You were live enough, eh?' said the butcher.
"`Yes, bless you!' said Mr. Macey, pausing, and smiling in pity at the impatience of his hearer's imagination, -- `why, I
Mr. Macey's doubts, however, are set at rest by the parson after the service, who assures him that what does the business is neither the meaning nor the words, but the register. Mr. Macey then arrives at the chapter -- or rather is gently inducted thereunto by his hearers -- of the ghosts who frequent certain of the Lammeter stables. But ghosts threatening to prove as pregnant a theme of contention as Durham cows, the landlord again meditates: "]`There 's folks i' my opinion, they can't see ghos'es, not if they stood as plain as a pike- staff before 'em. And there 's reason i' that. For there 's my wife, now, can't smell, not if she 'd the strongest o' cheese under her nose. I never seed a ghost myself, but then I says to myself, "Very like have n't the smell for 'em." I mean, putting a ghost for a smell or else contrairiways. And so I 'm for holding with both sides. . . . . For the smell 's what I go by.'"
The best drawn of the village worthies in "Silas Marner" are Mr. Macey, of the scene just quoted, and good Dolly Winthrop, Marner's kindly patroness. I have room for only one more specimen of Mr. Macey. He is looking on at a New Year's dance at Squire Cass's, beside Ben Winthrop, Dolly's husband.
"`The Squire's pretty springy, considering his weight,' said Mr. Macey, `and he stamps uncommon well. But Mr. Lammeter beats 'em all for shapes; you see he holds his head like a sodger, and he is n't so cushiony as most o' the oldish gentlefolks, -- they run fat in gineral; -- and he 's got a fine leg. The parson 's nimble enough, but he has n't got much of a
"`Talk o' nimbleness, look at Mrs. Osgood,' said Ben Winthrop. . . . . `She 's the finest made woman as is, let the next be where she will.'
"`I don't heed how the women are made,' said Mr. Macey, with some contempt. `They wear nayther coat nor breeches; you can't make much out o' their shapes!'"
Mrs. Winthrop, the wheelwright's wife who, out of the fulness of her charity, comes to comfort Silas in the season of his distress, is in her way one of the most truthfully sketched of the author's figures. "She was in all respects a woman of scrupulous conscience, so eager for duties that life seemed to offer them too scantily unless she rose at half past four, though this threw a scarcity of work over the more advanced hours of the morning, which it was a constant problem for her to remove. . . . . She was a very mild, patient woman, whose nature it was to seek out all the sadder and more serious elements of life and pasture her mind upon them." She stamps I. H. S. on her cakes and loaves without knowing what the letters mean, or indeed without knowing that they are letters, being very much surprised that Marner can "read 'em off," -- chiefly because they are on the pulpit cloth at church. She touches upon religious themes in a manner to make the superficial reader apprehend that she cultivates some polytheistic form of faith, -- extremes meet. She urges Marner to go to church, and describes the satisfaction which she herself derives from the performance of her religious duties.
"If you've niver had no church, there 's no telling what good it 'll do you. For I feel as set up and comfortable as niver was, when I 've been and heard the prayers and the singing to the praise and glory o' God, as Mr. Macey gives out, -- and Mr. Crackenthorp saying good words and more partic'lar on Sacramen' day; and if a bit o' trouble comes, I feel as I can put up wi' it, for I 've looked for help i' the right quarter, and giv myself up to Them as we must all give ourselves up to at the last: and if we've done our part, it is n't
"The plural pronoun," says the author, "was no heresy of Dolly's, but only her way of avoiding a presumptuous familiarity." imagine that there is in no other English novel a figure so simple in its elements as this of Dolly Winthrop, which is so real without being contemptible, and so quaint without being ridiculous.
In all those of our author's books which have borne the name of the hero or heroine, -- "Adam Bede," "Silas Marner," "Romola," and "Felix Holt," -- the person so put forward has really played a subordinate part. The author may have set out with the intention of maintaining him supreme; but her material has become rebellious in her hands, and the technical hero has been eclipsed by the real one. Tito is the leading figure in "Romola." The story deals predominantly, not with Romola as affected by Tito's faults, but with Tito's faults as affecting first himself, and incidentally his wife. Godfrey Cass, with his lifelong secret, is by right the hero of "Silas Marner." Felix Holt, in the work which bears his name, is little more than an occasional apparition; and indeed the novel has no hero, but only a heroine. The same remark applies to "Adam Bede," as the work stands. The central figure of the book, by virtue of her great misfortune, is Hetty Sorrel. In the presence of that misfortune no one else, assuredly, has a right to claim dramatic pre-eminence. The one person for whom an approach to equality may be claimed is, not Adam Bede, but Arthur Donnithorne. If the story had ended, as I should have infinitely preferred to see it end, with Hetty's execution, or even with her reprieve, and if Adam had been left to his grief, and Dinah Morris to the enjoyment of that distinguished celibacy for which she was so well suited, then I think Adam might have shared the honors of pre-eminence with his hapless sweetheart. But as it is, the continuance of the book in his interest is fatal to him. His sorrow at Hetty's misfortune is not a sufficient sorrow for the situation. That his marriage at some future time was quite possible, and even natural, I readily admit; but that was matter for a new story. This point illustrates, I think, the great advantage of the much-censured
When you re-read coldly and critically a book which in former years you have read warmly and carelessly, you are surprised to see how it changes its proportions. It falls away in those parts which have been pre-eminent in your memory, and it increases in the small portions. Until I lately read "Adam Bede" for a second time, Mrs. Poyser was in my mind its representative figure; for I remembered a number of her epigrammatic sallies. But now, after a second reading, Mrs. Poyser is the last figure I think of, and a fresh perusal of her witticisms has considerably diminished their classical flavor. And if I must tell the truth, Adam himself is next to the last, and sweet Dinah Morris third from the last. The person immediately evoked by the title of the work is poor Hetty Sorrel. Mrs. Poyser is too epigrammatic; her wisdom smells of
My chief complaint with Adam Bede himself is that he is too good. He is meant, I conceive, to be every inch a man; but, to my mind, there are several inches wanting. He lacks spontaneity and sensibility, he is too stiff-backed. He lacks that supreme quality without which a man can never be interesting to men, -- the capacity to be tempted. His nature is without richness or responsiveness. I doubt not that such men as he exist, especially in the author's thrice-English Loamshire; she has partially described them as a class, with a felicity which carries conviction. She claims for her hero that,
"He was not an average man. Yet such men as he are reared here and there in every generation of our peasant artisans, with an inheritance of affections nurtured by a simple family life of common need and common industry, and an inheritance of faculties trained in skilful, courageous labor; they make their way upward, rarely as geniuses, most commonly as painstaking, honest men, with the skill and conscience to do well the tasks that lie before them. Their lives have no discernible echo beyond the neighborhood where they dwelt; but you are almost sure to find there some good piece of road, some building, some application of mineral produce, some improvement in farming practice, some reform of parish abuses, with which their names are associated by one or two generations after them. Their employers were the richer for them; the work of their hands has worn well, and the work of their brains has guided well the hands of other men."
One cannot help feeling thankful to the kindly writer who attempts to perpetuate their memories beyond the generations which profit immediately by their toil. If she is not a great dramatist, she is at least an exquisite describer. But one can as little help feeling that it is no more than a strictly logical retribution, that in her hour of need (dramatically speaking) she should find them indifferent to their duties as heroes. I profoundly doubt whether the central object of a novel may successfully be a passionless creature. The ultimate eclipse, both of Adam Bede and of Felix Holt, would seem to justify my question. Tom Tulliver is passionless, and Tom Tulliver lives gratefully in the memory; but this, I take it, is because he is strictly a subordinate figure, and awakens no reaction of feeling on the reader's part by usurping a position which he is not the man to fill.
Dinah Morris is apparently a study from life; and it is warm praise to say, that, in spite of the high key in which she is conceived, morally, she retains many of the warm colors of life. But I confess that it is hard to conceive of a woman so exalted by religious fervor remaining so cool-headed and so temperate. There is in Dinah Morris too close an agreement between her distinguished natural disposition and the action
It is as a picture, or rather as a series of pictures, that find "Adam Bede" most valuable. The author succeeds better in drawing attitudes of feeling than in drawing movements of feeling. Indeed, the only attempt at development of character or of purpose in the book occurs in the case of Arthur Donnithorne, where the materials are of the simplest kind. Hetty's lapse into disgrace is not gradual, it is immediate: it is without struggle and without passion. Adam himself has arrived at perfect righteousness when the book opens; and it is impossible to go beyond that. In his case too, therefore, there is no dramatic progression. The same remark applies to Dinah Morris. It is not in her conceptions nor her composition that George Eliot is strongest: it is in her touches. In these she is quite original. She is a good deal of a humorist, and something of a satirist; but she is neither Dickens nor Thackeray. She has over them the great advantage that she is also a good deal of a philosopher; and it is to this union of the keenest observation with the ripest reflection, that her style owes its essential force. She is a thinker, -- not, perhaps, a passionate thinker, but at least a serious one; and the term can be applied with either adjective neither to Dickens nor Thackeray. The constant play of lively and vigorous thought about the objects furnished by her observation animates these latter with a surprising richness of color and a truly human interest. It gives to the author's style, moreover, that lingering, affectionate, comprehensive quality which is its chief distinction; and perhaps occasionally it makes her tedious. George Eliot is so little tedious, however, because, if, on the one hand, her reflection never flags, so, on the other, her observation never ceases to supply it with material. Her observation, I think, is decidedly of the feminine kind: it deals, in preference, with small things. This fact may be held to explain the excellence of what I have called her pictures, and the comparative feebleness of her dramatic movement. The contrast here indicated, strong in "Adam Bede," is most striking in "Felix Holt, the Radical." The latter work is an admirable tissue of details; but it seems to me quite without character as a composition. It
"There were different orders of beings, -- so ran Denner's creed, -- and she belonged to another order than that to which her mistress belonged. She had a mind as sharp as a needle, and would have seen through and through the ridiculous pretensions of a born servant who did not submissively accept the rigid fate which had given her born superiors. She would have called such pretensions the wrigglings of a worm that tried to walk on its tail. . . . . She was a hard-headed, godless little woman, but with a character to be reckoned on as you reckon on the qualities of iron."
"I 'm afraid of ever expecting anything good again," her mistress says to her in a moment of depression.
"`That 's weakness, madam. Things don't happen because they are bad or good, else all eggs would be addled or none at all, and at the most it is but six to the dozen. There 's good chances and bad chances, and nobody's luck is pulled only by one string. . . . . . There 's a good deal of pleasure in life for you yet.'
"`Nonsense! There 's no pleasure for old women. . . . . . What are your pleasures, Denner, besides being a slave to me?'
"`O, there 's pleasure in knowing one is not a fool, like half the people one sees about. And managing one's husband is
And, on another occasion, when her mistress exclaims, in a fit of distress, that "God was cruel when he made women," the author says: - -
"The waiting-woman had none of that awe which could be turned into defiance; the sacred grove was a common thicket to her.
"`It may n't be good luck to be a woman,' she said. `But one begins with it from a baby; one gets used to it. And I should n't like to be a man, -- to cough so loud, and stand straddling about on a wet day, and be so wasteful with meat and drink. They 're a coarse lot, think.'"
I should think they were, beside Mrs. Denner.
This glimpse of her is made up of what I have called the author's touches. She excels in the portrayal of homely stationary figures for which her well-stored memory furnishes her with types. Here is another touch, in which satire predominates. Harold Transome makes a speech to the electors at Treby.
"Harold's only interruption came from his own party. The oratorical clerk at the Factory, acting as the tribune of the dissenting interest, and feeling bound to put questions, might have been troublesome; but his voice being unpleasantly sharp, while Harold's was full and penetrating, the questioning was cried down."
Of the four English stories, "The Mill on the Floss" seems to me to have most dramatic continuity, in distinction from that descriptive, discursive method of narration which I have attempted to indicate. After Hetty Sorrel, I think Maggie Tulliver the most successful of the author's young women, and after Tito Melema, Tom Tulliver the best of her young men. English novels abound in pictures of childhood; but I know
"The knife descended on the puff, and it was in two; but the result was not satisfactory to Tom, for he still eyed the halves doubtfully. At last he said, `Shut your eyes, Maggie.'
"`What for?'
"`You never mind what for, -- shut 'em when I tell you.'
"Maggie obeyed.
"`Now which 'll you have, Maggie, right hand or left?'
"`I 'll have that one with the jam run out,' said Maggie, keeping her eyes shut to please Tom.
"`Why, you don't like that, you silly. You may have it if it comes to you fair, but I sha'n't give it to you without. Right or left, -- you choose now. Ha-a-a!' said Tom, in a tone of exasperation, as Maggie peeped. `You keep your eyes shut now, else you sha'n't have any.'
"Maggie's power of sacrifice did not extend so far; indeed, fear she cared less that Tom should enjoy the utmost possible amount of puff, than that he should be pleased with her for giving him the best bit. So she shut her eyes quite close until Tom told her to `say which,' and then she said, `Left hand.'
"`You 've got it,' said Tom, in rather a bitter tone.
"`What! the bit with the jam run out?'
"`No; here, take it,' said Tom, firmly, handing decidedly the best piece to Maggie.
"`O, please, Tom, have it; I don't mind, -- I like the other; please take this.'
"`No, I sha'n't,' said Tom, almost crossly, beginning on his own inferior piece.
"Maggie, thinking it was of no use to contend further, began too, and ate up her half puff with considerable relish as well as rapidity. But Tom had finished first, and had to look
"`O, you greedy thing!' said Tom, when she had swallowed the last morsel."
The portions of the story which bear upon the Dodson family are in their way not unworthy of Balzac; only that, while our author has treated its peculiarities humorously, Balzac would have treated them seriously, almost solemnly. We are reminded of him by the attempt to classify the Dodsons socially in a scientific manner, and to accumulate small examples of their idiosyncrasies. I do not mean to say that the resemblance is very deep. The chief defect -- indeed, the only serious one -- in "The Mill on the Floss" is its conclusion. Such a conclusion is in itself assuredly not illegitimate, and there is nothing in the fact of the flood, to my knowledge, essentially unnatural: what I object to is its relation to the preceding part of the story. The story is told as if it were destined to have, if not a strictly happy termination, at least one within ordinary probabilities. As it stands, the dnouement shocks the reader most painfully. Nothing has prepared him for it; the story does not move towards it; it casts no shadow before it. Did such a dnouement lie within the author's intentions from the first, or was it a tardy expedient for the solution of Maggie's difficulties? This question the reader asks himself, but of course he asks it in vain. For my part, although, as long as humanity is subject to floods and earthquakes, I have no objection to see them made use of in novels, I would in this particular case have infinitely preferred that Maggie should have been left to her own devices. I understand the author's scruples, and to a certain degree I respect them. A lonely spinsterhood seemed but a dismal consummation of her generous life; and yet, as the author conceives, it was unlikely that she would return to Stephen Guest. I respect Maggie profoundly; but nevertheless I ask, Was this after all so unlikely? I will not try to answer the question. have shown enough courage in asking it. But one thing is certain: a dnouement by which Maggie should have called Stephen back would have been extremely interesting,
I have come to the end of my space without speaking of "Romola," which, as the most important of George Eliot's works, I had kept in reserve. I have only room to say that on the whole I think it is decidedly the most important, -- not the most entertaining nor the most readable, but the one in which the largest things are attempted and grasped. The figure of Savonarola, subordinate though it is, is a figure on a larger scale than any which George Eliot has elsewhere undertaken; and in the career of Tito Melema there is a fuller representation of the development of a character. Considerable as are our author's qualities as an artist, and largely as they are displayed in "Romola," the book strikes me less as a work of art than as a work of morals. Like all of George Eliot's works, its dramatic construction is feeble; the story drags and halts, -- the setting is too large for the picture; but I remember that, the first time I read it, I declared to myself that much should be forgiven it for the sake of its generous feeling and its elevated morality. I still recognize this latter fact, but I think I find it more on a level than I at first found it with the artistic conditions of the book. "Our deeds determine us," George Eliot says somewhere in "Adam Bede," "as much as we determine our deeds." This is the moral lesson of "Romola." A man has no associate so intimate as his own character, his own career, -- his present and his past; and if he builds up his career of timid and base actions, they cling to him like evil companions, to sophisticate, to corrupt, and to damn him. As in Maggie Tulliver we had a picture of the elevation of the moral tone by honesty and generosity, so that when the mind found itself face to face with the need for a strong muscular effort, it was competent to perform it; so in Tito we have a picture of that depression of the moral tone by falsity and self-indulgence, which gradually evokes on every side of the subject some implacable claim, to be avoided or propitiated. At last all his unpaid debts join issue before him, and he finds the path of life a hideous blind alley. Can any argument be more plain? Can any lesson be more salutary? "Under every guilty secret," writes the author, with her usual felicity, "there is a hidden brood of guilty wishes, whose
One word more. Of all the impressions -- and they are numerous -- which a reperusal of George Eliot's writings has given me, I find the strongest to be this: that (with all deference to "Felix Holt, the Radical") the author is in morals and aesthetics essentially a conservative. In morals her problems
Atlantic Monthly, October 1866
The appearance of a new work by George Eliot is properly a cause of no small satisfaction to the lovers of good literature. She writes little compared with most of her distinguished comrades, and, still compared with them, she writes admirably well. She has shown no inclination to trade upon her popularity by anticipating -- precipitating, one may say -- the promptings of her genius, the moment of inspiration, or to humor the inconsiderate enthusiasm of that large body of critics who would fain persuade her, against her excellent sagacity, that she is at once a great romancer, a great poet, and a great philosopher. She is, as we have said, to our mind, one of the best of English writers; she is, incidentally to this, an excellent story-teller -- a real novelist, in fact -- and she is, finally, an elegant moralist. In her novels she had never struck
The poem was composed, the author intimates, while Spain was yet known to her only by descriptions and recitals; it was then, after a visit to the country, rewritten and enlarged. These facts correspond somehow to an impression made upon the reader's mind. The work is primarily -- like the author's other productions, we think -- an eminently intellectual performance; not the result of experience, or of moral and sensuous impressions. In this circumstance reside at once its strength and its weakness; its want of heat, of a quickening central flame; and its admirable perfection of manner, its densely wrought, richly embroidered garment of thought and language. Never, assuredly, was a somewhat inefficient spirit so richly supplied with the outward organs and faculties of maturity and manhood. George Eliot has nothing in common, either in her merits or her defects, with the late Mrs. Browning. The critic is certainly not at his ease with Mrs. Browning until he has admitted, once for all, that she is a born poet. But she is without tact and without taste; her faults of detail are unceasing. George Eliot is not a born poet; but, on the other hand, her intellectual tact is equally delicate and vigorous, her taste is infallible, she is never guilty of errors or excesses. In the whole length of the volume before us we have not observed a single slovenly line, a single sentence unpolished or unfinished. And of strong and beautiful lines what a number; of thoughts deep and clear, of images vivid and complete, of heavily-burdened sentences happily delivered of their meaning, what an endless variety! The whole poem is a tissue of the most elegant, most intelligent rhetoric, from the beautiful exordium descriptive of
"Broad-breasted Spain, leaning with equal love
(A calm earth-goddess, crowned with corn and vines)
On the Mid Sea that moans with memories,
And on the untravelled Ocean,"
to the majestic pathos of the final scene, in which, contrary to her wont, the author has brought herself fairly to disjoin her young lovers.
But fully to appreciate the writer's skill and the (for the most part) really profound character of her various conceptions, it is needful to acquaint one's mind with the outline of her story. This story, whether invented by the author or borrowed ready-made, is extremely thrilling and touching. It is, of course, a genuine romance, full of color and movement and dramatic opportunities. The scene is laid at the close of the fifteenth century, in the town and castle of Bedm r, in Andalusia. Warriors, inquisitors, astrologers, Moors, gypsies, minstrels -- all the consecrated figures of Spanish romance -- are effectively represented. "The time was great," as the author says; the Renaissance had just dawned, the Moorish dominion was hard pressed, America lay but just without the circle of the known and soon to be included, Spain had entered into her mighty, short-lived manhood. The hero of the poem -- which we must premise is cast in the dramatic form, with occasional narrative interludes -- Don Silva, the young Duke of Bedm r, personifies in a very vivid manner all the splendid tendencies and deep aspirations of the scene and the hour. Admirably well, it seems to us, has the author depicted in the mind of this generous nobleman the growth and fusion of a personal and egotistical consciousness into the sense of generic and national honor, governed and directed by his religion, his Christ, his patron saints, his ancestors, and
" ---- by the mystery of his Spanish blood
Charged with the awe and glories of the past."
The young duke's mother, recently deceased, has adopted and educated a girl of unknown parentage and remarkable beauty, by name Fedalma. Don Silva, on reaching manhood, conceives a passionate attachment to this young girl, and determines to make her his wife. The match is bitterly opposed by his uncle, a stern Dominican monk, on the ground that Fedalma is a creature of heretical lineage and sympathies. On the eve of the marriage, the young girl is suddenly claimed as the
Besides the characters whom we have indicated, there are
"Living 'mid harnessed men
With limbs ungalled by armor, ready so
To soothe them weary and to cheer them sad.
Guest at the board, companion in the camp,
A crystal mirror to the life around,
. . . . . . .
. . . . singing as a listener
To the deep moans, the cries, the wild strong joys
Of universal nature.". . .
This author has invested this character of Juan with a peculiar and affecting dignity. As a portrait, indeed, it is like those of all its companions, full of the most exquisite intentions, which confess themselves only on a second reading of the work. The chief motive of our interest in Juan is, of course, the contrast offered by his dreamy, sceptical, idle, disinterested mind, with the fervid intensity which burns around him, in war, and traffic, and piety. Let us add, however, that the lyrics which are laid upon his life and his lute, strike us as the least successful passages in the work. They have an unpardonable taint -- they are cold, torpid; they are lyrics made, not lyrics born. The other characters, Silva, Zarca, and Fedalma, are all elaborate full- length portraits. The author has not felt it necessary, because she was writing a picturesque romance, to eschew psychology and morals. She has remembered that she was writing a drama, and that she would have
"Lies not in lightning that avenges them,
But in the injury wrought by broken bonds
And in the garnered good of human trust."
And elsewhere:
"No good is certain but the steadfast mind,
The undivided will to seek the good:
'Tis that compels the elements, and wrings
A human music from the indifferent air.
The greatest gift the hero leaves his race,
Is to have been a hero. Say we fail! --
We feed the high tradition of the world,
And leave our spirit in Zincalo breasts."
The gypsy captain who utters these great truths with such greatness of diction, certainly views the world from a lofty standpoint. Fedalma, his daughter, is throughout a very
"With gentle wheeling sweep
Returning like the loveliest of the Hours
Strayed from her sisters, truant lingering,"
to where she bids farewell to her lover on the strand, and speaks of their ruined love, their "dear young love" having
"Grown upon a larger life
Which tore its roots asunder."
The author has drawn no purer and more radiant figure than this finely nurtured, deep-souled, double-natured Zincalo maiden; and she has drawn her manners with perfect lightness of touch, with an instrument that never blurs the graceful curve of the outline, or dims the luminous warmth of the coloring. The great success of the work, however, is the figure, Don Silva, with his stormy alternations of passion and reflection, of headlong devotion and intellectual reserve. The finest passages in the book, we think, are the pages descriptive of the restless tumult of his soul during the hours of his confinement, after he has burned his ships and pledged his faith to Zarca. These pages are deeply and nobly imaginative. We have no space to quote: they must be read, re-read, and pondered. But we cannot forego the pleasure of transcribing these few lines, the sweetest in the poem, borne upon Don Silva's lips from the ineffable joy of Fedalma's presence:
"Speech is but broken light upon the depths
Of the unspoken: even your loved words
Float in the larger meaning of your voice
As something dimmer."
Imagine a rich, masculine nature, all refined to the delicate temper of this compliment, and you have an idea of the splendid personality of George Eliot's hero. We may but qualify him by saying that he exhibits the highest reach, the broadest
We had marked many passages for quotation, but we have come to the end of our space. The book itself will be in every one's hands by the time these remarks are printed.
In conclusion, we must express our deep sense of its beauty. One may say, indeed, that it has no faults (except its lyrics). As a composition, it is polished to defiance of all censure. It is, at most, deficient in certain virtues, which the success of the poem, as a whole, would tend to prove nonessential. It is deficient in natural heat; it does not smell of the Spanish soil, but of that of the author's mind. It is neither rapid nor simple. Reflection, not imagination, has presided at the work. Nevertheless it is a most fair achievement, and a valuable contribution to literature. It is the production of a noble intellect, of a moral vision equally broad and deep, and of marvellous ingenuity. Nation, July 2, 1868
I know not whether George Eliot has any enemies, nor why she should have any; but if perchance she has, I can imagine them to have hailed the announcement of a poem from her pen as a piece of particularly good news. "Now, finally," I fancy them saying, "this sadly overrated author will exhibit all the weakness that is in her; now she will prove herself what we have all along affirmed her to be, -- not a serene, self-directing genius of the first order, knowing her powers and respecting them, and content to leave well enough alone, but a mere showy rhetorician, possessed and prompted, not by the humble spirit of truth, but by an insatiable longing for applause." Suppose Mr. Tennyson were to come out with a novel, or Madame George Sand were to
In consulting her past works, for approval of their hopes and their fears, I think both her friends and her foes would have found sufficient ground for their arguments. Of all our English prose-writers of the present day, I think I may say, that, as a writer simply, a mistress of style, I have been very near preferring the author of "Silas Marner" and of "Romola," -- the author, too, of "Felix Holt." The motive of my great regard for her style I take to have been that I fancied it such perfect solid prose. Brilliant and lax as it was in tissue, it seemed to contain very few of the silken threads of poetry; it lay on the ground like a carpet, instead of floating in the air like a banner. If my impression was correct, "The Spanish Gypsy" is not a genuine poem. And yet, looking over the author's novels in memory, looking them over in the light of her unexpected assumption of the poetical function, find it hard at times not to mistrust my impression. I like George Eliot well enough, in fact, to admit, for the time, that I might have been in the wrong. If I had liked her less, if I had rated lower the quality of her prose, I should have estimated coldly the possibilities of her verse. Of course, therefore, if, as I am told many persons do in England, who consider carpenters and weavers and millers' daughters no legitimate subject for reputable fiction, I had denied her novels any qualities at all, I should have made haste, on reading the announcement of her poem, to speak of her as the world speaks of a lady, who, having reached a comfortable middle age, with her shoulders decently covered, "for reasons deep below the reach of thought," (to quote our author,) begins to go out to dinner in a low-necked dress "of the period,"
But here, meanwhile, is the book before me, to arrest all this a priori argumentation. Time enough has elapsed since its appearance for most readers to have uttered their opinions, and for the general verdict of criticism to have been formed. In looking over several of the published reviews, I am struck with the fact that those immediately issued are full of the warmest delight and approval, and that, as the work ceases to be a novelty, objections, exceptions, and protests multiply. This is quite logical. Not only does it take a much longer time than the reviewer on a weekly journal has at his command to properly appreciate a work of the importance of "The Spanish Gypsy," but the poem was actually much more of a poem than was to be expected. The foremost feeling of many readers must have been -- it was certainly my own -- that we had hitherto only half known George Eliot. Adding this dazzling new half to the old one, readers constructed for the moment a really splendid literary figure. But gradually the old half began to absorb the new, and to assimilate its virtues and failings, and critics finally remembered that the cleverest writer in the world is after all nothing and no one but himself.
The most striking quality in "The Spanish Gypsy," on a first reading, I think, is its extraordinary rhetorical energy and elegance. The richness of the author's style in her novels gives but an inadequate idea of the splendid generosity of diction displayed in the poem. She is so much of a thinker and an observer that she draws very heavily on her powers of expression, and one may certainly say that they not only never fail her, but that verbal utterance almost always bestows upon her ideas a peculiar beauty and fulness, apart from their significance. The result produced in this manner, the reader will see, may come very near being poetry; it is assuredly eloquence. The faults in the present work are very seldom faults of weakness, except in so far as it is weak to lack an absolute mastery of one's powers; they arise rather from an excess of rhetorical energy, from a desire to attain to perfect fulness and roundness of utterance; they are faults of overstatement. It is by no means uncommon to find a really fine passage injured by the addition of a clause which dilutes the idea under pretence of
"Broad-breasted Spain, leaning with equal love
(A calm earth-goddess crowned with corn and vines)
On the Mid Sea that moans with memories,
And on the untravelled Ocean, whose vast tides
Pant dumbly passionate with dreams of youth."
The second half of the fourth line and the fifth, here, seem to me as poor as the others are good. So in the midst of the admirable description of Don Silva, which precedes the first scene in the castle: --
"A spirit framed
Too proudly special for obedience,
Too subtly pondering for mastery:
Born of a goddess with a mortal sire,
Heir of flesh-fettered, weak divinity,
Doom-gifted with long resonant consciousness
And perilous heightening of the sentient soul."
The transition to the lines in Italic is like the passage from a well-ventilated room into a vacuum. On reflection, we see "long resonant consciousness" to be a very good term; but, as it stands, it certainly lacks breathing-space. On the other hand, there are more than enough passages of the character of the following to support what I have said of the genuine splendor of the style: --
"I was right!
These gems have life in them: their colors speak,
Say what words fail of. So do many things, --
The scent of jasmine and the fountain's plash,
The moving shadows on the far-off hills,
The slanting moonlight and our clasping hands.
O Silva, there 's an ocean round our words,
That overflows and drowns them. Do you know,
Sometimes when we sit silent, and the air
Breathes gently on us from the orange-trees,
It seems that with the whisper of a word
Our souls must shrink, get poorer, more apart?
Is it not true?
DON SILVA.
Yes, dearest, it is true.
Speech is but broken light upon the depth
Of the unspoken: even your loved words
Float in the larger meaning of your voice
As something dimmer."
I may say in general, that the author's admirers must have found in "The Spanish Gypsy" a presentment of her various special gifts stronger and fuller, on the whole, than any to be found in her novels. Those who valued her chiefly for her humor -- the gentle humor which provokes a smile, but deprecates a laugh -- will recognize that delightful gift in Blasco, and Lorenzo, and Roldan, and Juan, -- slighter in quantity than in her prose-writings, but quite equal, think, in quality. Those who prize most her descriptive powers will see them wondrously well embodied in these pages. As for those who have felt compelled to declare that she possesses the Shakespearian touch, they must consent, with what grace they may, to be disappointed. I have never thought our author a great dramatist, nor even a particularly dramatic writer. A real dramatist, I imagine, could never have reconciled himself to the odd mixture of the narrative and dramatic forms by which the present work is distinguished; and that George Eliot's genius should have needed to work under these conditions seems to me strong evidence of the partial and incomplete character of her dramatic instincts. An English critic lately described her, with much correctness, as a critic rather than a creator of characters. She puts her figures into action very successfully, but on the whole she thinks for them more than they think for themselves. She thinks, however, to wonderfully good purpose. In none of her works are there two more distinctly human representations than the characters of Silva and Juan. The latter, indeed, if I am not mistaken, ranks with Tito Melema and Hetty Sorrel, as one of her very best conceptions.
What is commonly called George Eliot's humor consists
"He is one of those
Who steal the keys from snoring Destiny,
And make the prophets lie."
Zarca himself, speaking of "the steadfast mind, the undivided will to seek the good," says most admirably, --
"'T is that compels the elements, and wrings
A human music from the indifferent air."
When the Prior pronounces Fedalma's blood "unchristian as the leopard's," Don Silva retorts with, --
"Unchristian as the Blessed Virgin's blood,
Before the angel spoke the word, `All hail!'"
Zarca qualifies his daughter's wish to maintain her faith to her lover, at the same time that she embraces her father's fortunes, as
"A woman's dream, -- who thinks by smiling well
To ripen figs in frost."
This happy brevity of expression is frequently revealed in those rich descriptive passages and touches in which the work abounds. Some of the lines taken singly are excellent: --
"And bells make Catholic the trembling air";
and,
"Sad as the twilight, all his clothes ill-girt";
and again,
"Mournful professor of high drollery."
Here is a very good line and a half: --
"The old rain-fretted mountains in their robes
Of shadow-broken gray."
Here, finally, are three admirable pictures: --
"The stars thin-scattered made the heavens large,
Bending in slow procession; in the east,
Emergent from the dark waves of the hills,
Seeming a little sister of the moon,
Glowed Venus all unquenched."
"Spring afternoons, when delicate shadows fall
Pencilled upon the grass; high summer morns,
When white light rains upon the quiet sea,
And cornfields flush for ripeness."
"Scent the fresh breath of the height-loving herbs,
That, trodden by the pretty parted hoofs
Of nimble goats, sigh at the innocent bruise,
And with a mingled difference exquisite
Pour a sweet burden on the buoyant air."
But now to reach the real substance of the poem, and to allow the reader to appreciate the author's treatment of human character and passion, I must speak briefly of the story. I shall hardly misrepresent it, when I say that it is a very old one, and that it illustrates that very common occurrence in human affairs, -- the conflict of love and duty. Such, at least, is the general impression made by the poem as it stands. It is very possible that the author's primary intention may have had a breadth which has been curtailed in the execution of the work, -- that it was her wish to present a struggle between nature and culture, between education and the instinct of race. You can detect in such a theme the stuff of a very good drama, -- a somewhat stouter stuff, however, than "The Spanish Gypsy" is made of. George Eliot, true to that didactic
It misses it, I think, thanks to that circumstance which in reading and criticising "The Spanish Gypsy" we must not cease to bear in mind, the fact that the work is emphatically a romance. We may contest its being a poem, but we must admit that it is a romance in the fullest sense of the word. Whether the term may be absolutely defined know not; but we may say of it, comparing it with the novel, that it carries much farther that compromise with reality which is the basis of all imaginative writing. In the romance this principle of compromise pervades the superstructure as well as the basis. The most that we exact is that the fable be consistent with itself. Fedalma is not a real Gypsy maiden. The conviction is strong in the reader's mind that a genuine Spanish Zincala would have somehow contrived both to follow her tribe and to keep her lover. If Fedalma is not real, Zarca is even less so. He is interesting, imposing, picturesque; but he is very far, take it, from being a genuine Gypsy chieftain. They are both ideal figures, -- the offspring of a strong mental desire for creatures well rounded in their elevation and heroism, -- creatures who should illustrate the nobleness of human nature divorced from its smallness. Don Silva has decidedly more of the common stuff of human feeling, more charming natural passion and weakness. But he, too, is largely a vision of the intellect; his constitution is adapted to the atmosphere and the climate of romance. Juan, indeed, has one foot well planted on the lower earth; but Juan is only an accessory figure. I have said enough to lead
Viewed in this manner, as efficient figures in an essentially ideal and romantic drama, Fedalma and Zarca seem to gain vastly, and to shine with a brilliant radiance. If we reduce Fedalma to the level of the heroines of our modern novels, in which the interest aroused by a young girl is in proportion to the similarity of her circumstances to those of the reader, and in which none but the commonest feelings are required, provided they be expressed with energy, we shall be tempted to call her a solemn and cold-blooded jilt. In a novel it would have been next to impossible for the author to make the heroine renounce her lover. In novels we not only forgive that weakness which is common and familiar and human, but we actually demand it. But in poetry, although we are compelled to adhere to the few elementary passions of our nature, we do our best to dress them in a new and exquisite garb. Men and women in a poetical drama are nothing, if not distinguished.
"Our dear young love, -- its breath was happiness!
But it had grown upon a larger life,
Which tore its roots asunder."
These words are uttered by Fedalma at the close of the poem, and in them she emphatically claims the distinction of having her own private interests invaded by those of a people. The manner of her kinship with the Zincali is in fact a very much "larger life" than her marriage with Don Silva. We may, indeed, challenge the probability of her relationship to her tribe impressing her mind with a force equal to that of her love, -- her "dear young love." We may declare that this is an unnatural and violent result. For my part, I think it is very far from violent; I think the author has employed her art in reducing the apparently arbitrary quality of her preference for her tribe. I say reducing; I do not say effacing; because it seems to me, as I have intimated, that just at this point her art has been wanting, and we are not sufficiently prepared for Fedalma's
"All gathering influences culminate
And urge Fedalma. Earth and heaven seem one,
Life a glad trembling on the outer edge
Of unknown rapture. Swifter now she moves,
Filling the measure with a double beat
And widening circle; now she seems to glow
With more declard presence, glorified.
Circling, she lightly bends, and lifts on high
The multitudinous-sounding tambourine,
And makes it ring and boom, then lifts it higher,
Stretching her left arm beauteous."
We are better prepared for it, however, than by anything else, by the whole impression we receive of the exquisite refinement and elevation of the young girl's mind, -- by all that makes her so bad a Gypsy. She possesses evidently a very high-strung intellect, and her whole conduct is in a higher key, as I may say, than that of ordinary women, or even ordinary heroines. She is natural, I think, in a poetical sense. She is consistent with her own prodigiously superfine character. From a lower point of view than that of the author, she lacks several of the desirable feminine qualities, -- a certain womanly warmth and petulance, a graceful irrationality. Her mind is very much too lucid, and her aspirations too lofty. Her conscience, especially, is decidedly over-active. But this is a distinction which she shares with all the author's heroines, -- Dinah Morris, Maggie Tulliver, Romola, and Esther Lyon, -- a distinction, moreover, for which I should be very sorry to hold George Eliot to account. There are most assuredly women and women. While Messrs. Charles Reade and Wilkie Collins, and Miss Braddon and her school, tell one half the story, it is no more than fair that the author of "The Spanish Gypsy" should, all unassisted, attempt to relate the other.
Whenever a story really interests one, he is very fond of paying it the compliment of imagining it otherwise constructed,
After Fedalma comes Zarca, and here our imagination flags. Not so George Eliot's: for as simple imagination, I think that in the conception of this impressive and unreal figure it appears decidedly at its strongest. With Zarca, we stand at the very heart of the realm of romance. There is a truly
"Wanderers whom no God took knowledge of,
To give them laws, to fight for them, or blight
Another race to make them ampler room;
A people with no home even in memory,
No dimmest lore of giant ancestors
To make a common hearth for piety";
a people all ignorant of
"The rich heritage, the milder life,
Of nations fathered by a mighty Past."
Like Don Silva, like Juan, like Sephardo, Zarca is decidedly a man of intellect.
Better than Fedalma or than Zarca is the remarkably beautiful and elaborate portrait of Don Silva, in whom the author has wished to present a young nobleman as splendid in person and in soul as the dawning splendor of his native country. In the composition of his figure, the real and the romantic, brilliancy and pathos, are equally commingled. He cannot be said to stand out in vivid relief. As a piece of painting, there is nothing commanding, aggressive, brutal, as I may say, in his lineaments. But they will bear close scrutiny. Place yourself within the circumscription of the work, breathe its atmosphere, and you will see that Don Silva is portrayed with a delicacy to which English story-tellers, whether in prose or
"Such titles with their blazonry are his
Who keeps this fortress, sworn Alcade,
Lord of the valley, master of the town,
Commanding whom he will, himself commanded
By Christ his Lord, who sees him from the cross,
And from bright heaven where the Mother pleads;
By good Saint James, upon the milk-white steed,
Who leaves his bliss to fight for chosen Spain;
By the dead gaze of all his ancestors;
And by the mystery of his Spanish blood,
Charged with the awe and glories of the past."
Throughout the poem, we are conscious, during the evolution of his character, of the presence of these high mystical influences, which, combined with his personal pride, his knightly temper, his delicate culture, form a splendid background for passionate dramatic action. The finest pages in the book, to my taste, are those which describe his lonely vigil in the Gypsy camp, after he has failed in winning back Fedalma, and has pledged his faith to Zarca. Placed under guard, and
"Now awful Night,
Ancestral mystery of mysteries, came down_
Past all the generations of the stars,
And visited his soul with touch more close
Than when he kept that closer, briefer watch,
Under the church's roof, beside his arms,
And won his knighthood."
To be appreciated at their worth, these pages should be attentively read. Nowhere has the author's marvellous power of expression, the mingled dignity and pliancy of her style, obtained a greater triumph. She has reproduced the expression of a mind with the same vigorous distinctness as that with which a great painter represents the expression of a countenance.
The character which accords best with my own taste is that of the minstrel Juan, an extremely generous conception. He fills no great part in the drama; he is by nature the reverse of a man of action; and, strictly, the story could very well dispense with him. Yet, for all that, I should be sorry to lose him, and lose thereby the various excellent things which are said of him and by him. I do not include his songs among the latter. Only two of the lyrics in the work strike me as good: the song of Pablo, "The world is great: the birds all fly from me"; and, in a lower degree, the chant of the Zincali, in the fourth book. But I do include the words by which he is introduced to the reader: --
"Juan was a troubadour revived,
Freshening life's dusty road with babbling rills
Of wit and song, living 'mid harnessed men
With limbs ungalled by armor, ready so
To soothe them weary and to cheer them sad.
Guest at the board, companion in the camp,
A crystal mirror to the life around:
Flashing the comment keen of simple fact
Defined in words; lending brief lyric voice
To grief and sadness; hardly taking note
Of difference betwixt his own and others';
But rather singing as a listener
To the deep moans, the cries, the wildstrong joys
Of universal Nature, old, yet young."
When Juan talks at his ease, he strikes the note of poetry much more surely than when he lifts his voice in song: --
"Yet if your graciousness will not disdain
A poor plucked songster, shall he sing to you?
Some lay of afternoons, -- some ballad strain
Of those who ached once, but are sleeping now
Under the sun-warmed flowers?"
Juan's link of connection with the story is, in the first place, that he is in love with Fedalma, and, in the second, as a piece of local color. His attitude with regard to Fedalma is indicated with beautiful delicacy: --
"O lady, constancy has kind and rank.
One man's is lordly, plump, and bravely clad,
Holds its head high, and tells the world its name:
Another man's is beggared, must go bare,
And shiver through the world, the jest of all,
But that it puts the motley on, and plays
Itself the jester."
Nor are his merits lost upon her, as she declares, with no small force, --
"No! on the close-thronged spaces of the earth
A battle rages; Fate has carried me
'Mid the thick arrows: I will keep my stand, --
Nor shrink, and let the shaft pass by my breast
To pierce another. O, 't is written large,
The thing I have to do. But you, dear Juan,
Renounce, endure, are brave, unurged by aught
Save the sweet overflow of your good-will."
In every human imbroglio, be it of a comic or a tragic nature, it is good to think of an observer standing aloof, the critic, the idle commentator of it all, taking notes, as we may say, in the interest of truth. The exercise of this function is the chief ground of our interest in Juan. Yet as a man of action, too, he once appeals most irresistibly to our sympathies: I mean in the admirable scene with Hinda, in which he wins back his stolen finery by his lute-playing. This scene, which is written in prose, has a simple realistic power which renders it a truly remarkable composition.
Of the different parts of "The Spanish Gypsy" I have spoken with such fulness as my space allows: it remains to add a few remarks upon the work as a whole. Its great fault is simply that it is not a genuine poem. It lacks the hurrying quickness, the palpitating warmth, the bursting melody of such a creation. A genuine poem is a tree that breaks into blossom and shakes in the wind. George Eliot's elaborate composition is like a vast mural design in mosaic-work, where great slabs and delicate morsels of stone are laid together with wonderful art, where there are plenty of noble lines and generous hues, but where everything is rigid, measured, and cold, -- nothing dazzling, magical, and vocal. The poem contains a number of faulty lines, -- lines of twelve, of eleven, and of eight syllables, -- of which it is easy to suppose that a more sacredly commissioned versifier would not have been guilty. Occasionally, in the search for poetic effect, the author decidedly misses her way: --
"All her being paused
In resolution, as some leonine wave," etc.
A "leonine" wave is rather too much of a lion and too little of a wave. The work possesses imagination, I think, in no small measure. The description of Silva's feelings during his sojourn in the Gypsy camp is strongly pervaded by it; or if perchance the author achieved these passages without rising on the wings of fancy, her glory is all the greater. But the poem is wanting in passion. The reader is annoyed by a perpetual sense of effort and of intellectual tension. It is a characteristic of George Eliot, I imagine, to allow her impressions
The great merit of the characters is that they are marvellously well understood, -- far better understood than in the ordinary picturesque romance of action, adventure, and mystery. And yet they are not understood to the bottom; they retain an indefinably factitious air, which is not sufficiently justified by their position as ideal figures. The reader who has attentively read the closing scene of the poem will know what I mean. The scene shows remarkable talent; it is eloquent, it is beautiful; but it is arbitrary and fanciful, more than unreal, -- untrue. The reader silently chafes and protests, and finally breaks forth and cries, "O for a blast from the outer world!" Silva and Fedalma have developed themselves so daintily and elaborately within the close- sealed precincts of the author's mind, that they strike us at last as acting not as simple human creatures, but as downright amateurs of the morally graceful and picturesque. To say that this is the ultimate impression of the poem is to say that it is not a great work. It is in fact not a great drama. It is, in the first place, an admirable study of character, -- an essay, as they say, toward the solution of a given problem in conduct. In the second, it is a noble literary performance. It can be read neither without interest in the former respect, nor without profit for its signal merits of style, -- and this in spite of the fact that the versification is, as the French say, as little russi as was to be expected in a writer beginning at a bound with a kind of
North American Review, October 1868
Middlemarch" is at once one of the strongest and one of the weakest of English novels. Its predecessors as they appeared might have been described in the same terms; "Romola," is especially a rare masterpiece, but the least entra nant of masterpieces. "Romola" sins by excess of analysis; there is too much description and too little drama; too much reflection (all certainly of a highly imaginative sort) and too little creation. Movement lingers in the story, and with it attention stands still in the reader. The error in "Middlemarch" is not precisely of a similar kind, but it is equally detrimental to the total aspect of the work. We can well remember how keenly we wondered, while its earlier chapters unfolded themselves, what turn in the way of form the story would take -- that of an organized, moulded, balanced composition, gratifying the reader with a sense of design and construction, or a mere chain of episodes, broken into accidental lengths and unconscious of the influence of a plan. We expected the actual result, but for the sake of English imaginative literature which, in this line is rarely in need of examples, we hoped for the other. If it had come we should have had the pleasure of reading, what certainly would have seemed to us in the immediate glow of attention, the first of English novels. But that pleasure has still to hover between prospect and retrospect. "Middlemarch" is a treasure-house of details, but it is an indifferent whole.
Our objection may seem shallow and pedantic, and may even be represented as a complaint that we have had the less given us rather than the more. Certainly the greatest minds have the defects of their qualities, and as George Eliot's mind
The dramatic current stagnates; it runs between hero and heroine almost a game of hair-splitting. Our dissatisfaction here is provoked in a great measure by the insubstantial character of the hero. The figure of Will Ladislaw is a beautiful attempt, with many finely- completed points; but on the whole it seems to us a failure. It is the only eminent failure in the book, and its defects are therefore the more striking. It lacks sharpness of outline and depth of color; we have not found ourselves believing in Ladislaw as we believe in Dorothea, in Mary Garth, in Rosamond, in Lydgate, in Mr. Brooke and Mr. Casaubon. He is meant, indeed, to be a light creature (with a large capacity for gravity, for he finally gets into Parliament), and a light creature certainly should not be heavily drawn. The author, who is evidently very fond of him, has found for him here and there some charming and eloquent touches; but in spite of these he remains vague and impalpable to the end. He is, we may say, the one figure which a masculine intellect of the same power as George Eliot's would not have conceived with the same complacency; he is, in short, roughly speaking, a woman's man. It strikes us as an oddity in the author's scheme that she should have chosen just this figure of Ladislaw as the creature in whom Dorothea was to find her spiritual compensations. He is really, after all, not the ideal foil to Mr. Casaubon which her soul must have imperiously demanded, and if the author of the "Key to all Mythologies" sinned by lack of order, Ladislaw too has not the concentrated fervor essential in the man chosen by so nobly strenuous a heroine. The impression once
In reading, we have marked innumerable passages for quotation and comment; but we lack space and the work is so ample that half a dozen extracts would be an ineffective illustration. There would be a great deal to say on the broad array
All these people, solid and vivid in their varying degrees, are members of a deeply human little world, the full reflection of whose antique image is the great merit of these volumes. How bravely rounded a little world the author has made it --
When the author of "Middlemarch" published, some years since, her first volume of verse, the reader, in trying to judge it fairly, asked himself what he should think of it if she had never published a line of prose. The question, perhaps, was not altogether a help to strict fairness of judgment, but the author was protected from illiberal conclusions by the fact that, practically, it was impossible to answer it. George Eliot belongs to that class of pre-eminent writers in relation to whom the imagination comes to self-consciousness only to find itself in subjection. It was impossible to disengage one's judgment from the permanent influence of "Adam Bede" and its companions, and it was necessary, from the moment that the author undertook to play the poet's part, to feel that her genius was all of one piece. People have often asked themselves how they would estimate Shakespeare if they knew him only by his comedies, Homer if his name stood only for the "Odyssey," and Milton if he had written nothing but "Lycidas" and the shorter pieces. The question, of necessity, inevitable though it is, leads to nothing. George Eliot is neither Homer nor Shakespeare nor Milton; but her work, like theirs, is a massive achievement, divided into a supremely good and a less good, and it provokes us, like theirs, to the fruitless attempt to estimate the latter portion on its own merits alone. The little volume before us gives us another opportunity; but here, as before, we find ourselves uncomfortably divided between the fear, on the one hand, of being bribed into favor, and, on the other, of giving short measure of it. The author's verses are a narrow manifestation of her genius, but
We have found them extremely so. They consist of a rhymed narrative, of some length, of the career of Jubal, the legendary inventor of the lyre; of a short rustic idyl in blank verse on a theme gathered in the Black Forest of Baden; of a tale, versified in rhyme, from Boccaccio; and of a series of dramatic scenes called "Armgart," -- the best thing, to our sense, of the four. To these are added a few shorter pieces, chiefly in blank verse, each of which seems to us proportionately more successful than the more ambitious ones. Our author's verse is a mixture of spontaneity of thought and excessive reflectiveness of expression, and its value is generally more in the idea than in the form. In whatever George Eliot writes, you have the comfortable certainty, infrequent in other quarters, of finding an idea, and you get the substance of her thought in the short poems, without the somewhat rigid envelope of her poetic diction. If we may say, broadly, that the supreme merit of a poem is in having warmth, and that it is less and less valuable in proportion as it cools by too long waiting upon either fastidious skill or inefficient skill, the little group of verses entitled "Brother and Sister" deserve our preference. They have extreme loveliness, and the feeling they so abundantly express is of a much less intellectualized sort than that which prevails in the other poems. It is seldom that one of our author's compositions concludes upon so simply sentimental a note as the last lines of "Brother and Sister": --
"But were another childhood-world my share,
I would be born a little sister there!"
This will be interesting to many readers as proceeding more directly from the writer's personal experience than anything else they remember. George Eliot's is a personality so enveloped in the mists of reflection that it is an uncommon sensation to find one's self in immediate contact with it. This charming poem, too, throws a grateful light on some of the best pages the author has written, -- those in which she describes her heroine's childish years in "The Mill on the Floss." The finest thing in that admirable novel has always been, to our taste, not its portrayal of the young girl's love-struggles as regards her lover, but those as regards her brother. The former are fiction, -- skilful fiction; but the latter are warm reality, and the merit of the verses we speak of is that they are colored from the same source.
In "Stradivarius," the famous old violin-maker affirms in very pregnant phrase the supreme duty of being perfect in one's labor, and lays down the dictum, which should be the first article in every artist's faith: --
"'Tis God gives skill,
But not without men's hands: He could not make
Antonio Stradivari's violins
Without Antonio."
This is the only really inspiring working-creed, and our author's utterance of it justifies her claim to having the distinctively artistic mind, more forcibly than her not infrequent shortcomings in the direction of an artistic ensemble. Many persons will probably pronounce "A Minor Prophet" the gem of this little collection, and it is certainly interesting, for a great many reasons. It may seem to characterize the author on a number of sides. It illustrates vividly, in the extraordinary ingenuity and flexibility of its diction, her extreme provocation to indulge in the verbal license of verse. It reads almost like a close imitation of Browning, the great master of the poetical grotesque, except that it observes a discretion which the poet of Red-Cotton Nightcaps long ago threw
"And when all earth is vegetarian,
When, lacking butchers, quadrupeds die out,
And less Thought-atmosphere is reabsorbed
By nerves of insects parasitical,
Those higher truths, seized now by higher minds,
But not expressed (the insects hindering),
Will either flash out into eloquence,
Or, better still, be comprehensible,
By rappings simply, without need of roots."
The author proceeds to give a sketch of the beatific state of things under the vegetarian rgime prophesied by her friend in
"Mildly nasal tones
And vowels stretched to suit the widest views."
How, for instance,
"Sahara will be populous
With families of gentlemen retired
From commerce in more Central Africa,
Who order coolness as we order coal,
And have a lobe anterior strong enough
To think away the sand-storms."
Or how, as water is probably a non-conductor of the Thought- atmosphere,
"Fishes may lead carnivorous lives obscure,
But must not dream of culinary rank
Or being dished in good society."
Then follows the author's own melancholy head-shake and her reflections on the theme that there can be no easy millennium, and that I feel that every change upon this earth
"Bitterly
I feel that every change upon this earth
Is bought with sacrifice";
and that, even if Mr. Butterworth's axioms were not too good to be true, one might deprecate them in the interest of that happiness which is associated with error that is deeply familiar. Human improvement, she concludes, is something both larger and smaller than the vegetarian bliss, and consists less in a realized perfection than in the sublime dissatisfaction of generous souls with the shortcomings of the actual. All this is unfolded in verse which, if without the absolute pulse of spontaneity, has at least something that closely resembles it. It has very fine passages.
Very fine, too, both in passages and as a whole, is "The Legend of Jubal." It is noteworthy, by the way, that three of these poems are on themes connected with music; and yet we remember no representation of a musician among the multitudinous figures which people the author's novels. But George Eliot, we take it, has the musical sense in no small degree, and the origin of melody and harmony is here described in some very picturesque and sustained poetry. Jubal invents the lyre and teaches his companions and his tribe how to use it, and then goes forth to wander in quest of new musical inspiration. In this pursuit he grows patriarchally old, and at last makes his way back to his own people. He finds them, greatly advanced in civilization, celebrating what we should call nowadays his centennial, and making his name the refrain of their songs. He goes in among them and declares himself, but they receive him as a lunatic, and buffet him, and thrust him out into the wilderness again, where he succumbs to their unconscious ingratitude.
"The immortal name of Jubal filled the sky,
While Jubal, lonely, laid him down to die."
In his last hour he has a kind of metaphysical vision which consoles him, and enables him to die contented. A mystic voice assures him that he has no cause for complaint; that his use to mankind was everything, and his credit and glory nothing; that being rich in his genius, it was his part to give, gratuitously, to unendowed humanity; and that the knowledge of his having become a part of man's joy, and an image in man's soul, should reconcile him to the prospect of lying senseless in the tomb. Jubal assents, and expires
"A quenched sun-wave,
The all-creating Presence for his grave."
This is very noble and heroic doctrine, and is enforced in verse not unworthy of it for having a certain air of strain and effort; for surely it is not doctrine that the egoistic heart rises to without some experimental flutter of the wings. It is the expression of a pessimistic philosophy which pivots upon itself only in the face of a really formidable ultimatum. We cordially accept it, however, and are tolerably confident that the artist in general, in his death-throes, will find less repose in the idea of a heavenly compensation for earthly neglect than in the certainty that humanity is really assimilating his productions.
"Agatha" is slighter in sentiment than its companions, and has the vague aroma of an idea rather than the positive weight of thought. It is very graceful. "How Lisa loved the King" seems to us to have, more than its companions, the easy flow and abundance of prime poetry; it wears a reflection of the incomparable naturalness of its model in the Decameron. "Armgart" we have found extremely interesting, although perhaps it offers plainest proof of what the author sacrifices in renouncing prose. The drama, in prose, would have been vividly dramatic, while, as it stands, we have merely a situation contemplated, rather than unfolded, in a dramatic light. A great singer loses her voice, and a patronizing nobleman, who, before the calamity, had wished her to become his
"That empty cup so neatly ciphered, `Time,'
Handed me as a cordial for despair.
Time -- what a word to fling in charity!
Bland, neutral word for slow dull-beating pain, --
Days, months, and years!"
We must refer the reader to the poem itself for knowledge how resignation comes to so bitter a pain as the mutilation of conscious genius. It comes to Armgart because she is a very superior girl; and though her outline, here, is at once rather sketchy and rather rigid, she may be added to that group of magnificently generous women, -- the Dinahs, the Maggies, the Romolas, the Dorotheas, -- the representation of whom is our author's chief title to our gratitude. But in spite of Armgart's resignation, the moral atmosphere of the poem, like that of most of the others and like that of most of George Eliot's writings, is an almost gratuitously sad one. It would take more space than we can command to say how it is that at this and at other points our author strikes us as a spirit mysteriously perverted from her natural temper. We have a feeling that, both intellectually and morally, her genius is essentially of a simpler order than most of her recent manifestations of it. Intellectually, it has run to epigram and polished cleverness, and morally to a sort of conscious and ambitious scepticism, with which it only half commingles. The interesting thing would be to trace the moral divergence from the characteristic type. At bottom, according to this notion, the author of "Romola" and "Middlemarch" has an ardent desire and faculty for positive, active, constructive belief of the old- fashioned kind, but she has fallen upon a critical age and felt its contagion and dominion. If, with her magnificent gifts, she had been borne by the mighty general current in the direction
North American Review, October 1874
In view of the deluge of criticism which is certain to be poured out upon George Eliot's new novel when the publication is completed, it might seem the part of discretion not to open fire upon the first instalment. But this writer's admirers can reconcile themselves to no argument which forbids them to offer the work a welcome, and -- putting criticism aside -- we must express our pleasure in the prospect of the intellectual luxury of taking up, month after month, the little clear-paged volumes of `Daniel Deronda.' We know of none other at the present time that is at all comparable to it. The quality of George Eliot's work makes acceptable, in this particular case, a manner of publication to which in general we strongly object. It is but just that so fine and rare a pleasure should have a retarding element in it. George Eliot's writing is so full, so charged with reflection and intellectual experience, that there is surely no arrogance in her giving us a month to think over and digest any given portion of it. For almost a year to come the lives of appreciative readers will have a sort of lateral extension into another multitudinous world -- a world ideal only in the soft, clear light under which it lies, and most real in its close appeal to our curiosity. It is too early to take the measure of the elements which the author has in hand, but the imagination has a confident sense of large and complex unfolding. The opening chapters are of course but the narrow end of the wedge. The wedge -- as embodied in the person of Gwendolen Harleth -- seems perhaps unexpectedly narrow, but we make no doubt that before many weeks have gone by we shall be hanging upon this young lady's entangled destiny with the utmost tension of our highest faculties. Already we are conscious of much acuteness of conjecture as to the balance of her potentialities -- as to whether she is to exemplify the harsh or the tender side of
Nation, February 24, 1876
Theodora, one day early in the autumn, sat on her verandah with a piece of embroidery, the design of which she made up as she proceeded, being careful, however, to have a Japanese screen before her, to keep her inspiration at the proper altitude. Pulcheria, who was paying her a visit, sat near her with a closed book, in a paper cover, in her lap. Pulcheria was playing with the pug-dog, rather idly, but Theodora was stitching, steadily and meditatively. "Well," said Theodora, at last, "I wonder what he accomplished in the East." Pulcheria took the little dog into her lap and made him sit on the book. "Oh," she replied, "they had tea-parties at Jerusalem -- exclusively of ladies -- and he sat in the midst and stirred his tea and made high-toned remarks. And then Mirah sang a little, just a little, on account of her voice being so weak. Sit still, Fido," she continued, addressing the little dog, "and keep your nose out of my face. But it's a nice little nose, all the same," she pursued, "a nice little short snub nose and not a horrid big Jewish nose. Oh, my dear, when I think what a collection of noses there must have been at that wedding!"
Theodora. Yes, Pulcheria has been reading aloud the last chapters to me. They are wonderfully beautiful.
Constantius (after a moment's hesitation). Yes, they are very beautiful. I am sure you read well, Pulcheria, to give the fine passages their full value.
Theodora. She reads well when she chooses, but I am sorry to say that in some of the fine passages of this last book she took quite a false tone. I couldn't have read them aloud myself; I should have broken down. But Pulcheria -- would you really believe it? -- when she couldn't go on it was not for tears, but for -- the contrary.
Constantius. For smiles? Did you really find it comical? One of my objections to Daniel Deronda is the absence of those delightfully humorous passages which enlivened the author's former works.
Pulcheria. Oh, I think there are some places as amusing as anything in Adam Bede or The Mill on the Floss: for instance where, at the last, Deronda wipes Gwendolen's tears and Gwendolen wipes his.
Constantius. Yes, I know what you mean. I can understand that situation presenting a slightly ridiculous image; that is, if the current of the story don't swiftly carry you past.
Pulcheria. What do you mean by the current of the story? never read a story with less current. It is not a river; it is a series of lakes. I once read of a group of little uneven ponds resembling, from a bird's-eye view, a looking-glass which had
Theodora. Pulcheria found that comparison in a French novel. She is always reading French novels.
Constantius. Ah, there are some very good ones.
Pulcheria (perversely). I don't know; I think there are some very poor ones.
Constantius. The comparison is not bad, at any rate. I know what you mean by Daniel Deronda lacking current. It has almost as little as Romola.
Pulcheria. Oh, Romola is unpardonably slow; it is a kind of literary tortoise.
Constantius. Yes, I know what you mean by that. But I am afraid you are not friendly to our great novelist.
Theodora. She likes Balzac and George Sand and other impure writers.
Constantius. Well, I must say I understand that.
Pulcheria. My favourite novelist is Thackeray, and I am extremely fond of Miss Austen.
Constantius. I understand that too. You read over The Newcomes and Pride and Prejudice.
Pulcheria. No, I don't read them over now; I think them over. I have been making visits for a long time past to a series of friends, and I have spent the last six months in reading Daniel Deronda aloud. Fortune would have it that I should always arrive by the same train as the new number. I am accounted a frivolous, idle creature; I am not a disciple in the new school of embroidery, like Theodora; so I was immediately pushed into a chair and the book thrust into my hand, that I might lift up my voice and make peace between all the impatiences that were snatching at it. So I may claim at least that I have read every word of the work. I never skipped.
Theodora. I should hope not, indeed!
Constantius. And do you mean that you really didn't enjoy it?
Pulcheria. I found it protracted, pretentious, pedantic.
Constantius. I see; I can understand that.
Theodora. Oh, you understand too much! This is the twentieth time you have used that formula.
Constantius. What will you have? You know I must try to understand; it's my trade.
Theodora. He means he writes reviews. Trying not to understand is what I call that trade!
Constantius. Say then I take it the wrong way; that is why it has never made my fortune. But I do try to understand; it is my -- my -- (He pauses.)
Theodora. I know what you want to say. Your strong side.
Pulcheria. And what is his weak side?
Theodora. He writes novels.
Constantius. I have written one. You can't call that a side. It's a little facet, at the most.
Pulcheria. You talk as if you were a diamond. I should like to read it -- not aloud!
Constantius. You can't read it softly enough. But you, Theodora, you didn't find our book too "protracted"?
Theodora. I should have liked it to continue indefinitely, to keep coming out always, to be one of the regular things of life.
Pulcheria. Oh, come here, little dog! To think that Daniel Deronda might be perpetual when you, little short-nosed darling, can't last at the most more than nine or ten years!
Theodora. A book like Daniel Deronda becomes part of one's life; one lives in it, or alongside of it. I don't hesitate to say that I have been living in this one for the last eight months. It is such a complete world George Eliot builds up; it is so vast, so much-embracing! It has such a firm earth and such an ethereal sky. You can turn into it and lose yourself in it.
Pulcheria. Oh, easily, and die of cold and starvation!
Theodora. I have been very near to poor Gwendolen and very near to that sweet Mirah. And the dear little Meyricks also; I know them intimately well.
Pulcheria. The Meyricks, I grant you, are the best thing in the book.
Theodora. They are a delicious family; I wish they lived in Boston. I consider Herr Klesmer almost Shakespearean, and his wife is almost as good. I have been near to poor grand Mordecai --
Pulcheria. Oh, reflect, my dear; not too near!
Theodora. And as for Deronda himself I freely confess that am consumed with a hopeless passion for him. He is the most irresistible man in the literature of fiction.
Pulcheria. He is not a man at all.
Theodora. I remember nothing more beautiful than the description of his childhood, and that picture of his lying on the grass in the abbey cloister, a beautiful seraph-faced boy, with a lovely voice, reading history and asking his Scotch tutor why the Popes had so many nephews. He must have been delightfully handsome.
Pulcheria. Never, my dear, with that nose! I am sure he had a nose, and I hold that the author has shown great pusillanimity in her treatment of it. She has quite shirked it. The picture you speak of is very pretty, but a picture is not a person. And why is he always grasping his coat-collar, as if he wished to hang himself up? The author had an uncomfortable feeling that she must make him do something real, something visible and sensible, and she hit upon that clumsy figure. I don't see what you mean by saying you have been near those people; that is just what one is not. They produce no illusion. They are described and analysed to death, but we don't see them nor hear them nor touch them. Deronda clutches his coat-collar, Mirah crosses her feet, Mordecai talks like the Bible; but that doesn't make real figures of them. They have no existence outside of the author's study.
Theodora. If you mean that they are nobly imaginative quite agree with you; and if they say nothing to your own imagination the fault is yours, not theirs.
Pulcheria. Pray don't say they are Shakespearean again. Shakespeare went to work another way.
Constantius. I think you are both in a measure right; there is a distinction to be drawn. There are in Daniel Deronda the figures based upon observation and the figures based upon invention. This distinction, I know, is rather a rough one. There are no figures in any novel that are pure observation, and none that are pure invention. But either element may preponderate, and in those cases in which invention has preponderated George Eliot seems to me to have achieved at the best but so many brilliant failures.
Theodora. And are you turning severe? I thought you admired her so much.
Constantius. I defy any one to admire her more, but one must discriminate. Speaking brutally, I consider Daniel Deronda the weakest of her books. It strikes me as very sensibly inferior to Middlemarch. I have an immense opinion of Middlemarch.
Pulcheria. Not having been obliged by circumstances to read Middlemarch to other people, I didn't read it at all. I couldn't read it to myself. I tried, but I broke down. I appreciated Rosamond, but couldn't believe in Dorothea.
Theodora (very gravely). So much the worse for you, Pulcheria. I have enjoyed Daniel Deronda because I had enjoyed Middlemarch. Why should you throw Middlemarch up against her? It seems to me that if a book is fine it is fine. I have enjoyed Deronda deeply, from beginning to end.
Constantius. I assure you, so have I. I can read nothing of George Eliot's without enjoyment. I even enjoy her poetry, though don't approve of it. In whatever she writes I enjoy her intelligence; it has space and air, like a fine landscape. The intellectual brilliancy of Daniel Deronda strikes me as very great, in excess of anything the author has done. In the first couple of numbers of the book this ravished me. I delighted in its deep, rich English tone, in which so many notes seemed melted together.
Pulcheria. The tone is not English, it is German.
Constantius. I understand that -- if Theodora will allow me to say so. Little by little I began to feel that I cared less for certain notes than for others. I say it under my breath -- I began to feel an occasional temptation to skip. Roughly speaking, all the Jewish burden of the story tended to weary me; it is this part that produces the poor illusion which I agree with Pulcheria in finding. Gwendolen and Grandcourt are admirable -- Gwendolen is a masterpiece. She is known, felt and presented, psychologically, altogether in the grand manner. Beside her and beside her husband -- a consummate picture of English brutality refined and distilled (for Grandcourt is before all things brutal), Deronda, Mordecai and Mirah are hardly more than shadows. They and their fortunes
Theodora. Oh, Constantius, how can you compare George Eliot's novels to that woman's? It is sunlight and moonshine.
Pulcheria. I really think the two writers are very much alike. They are both very voluble, both addicted to moralising and philosophising tout bout de champ, both inartistic.
Constantius. I see what you mean. But George Eliot is solid, and George Sand is liquid. When occasionally George Eliot liquefies -- as in the history of Deronda's birth, and in that of Mirah -- it is not to so crystalline a clearness as the author of Consuelo and Andr. Take Mirah's long narrative of her adventures, when she unfolds them to Mrs. Meyrick. It is arranged, it is artificial, ancien jeu, quite in the George Sand manner. But George Sand would have done it better. The false tone would have remained, but it would have been more persuasive. It would have been a fib, but the fib would have been neater.
Theodora. I don't think fibbing neatly a merit, and I don't see what is to be gained by such comparisons. George Eliot is pure and George Sand is impure; how can you compare them? As for the Jewish element in Deronda, I think it a very fine idea; it's a noble subject. Wilkie Collins and Miss Braddon would not have thought of it, but that does not condemn it. It shows a large conception of what one may do in a novel. I heard you say, the other day, that most novels were so trivial -- that they had no general ideas. Here is a general idea, the idea interpreted by Deronda. I have never disliked the Jews as some people do; I am not like Pulcheria, who sees a Jew in every bush. wish there were one; I would cultivate shrubbery. I have known too many clever and charming Jews; I have known none that were not clever.
Pulcheria. Clever, but not charming.
Constantius. I quite agree with you as to Deronda's going
Pulcheria. A la bonne heure!
Constantius. I rather suspect it is not a possibility; that the Jews in general take themselves much less seriously than that. They have other fish to fry. George Eliot takes them as a person outside of Judaism -- aesthetically. I don't believe that is the way they take themselves.
Pulcheria. They have the less excuse then for keeping themselves so dirty.
Theodora. George Eliot must have known some delightful Jews.
Constantius. Very likely; but I shouldn't wonder if the most delightful of them had smiled a trifle, here and there, over her book. But that makes nothing, as Herr Klesmer would say. The subject is a noble one. The idea of depicting a nature able to feel and worthy to feel the sort of inspiration that takes possession of Deronda, of depicting it sympathetically, minutely and intimately -- such an idea has great elevation. There is something very fascinating in the mission that Deronda takes upon himself. I don't quite know what it means, don't understand more than half of Mordecai's rhapsodies, and I don't perceive exactly what practical steps could be taken. Deronda could go about and talk with clever Jews -- not an unpleasant life.
Pulcheria. All that seems to me so unreal that when at the end the author finds herself confronted with the necessity of making him start for the East by the train, and announces that Sir Hugo and Lady Mallinger have given his wife "a complete Eastern outfit," I descend to the ground with a ludicrous jump.
Constantius. Unreal, if you please; that is no objection to it; it greatly tickles my imagination. I like extremely the idea of Mordecai believing, without ground of belief, that if he only wait, a young man on whom nature and society have centred all their gifts will come to him and receive from his hands the precious vessel of his hopes. It is romantic, but it
Pulcheria. She made a dreadful prig.
Constantius. He is rather priggish, and one wonders that so clever a woman as George Eliot shouldn't see it.
Pulcheria. He has no blood in his body. His attitude at moments is like that of a high-priest in a tableau vivant.
Theodora. Pulcheria likes the little gentlemen in the French novels who take good care of their attitudes, which are always the same attitude, the attitude of "conquest" -- of a conquest that tickles their vanity. Deronda has a contour that cuts straight through the middle of all that. He is made of a stuff that isn't dreamt of in their philosophy.
Pulcheria. Pulcheria likes very much a novel which she read three or four years ago, but which she has not forgotten. It was by Ivan Turgnieff, and it was called On the Eve. Theodora has read it, I know, because she admires Turgnieff, and Constantius has read it, suppose, because he has read everything.
Constantius. If I had no reason but that for my reading, it would be small. But Turgnieff is my man.
Pulcheria. You were just now praising George Eliot's general ideas. The tale of which I speak contains in the portrait of the hero very much such a general idea as you find in the portrait of Deronda. Don't you remember the young Bulgarian student, Inssaroff, who gives himself the mission of rescuing his country from its subjection to the Turks? Poor man, if he had foreseen the horrible summer of 1876! His character is the picture of a race-passion, of patriotic hopes and dreams. But what a difference in the vividness of the two figures. Inssaroff is a man; he stands up on his feet; we see him, hear him, touch him. And it has taken the author but a couple of hundred pages -- not eight volumes -- to do it.
Theodora. I don't remember Inssaroff at all, but I perfectly
Constantius. Turgnieff is a magician, which I don't think should call George Eliot. One is a poet, the other is a philosopher. One cares for the aspect of things and the other cares for the reason of things. George Eliot, in embarking with Deronda, took aboard, as it were, a far heavier cargo than Turgnieff with his Inssaroff. She proposed, consciously, to strike more notes.
Pulcheria. Oh, consciously, yes!
Constantius. George Eliot wished to show the possible picturesqueness -- the romance, as it were -- of a high moral tone. Deronda is a moralist, a moralist with a rich complexion.
Theodora. It is a most beautiful nature. I don't know anywhere a more complete, a more deeply analysed portrait of a great nature. We praise novelists for wandering and creeping so into the small corners of the mind. That is what we praise Balzac for when he gets down upon all fours to crawl through Le P re Goriot or Les Parents Pauvres. But I must say I think it a finer thing to unlock with as firm a hand as George Eliot some of the greater chambers of human character. Deronda is in a manner an ideal character, if you will, but he seems to me triumphantly married to reality. There are some admirable things said about him; nothing can be finer than those pages of description of his moral temperament in the fourth book -- his elevated way of looking at things, his impartiality, his universal sympathy, and at the same time his fear of their turning into mere irresponsible indifference. I remember some of it verbally: "He was ceasing to care for knowledge -- he had no ambition for practice -- unless they could be gathered up into one current with his emotions."
Pulcheria. Oh, there is plenty about his emotions. Everything about him is "emotive." That bad word occurs on every fifth page.
Theodora. I don't see that it is a bad word.
Pulcheria. It may be good German, but it is poor English.
Theodora. It is not German at all; it is Latin. So, my dear!
Pulcheria. As I say, then, it is not English.
Theodora. This is the first time I ever heard that George Eliot's style was bad!
Constantius. It is admirable; it has the most delightful and the most intellectually comfortable suggestions. But it is occasionally a little too long-sleeved, as I may say. It is sometimes too loose a fit for the thought, a little baggy.
Theodora. And the advice he gives Gwendolen, the things he says to her, they are the very essence of wisdom, of warm human wisdom, knowing life and feeling it. "Keep your fear as a safeguard, it may make consequences passionately present to you." What can be better than that?
Pulcheria. Nothing, perhaps. But what can be drearier than a novel in which the function of the hero -- young, handsome and brilliant -- is to give didactic advice, in a proverbial form, to the young, beautiful and brilliant heroine?
Constantius. That is not putting it quite fairly. The function of Deronda is to make Gwendolen fall in love with him, to say nothing of falling in love himself with Mirah.
Pulcheria. Yes, the less said about that the better. All we know about Mirah is that she has delicate rings of hair, sits with her feet crossed, and talks like an article in a new magazine.
Constantius. Deronda's function of adviser to Gwendolen does not strike me as so ridiculous. He is not nearly so ridiculous as if he were lovesick. It is a very interesting situation -- that of a man with whom a beautiful woman in trouble falls in love and yet whose affections are so preoccupied that the most he can do for her in return is to enter kindly and sympathetically into her position, pity her and talk to her. George Eliot always gives us something that is strikingly and ironically characteristic of human life; and what savours more of the essential crookedness of our fate than the sad cross-purposes of these two young people? Poor Gwendolen's falling in love with Deronda is part of her own luckless history, not of his.
Theodora. I do think he takes it to himself rather too little. No man had ever so little vanity.
Pulcheria. It is very inconsistent, therefore, as well as being extremely impertinent and ill-mannered, his buying back and sending to her her necklace at Leubronn.
Constantius. Oh, you must concede that; without it there would have been no story. A man writing of him, however, would certainly have made him more peccable. As George Eliot lets herself go, in that quarter, she becomes delightfully, almost touchingly, feminine. It is like her making Romola go to housekeeping with Tessa, after Tito Melema's death; like her making Dorothea marry Will Ladislaw. If Dorothea had married any one after her misadventure with Casaubon, she would have married a trooper.
Theodora. Perhaps some day Gwendolen will marry Rex.
Pulcheria. Pray, who is Rex?
Theodora. Why, Pulcheria, how can you forget?
Pulcheria. Nay, how can I remember? But I recall such a name in the dim antiquity of the first or second book. Yes, and then he is pushed to the front again at the last, just in time not to miss the falling of the curtain. Gwendolen will certainly not have the audacity to marry any one we know so little about.
Constantius. I have been wanting to say that there seems to me to be two very distinct elements in George Eliot -- a spontaneous one and an artificial one. There is what she is by inspiration and what she is because it is expected of her. These two heads have been very perceptible in her recent writings; they are much less noticeable in her early ones.
Theodora. You mean that she is too scientific? So long as she remains the great literary genius that she is, how can she be too scientific? She is simply permeated with the highest culture of the age.
Pulcheria. She talks too much about the "dynamic quality" of people's eyes. When she uses such a phrase as that in the first sentence in her book she is not a great literary genius, because she shows a want of tact. There can't be a worse limitation.
Constantius. The "dynamic quality" of Gwendolen's glance has made the tour of the world.
Theodora. It shows a very low level of culture on the world's part to be agitated by a term perfectly familiar to all decently-educated people.
Pulcheria. I don't pretend to be decently educated; pray tell me what it means.
Constantius (promptly). I think Pulcheria has hit it in speaking of a want of tact. In the manner of the book, throughout, there is something that one may call a want of tact. The epigraphs in verse are a want of tact; they are sometimes, I think, a trifle more pretentious than really pregnant; the importunity of the moral reflections is a want of tact; the very diffuseness is a want of tact. But it comes back to what I said just now about one's sense of the author writing under a sort of external pressure. I began to notice it in Felix Holt; I don't think I had before. She strikes me as a person who certainly has naturally a taste for general considerations, but who has fallen upon an age and a circle which have compelled her to give them an exaggerated attention. She does not strike me as naturally a critic, less still as naturally a sceptic; her spontaneous part is to observe life and to feel it, to feel it with admirable depth. Contemplation, sympathy and faith -- something like that, I should say, would have been her natural scale. If she had fallen upon an age of enthusiastic assent to old articles of faith, it seems to me possible that she would have had a more perfect, a more consistent and graceful development, than she has actually had. If she had cast herself into such a current -- her genius being equal -- it might have carried her to splendid distances. But she has chosen to go into criticism, and to the critics she addresses her work; I mean the critics of the universe. Instead of feeling life itself, it is "views" upon life that she tries to feel.
Pulcheria. She is the victim of a first-class education. am so glad!
Constantius. Thanks to her admirable intellect she philosophises very sufficiently; but meanwhile she has given a chill to her genius. She has come near spoiling an artist.
Pulcheria. She has quite spoiled one. Or rather I shouldn't say that, because there was no artist to spoil. I maintain that she is not an artist. An artist could never have put a story together so monstrously ill. She has no sense of form.
Theodora. Pray, what could be more artistic than the way that Deronda's paternity is concealed till almost the end, and the way we are made to suppose Sir Hugo is his father?
Pulcheria. And Mirah his sister. How does that fit together? I was as little made to suppose he was not a Jew as
Constantius. I think Deronda's mother is one of the unvivified characters; she belongs to the cold half of the book. All the Jewish part is at bottom cold; that is my only objection. I have enjoyed it because my fancy often warms cold things; but beside Gwendolen's history it is like the empty half of the lunar disk beside the full one. It is admirably studied, it is imagined, it is understood, but it is not embodied. One feels this strongly in just those scenes between Deronda and his mother; one feels that one has been appealed to on rather an artificial ground of interest. To make Deronda's reversion to his native faith more dramatic and profound, the author has given him a mother who on very arbitrary grounds, apparently, has separated herself from this same faith and who has been kept waiting in the wing, as it were, for many acts, to come on and make her speech and say so. This moral situation of hers we are invited retrospectively to appreciate. But we hardly care to do so.
Pulcheria. I don't see the princess, in spite of her flame-coloured robe. Why should an actress and prima-donna care so much about religious matters?
Theodora. It was not only that; it was the Jewish race she hated, Jewish manners and looks. You, my dear, ought to understand that.
Pulcheria. I do, but I am not a Jewish actress of genius; am not what Rachel was. If I were I should have other things to think about.
Constantius. Think now a little about poor Gwendolen.
Pulcheria. I don't care to think about her. She was a second-rate English girl who got into a flutter about a lord.
Theodora. I don't see that she is worse than if she were a first-rate American girl who should get into exactly the same flutter.
Pulcheria. It wouldn't be the same flutter at all; it wouldn't be any flutter. She wouldn't be afraid of the lord, though she might be amused at him.
Theodora. I am sure I don't perceive whom Gwendolen was afraid of. She was afraid of her misdeed -- her broken promise
Pulcheria. She was not afraid of Deronda when, immediately after her marriage and without any but the most casual acquaintance with him, she begins to hover about him at the Mallingers' and to drop little confidences about her conjugal woes. That seems to me very indelicate; ask any woman.
Constantius. The very purpose of the author is to give us an idea of the sort of confidence that Deronda inspired -- its irresistible potency.
Pulcheria. A lay father-confessor -- horrid!
Constantius. And to give us an idea also of the acuteness of Gwendolen's depression, of her haunting sense of impending trouble.
Theodora. It must be remembered that Gwendolen was in love with Deronda from the first, long before she knew it. She didn't know it, poor girl, but that was it.
Pulcheria. That makes the matter worse. It is very disagreeable to see her hovering and rustling about a man who is indifferent to her.
Theodora. He was not indifferent to her, since he sent her back her necklace.
Pulcheria. Of all the delicate attention to a charming girl that I ever heard of, that little pecuniary transaction is the most felicitous.
Constantius. You must remember that he had been en rapport with her at the gaming-table. She had been playing in defiance of his observation, and he, continuing to observe her, had been in a measure responsible for her loss. There was a tacit consciousness of this between them. You may contest the possibility of tacit consciousness going so far, but that is not a serious objection. You may point out two or three weak spots in detail; the fact remains that Gwendolen's whole history is vividly told. And see how the girl is known, inside out, how thoroughly she is felt and understood. It is the most intelligent thing in all George Eliot's writing, and that is saying much. It is so deep, so
Theodora. I don't know where the perception of character has sailed closer to the wind.
Pulcheria. The portrait may be admirable, but it has one little fault. You don't care a straw for the original. Gwendolen is not an interesting girl, and when the author tries to invest her with a deep tragic interest she does so at the expense of consistency. She has made her at the outset too light, too flimsy; tragedy has no hold on such a girl.
Theodora. You are hard to satisfy. You said this morning that Dorothea was too heavy, and now you find Gwendolen too light. George Eliot wished to give us the perfect counterpart of Dorothea. Having made one portrait she was worthy to make the other.
Pulcheria. She has committed the fatal error of making Gwendolen vulgarly, pettily, drily selfish. She was personally selfish.
Theodora. I know nothing more personal than selfishness.
Pulcheria. I am selfish, but I don't go about with my chin out like that; at least I hope I don't. She was an odious young woman, and one can't care what becomes of her. When her marriage turned out ill she would have become still more hard and positive; to make her soft and appealing is very bad logic. The second Gwendolen doesn't belong to the first.
Constantius. She is perhaps at the first a little childish for the weight of interest she has to carry, a little too much after the pattern of the unconscientious young ladies of Miss Yonge and Miss Sewell.
Theodora. Since when is it forbidden to make one's heroine young? Gwendolen is a perfect picture of youthfulness -- its eagerness, its presumption, its preoccupation with itself, its vanity and silliness, its sense of its own absoluteness. But she is extremely intelligent and clever, and therefore tragedy can have a hold upon her. Her conscience doesn't make the tragedy; that is an old story and, I think, a secondary form of suffering. It is the tragedy that makes her conscience, which then reacts upon it; and I can think of nothing more powerful than the way in which the
Constantius. That is perfectly true. Gwendolen's history is admirably typical -- as most things are with George Eliot: it is the very stuff that human life is made of. What is it made of but the discovery by each of us that we are at the best but a rather ridiculous fifth wheel to the coach, after we have sat cracking our whip and believing that we are at least the coachman in person? We think we are the main hoop to the barrel, and we turn out to be but a very incidental splinter in one of the staves. The universe forcing itself with a slow, inexorable pressure into a narrow, complacent, and yet after all extremely sensitive mind, and making it ache with the pain of the process -- that is Gwendolen's story. And it becomes completely characteristic in that her supreme perception of the fact that the world is whirling past her is in the disappointment not of a base but of an exalted passion. The very chance to embrace what the author is so fond of calling a "larger life" seems refused to her. She is punished for being narrow, and she is not allowed a chance to expand. Her finding Deronda pre-engaged to go to the East and stir up the race-feeling of the Jews strikes me as a wonderfully happy invention. The irony of the situation, for poor Gwendolen, is almost grotesque, and it makes one wonder whether the whole heavy structure of the Jewish question in the story was not built up by the author for the express purpose of giving its proper force to this particular stroke.
Theodora. George Eliot's intentions are extremely complex. The mass is for each detail and each detail is for the mass.
Pulcheria. She is very fond of deaths by drowning. Maggie Tulliver and her brother are drowned, Tito Melema is drowned, Mr. Grandcourt is drowned. It is extremely unlikely that Grandcourt should not have known how to swim.
Constantius. He did, of course, but he had a cramp. It served him right. I can't imagine a more consummate representation of the most detestable kind of Englishman -- the Englishman who thinks it low to articulate. And in Grand-court
Theodora. Mr. Casaubon, in Middlemarch, was very dry too; and yet what a genius it is that can give us two disagreeable husbands who are so utterly different!
Pulcheria. You must count the two disagreeable wives too -- Rosamond Vincy and Gwendolen. They are very much alike. I know the author didn't mean it; it proves how common a type the worldly, pince, selfish young woman seemed to her. They are both disagreeable; you can't get over that.
Constantius. There is something in that, perhaps. I think, at any rate, that the secondary people here are less delightful than in Middlemarch; there is nothing so good as Mary Garth and her father, or the little old lady who steals sugar, or the parson who is in love with Mary, or the country relatives of old Mr. Featherstone. Rex Gascoigne is not so good as Fred Vincy.
Theodora. Mr. Gascoigne is admirable, and Mrs. Davilow is charming.
Pulcheria. And you must not forget that you think Herr Klesmer "Shakespearean." Wouldn't "Wagnerian" be high enough praise?
Constantius. Yes, one must make an exception with regard to the Klesmers and the Meyricks. They are delightful, and as for Klesmer himself, and Hans Meyrick, Theodora may maintain her epithet. Shakespearean characters are characters that are born of the overflow of observation -- characters that make the drama seem multitudinous, like life. Klesmer comes in with a sort of Shakespearean "value," as a painter would say, and so, in a different tone, does Hans Meyrick. They spring from a much-peopled mind.
Theodora. I think Gwendolen's confrontation with Klesmer one of the finest things in the book.
Constantius. It is like everything in George Eliot; it will bear thinking of.
Pulcheria. All that is very fine, but you cannot persuade
Theodora. There is something higher than form -- there is spirit.
Constantius. I am afraid Pulcheria is sadly aesthetic. She had better confine herself to Mrime.
Pulcheria. I shall certainly to-day read over La Double Mprise.
Theodora. Oh, my dear, y pensez-vous?
Constantius. Yes, I think there is little art in Deronda, but I think there is a vast amount of life. In life without art you can find your account; but art without life is a poor affair. The book is full of the world.
Theodora. It is full of beauty and knowledge, and that is quite art enough for me.
Pulcheria (to the little dog). We are silenced, darling, but we are not convinced, are we? (The pug begins to bark.) No, we are not even silenced. It's a young woman with two bandboxes.
Theodora. Oh, it must be our muslins.
Constantius (rising to go). I see what you mean!
Atlantic Monthly, December 1876
Reprinted in Partial Portraits, 1888
In the absence of anything new from George Eliot's hand, the two short tales included in the cheap edition of her works in course of publication by Messrs. Blackwood and now for the first time reprinted, may be accepted as a novelty. They appear at the end of the volume which contains "Silas Marner," and will doubtless procure for this volume an extended
Nation, April 25, 1878
The writer of these pages has observed that the first question usually asked in relation to Mr. Cross's long-expected biography is whether the reader has not been disappointed in it. The inquirer is apt to be disappointed if the question be answered in the negative. It may as well be said, therefore, at the threshold of the following remarks, that such is not the feeling with which this particular reader laid down the book. The general feeling about it will depend very much on what has been looked for; there was probably, in advance, a considerable belief that we were to be treated to "revelations." I know not exactly why it should have been, but certain it is that the announcement of a biography of George Eliot has been construed more or less as a promise that we were to be admitted behind the scenes, as it were, of her life. No such result has taken place. We look at the drama from the point of view usually allotted to the public, and the curtain is lowered whenever it suits the biographer. The most "intimate" pages in the book are those in which the great novelist notes her derangements of health and depression of spirits. This history, to my sense, is quite as interesting as it
The plan on which it is composed is, so far as I know, without precedent, but it is a plan that could have occurred only to an "outsider" in literature, if I may venture to apply this term to one who has executed a literary task with such tact and success. The regular littrateur, hampered by tradition, would, I think, have lacked the boldness, the artless artfulness, of conjoining in the same text selected morsels of letters and journals, so as to form a continuous and multifarious talk, on the writer's part, punctuated only by marginal names and dates and divisions into chapters. There is something a little violent in the system, in spite of our feeling that it has been applied with a supple hand; but it was probably the best that Mr. Cross could have adopted, and it served especially well his purpose of appearing only as an arranger, or rather of not appearing at all. The modesty, the good taste, the self-effacement of the editorial element in the book are, in a word, complete, and the clearness and care of arrangement, the accuracy of reference, leave nothing to be desired. The form Mr. Cross has chosen, or invented, becomes, in the application, highly agreeable, and his rule of omission (for we have, almost always, only parts and passages of letters) has not prevented his volumes from being as copious as we could wish. George Eliot was not a great letter- writer, either in quantity or quality; she had neither the spirit, the leisure, nor the lightness of mind to conjure with the epistolary pen, and after her union with George Henry Lewes her disposition to play with it was further damped by his quick activity in her service. Letter- writing was part of the trouble he saved her; in this as in other ways he interposed between the world and his sensitive companion. The difference is striking between her habits in this respect and those of Madame George Sand, whose correspondence has lately been collected into six closely-printed volumes which testify afresh to her extraordinary energy and facility. Madame Sand, however, indefatigable producer as she was, was not a woman of study; she lived from day to day, from hand to mouth (intellectually), as it were, and had no general plan of life and culture. Her English compeer took the problem of production more seriously; she
It was not till Marian Evans was past thirty, indeed, that she became an author by profession, and it may accordingly be supposed that her early letters are those which take us most into her confidence. This is true of those written when she was on the threshold of womanhood, which form a very full expression of her feelings at the time. The drawback here is that the feelings themselves are rather wanting in interest -- one may almost say in amiability. At the age of twenty Marian Evans was a deeply religious young woman, whose faith took the form of a narrow evangelicism. Religious, in a manner, she remained to the end of her life, in spite of her adoption of a scientific explanation of things; but in the year 1839 she thought it ungodly to go to concerts and to read novels. She writes to her former governess that she can "only sigh" when she hears of the "marrying and giving in marriage that is constantly transacted;" expresses enjoyment of Hannah More's letters ("the contemplation of so blessed a character as hers is very salutary"); wishes that she "might be more useful in her own obscure and lowly station" ("I feel myself to be a mere cumberer of the ground"), that she "might seek to be sanctified wholly." These first fragments of her correspondence, first glimpses of her mind, are very curious; they have nothing in common with the later ones but the deep seriousness of the tone. Serious, of course, George Eliot continued to be to the end; the sense of moral responsibility, of the sadness and difficulty of life, was the most inveterate part of her nature. But the provincial strain in the letters from which I have quoted is very marked: they reflect a meagreness and grayness of outward circumstance; have a tinge as of Dissent in a small English town, where there are brick chapels in back streets. This was only a moment in her development; but there is something touching in the contrast between such a state of mind and that of the woman before whom, at middle age, all the culture of the world unrolled itself, and towards whom fame and fortune, and an activity which at the earlier period she would have thought very profane, pressed with rapidity. In 1839, as I have said, she thought very meanly of
The great event of her life was of course her acquaintance with George Henry Lewes. I say "of course," because this relation had an importance even more controlling than the publication and success of her first attempt at fiction, inasmuch as it was in consequence of Mr. Lewes's friendly urgency that she wrote the Scenes of Clerical Life. She met him for the first time in London, in the autumn of 1851; but it was not till the summer of 1854 that the connection with him began (it was marked to the world by their going to spend together several months in Germany, where he was bent on researches for his Life of Goethe), which was to become so much closer than many formal marriages and to last till his death in 1878. The episode of Miss Evans's life in London during these three years was already tolerably well known. She had become by this time a professional literary woman, and had regular work as assistant editor of the Westminster Review, to which she gave her most conscientious attention. Her accomplishments now were wide. She was a linguist, a copious reader, an earnest student of history and philosophy. She wrote much for her magazine as well as solicited articles from others, and several of her contributions are contained in the volume of essays published after her death -- essays of which it is fair to say that they give but a faint intimation of her latent powers. George Henry Lewes was a versatile, hard-working journalist, with a tendency, apparently, of the drifting sort; and after having been made acquainted with each other by Mr. Herbert Spencer, the pair commingled their sympathies and their efforts. Her letters, at this season, contain constant mention of Lewes (one allusion to the effect that he "has quite won my regard, after having had a good deal of my vituperation"); she takes an interest in his health and corrects his proofs for him when he is absent. It was impossible for Mr. Lewes to marry, as he had a wife living, from whom he was separated. He had also three children, of whom the care did not devolve upon their mother. The union Miss Evans formed with him was a deliberate step, of which she accepted all the consequences. These consequences were
She was thirty-seven years old when the Scenes from Clerical Life were published, but this work opened wide for her the door of success, and fame and fortune came to her rapidly. Her union with Lewes had been a union of poverty: there is a sentence in her journal, of the year 1856, which speaks of their ascending certain cliffs called the Tors, at Ilfracombe, "only twice; for a tax of 3d. per head was demanded for this luxury, and we could not afford a sixpenny walk very frequently." The incentive to writing Amos Barton seems to have been mainly pecuniary. There was an urgent need to make money, and it appears to have been agreed between the pair that there was at least no harm in the lady's trying her hand at a story. Lewes professed a belief that she would really do something in this line, while she, more sceptical, reserved her judgment till after the test. The Scenes from Clerical Life were therefore pre-eminently an empirical work of fiction. With the sending of the first episode to the late Mr. John Blackwood for approval, there opened a relation between publisher and author which lasted to the end, and which was probably more genial and unclouded than any in the annals of literature, as well as almost unprecedentedly lucrative to both parties. This first book of George Eliot's has little of the usual air of a first book, none of the crudity of an early attempt; it was not the work of a youthful person, and one sees that the material had
This is a very noble and defensible view, and one must speak respectfully of any theory of work which would produce such fruit as Romola and Middlemarch. But it testifies to that side of George Eliot's nature which was weakest -- the
The truth is, perception and reflection, at the outset, divided George Eliot's great talent between them; but as time went on circumstances led the latter to develop itself at the expense of the former -- one of these circumstances being apparently the influence of George Henry Lewes. Lewes was interested in science, in cosmic problems; and though his companion, thanks to the original bent of her versatile, powerful mind, needed no impulse from without to turn herself to speculation, yet the contagion of his studies pushed her further than she would otherwise have gone in the direction of scientific observation, which is but another form of what I have called reflection. Her early novels are full of natural as distinguished from systematic observation, though even in them it is less the dominant note, I think, than the love of the "moral," the reaction of thought in the face of the human comedy. They had observation sufficient, at any rate, to make their fortune, and it may well be said that that is enough for any novel. In Silas Marner, in Adam Bede, the quality seems gilded by a sort of autumn haze, an afternoon light, of meditation, which mitigates the sharpness of portraiture. I doubt very much whether the author herself had a clear vision, for instance, of the marriage of Dinah Morris to Adam, or of the rescue of Hetty from the scaffold at the eleventh hour. The reason of this may be, indeed, that her perception was a perception of nature much more than of art, and that these particular incidents do not belong to nature (to my sense at least); by which I do not mean that they belong to a very happy art. I cite them, on the contrary, as an evidence of artistic weakness; they are a very good example of the view in which a story must have marriages and rescues in the nick of time, as a matter of course. I must add, in fairness to George
It is a part of this same limitation of the pleasure she was capable of taking in the fact of representation for itself that the various journals and notes of her visits to the Continent are, though by no means destitute of the tempered enjoyment of foreign sights which was as near as she ever came to rapture, singularly vague in expression on the subject of the general and particular spectacle -- the life and manners, the works of art. She enumerates diligently all the pictures and statues she sees, and the way she does so is a proof of her active, earnest intellectual habits; but it is rarely apparent that they have said much to her, or that what they have said is one of their deeper secrets. She is capable of writing, after coming out of the great chapel of San Lorenzo, in Florence, that "the world-famous statues of Michael Angelo on the tombs . . . remained to us as affected and exaggerated in the original as in copies and casts." That sentence startles one, on the part of the author of Romola, and that Mr. Cross should have printed it is a commendable proof of his impartiality.
It was in Romola, precisely, that the equilibrium I spoke of just now was lost, and that reflection began to weigh down the scale. Romola is preeminently a study of the human conscience in an historical setting which is studied almost as much, and few passages in Mr. Cross's volumes are more interesting than those relating to the production of this magnificent romance. George Eliot took all her work with a noble seriousness, but into none of it did she throw herself with more passion. It drained from her as much as she gave to it, and none of her writing ploughed into her, to use her biographer's expression, so deeply. She told him that she began it a young woman and finished it an old one. More than any of her novels it was evolved, as I have said, from her moral consciousness -- a moral consciousness encircled by a prodigious amount of literary research. Her literary ideal was at all times of the highest, but in the preparation of Romola it placed her
The most definite impression produced, perhaps, by Mr. Cross's volumes (by the second and third) is that of simple success -- success which had been the result of no external accidents (unless her union with Lewes be so denominated), but was involved in the very faculties nature had given her. All the elements of an eventual happy fortune met in her constitution.
It was part of the good fortune of which I speak that in Mr. Lewes she had found the most devoted of caretakers, the most jealous of ministers, a companion through whom all business was transacted. The one drawback of this relation was that, considering what she attempted, it limited her experience too much to itself; but for the rest it helped her in a hundred ways -- it saved her nerves, it fortified her privacy, it protected her leisure, it diminished the friction of living. His admiration of her work was of the largest, though not always, I think, truly discriminating, and he surrounded her with a sort of temperate zone of independence -- independence of everything except him and her own standards. Nervous, sensitive, delicate in every way in which genius is delicate (except, indeed, that she had a robust reason), it was a great thing for her to have accident made rare and exposure mitigated; and to this result Lewes, as the administrator of her fame, admirably contributed. He filtered the stream, giving her only the clearer water. The accident of reading reviews of one's productions, especially when they are bad, is, for the artist of our day, one of the most frequent; and Mr. Lewes, by keeping these things out of her way, enabled her to achieve what was perhaps the highest form of her success -- an inaccessibility to the newspaper. "It is remarkable to me," she writes in 1876, "that I have entirely lost my personal melancholy. often, of course, have melancholy thoughts about the destinies of my fellow creatures, but I am never in that mood of sadness which used to be my frequent visitant even in the midst of external happiness." Her later years, coloured by this accumulated wisdom, when she had taken her final form before the world and had come to be regarded more and more as a teacher and philosopher, are full of suggestion to the critic, but have exhausted my limited space. There is a certain coldness in them perhaps -- the coldness that results from most of one's opinions being formed, one's mind made up, on many great subjects; from the degree, in a word, to which "culture" had taken the place of the more primitive processes of experience.
"Ah, les livres, ils nous dbordent, ils nous touffent -- nous prissons par les livres!" That cry of a distinguished French novelist (there is no harm in mentioning M. Alphonse Daudet), which fell upon the ear of the present writer some time ago, represents as little as possible the emotion of George Eliot confronted with literatures and sciences. M. Alphonse Daudet went on to say that, to his mind, the personal impression, the effort of direct observation, was the most precious source of information for the novelist; that nothing could take its place; that the effect of books was constantly to check and pervert this effort; that a second-hand, third-hand, tenth-hand, impression was constantly tending to substitute itself for a fresh perception; that we were ending by seeing everything through literature instead of through our own senses; and that in short literature was rapidly killing literature. This view has immense truth on its side, but the case would be too simple if, on one side or the other, there were only one way of finding out. The effort of the novelist is to find out, to know, or at least to see, and no one, in the nature of things, can less afford to be indifferent to sidelights. Books are themselves, unfortunately, an expression of human passions. George Eliot had no doubts, at any rate; if impressionism, before she laid down her pen, had already begun to be talked about, it would have made no difference with her -- she would have had no desire to pass for an impressionist.
There is one question we cannot help asking ourselves as we close this record of her life; it is impossible not to let our imagination wander in the direction of what turn her mind or her fortune might have taken if she had never met George Henry Lewes, or never cast her lot with his. It is safe to say that, in one way or another, in the long run, her novels would have got themselves written, and it is possible they would have been more natural, as one may call it, more familiarly and casually human. Would her development have been less systematic, more irresponsible, more personal, and should we have had more of Adam Bede and Silas Marner and less of Romola and Middlemarch? The question, after all, cannot be answered, and I do not push it, being myself very grateful for Middlemarch and Romola. It is as George Eliot does actually present herself that we must judge her -- a condition that will
Atlantic Monthly, May 1885
Reprinted in Partial
Portraits, 1888
Frances Elliot (22)
The Italians: A Novel. By Frances Elliot. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1875.
We knew Mrs. Elliot as the author of that rather flippant and untrustworthy book, the `Diary of an Idle Woman in Italy,' and yet we opened `The Italians' with tolerable hopes of entertainment. But Mrs. Elliot seems to us a mistress of the art of disappointing one. Her former work, in spite of its particularly pleasing title, was singularly unamiable and unsympathetic; it made the reader wonder that a person who cared to be at pains to write two volumes about Italian things, should not have a finer sense and a more delicate touch. Mrs. Elliot evidently knows Italy fairly well in a superficial way, and has had some observation of provincial Italian society, but she does not seem to us to have risen to the level of her opportunities. It is as if she had come to know Italy against her will and not from ardent choice, and had accepted her subject half in grumbling. The scene of her story is the picturesque town of Lucca, into certain of whose social mysteries she appears to have been initiated. We confess that we read her novel for the sake of Lucca, its beautiful cathedral and its grassy bastions, rather than for that of the author's own style. Italian scenery and manners have come to be a rather threadbare resource in romance; but we confess to a sneaking kindness for the well-worn theme, and our curiosity would have abundantly found its account in a story with the real savor of the Lucchese soil. In what Mrs. Elliot has undertaken to tell us, however, there is nothing especially characteristic, and no needful connection between her background and her intrigue. The latter is rather stale and tame. The young Count Nobili (of very new nobility) comes to live opposite a poor and proud old marchesa, the penultimate scion of a once glorious race. The ultimate scion is the marchesa's niece, a young girl with whom the count falls in love. The marchesa hates him for his wealth and his new-made prosperity, and takes away her niece to a castle in the Apennines. Here she falls asleep, one night, burning old papers, and sets fire to her niece's apartments. The niece seems likely to go the way of the papers, when the count turns up in a cloak and
Nation, August 12,
1875
James Anthony Froude (23)
Short Studies on Great Subjects. By James Anthony Froude. New York: Charles Scribner & Co., 1868.
Mr. Froude's two volumes, here reprinted in one, consist of a series of articles contributed to magazines and journals or delivered as lectures. They are collected probably rather in deference to a prevailing fashion than because they have been thought especially valuable. Valuable they are not in any high degree. The subjects treated are historical and theological. The historical papers are written in the popular manner and addressed to the popular judgment, which is but another way of saying that they are very superficial. The articles on religious subjects, "The Philosophy of Catholicism," "Criticism and the Bible History," "The Book of Job," are vitiated by a feeble sentimentalism which deprives them of half their worth as liberal discussions. Mr. Froude appears, therefore, to decidedly better advantage in his "History of England" than in these short essays. Here the faults which in the larger work are in a great degree concealed and redeemed by its distinguished merits -- the energy of spirit, the industry of execution, the dignity of tone, the high pictorial style -- are strangely obtrusive. What these faults are -- what, at least, we hold them to be -- may be gathered from our remarks.
Mr. Froude's volume opens with a lecture on the science of history, a very loose piece of writing for one who has made the study of history the business of his life. "One lesson, and one only," says Mr. Froude, "history may be said to repeat with distinctness, that the world is built somehow on moral foundations; that in the long run it is well with the good; in the long run it is ill with the wicked." If this is all that history teaches, we had better cease to trouble ourselves about it. But it is hard to see how Mr. Froude is competent to make this assertion, and wherein his "long run" differs from those great cycles, defying human measurement, in which he affirms history must be organized if it is organized at all. If there is one thing that history does not teach, it seems to us, it is just this very lesson. What strikes an attentive student of the past is the indifference of events to man's moral worth or worthlessness.
The lecture on "The Science of History" is followed by three lectures on "The Times of Luther and Erasmus," and then by another on "The Influence of the Reformation on the Scottish Character." Here is a sentence from the last: "It had been arranged that the little Mary Stuart should marry our English Edward VI., and the difficulty was to be settled so. They would have been contented, they said, if Scotland had had the `lad' and England the `lass.' As it stood, they broke their bargain and married the little queen away into France to prevent the Protector Somerset from getting hold of her." There is something in the style of this short passage which reminds us forcibly of Dickens's "Child's History of England," and of a dozen other works for the instruction of the
Nothing can be more unphilosophical than such a method of exhibiting the development of a great race and a great cause. When once Mr. Froude and his associates have placed themselves on the same side as a given individual, the latter is allowed to have neither foibles nor vices nor passions; and because he was a powerful instrument in the civilization of his age he is also assumed to have been a person of unsullied private virtue. Mr. Froude thinks it necessary to enter upon an elaborate apology for Luther's marriage -- an act for which no apology is needed -- and in doing so he deprives his hero of the very best reason he could plead. "The marriage," he says, "was unquestionably no affair of passion." If it was not, so much the worse for Luther. There is a want of logic on Mr. Froude's part in affirming that feeling and emotion entered so largely into Luther's attitude towards the corruptions of the Church and into his own purifying desires, and in yet denying him the benefit of this same element of feeling on an occasion which so perfectly justifies its interference, simply because it may compromise a thoroughly fanciful and modern notion of personal purity. Upon the "Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII." and upon "England's Forgotten Worthies" Mr. Froude has two articles of greatly
Nation, October 31,
1867
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (24)
Wives and Daughters. A Novel. By Mrs. Gaskell. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1866.
We cannot help thinking that in "Wives and Daughters" the late Mrs. Gaskell has added to the number of those works of fiction -- of which we cannot perhaps count more than a score as having been produced in our time -- which will outlast the duration of their novelty and continue for years to come to be read and relished for a higher order of merits. Besides being the best of the author's own tales -- putting aside "Cranford," that is, which as a work of quite other pretensions ought not to be weighed against it, and which seems to us manifestly destined in its modest way to become a classic -- it is also one of the very best novels of its kind. So delicately, so elaborately, so artistically, so truthfully, and heartily is the story wrought out, that the hours given to its perusal seem like hours actually spent, in the flesh as well as the spirit, among the scenes and people described, in the atmosphere of their motives, feelings, traditions, associations. The gentle skill with which the reader is slowly involved in the tissue of the story; the delicacy of the handwork which has perfected every mesh of the net in which he finds himself ultimately entangled; the lightness of touch which, while he stands all unsuspicious of literary artifice, has stopped every issue into the real world; the admirable, inaudible, invisible exercise of creative power, in short, with which a new and arbitrary world is reared over his heedless head -- a world insidiously inclusive of him (such is the assoupissement of his critical sense), complete in every particular, from the divine blue of the summer sky to the June-bugs in the roses, from Cynthia Kirkpatrick and her infinite revelations of human nature to old Mrs. Goodenough and her provincial bad grammar -- these marvellous results, we say, are such as to compel the reader's very warmest admiration, and to make him feel, in his gratitude for this seeming accession of social and moral knowledge, as if he made but a poor return to the author in testifying, no matter how strongly, to the fact of her genius.
For Mrs. Gaskell's genius was so very composite as a quality, it was so obviously the offspring of her affections, her
The book is very long and of an interest so quiet that not a few of its readers will be sure to vote it dull. In the early portion especially the details are so numerous and so minute that even a very well-disposed reader will be tempted to lay down the book and ask himself of what possible concern to him are the clean frocks and the French lessons of little Molly Gibson. But if he will have patience awhile he will see. As an end these modest domestic facts are indeed valueless; but as a means to what the author would probably have called a "realization" of her central idea, i. e., Molly Gibson, a product,
Mrs. Gaskell's men are less successful than her women, and her hero in this book, making all allowance for the type of man intended, is hardly interesting enough in juxtaposition with his vivid sweethearts. Still his defects as a masculine being are negative and not positive, which is something to be thankful for, now that lady-novelists are growing completely to eschew the use of simple and honest youths. Osborne Hamley, a much more ambitious figure than Roger, and ambitious as the figure of Cynthia is ambitious, is to our judgment less successful than either of these; and we think the praise given him in the editorial note above-mentioned is excessive. He has a place in the story, and he is delicately and even forcibly conceived, but he is practically little more than a suggestion. Mrs. Gaskell had exhausted her poetry upon Cynthia, and she could spare to Osborne's very dramatic and even romantic predicaments little more than the close prosaic handling which she had found sufficient for the more vulgar creations. Where this handling accords thoroughly with the spirit of the figures, as in the case of Doctor Gibson and Squire Hamley, the result is admirable. It is good praise of these strongly marked, masculine, middle-aged men to say that they are as forcibly drawn as if a wise masculine hand had drawn them. Perhaps the best scene in the book (as the editor remarks) is the one in which the squire smokes a pipe with one of his sons after his high words with the other. We have intimated that this scene is prosaic; but let not the reader take fright at the word. If an author can be powerful, delicate, humorous, pathetic, dramatic, within the strict limits of homely prose, we see no need of his "dropping into poetry," as Mr. Dickens says. It is Mrs. Gaskell's highest praise to have
Nation, February 22,
1866
Charles C. F. Greville (25)
A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV. and King William IV. By the late Charles C. F. Greville, Esq. 2 vols. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1875.
Mr. Greville belonged to a more leisurely generation than our own, and he is a singularly complete example of the amateur annalist. Born in an aristocratic circle; intimate with all the social magnates of his time, and related to many of them; holder of a political office which gave him the "inside view" of public people and affairs, and yet was enough of a sinecure to leave him liberty and time for thinking and writing after his own fashion; observant, shrewd, sagacious, cultivated, too, in a fair degree, in spite of his disclaimers -- he had the happy inspiration very early in life of taking copious notes of what he saw and heard, the perseverance to continue the practice for half a century, and the talent to make his observations extremely luminous and interesting. In 1818, when he was barely twenty-four years of age, he resumed a Journal which he had already begun and interrupted, "because," as he says, "having frequent opportunities of mixing in the society of celebrated men, some particulars about them might be interesting hereafter." With this simple remark he ushers in this extremely voluminous record of the political and social events of his time, of which the first instalment, coming up to the year 1837, fills two stout, closely-printed volumes. The remainder, from the accession of Queen Victoria to the close of the author's life in 1865, is withheld for the present, in deference to contemporary susceptibilities. The author fulfils the first duty of a memoir-writer -- that of being frank; and if his treatment of the people of our own immediate day may be measured by his treatment of their fathers and grandfathers, there will be high entertainment, in the volumes yet to come, for their children and grandchildren. It is not that he is a scandal-monger, but something that is, on the whole, more uncomfortable. Scandal may be set down as scandal, and abusive tales may easily be too heavily weighted to float. Mr. Greville is discreet, temperate, irreproachable in tone, never scurrilous. But, on the other hand, he is full of common sense; he has an extreme directness of vision; he
Mr. Greville was Clerk of the Council under the two sovereigns we have mentioned -- a position which made him pass his whole life in a political atmosphere, at the same time that it gave him no political responsibilities. He was a Whig and a Liberal (as the term was understood forty years ago), and although he was a complete man of society, he was quite capable of taking general views, and, when he speaks of the future, making serious reflections. His Journal has an under-current of melancholy, and if he was not exactly a bilious observer, he was by no means an optimist. "He is half-mad, eccentric, ingenious," he says of a politician of his time, "with a great and varied information, and a coarse, vulgar mind, delighting in ribaldry and abuse, besides being an enthusiast." That is Liberalism tempered by good-breeding; but when he says (in 1829) "I am convinced that very few years will elapse before the Church will really be in danger. People will grow tired of paying so dearly for so bad an article"; or when he talks, apropos of the cholera in 1832, and the misery revealed by the investigations of the Health Commissioners, of "the rotten foundation on which the whole fabric of this gorgeous society rests" ("Can such a state of things permanently go on?" he asks. "Can any reform ameliorate it?"); when he exclaims, over the dulness of his Journal, "What can I make out of such animals as I herd with, and such occupations as I am engaged in?" and when, in a dozen different places, he repines at his wasted life, his having played no part and made nothing of himself, he takes us into the confidence of a person who, in the intervals of dining-out, of parliamentary debates and horse-racing, finds human life decidedly less brilliant than it would seem that these occupations ought to make it. Mr. Greville had a passion for the turf, owned some famous horses, and spent at Newmarket and Doncaster an amount of time which in his melancholy moods he bitterly grudges. He was a gentleman, not only socially but intellectually, and he continued to the end to find something wanting in the conversation of horsey people. He never married, and his long life was passed in London and in country visits. In 1830 he made a journey to Italy, where he still faithfully journalizes,
Mr. Greville was not the rose, but he lived near the roses, and he discussed things, sooner or later, with every one of consequence, from the two kings and the Duke of Wellington, from Talleyrand and the Princess de Lieven, down to Beau Brummel, Mr. Batchelor the valet of George IV., Theodore Hook, and the numerous Fitzclarences, illegitimate progeny of William IV. Every one passes before him, and he has something to say -- some anecdote to relate, some mot to register, some reflection to slip in, about every one and everything. He turns inside out, as it were, one after another, the governments of the Duke of Wellington, of Lord Grey, of Sir Robert Peel, of Lord John Russell, of Lord Melbourne, of Lord Palmerston. Much of his journalizing on all these matters seems to us at this distance of time a rather wearisome imbroglio, for the questions at issue have long ago lost their actuality. Reform, as Mr. Greville impatiently invoked it in 1830, and as the Duke of Wellington blindly and doggedly resisted it, has been rather cast into the shadow by the long strides of Mr. Gladstone and John Bright. Mr. Greville's goal has been for some time our starting- point. Nevertheless, the interest of such memoranda -- that of seeing how events and actions looked at the moment of their occurrence -- is permanent, and in our author's narrative, at numberless points, we seem to breathe the moral atmosphere of the time. Returning again and again to certain of the leading actors in public affairs, with one touch confirming or correcting, or
"He leads," says Mr. Greville elsewhere, "a most extraordinary life -- never gets up till six in the afternoon. They come to him and open the window-curtains at six or seven o'clock in the morning; he breakfasts in bed, does whatever business he can be brought to transact in bed, too, he reads every newspaper quite through, dozes three or four hours, gets up in time for dinner, and goes to bed between ten and eleven. He sleeps very ill, and rings his bell forty times in the night; if he wants to know the hour, though a watch hangs close to him, he will have his valet de chambre down rather than turn his head to look at it. The same thing if he wants a glass of water; he won't stretch out his hand to get it."
Mr. Greville writes of this monarch in a tone of irritation, and we can imagine that it must have been rather a tax on one's patience to have to show especial civility to a corpulent voluptuary of this particular pattern. William IV., with his awkward, blundering, boisterous, garrulous activity, is sketched with an even greater multitude of touches:
"His ignorance, weakness, and levity put him in a miserable light and prove him to be one of the silliest old gentlemen in his dominions; but I believe he is mad, for yesterday he gave a great dinner to the Jockey Club, at
It was after one of the King's speeches of this kind that a neighbor of Talleyrand's, at table, asked him what he thought of it. "With his unmoved, immovable face he answered only, `C'est bien remarquable.'" There would be a great deal to quote, if we had space, upon the Duke of Wellington, as to whom the author seems divided between a sense of his great soldiership and a sense of his incompetency as a political leader. He is equally sorry to forget the one and to shut his eyes to the other. Everything that he says about the Duke of Wellington seems to us to indicate in an unusual degree the faculty of discrimination. It is really refined characterization. The same is true of his treatment of Peel. There are a great many very short anecdotes, but even these are too long for us.
"Talleyrand afterwards talked of Madame de Sta l and Monti. They met at Madame de Marescalchi's villa, near Bologna, and were profuse of compliments and admiration for each other. Each brought a copy of their respective works, beautifully bound, to present to the other. After a day passed in an interchange of literary flatteries and the most ardent expressions of delight, they separated, but each forgot to carry away the present of the other, and the books remain in Madame de Marescalchi's library to this day."
Of Washington Irving Mr. Greville makes mention which is slightly derogatory; it is a case of "how it strikes a contemporary" when the contemporary is rigidly a man of the world, and of the Old World. "Washington Irving wants sprightliness and more refined manners. . . . Even Irving, who has been so many years here, has a bluntness which is very foreign
"He had a long-standing quarrel with Lushington. Having occasion to go to Naples, he wrote beforehand to him to say that their quarrel had better be suspended, and he went and lived with him and his sister (Lady L.) in perfect cordiality during his stay. When he departed, he wrote to Lushington that now they could resume their quarrel, and accordingly he did resume it, with rather more acharnement than before."
But we must leave our readers to explore at first hand this very considerable contribution to the political and social history of England for the greater part of the present century. Mr. Greville, in quietly making his entries, knew he was doing well, but he has done even better than he suspected. In addition to portraying a society, he has depicted himself; and his figure, in spite of a certain dryness, has a kind of exemplary dignity. It is eminently that of a gentleman. We welcome these volumes as a suggestive reminder that it is, after all, possible to be concerned with public affairs and to preserve the tone belonging to this character.
Nation, January 28,
1875
Philip Gilbert Hamerton (26)
Contemporary French Painters. An Essay. By Philip Gilbert Hamerton. With Sixteen Photographic Illustrations. London: Seeley, Jackson, and Halliday, 1868.
The profession of art-critic, so largely and successfully exercised in France, has found in England but a single eminent representative. It is true, indeed, that Mr. Ruskin has invested the character with a breadth and vigor which may be thought to have furnished, without emulation on the part of other writers, sufficient stress of commentary on the recent achievements of English art, -- at the same time that, on the other hand, this remarkable man has of late years shown a growing tendency to merge the function of art-critic in that of critic of life or of things in general. It is nevertheless true, that, as Mr. Ruskin is in the highest degree a devotee of art, he applies to the contemplation of manners and politics very much the same process of reflection and interpretation as in his earlier works he had acquired the habit of applying to the study of painting and architecture. He has been unable to abandon the aesthetic standpoint. Let him treat of what subjects he pleases, therefore, he will always remain before all things an art-critic. He has achieved a very manifest and a very extended influence over the mind and feelings of his own generation and that succeeding it; and those forms of intellectual labor, or of intellectual play, are not few in number, of which one may say without hesitation, borrowing for a moment a French idiom and French words, that Ruskin has pass par l. We have not the space to go over the ground of our recent literature, and enumerate those fading or flourishing tracts which, in one way or another, communicate with that section of the great central region which Mr. Ruskin has brought under cultivation. Sometimes the connecting path is very sinuous, very tortuous, very much inclined to lose itself in its course, and to disavow all acquaintance with its parent soil; sometimes it is a mere thread of scanty vegetation, overshadowed by the rank growth of adjacent fields; but with perseverance we can generally trace it back to its starting-point, on the margin of "Modern Painters." Mr. Ruskin has had passionate admirers; he has had disciples of the more rational
There are a great many pictures painted annually in England, and even, for that matter, in America; and there is in either country a great deal of criticism annually written about these pictures, in newspapers and magazines. No portion of such criticism, however, possesses sufficient substance or force to make it worth any one's while to wish to see it preserved in volumes, where it can be referred to and pondered. More than this, there are, to our knowledge, actually very few books in our language, belonging in form to literature, in which the principles of painting, or certain specific pictures, are intelligently discussed. There is a small number of collections of lectures by presidents of the Royal Academy, the best of which are Reynolds's; there is Leslie's "Handbook"; there are the various compilations of Mrs. Jameson; and there is the translation of Vasari, and the recent valuable "History of Italian Art" by Crowe and Cavalcaselle. For the needs of serious students, these make a very small library, and such students for the most part betake themselves, sooner or later, to the perusal of the best French critics, such as Stendhal, Gustave Planche, Vitet, and in these latter days Taine. They find in
Painters always have a great distrust of those who write about pictures. They have a strong sense of the difference between the literary point of view and the pictorial, and they inveterately suspect critics of confounding them. This suspicion may easily be carried too far. Painters, as a general thing, are much less able to take the literary point of view, when it is needed, than writers are to take the pictorial; and yet, we repeat, the suspicion is natural and not unhealthy. It is no more than just, that, before sitting down to discourse upon works of art, a writer should be required to prove his familiarity with the essential conditions of the production of such works, and that, before criticising the way in which objects are painted, he should give evidence of his knowledge of the difference between the manner in which they strike the senses of persons of whom it is impossible to conceive as being tempted to reproduce them and the manner in which they strike the senses of persons in whom to see them and to wish to reproduce them are almost one and the same act. With an accomplished sense of this profound difference, and with that proportion of insight into the workings of the painter's genius and temperament which would naturally accompany it, it is not unreasonable to believe that a critic in whom the
The three principal art-critics now writing in England -- the only three, we believe, who from time to time lay aside the anonymous, and republish their contributions to the newspapers -- are Mr. W. M. Rossetti, Mr. F. T. Palgrave, and Mr. P. G. Hamerton, the author of the volume whose title is prefixed to this notice. Mr. Hamerton is distinguished from the two former gentlemen by the circumstance that he began life as a painter, and that in all that he has written he has stood close to the painter's point of view. Whether he continues to paint we know not, but such reputation as he enjoys has been
Mr. Hamerton begins his essay with a little talk about David, - - the first, in time, of modern French painters, and certainly one of the most richly endowed. David leads him to the classical movement, and the classical movement to Ingres. Of the classical tendency -- the classical "idea" -- Mr. Hamerton gives a very fair and succinct account, but we may question the fairness of his estimate of Ingres. The latter has been made the object of the most extravagant and fulsome adulation; but one may admire him greatly and yet keep within the bounds of justice. Nothing is more probable, however, than that those theories of art of which his collective works are
As Ingres represents the comparative permanence of the tendency inaugurated by David, Mr. Hamerton mentions Gricault as the best of the early representatives of the reactionary or romantic movement. We have no need to linger upon him. Every one who has been through the Louvre remembers his immense "Raft of the Medusa," and retains a strong impression that the picture possesses not only vastness of size, but real power of conception.
Among the contemporary classicists, Mr. Hamerton mentions
Of Couture Mr. Hamerton says nothing. A discreet publisher would very probably have vetoed the admission of the photograph of his famous "Romans of the Decline," had such a photograph been obtainable. Couture's masterpiece is interesting, in a survey of the recent development of French art, as an example of a "classical" subject, as one may call it, --
A propos of Horace Vernet and military painters, Mr. Hamerton introduces us to Protais, an artist little known to Americans, but who deserves to become well known, on the evidence of the excellent work of which Mr. Hamerton gives a copy. "Before the Attack" is the title of the picture: a column of chasseurs halting beneath the slope of a hill in the gray dusk of morning and eagerly awaiting the signal to advance. Everything is admirably rendered, -- the cold dawn, the half-scared, half-alert expression of the younger soldiers, and the comparative indifference of the elder. It is plain that M. Protais knows his subject. We have seen it already pointed out, that, in speaking of him as the first French painter of military scenes who has attempted to subordinate the character of the general movement to the interest awakened by the particular figures, Mr. Hamerton is guilty of injustice to the admirable Raffet, whose wonderfully forcible designs may really be pronounced a valuable contribution to the military history of the first Empire. We never look at them ourselves, at least, without being profoundly thrilled and moved.
Of Rosa Bonheur Mr. Hamerton speaks with excellent discrimination; but she is so well known to Americans that we need not linger over his remarks. Of Troyon -- also quite well known in this country -- he has a very exalted opinion. The well-known lithograph, a "Morning Effect," which Mr. Hamerton reproduces as a specimen of Troyon, is certainly a charming picture. We may add, that, while on the subject of
Of Decamps Mr. Hamerton speaks sympathetically; but we are not sure that we should not have gone farther. His paintings contain an immense fund of reality, hampered by much weakness, and yet unmistakable. He seems to have constantly attempted, without cleverness, subjects of the kind traditionally consecrated to cleverness. A propos to cleverness, we may say that Mr. Hamerton gives a photograph from Grme, along with some tolerably stinted praise. The photograph is "The Prisoner," -- a poor Egyptian captive pinioned in a boat and rowed along the Nile, while a man at the stern twitches a guitar under his nose, or rather just over it, for he is lying on his back, and another at the bow sits grimly smoking the pipe of indifference. This work strikes us as no better than the average of Grme's pictures, which is placing a decided restriction upon it, -- at the same time that, if we add that it is not a bit worse, we give it strong praise. Mr. Hamerton speaks of Grme's heartlessness in terms in which most observers will agree with him. His pictures are for art very much what the novels of M. Gustave Flaubert are for literature, only decidedly inferior. The question of heartlessness brings Mr. Hamerton to Meissonier, whom he calls heartless too, but without duly setting forth all that he is besides.
The author closes his essay with a photograph from Fr re, and another from Toulmouche, -- of whom it may be said, that the former paints charming pictures of young girls in the cabins of peasants, and the latter charming pictures of young girls in Paris drawing-rooms. But Fr re imparts to his figures all the pathos of peasant life, and Toulmouche all the want of pathos which belongs to fashionable life.
We have already expressed our opinion that the one really great modern painter of France is conspicuous by his absence from this volume. Other admirable artists are absent, concerning whom, by the way, Mr. Hamerton promises at some
North American Review, April 1868
Mr. Hamerton is surprisingly productive writer, but he is a very entertaining one: and to those who retain a friendly memory of his `Painter's Camp' it will not seem that he has exhausted his welcome. He is capable of talking agreeably and philosophically about an extraordinary variety of topics, and if he is sometimes frank to confidingness on the subject of his domestic and personal affairs, he is so sympathetic and good-humored that one never thinks of calling the tendency by so harsh a name as egotism. He inspires his reader with a sort of personal regard. In the volume before us his personal affairs are the admitted text of his discourse. He proposes to relate what sort of a time he and his wife have had of it in attempting to live in a small French provincial town. They appear to have had a very comfortable time, and the story makes a very pleasant book. He begins it at the beginning, and enumerates the reasons why he determined to take up his abode in France -- the need for mild winters and yet for a climate that made a summer residence possible, subjects for a landscape painter, moderate prices, etc. He describes various houses, in different provinces, which he did not take: but he finally found the desired advantages in a town which he does not designate by name, but which, from his description, we suppose to be Autun, near Macon, in Burgundy. Under the somewhat unduly trivial title which he has affixed to his book he gives an account of his neighbors and their manners and customs. His criticism is decidedly shrewd,
Mr. Hamerton has some entertaining pages upon French servants, whom he thinks the best and most sympathetic in the world when they are treated with frankness and geniality. So in France they generally are treated, but Mr. Hamerton affirms that in certain high-pitched establishments, where it is the tone to keep the domestics at a distance, they are addressed with a curt contemptuousness much more inhuman than the English defensive reserve. He mentions a gardener of one of his friends who, falling fatally ill, sent him a message from his death-bed, having taken a fancy to him as a visitor at the house; and such conduct, he says, even in the presence of the "great hereafter," would have been impossible in an English servant. He gives a charming portrait of a certain gardener of his own, who appears to have combined, in an admirable manner, all the best French virtues with all the best English ones, and whose acquaintance -- quite apart from his services -- the reader greatly envies him. Mr. Hamerton has, of course, a good deal to say about the ladies of the society under his observation, but his gallantry cannot avail to conceal the fact that he has not found them signally interesting. French provincial women are divided into the two unvarying classes of the femmes du monde and the femmes d'intrieur. The latter are housewives pure and simple, with great skill in this department, great virtue, great piety, and no culture; the others are silly and frivolous, but with nothing to contribute to a society in which men and women may meet, in the English fashion, on common ground. The young girls knew absolutely about nothing but church matters and embroidery. The consequence is that the separation of the sexes is extreme; the men live in clubs and cafs, and even in drawing-rooms they form knots and groups by themselves. This is one of those curious anomalies and self-contradictions of which French civilization is so full. France has been prominently the country
Nation, February 3,
1876
Thomas Hardy (27)
Far from the Madding Crowd. By Thomas Hardy. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1874.
Mr. Hardy's novel came into the world under brilliant auspices -- such as the declaration by the London Spectator that either George Eliot had written it or George Eliot had found her match. One could make out in a manner what the Spectator meant. To guess, one has only to open `Far from the Madding Crowd' at random: "Mr. Jan Coggan, who had passed the cup to Henery, was a crimson man with a spacious countenance and a private glimmer in his eye, whose name had appeared on the marriage register of Weatherbury and neighboring parishes as best-man and chief witness in countless unions of the previous twenty years; he also very frequently filled the post of head godfather in baptisms of the subtly-jovial kind." That is a very fair imitation of George Eliot's humorous manner. Here is a specimen of her serious one: "He fancied he had felt himself in the penumbra of a very deep sadness when touching that slight and fragile creature. But wisdom lies in moderating mere impressions, and Gabriel endeavored to think little of this." But the Spectator's theory had an even broader base, and we may profitably quote a passage which perhaps constituted one of its solidest blocks. The author of `Silas Marner' has won no small part of her fame by her remarkable faculty as a reporter of ale-house and kitchen-fire conversations among simple-minded rustics. Mr. Hardy has also made a great effort in this direction, and here is a specimen -- a particularly favorable specimen -- of his success:
"`Why, Joseph Poorgrass, you han't had a drop!' said Mr. Coggan to a very shrinking man in the background, thrusting the cup towards him.
"`Such a shy man as he is,' said Jacob Smallbury. `Why, ye've hardly had strength of eye enough to look in our young mis'ess's face, so I hear, Joseph?'
"All looked at Joseph Poorgrass with pitying reproach.
"`No, I've hardly looked at her at all,' faltered Joseph, reducing his body smaller while talking, apparently from a
"`Poor fellow,' said Mr. Clark.
" `'Tis a curious nature for a man,' said Jan Coggan.
"`Yes,' continued Joseph Poorgrass, his shyness, which was so painful as a defect, just beginning to fill him with a little complacency, now that it was regarded in the light of an interesting study. `'Twere blush, blush, blush with me every minute of the time when she was speaking to me.'
"`I believe ye, Joseph Poorgrass, for we all know ye to be a very bashful man.'
" `'Tis terrible bad for a man, poor soul!' said the maltster. `And how long have ye suffered from it, Joseph?'
"`Oh, ever since I was a boy. Yes -- mother was concerned to her heart about it -- yes. But 'twas all naught.'
"`Did ye ever take anything to try and stop it, Joseph Poorgrass?'
"`Oh, aye, tried all sorts. They took me to Greenhill Fair, and into a great large jerry-go-nimble show, where there were women-folk riding round -- standing up on horses, with hardly anything on but their smocks; but it didn't cure me a morsel -- no, not a morsel. And then was put errand-man at the Woman's Skittle Alley at the back of the Tailor's Arms in Casterbridge. 'Twas a horrible gross situation, and altogether a very curious place for a good man. I had to stand and look at wicked people in the face from morning till night; but 'twas no use - - I was just as bad as ever after all. Blushes have been in the family for generations. There, 'tis a happy providence I be no worse, so to speak it -- yes, a happy thing, and I feel my few poor gratitudes.'"
This is extremely clever, and the author has evidently read to good purpose the low-life chapters in George Eliot's novels; he has caught very happily her trick of seeming to humor benignantly her queer people and look down at them from the heights of analytic omniscience. But we have quoted the episode because it seems to us an excellent example of the cleverness which is only cleverness, of the difference between original and imitative talent -- the disparity, which it is almost
We are happily not subject, in this (as to minor matters) much- emancipated land, to the tyranny of the three volumes; but we confess that we are nevertheless being rapidly urged
"Then there came a third flash. Manoeuvres of the most extraordinary kind were going on in the vast firmamental hollows overhead. The lightning now was the color of silver, and gleamed in the heavens like a mailed army. Rumbles became rattles. Gabriel, from his elevated position, could see over the landscape for at least half a dozen miles in front. Every hedge, bush, and tree was distinct as in a line engraving. In a paddock in the same direction was a herd of heifers, and the forms of these were visible at this moment in the act of galloping about in the wildest and maddest confusion, flinging their heels and tails high into the air, their heads to earth. A poplar in the immediate foreground was like an ink-stroke on burnished tin. Then the picture vanished, leaving a darkness so intense that Gabriel worked entirely by feeling with his hands."
Mr. Hardy describes nature with a great deal of felicity, and is evidently very much at home among rural phenomena. The most genuine thing in his book, to our sense, is a certain aroma of the meadows and lanes -- a natural relish for harvestings and sheep-washings. He has laid his scene in an agricultural county, and his characters are children of the soil -- unsophisticated country-folk. Bathsheba Everdene is a rural heiress, left alone in the world, in possession of a substantial farm. Gabriel Oak is her shepherd, Farmer Boldwood is her neighbor, and Sergeant Troy is a loose young soldier who comes a- courting her. They are all in love with her, and the young lady is a flirt, and encourages them all. Finally she marries the Sergeant, who has just seduced her maid-servant. The maid-servant dies in the work- house, the Sergeant repents, leaves his wife, and is given up for drowned. But he reappears and is shot by Farmer Boldwood, who delivers himself up to justice. Bathsheba then marries Gabriel Oak, who has loved
Nation, December 24,
1874
Augustus J. C. Hare (28)
Days Near Rome. By Augustus J. C. Hare. Two volumes. Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1875.
Both Mr. Hare's subject, which is one of the most charming possible, and the great popularity of his `Walks in Rome,' will assure his present work a general welcome. Ever since he had announced, in the preface to the `Walks,' that it was in preparation, we had been eagerly impatient for it; and, on the whole, we have not been disappointed. He depends rather more than may seem desirable on other people to convey his impressions, and rather less upon himself; that is, he is a compiler rather than a describer. His own powers of description, though not brilliant, are always agreeable, and he might with advantage more frequently trust to them. His present work is, with modifications, fashioned in the same manner as the `Walks'; the text constantly alternating with quotations from other writers. It was noticeable in the `Walks' that almost every one who had written with any conspicuity about anything else in the world, had also written something about Rome that could be made to pass muster as an "extract." The extracts were sometimes rather trivial, but taken together they made an extremely entertaining book. The outlying towns and districts of the old Papal Dominion have lain less in the beaten track of literature, and the process of collecting pertinent anecdotes, allusions, descriptions, must have been a good deal more laborious. Mr. Hare has followed a very happy line. His book is meant for the average Anglo-Saxon tourist, who is usually not brimming with native erudition, and he reproduces a great many things which are probably familiar to the learned (though of which even the learned can afford to be reminded), but in which most people will find much of the freshness of unsuspected lore. He is abundant (as is quite right) in his quotations from the Latin poets -- from Horace, Virgil, Ovid, and Juvenal. The smallest pretext for quoting from Horace -- the most quotable of the ancients -- should always be cultivated. For the rest, his tributaries have chiefly been the modern (English, German, and French) historians and antiquarians; to
The author has thoroughly explored the field, and left no mossy stone unturned which might reveal some lurking treasure of picturesqueness. The volume represents in this way no small amount of good-natured submission to dire discomfort. It is true that the inspiration and the reward were great, and that there is no bed one would not lie down upon, no tavern fare he would not contrive to swallow, for the sake of a few hours in such places as Norma and Ninfa, Anagno or Sutri. The Alban and Sabine, the Ciminian and Volscian hills, the romantic Abruzzi, the Pontine Marshes, the Etruscan treasures of Cervetri and Corneto, the nearer towns along the railway to Florence, the direction of the Neapolitan railway as far as Monte Cassino -- this great treasure-ground of antiquities and curiosities, of the picturesque in history, in scenery, in population, has been minutely inspected by Mr. Hare. Many of the places have long been among the regular excursions from Rome; others had to be discovered, to be reached in such scrambling fashion as might be, to be put into relation, after drowsy intervals, with the outer world. The author now tells us in detail the ways and means for following in his footsteps, and gives us valuable practical advice. He has made a great deal of delightful experience easier, but we hardly know whether to thank him. We see the mighty annual herd of tourists looming up behind him, and we sigh over the kindly obscurity that he has dispelled. It was thanks to their being down in no guide-book that he found many of the places he describes so charming; but he breaks the charm, even while he commemorates it, and he inaugurates the era of invasion. He has done a good work, but we should think that he must feel at times as if he had assumed a heavy responsibility. He makes in his opening pages a vivid and dismal
Nation, April 1, 1875
Mr. Hare has already earned the gratitude of tourists by his two elaborate compilations -- the `Walks in Rome' and the `Days Near Rome,' and the work before us will add largely to the obligations felt by that numerous class of travellers who find their Murray and their Bdeker dry and meagre, and yet have not time or means for making researches. If the `Cities of Italy' (like its immediate predecessor) is not such entertaining reading as the `Walks in Rome,' this is not the fault of the author, who appears to have been equally zealous and careful; it is explained simply by the fact that no place in Italy, and no combination of places, is so interesting as Rome, and that the fund of quotable matter which Mr. Hare had to draw from is in this case very much less rich. Every one who has written at all (and who at the same time has been a traveller) seemed, by the testimony of Mr. Hare's pages, to have recorded some impression or some memory of Rome, and the subject, for the moment at least, has always made the writers vivid and eloquent. It was therefore easy, comparatively speaking, to make up a book very largely of quotations. Mr. Hare still follows the same system -- that of giving himself the mere facts and directions, and letting some one else speak for him in matters of opinion and description. He has had some trouble, we imagine, in drumming up his authorities in the present case, and he has admitted a few rather ragged recruits. It is rather a shock to the discriminating reader's faith in his guide to find him offering us the spurious rhapsodies of
Mr. Hare's first volume treats of the Rivieras, Piedmont, and Lombardy; the second, of Venice, Bologna, the cities of the upper Adriatic, and those of Tuscany north of Florence; and the third, of Florence, the minor Tuscan cities, and those which lie along the road to Rome. All this is very complete and exhaustive, and the author has taken pains to acquaint himself with places that are rarely visited. We wish, indeed, that he had devoted to some of these obscurer lurking- places of the picturesque a portion of the large space he has allotted to Venice and Florence. Murray's hand-book for France contains no account of Paris, on the ground that it is so well described elsewhere; and on some such principle as this Mr. Hare might have neglected the cities we have mentioned in the interest of certain by-ways and unvisited nooks. Mr. Hare would be very sorry, however, to take example in any respect by Murray, for whom he appears to cherish a vigorous contempt. This sentiment is on some grounds well-deserved -- chiefly on that of the antiquated tone and exploded instructions of the great father of guide-books; but a generous tourist, it seems to us, should remember that Murray was a precursor in days when the tourist's lot was not so easy a one as now, and that he has smoothed the path for those who, thanks in a measure to his exertions, are in a position to cavil at him. But, as we say, Mr. Hare is extremely thorough -- his excursions to places so off the beaten track (and in one case indeed so inaccessible) as Bobbio and Canossa are good examples of his determination to be complete. His volumes have been to us an eloquent reminder of the inexhaustible charm and interest of Italy, and of her unequalled claims to our regard as the richest museum in the world. It may cost
Nation, May 10, 1876
Mr. Hare, in attempting to do for London what he had done for Rome, has produced a book that will be found very useful, and that, without having the charm of coloring of the `Walks in Rome,' will yet appear entertaining and readable even to persons not consulting it on the spot as a guide-book. We must add, however, that the exercise of a little finer sort of art might have made this lively compilation something better than a mere modified itinerary. Mr. Hare's descriptive powers are rather meagre, and he gives his readers fewer pictures by the way than might have been expected from a writer at once minutely familiar with London and addicted to observing the pictorial aspect of things. The author writes, indeed, as if he were but partially familiar with the great city by the Thames -- as if, in fact, he had not been much of a walker there. His book has a rather perfunctory and done-to- order air -- a quality much less apparent in the volumes of Messrs. Peter Cunningham and John Timbs, whom one feels to be genuine Londoners as well as antiquaries. But if Mr. Hare has "got up" his London, he has got it up very well, and to those American tourists who, on the long spring days, emerge from the by-ways of Piccadilly with an oppressive sense of long distances, accumulated cab-fares, and historic associations, he may be recommended as an edifying companion. About a place that has been so enormously lived
We have not the space here to tread in our author's footsteps, and we are afraid, we confess, that even the very appreciative American sight-seer, proposing to himself to grapple with the great commercial Babylon, will sometimes find his energy failing him. The modern tumult and uproar of the City, the daily press and jostle, are sadly hostile to contemplation. The spirit of historical enquiry is merged in the baser instinct of self-preservation. The love of research must be mighty within you to enable you to hold your ground for the purpose of staring at the front of a house in which a British Classic was born, when a death-dealing hansom-cab is bearing straight down upon you. It is only on Sunday, as Mr. Hare says, that you can really look at the City, and give yourself an idea of what it contains. Then, indeed, in the blank, empty streets, among the closed shops, with only the tall policemen stationed at intervals for landmarks, you may discover how much curious and interesting detail lurks amid the general duskiness and ugliness. It must be added, however, that no one will have a right to accuse you of bad taste if you succumb to the depressing influence of Sunday- morning street scenery. A Sunday's worth of London City vistas is not an entertainment to be lightly recommended. Among other discoveries, on such an occasion, you come to a sense of the very large number of the City churches, and of the fact that some of these structures have a good deal of architectural merit. Most of the time, with the great human tides surging in front of them, and their steeples lost in the week-day smoke and
Mr. Hare reconstructs in a measure "the great palaces of the Strand" -- the noble residences of immense proportions that once edged the water-side of the great westward thoroughfare. As regards the destruction of the last-removed of them (Northumberland House, at Charing Cross), he indulges in something like an imprecation. The present aspect of Charing Cross is certainly most discreditable; but we hardly agree with Mr. Hare that Northumberland House was a great architectural honor to London. It must have seemed to foreign visitors a sad proof of architectural poverty that this low, plain, meagrely- Jacobean structure should have been counted as a gem. The stiff-tailed little lion on top was always amusing; but the building itself did hardly more than contribute its part to the incongruous ineffectiveness of "the finest site in Europe," as Trafalgar Square has been properly enough called. The thought that in the Strand there were once other
That some such process is greatly needed we are vividly reminded as we turn those pages of Mr. Hare's book which treat of the West End. The author is very fond of the adjective "frightful," and in speaking of these regions -- regions in which a Baker Street and a Harley Street have become possible -- he has frequent opportunity to use it. There is, however, every reason to believe that in regard to architectural dreariness London has touched bottom and done its worst. Harley Street and Baker Street cannot, in their own peculiar way, be surpassed, and it is not likely they will be imitated. London is the most interesting city in the world, and is wonderfully well adapted for becoming the handsomest. The climate, the atmosphere, the manner in which a population of four millions reacts upon the natural local conditions, all contribute to the picturesqueness of the place. Nowhere is there such a play of light and shade, such a confusion of haze and cloud and smoke, such a mystery and variety of perspective. If all this is striking in an ugly London, what would it be in a stately and beautiful one? It will be seen that we speak appreciatively; our appreciation has been quickened by Mr. Hare's full and agreeable volumes.
Nation, June 20, 1878
Abraham Hayward (29)
Selected Essays. By A. Hayward, Esq., Q.C. 2 vols. London: Longmans; New York: Scribner & Welford, 1878.
The five volumes into which Mr. Hayward, at three different times, has gathered his contributions to the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews, are less known to the reading world than their great merits would have indicated. They had, we believe, but a narrow circulation, and they have ceased for some time to belong to things actual. The author was well advised, however, in undertaking a partial reissue of these unjustly neglected essays; and we are greatly mistaken if, at present, he does not find the public more alive to their very entertaining qualities. Mr. Hayward enjoys, it may not be impertinent to observe, a high degree of celebrity in the London world as a talker and a raconteur, and his essays bear the stamp of a man who, during half a century, has been familiar with the most noteworthy people and most interesting English society, and whose memory is an inexhaustible fund of anecdote and illustration. He has picked out here more than a dozen of the articles contained in his earlier volumes, and the readers of these will confess to a lively desire to make acquaintance with those he has omitted. Mr. Hayward's criticism is of the old-fashioned English sort -- not especially aesthetic or psychological; not going into fine shades or the more recently-invented grounds of appreciation; but very wholesome, lively, vigorous, and well-informed, and very rich in interesting allusion. The author's allusions are indeed the chief part of his work; for the most part he regards a book or a writer simply as a pretext for a succession of amusing stories. His volumes fairly bristle with what are called "good things," and the reader will not be likely to complain of unfamiliar anecdotes suggested by such names as Sidney Smith, Samuel Rogers, Friedrich von Gentz, Maria Edgeworth, Stendhal, Lady Palmerston, and Sir Henry Bulwer; or by such topics as the history of English parliamentary eloquence, the vicissitudes of great British families, and the differences and contrasts in English and French manners and morals.
The article on Sidney Smith is very appreciative and discriminiating,
Quite the best of all Mr. Hayward's essays seems to us to be the long account of Maria Edgeworth, based upon the
Nation, December 26,
1878
Sir Arthur Helps (30)
Social Pressure. By Sir Arthur Helps, K.C.B. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1875.
This volume from the pen of Sir Arthur Helps, the news of whose death has just come to us, is a characteristic and agreeable last bequest of its author. It belongs to the somewhat voluminous series of `Friends in Council,' of which the philosophy is not very deep, but, so far as it goes, very clear and very sound; the gayety, the humor, rather mild, but very constant, and in perfectly good taste. It is genial common-sense and intelligence, a trifle diluted, but not fatally so, applied to what we may call episodical questions -- secondary questions, questions by no means trivial, but not of the first importance. The number and variety of the questions which Sir Arthur Helps touches upon are very great; he has remarkable fertility of suggestion and invention. We must repeat, too, what we had occasion to say above, in our general characterization of him and of his works, that, if his sense is of the more strictly common-sense category, his style is decidedly above the common.
"If you ever make use of our essays and lucubrations," says one of Sir Arthur Helps's interlocutors, "take this as your title to them: `Social Pressure.' It is vague, sounds important, does not tell too much, and, at any rate, it keeps clear of politics. You need not say from where the pressure comes; each reader will suppose that it comes from himself." "I have often dared to think," says another, "what an advantage it would be to this country if Parliamentary discussions were put aside for two or three years, and the attention of the country were directed to administration. . . . Do you not agree with me that there is an enormous deal to be done in those branches of human effort which have nothing whatever to do with the redistribution of political power, with theological matters, or with any of those questions which are abundant in strife, and which produce very little improvement for the great masses of mankind?" The topics discussed by the "Friends" are for the most part chosen in accordance with this suggestion, although many of them are of a simply ethical sort. "That towns may be too large," on the one hand, and on the other
Nation, March 18,
1875
Rosamond and Florence Hill (31)
What We Saw in Australia. By Rosamond and Florence Hill. New York: Macmillan & Co., 1875.
This stout volume is an excellent book of its kind. It relates the adventures and observations of two maiden ladies who, in 1873, went out to Australia to visit some relatives, and took advantage of the occasion to gather a large amount of useful information. They are model travellers -- energetic, good-humored, appreciative, observant -- and they are also exemplary narrators. They are always exact and definite; they have evidently been zealous and careful in collecting their facts; and they are not afraid, on all occasions, to go into minute detail. The only drawback to their book, indeed, is that its pages are rather clogged with small particulars -- as, for instance, that in the Town Hall at Adelaide, "beneath each window and about eight feet from the floor there is a ventilator," or that, in Tasmania, having sent a message to the telegraph office, they found an hour later that it had not been despatched, and the clerk returned them their shilling -- a finale at which they "could not but feel highly satisfied." If Australia is not a picturesque country, it is not the fault of the Misses Hill, who make the most of their opportunities for entertainment, and express the liveliest admiration for the scenery of Mount Brown, Mount Remarkable, the Razor-Back Hills, the Murray River, and other local attractions. But their attention is chiefly devoted to the penal and penitentiary establishments, and their first visit on arriving in an Australian town is usually to the prison. Of these matters they have evidently made a special study, and are qualified to speak with authority; persons interested in similar enquiries will find in their book an abundance of facts and figures. The Misses Hill passed most of their time at Adelaide in South Australia, but afterwards went to Melbourne and Sydney, and, before returning home, paid a visit to Tasmania. They complain of the great ignorance which prevails in England as to Australian distances, and smile at the na vet with which people who have friends going to New Zealand commend them to the civility of other friends in Australia. Sydney is, by sea, 1,100
Nation, January 6,
1876
Anna Jameson (32)
Memoirs of Anna Jameson. By Geraldine Macpherson. London: Longmans; Boston: Roberts Bros., 1878.
This brief account of Mrs. Jameson's laborious career is very interesting and touching -- we use the latter word for two reasons. In the first place, Mrs. Jameson's life was one of effort and labor, although at the same time it was, in many ways, a life of enjoyment. Secondly, this volume is the composition of a much-loved niece, who spent the greater part of her own career in Rome. This lady collected the materials for her work and performed her task in the midst of sad personal tribulations -- poverty, illness, and bereavement; and she died while the little monument that she had erected to her aunt's perhaps slightly waning celebrity was on the point of being made public. The reader will not fail to regret that she should not have reaped the reward of her piety; for the thing had been a labor of love, and, as Mrs. Macpherson conceived, of justice to a memory cruelly disparaged by that very heavy-handed genius, Miss Martineau, in that lady's own lately-published memoirs. The book is written with a great deal of grace and skill, and strikes us as a model volume of its kind. It is the brief history of a long life devoted to art, literature, and friendship -- one of those frequent women's lives which are occupied, to the public sense, with the production of charming things, but which are in fact pervaded by sharp private trouble.
Mrs. Jameson's writings have, in these days of strongly accentuated literature, lost something of their point, and the most interesting pages in Mrs. Macpherson's volume will perhaps be found to be those which treat of her aunt's marriage and her singular relations with her husband. This was a very odd and unhappy episode, but the oddity almost exceeds the misery. Mr. Jameson died in Canada in 1854, and there had been no children of the marriage, so that one is able to speak of the husband, who occupied a post in the Canadian administration, with some frankness. He must have been a profoundly exasperating person -- a fact that became evident only four days after his marriage, when, on a certain rainy Sunday,
Nation, December 19,
1878
Frances Anne Kemble (33)
Record of a Girlhood. By Frances Anne Kemble. London: Bentley, 1878.
Of this work Americans have had the foretaste, under another title, in the Atlantic Monthly. To the series which there appeared, a good deal has now been added; by no means enough, however, to console the reader for his regret that the author should not have prolonged her chronicle and carried it into her riper years. The book is so charming, so entertaining, so stamped with the impress of a strong, remarkable, various nature, that we feel almost tormented in being treated to a view only of the youthful phases of the character. Like most of the novels that we read, or don't read, these volumes are the history of a young lady's entrance into life. Mrs. Kemble's young lady is a very brilliant and charming one, and our only complaint is that we part company with her too soon. It is a pity that her easy, natural, forcible descriptive powers, her vivid memory of detail, her spontaneous pathos and humor, should not have exercised themselves upon a larger experience. What we have here, however, is excellent reading, and as the author is always tolerably definite in her characterizations of people she has met, discretion perhaps justified her in confining herself to subjects not strictly contemporaneous. Mrs. Kemble's part in these volumes is admirably done; she is naturally a writer, she has a style of her own which is full of those felicities of expression that indicate the literary sense. But as regards the publication of her work she has evidently been irresponsible, and the publishers might have done better. It has received the very minimum of editing (by which we do not mean retouching or redistributing, but simply the material conversion of a MS. into a book). There are no headings to the pages or to the chapters, and anything in the nature of a table of contents or an index is conspicuous by its absence. The work has been brought out, in short, like a three-volume novel. Its substance, of course, is very theatrical, but by no means exclusively so. On the contrary, nothing is more striking than the fact that Fanny Kemble, in the midst of her youthful triumph, led a life entirely independent of the stage, and had personal and intellectual interests that
The serious side of the young actress's mind and the complete absence of any touch of Bohemianism in her personal situation make of the charming heroine of these pages a very original figure in the history of the stage. To produce such a figure certain influences were needed which are not likely soon to recur. Mrs. Kemble had the good fortune to issue from a remarkable race -- a race each of whose members appears to have had some striking or charming gift, were it only the personal beauty which was their most universal characteristic. She summed up in herself most of their salient qualities -- she came into the world with a great hereditary impetus. And then the English theatre at that time was a very different affair from now; it enjoyed a different sort of consideration. Actors and actresses took themselves seriously, and the public took them in the same fashion. The two great play-houses, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, enjoyed, in virtue of their "patents," a monopoly of the Shaksperean and classical drama, and to this end they were able to concentrate all the available talent and experience of the time. It is probable, therefore, that at these theatres the plays of the old repertory were acted with a general perfection of which, in our own time, we can form no idea. Charles Kemble was great as Mercutio; who in our own day is great as Mercutio? Who, even, can deliver the enchanting poetry of the part with tolerable spirit and grace? Mrs. Kemble's reminiscences bring back to us this happier time, as well as a great many other agreeable
We may add that this record is particularly interesting from what one may call a psychological point of view, on account of the singular anomaly it points out. Mrs. Kemble, during the years of her early histrionic triumphs, took no pleasure in the exercise of her genius. She went upon the stage from extrinsic considerations, and she never overcame a strong aversion to it. The talent, and the sort of activity that the talent involved, remained mutually unsympathetic. Given, in Mrs. Kemble's case, the remarkable proportions of the talent, the fact appears to be without precedent, though, if we are not mistaken, something akin to it is pointed out in the Memoirs of Macready. There have been people who could not act by many degrees so well as Mrs. Kemble who have had an incorrigible passion for the footlights; but we doubt whether there has been any one who, possessing so strongly the dramatic instinct, has had so little taste for the stage. The contradiction is interesting, and leads one to ask whether it takes a distinctly inferior mind to content itself with the dramatic profession. The thing is possible, though one hesitates to affirm it. We venture to say no more than that it is probable Miss Fanny Kemble would have been a more contented and ambitious actress, a more complete and business-like artist, if she had not been so generally intelligent and accomplished a young lady. She would have been happier if she could have been more "professional." But this contradiction is only a detail in the portrait of a very interesting character.
Nation, December 12, 1878
Mrs. Kemble used often to say of people who met her during the later years of her life, "No wonder they were surprised and bewildered, poor things -- they supposed
As it was not, however, the least interesting thing in her
Not the least of the sources of its impressiveness in her later years was the historic value attached to it -- its long backward reach into time. Even if Mrs. Kemble had been a less remarkable
She had figured in the old London world, which lived again in her talk and, to a great degree, in her habits and standards and tone. This background, embroidered with her theatrical past, so unassimilated, but so vivid in her handsome hereditary head and the unflagging drama of her manner, was helped by her agitated, unsettled life to make her what I have called historic. If her last twenty years were years of rest, it was impossible for an observer of them not to feel from how many things she was resting -- from how long a journey and how untempered a fate, what an expenditure of that rich personality which always moved all together and with all its violent force. Whatever it was, at any rate, this extraordinary mixture of incongruous things, of England and France in her blood, of America and England in her relationships, of the footlights and the glaciers in her activity, of conformity and contumacy in her character, and tragedy and comedy in her talk -- whatever it was, there was always this strangeness and this amusement for the fancy, that the beginning of it had been anything so disconnected as the elder Covent Garden, the Covent Garden of Edmund Kean (I find his name on a playbill of the year of her first appearance), and a tremendous success as Juliet in 1829. There was no convenient and handy formula for Mrs. Kemble's genius, and one had to take her career, the juxtaposition of her interests, exactly as one took her disposition, for a remarkably fine cluster of inconsistencies. But destiny had turned her out a Kemble, and had taken for granted of a Kemble certain things -- especially a theatre and a tone; in this manner she was enabled to present as fine an example as one could wish of submission to the general law at the sacrifice of every approach, not to freedom, which she never could forego, but to the superficial symmetry that enables critics to classify. This facility her friends enjoyed with her as little as they enjoyed some others; but it was a small drawback in the perception of that variety, the result of many endowments, which made other company by contrast alarmingly dull and yet left one always under the final impression of her sincerity. It was her character, in its generosity and sincerity, that was simple; it was her great gifts and her intelligence
Since it was indeed, however, as the daughter of the Kembles, the histrionic figure, the far-away girlish Juliet and Julia, that the world primarily regarded her and that her admirably mobile face and expressive though not effusive manner seemed, with however little intention, to present her, this side of her existence should doubtless be disposed of at the outset of any attempted sketch of her, even should such a sketch be confined by limits permitting not the least minuteness. She left it behind her altogether as she went, very early in life indeed, but her practice of theatrical things is a point the more interesting as it threw a strong light not only on many of those things themselves, but on the nature of her remarkable mind. No such mind and no such character were surely in any other case concerned with them. Besides having an extreme understanding of them, she had an understanding wholly outside of them and larger than any place they can fill; and if she came back to them in tone, in reminiscence, in criticism (she was susceptible to playhouse beguilement to her very latest years), it was a return from excursions which ought logically to have resulted in alienation. Nobody connected with the stage could have savored less of the "shop." She was a reactionary Kemble enough, but if she got rid of her profession she could never get rid of her instincts, which kept her dramatic long after she ceased to be theatrical. They existed in her, as her unsurpassable voice and facial play existed, independently of ambition or cultivation, of disenchantment or indifference. She never ceased to be amusing on the subject of that vivid face which was so much more scenic than she intended, and always declined to be responsible for her manner, her accents, her eyes. These things, apart from family ties, were her only link with the stage, which she had from the first disliked too much to have anything so submissive as a taste about it. It was a convenience for her which heredity made immediate, just as it was a convenience to write, offhand, the most entertaining books, which from the day they went to the publisher she never thought of again nor listened to a word about; books inspired by her spirits, really, the high
All these repudiations together, however, didn't alter the fact that when the author of these pages was a very small boy the reverberation of her first visit to the United States, though it had occurred years before, was still in the air: I allude to the visit of 1832, with her father, of which her first "Journal," published in 1835, is so curious, so amusing, and, with its singular testimony to the taste of the hour, so living a specimen. This early book, by the way, still one of the freshest pictures of what is called a "brilliant girl" that our literature possesses, justifies wonderfully, with its spontaneity and gayety, the sense it gives of variety and vitality, of easy powers and overtopping spirits, the great commotion she produced in her youth. Marie Bashkirtseff was in the bosom of the future, but as a girlish personality she had certainly been anticipated; in addition to which it may be said that a comparison of the two diaries would doubtless lead to considerations enough on the difference between health and disease. However this may be, one of the earliest things that I remember with any vividness is a drive in the country, near New York, in the course of which the carriage passed a lady on horseback who had stopped to address herself with some vivacity to certain men at work by the road. Just as we had got further one of my elders exclaimed to the other, "Why, it's Fanny Kemble!" and on my inquiring who was the bearer of this name, which fell upon my ear for the first time, I was informed that she was a celebrated actress. It was added, I think, that she was a brilliant reader of Shakespeare, though I am not certain that the incident occurred after she had begun her career of reading. The American cities, at any rate, were promptly filled with the glory of this career, so that there was a chance for me to be vaguely perplexed as to the bearing on the performance,
This was in London, and I remember even from such a distance of time every detail of the picture and every tone of her voice. The two readings -- one was of King Lear, the other of A Midsummer-Night's Dream -- took place in certain Assembly Rooms in St. John's Wood, which, in immediate contiguity to the Eyre Arms tavern, appear still to exist, and which, as I sometimes pass, I even yet never catch a glimpse of without a faint return of the wonder and the thrill. The choice of the place, then a "local centre," shows how London ways have altered. The reader dressed in black velvet for Lear and in white satin for the comedy, and presented herself to my young vision as a being of formidable splendor. I must have measured in some degree the power and beauty of her performance, for I perfectly recall the sense of irreparable privation with which a little later I heard my parents describe the emotion produced by her Othello, given at the old Hanover Square Rooms and to which I had not been conducted. I have seen both the tragedy and the "Dream" acted several times since then, but I have always found myself waiting vainly for any approach to the splendid volume of Mrs. Kemble's "Howl, howl, howl!" in the one, or to the animation and variety that she contributed to the other. I am confident that the most exquisite of fairy-tales never was such a "spectacle" as when she read, I was going to say mounted, it. Is this reminiscence of the human thunder-roll that she produced in Lear in some degree one of the indulgences with which we treat our childhood? I think not, in the light of
It is always a torment to the later friends of the possessor of a great talent to have to content themselves with the supposition and the hearsay; but in Mrs. Kemble's society there were precious though casual consolations for the treacheries of time. She was so saturated with Shakespeare that she had made him, as it were, the air she lived in, an air that stirred with his words whenever she herself was moved, whenever she was agitated or impressed, reminded or challenged. He was indeed her utterance, the language she spoke when she spoke most from herself. He had said the things that she would have wished most to say, and it was her greatest happiness, I think, that she could always make him her obeisance by the same borrowed words that expressed her emotion. She was as loyal to him -- and it is saying not a little -- as she was to those most uplifted Alps which gave her the greater part of the rest of her happiness and to which she paid her annual reverence with an inveteracy, intensely characteristic, that neither public nor private commotions, neither revolutions nor quarantines, neither war nor pestilence nor floods, could disconcert. Therefore one came in for many windfalls, for echoes and refrains, for snatches of speeches and scenes. These things were unfailing illustrations of the great luxury one had been born to miss. Moreover, there were other chances -- the chances of anecdote, of association, and that, above all, of her company at the theatre, or rather on the return from the theatre, to which she often went, occasions when, on getting, after an interval of profound silence, to a distance -- never till then -- some train of quotation and comparison was kindled. As all roads lead to Rome, so all humor and all pathos, all
Twice again, after these juvenile evenings I have permitted myself to recall, I had the opportunity of hearing her read whole plays. This she did repeatedly, though she had quitted public life, in one or two American cities after the civil war; she had never been backward in lending such aid to "appeals," to charitable causes, and she had a sort of American patriotism, a strange and conditioned sentiment of which there is more to be said, a love for the United States which was a totally different matter from a liking, and which, from 1861 to 1865, made her throb with American passions. She returned to her work to help profusely the Sanitary Commission or some other deserving enterprise that was a heritage of the war-time. One of the plays I speak of in this connection was The Merchant of Venice, the other was Henry V. No Portia was so noble and subtle as that full-toned Portia of hers -- such a picturesque great lady, such a princess of poetry and comedy. This circumstance received further light on an occasion -- years afterwards, in London -- of my going to see the play with her. If the performance had been Shakespearean there was always an epilogue that was the real interest of the evening -- a beautiful rally, often an exquisite protest, of all her own instinct, in the brougham, in the Strand, in the Brompton Road. Those who sometimes went with her to the play in the last years of her life will remember the Juliets, the Beatrices, the Rosalinds whom she could still make vivid without an accessory except the surrounding London uproar. There was a Beatrice in particular, one evening, who seemed to have stepped with us into the carriage in pursuance of her demonstration that this charming creature, all rapidity and resonance of wit, should ring like a silver bell. We might have been to the French comedy -- the sequel was only the more interesting, for, with her love of tongues and her ease in dealing with them, her gift of tone was not so poor a thing as to be limited to her own language. Her own language indeed was a plural number; French rose to her lips as quickly and as racily as English, and corresponded to the strong strain she
This imagination Mrs. Kemble, as was even more the case with her eminent sister, had in abundance; her conversation jumped gayly the Chinese wall, and if she "didn't like foreigners" it was not, as many persons can attest, because she didn't understand them. She declared of herself, freely -- no faculty for self-derision was ever richer or droller -- that she was not only intensely English, but the model of the British Philistine. She knew what she meant, and so assuredly did her friends; but somehow the statement was always made in French; it took her foreignness to support it: "Ah, vous savez, je suis Anglaise, moi - - la plus Anglaise des Anglaises!" That happily didn't prevent the voice of Mademoiselle Mars from being still in her ear, nor, more importunately yet, the voice of the great Rachel, nor deprive her of the ability to awaken these wonderful echoes. Her memory was full of the great speeches of the old French drama, and it was in her power especially to console, in free glimpses, those of her interlocutors who languished under the sorrow of having come too late for Camille and Hermione. The moment at which, however, she remembered Rachel's deep voice most gratefully was that of a certain grave "Bien, tr s bien!" dropped by it during a private performance of The Hunchback, for a charity, at Bridgewater House, I think, when the great actress, a spectator, happened to be seated close to the stage, and the Julia, after
I have mentioned that Henry V. was the last play I heard her read in public, and I remember a declaration of hers that it was the play she loved best to read, better even than those that yielded poetry more various. It was gallant and martial and intensely English, and she was certainly on such evenings the "Anglaise des Anglaises" she professed to be. Her splendid tones and her face, lighted like that of a war-goddess, seemed to fill the performance with the hurry of armies and the sound of battle; as in her rendering of A Midsummer-Night's Dream, so the illusion was that of a multitude and a pageant. I recall the tremendous ring of her voice, somewhat diminished as it then was, in the culminating "God for Harry, England, and
Her manner of dealing with her readings was the despair of her agents and managers, whom she profoundly commiserated, whom she vividly imitated, and who, in their wildest experience of the "temperament of genius" and the oddities of the profession, had never encountered her idiosyncrasies. It threw, indeed, the strongest light upon the relation in which her dramatic talent, and the faculty that in a different nature one would call as a matter of course her artistic sense stood to the rest of her mind, a relation in which such powers, on so great a scale, have probably never but in that single instance found themselves. On the artistic question, in short,
Like all passionate workers, Mrs. Kemble had her own convictions about the public taste, and those who knew her, moreover, couldn't fail to be acquainted with the chapter -- it was a large one -- of her superlative Quixotisms. During her American visits, before the war, she would never read in the Southern States: it was a part of the consistency with which
She was artistically, I think, a very fine anomaly, and, in relation to the efficacity of what may be called the natural method, the operation of pure sincerity, a witness no less interesting than unconscious. An equally active and fruitful love of beauty was probably never accompanied with so little technical curiosity. Her endowment was so rich, her spirit so proud, her temper so high, that, as she was an immense success, they made her indifference and her eccentricity magnificent. From what she would have been as a failure the imagination averts its face; and if her only receipt for "rendering" Shakespeare was to live with him and try to be worthy of him, there are many aspirants it would not have taken far on the way. Nor would one have expected it to be the precursor of performances masterly in their finish. Such simplicities were easy to a person who had Mrs. Kemble's organ, her presence, and her rare perceptions. I remember going many years ago, in the United States, to call on her in company with a lady who had borrowed from her a volume containing one of Calderon's plays translated by Edward Fitzgerald. This lady had brought the book back, and knowing her sufficiently well (if not sufficiently ill!) to venture to be pressing, expressed her desire that she should read us one of the great Spaniard's finest passages. Mrs. Kemble, giving reasons, demurred, but finally suffered herself to be persuaded. The scene struck me at the time, I remember, as a reproduction of some anecdotic picture I had carried in my mind of the later days of Mrs. Siddons -- Mrs. Siddons reading Milton in her mob-cap and spectacles. The sunny drawing-room in the country, the morning fire, the "Berlin wools" of the hostess and her rich old-English quality, which always counted double beyond the seas, seemed in a manner a reconstitution, completed, if I am not mistaken, by the presence of Sir Thomas Lawrence's magnificent portrait of her grandmother,
It was just as much and just as little in her talk, scarcely less than her dramatic faculty a part of her fine endowment and, indeed, scarcely at all to be distinguished from it. Her conversation opened its doors wide to all parts of her mind, and all expression, with her, was singularly direct and immediate. Her great natural resources put a premium, as it were, on expression, so that there might even have been ground for wondering to what exaggeration it would have tended had not such perfect genuineness been at the root. It was exactly this striking natural form, the channel open to it, that made the genuineness so unembarrassed. Full as she was, in reflection, of elements that might have excluded each other, she was at the same time, socially and in action, so much of one piece, as the phrase is, that her different gifts were literally portions of each other. As her talk was part of her drama, so, as I have intimated, her writing was part of her talk. It had the same free sincerity as her conversation, and an equal absence of that quality which may be called in social intercourse diplomacy and in literature preoccupation or even ambition or even vanity. It cannot often have befallen her in her long life to pronounce the great word Culture -- the sort of term she invariably looked at askance; but she had acted in the studious spirit without knowing that it had so fine a name. She had always lived with books and had the habit and, as it were, the hygiene of them; never, moreover (as a habit would not have been hers without some odd intensity), laying down a volume that she had begun, or failing to read any that was sent her or lent her. Her friends were often witnesses of heroic, of monstrous feats of this kind. "I read everything that is given me, except the newspaper -- and from beginning to end," she was wont to say with that almost touching docility
Her prose and her poetical writings are alike unequal; easily the best of the former, I think, are the strong, insistent, one-sided "Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation" (the most valuable account -- and as a report of strong emotion scarcely less valuable from its element of parti-pris -- of impressions begotten by that old Southern life which we are too apt to see to-day as through a haze of Indian summer), and the copious and ever-delightful "Records of a Girlhood" and "Records of Later Life," which form together one of the most animated autobiographies in the language. Her poetry, all passionate and melancholy and less prized, I think, than it deserves, is perfectly individual and really lyrical. Much of it is so off-hand as to be rough, but much of it has beauty as well as reality, such beauty as to make one ask one's self (and the question recurs in turning the leaves of almost any of her books) whether her aptitude for literary expression had not been well worth her treating it with more regard. That she might have cared for it more is very certain -- only as certain, however, as it is doubtful if any circumstances could have made her care. You can neither take vanity from those who have it nor give it to those who have it not. She really cared only for things higher and finer and fuller and happier than the shabby compromises of life, and the polishing of a few verses the more or the less would never have given her the illusion of the grand style. The matter comes back, moreover, to the terrible question of "art"; it is difficult after all to see where art can be squeezed in when you have such a quantity of nature. Mrs. Kemble would have said that she had all of hers on her hands. A certain rude justice presides over our affairs, we have to select and to pay, and artists in general are rather spare and thrifty folk. They give up for their security a great deal that Mrs. Kemble never could give up; security was her dream, but it remained her dream: practically she passed her days in peril. What she had in verse was not only the lyric impulse but the genuine lyric need; poetry, for her, was one of those moral conveniences of which I have spoken and which she took where she found them. She made a very honest use of it, inasmuch as it expressed for her what nothing else could express -- the inexpugnable, the fundamental, the boundless and generous sadness which lay beneath her vitality,
Twice only, after her early youth, she tried the sort of experiment that is supposed most effectually to liberate the mind from the sense of its own troubles -- the literary imagination of the troubles of others. She published, in 1863, the fine, sombre, poetical, but unmanageable play called An English Tragedy (written many years previous); and at the age of eighty she, for the first time, wrote and put forth a short novel. The latter of these productions, "Far Away and Long Ago," shows none of the feebleness of age; and besides the charm, in form, of its old decorous affiliation (one of her friends, on reading it, assured her in perfect good faith that she wrote for all the world like Walter Scott), it is a twofold example of an uncommon felicity. This is, on the one hand, to break ground in a new manner and so gracefully at so advanced an age (did any one else ever produce a first fiction at eighty?), and on the other, to revert successfully, in fancy, to associations long outlived. Interesting, touching must the book inevitably be, from this point of view, to American readers. There was nothing finer in Mrs. Kemble's fine mind than the generous justice of which she was capable (as her knowledge grew, and after the innocent impertinences of her girlish "Journal") to the country in which she had, from the first, found troops of friends and intervals of peace as well as depths of disaster. She had a mingled feeling and a sort of conscientious strife about it, together with a tendency to handle it as gently with one side of her nature as she was prompted to belabor it with the other. The United States
Compromised by looseness of construction, it has nevertheless such beauty and pathos as to make us wonder why, with her love of poetry (which she widely and perpetually quoted) and her hereditary habit of the theatre, she should not oftener have tried her strong hand at a play. This reflection is particularly suggested by a sallow but robust pamphlet which lies before me, with gilt edges and "Seventh Edition" stamped in large letters on its cover; an indication doubly significant in connection with the words "Five shillings and sixpence" (a very archaic price for the form) printed at the bottom. "Miss Fanny Kemble's Tragedy," Francis the First, was acted, with limited success indeed, in the spring of 1832, and afterwards published by Mr. John Murray. She appeared herself, incongruously, at the age of twenty-three, as the queen-mother, Louisa of Savoy (she acted indeed often at this time with her father parts the most mature); and the short life of the play, as a performance, does not seem to have impaired the circulation of the book. Much ventilated in London lately has been the question of the publication of acted plays; but even those authors who have hoped most for the practice have probably not hoped for seventh editions. It was to some purpose that she had been heard to describe herself as having been in ancient days "a nasty scribbling girl." I know not how many editions were attained by The Star of Seville, her other youthful
Any brief account of a character so copious, a life so various, is foredoomed to appear to sin by omissions; and any attempt at coherence is purchased by simplifications unjust, in the eyes of observers, according to the phase or the period with which such observers happen to have been in contact. If, as an injustice less positive than some others, we dwell, in speaking to unacquainted readers, on Mrs. Kemble's "professional" career, we seem to leave in the shade the other, the personal interest that she had for an immense and a constantly renewed circle and a whole later generation. If we hesitate to sacrifice the testimony offered by her writings to the vivacity of her presence in the world, we are (besides taking a tone that she never herself took) in danger of allotting a minor place to that social charm and more immediate empire which might have been held in themselves to confer eminence and lift the individual reputation into the type. These certainly were qualities of the private order; but originality is a question of degree, and the higher degrees carry away one sort of barrier as well as another. It is vain to talk of Mrs. Kemble at all, if we are to lack assurance in saying, for those who had not the privilege of knowing her as well as for those who had, that she was one of the rarest of women. To insist upon her accomplishments is to do injustice to that human largeness which was the greatest of them all, the one by which those who admired her most knew her best. One of the forms, for instance, taken by the loyalty she so abundantly inspired was an ineradicable faith in her being one of the first and most original of talkers. To that the remembering listener returns as on the whole, in our bridled race, the fullest measure and
These years of rest were years of anecdote and eloquence and commentary, and of a wonderful many-hued retrospective lucidity. Her talk reflected a thousand vanished and present things; but there were those of her friends for whom its value was, as I have hinted, almost before any other documentary. The generations move so fast and change so much that Mrs. Kemble testified even more than she affected to do, which was much, to antique manners and a closed chapter of history. Her conversation swarmed with people and with criticism of people, with the ghosts of a dead society. She had, in two hemispheres, seen every one and known every one, had assisted at the social comedy of her age. Her own habits and traditions were in themselves a survival of an era less democratic and more mannered. I have no room for enumerations, which moreover would be invidious; but the old London of her talk -- the direction I liked it best to take -- was in particular a gallery of portraits. She made Count d'Orsay familiar, she made Charles Greville present; I thought it wonderful that she could be anecdotic about Miss Edgeworth. She reanimated the old drawing-rooms, relighted the old lamps, retuned the old pianos. The finest comedy of all, perhaps, was that of her own generous whimsicalities. She was
The Alpine guides loved her -- she knew them all, and those for whom her name offered difficulties identified her charmingly as "la dame qui va chantant par les montagnes." She had sung, over hill and dale, all her days (music was in her blood); but those who had not been with her in Switzerland while she was still alert never knew what admirable nonsense she could talk, nor with what originality and gayety she could invite the spirit of mirth, flinging herself, in the joy of high places, on the pianos of mountain inns, joking, punning, botanizing, encouraging the lowly and abasing the proud, making stupidity everywhere gape (that was almost her mission
But it was not these frank humors that most distinguished her, nor those legendary brusqueries into which her flashing quickness caused her to explode under visitations of dulness and density, which, to save the situation, so often made her invent, for arrested interlocutors, retorts at her own expense to her own sallies, and which, in her stall at the theatre, when comedy was helpless and heavy, scarcely permitted her (while she instinctively and urgingly clapped her hands to a faster
"Love, joy and hope, honor and happiness,
And all that life could precious count beside,
Together sank into one dire abyss.
Think you there was too much of any pride
To fill so deep a pit, a gap so wide,
Sorrow of such a dismal wreck to hide,
And shame of such a bankruptcy's excess?
Oh, friend of many lonely hours, forbear
The sole support of such a weight to chide!
It helps me all men's pity to abide,
Less beggar'd than I am still to appear,
An aspect of some steadfastness to wear,
Nor yet how often it has bent confess
Beneath the burden of my wretchedness!"
It is not this last note, however, that any last word about her must sound. Her image is composed also of too many fairer and happier things, and in particular of two groups of endowment, rarely found together, either of which would have made her interesting and remarkable. The beauty of her deep and serious character was extraordinarily brightened and colored by that of her numerous gifts, and remains splendidly lighted by the memory of the most resonant and most personal of them all.
Temple Bar, April 1893
Reprinted in Essays in London and Elsewhere,
1893
Charles Kingsley (34)
Hereward, the Last of the English. By Charles Kingsley. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1866.
Mr. Kingsley has written nothing better than this recital of the adventures of Hereward, son of the famous Lady Godiva of Coventry, and the "grim earl," Leofric, her husband -- who as a boy, under King Edward the Confessor, was outlawed, as too hard a case for his parents to manage; who took service with foreign princes and turned sea-rover on his own account; who was the last of the Berserkers and the first of the knights-errant; who performed unparalleled feats of valor and of cunning; who on the Duke of Normandy's invasion of England felt himself, in spite of his outlawry, still an Englishman at heart, sailed over to England, and collected an army to contest the Norman rights; who contested them long and bravely, in the fen-country of Lincolnshire, but at last found the invaders too many for him and was driven for a subsistence to the greenwood, where he set the fashion to Robin Hood and the dozen other ballad-heroes whom the author enumerates; who under his reverses grew cold and faithless to the devoted wife whom he had married out of Flanders, and who had followed his fortunes over land and sea; who, repudiating Torfrida, thought to patch up his prospects by a base union with a Norman princess, for whom he had cherished an earlier but an unworthy passion, and by a tardy submission to the new king; but who at last, disappointed, humiliated, demoralized by idleness, fell a victim, in his stalwart prime, to the jealousy of the Norman knights.
Mr. Kingsley's hero, as the reader sees, is an historical figure, duly celebrated in the contemporary and other chronicles, Anglo- Saxon and Norman. How many of his adventures are fiction does not here signify, inasmuch as they were destined to become fiction in Mr. Kingsley's novel; and, as the elements of a novel by a man of genius, become animated with a more lively respectability than could ever accrue to them as parcels of dubious history. For his leading points, Mr. Kingsley abides by his chroniclers, who, on their side,
It has been hinted how "Hereward" turns out a coward. After a long career of generous hacking and hewing, of the most heroic brutalities and the most knightly courtesies, he finds himself face to face with one of the homely trials of private life. He is tired of his wife, who has lost her youth and her beauty in his service, and he is tempted by another woman who has been keeping both for him through all the years of his wanderings. To say, shortly, that he puts away his wife and marries his unworthy temptress would be to do him injustice. This is what he comes to, indeed; but, before judging him, we must learn in Mr. Kingsley's pages how naturally he does so. Hereward is an instance of that "demoralization" by defeat of which we have heard so much within the last five years. He is purely and simply a fighting man, and with his enormous fighting capacity he may not unfitly be taken to represent, on a reduced scale, the susceptibilities of a whole modern army. When, at last, his enemies outnumber him, he loses heart and, by a very simple process, becomes good for nothing. This process -- the gradual corrosion in idleness of a practical mind of the heroic type -- is one which Mr. Kingsley is very well qualified to trace; and although he has troubled himself throughout very little with the psychology of his story, and has told it as much as possible in the simple objective tone of the old chroniclers to whom he so constantly refers, he has yet, thanks to the moralizing habit which he is apparently quite unable entirely to renounce, given us a very pretty insight into poor Hereward's feelings.
It is the absence of the old attempt at philosophy and at the writing of history which makes the chief merit of "Hereward" as compared with the author's other tales. Certain merits Mr. Kingsley has in splendid fulness, but the metaphysical faculty is not one of them; and yet in every one of his writings hitherto there has been a stubborn philosophical pretension. There is a certain faculty of story-telling as complete and, used in no matter what simplicity, as legitimate and honorable as any other; and this gift is Mr. Kingsley's. But it has been his constant ambition to yoke it with the procedure of
Nation, January 25, 1866
With Charles Kingsley, who died in England on Sunday, has passed away one of the most widely known English writers of the present time. Mr. Kingsley, although not an old man at his death -- he was in his fifty-sixth year -- had in a measure outlived his earlier fame; but those who recall the literary events of twenty years ago will remember the appearance of his three or four novels -- his chief title to remembrance -- as not the least important among them. Mr. Kingsley had indeed not only outlived his earlier fame, he had even in some degree damaged and discredited it; and yet it may be said that `Westward Ho!' and `Hypatia' have not suffered by their kinship to their less happily begotten brothers. Their author was a striking example of a man who had a certain limited message to deliver -- whose cup was filled, at the most, but halfway up to the brim. While the prime impulse lasted the result was admirable, so much so that one who vividly remembers it and who was at the time getting his initiation into the literature of the day, has to make an effort to write of it at all judicially; but its days were numbered, and, though the cup was still offered for our entertainment and edification, one felt that the contents had been diluted and that the liquid had but a vague taste of its early potency. Mr. Kingsley played a number of parts, and his career was a busy one. If one wished to mention his most comprehensive rle, one would of course allude to him as the exponent of "muscular Christianity." We are not able to say whether he invented the term, but practically he did most to propagate it. In this direction -- and in this one only -- Mr. Kingsley founded a school and exerted a sensible influence. The influence in many ways was for great good, and it is not the fault of the author of `Westward Ho' and `Yeast' if `Guy Living
It often seemed to us regrettable that Mr. Kingsley was not either a good deal more or a good deal less of a serious writer. His didactic effort, in its later developments, such as his Lectures on Modern History at the University of Cambridge, was sufficient to obstruct his imagination, but not in itself of any great illuminating force. As a reasoner, and indeed as a moralist, Mr. Kingsley was very weak, and he had been so strong as a story-teller before he assumed these responsibilities, that his old admirers always bore him, in his other capacity, an obstinate grudge. A capital novelist was spoiled to make a very indifferent historian. Six months
Nation, January 28, 1875
Mrs. Kingsley has given proof, in this voluminous compilation, of no little zeal and industry. It is hardly more than a year and a half since Charles Kingsley died, but she has found time to collect a very large number of letters and other papers, to obtain testimonials of various kinds to the merits of the late Canon of Westminster, to make copious extracts from his sermons, tracts, and other writings, and to connect these things together by a considerable amount of agreeably- written narrative. We may say at the outset that the work seems to us much too long. When the plan is followed of giving not only the letters written by the subject of a memoir, but the letters that he received, and of transferring page upon page of his published works, the writing of biography threatens to assume proportions which may well alarm a very busy age. Mrs. Kingsley has reprinted too many of her husband's sermons -- a course which has not enlivened her pages. We may add that they would have gained also by the suppression
This record of the life of the founder of "Muscular Christianity" will strongly confirm the impression that he produced personally and through his writings, and will be found to contain matter of much pertinence, both for that numerous class of readers who regarded him as something of a prophet and for those others upon whom his effect was less gratefully irritating. It is not in any high degree the record of a literary life; we may almost say that it is hardly the record of an intellectual life. People who have wondered how it was that the author of `Hypatia' and `Westward Ho' should not have had in him the writing of more books as good, will, on reading these pages, rather be moved to wonder that even these admirable novels were produced. They were the exceptions; other things, and very different things, were the rule. Charles Kingsley was all his days a hard-working country parson, much devoted to the moral and the practical features of his office: to keeping down gin-shops, establishing "penny-readings," improving sanitary conditions, organizing and regulating charities, and preaching matter-of-fact sermons. In addition to this he was much addicted to harmless sports and to physical science. He was a passionate angler, an ardent botanist, geologist, and marine zologist. As regards his own personal "muscularity," we must add, however, Mrs. Kingsley rather tones down the picture. He never went out with a gun, and he could not be called a "fox-hunting parson." His means did not allow him to be brilliantly mounted, and as he preferred not to ride poor horses, he rode rarely. But the inclination was not wanting. He had a great deal of imagination, but he appears in early life to have worked off its fermenting
That Mrs. Kingsley is a thorough biographer may be inferred from the fact that she gives us sermons and poems written at the age of four years and of four years and eight months, respectively. For this period of life these compositions are even more remarkable than those which followed them in the author's maturity. Much of his childhood was passed upon that beautiful Devonshire coast which he has commemorated in `Westward Ho' and `Two Years Ago,' where his father, who had entered the church late in life, after a somewhat worldly career, was clergyman. He was educated at first at King's College, London, whence he went up to Cambridge. Immediately after graduating he entered the church, and became curate at Eversley, in Hampshire, where, two years later, the living falling vacant, he was promoted to the rectorship, and where the greater part of his life was
"To-day it is hotter than yesterday, if possible; so I wandered out into the fields and have been passing the morning in a lonely woodland bath -- a little stream that trickles off the moor, with the hum of bees and the sleepy song of birds around me, and the feeling of the density of life in myriads of insects and flowers strong upon me, drinking in all the forms of beauty which lie in the leaves and pebbles and mossy nooks of damp tree roots, and all the lovely intricacies of nature which no one stoops to see. . . . And over all, as the cool water trickled on, hovered the delicious sense of childhood and simplicity and purity and peace." . . . Elsewhere he says: ". . . The body is the temple of
Of those opinions and sympathies which produced `Alton Locke,' and which were further expressed in many contributions to three or four of the small socialist periodicals generated by the Chartist agitation of 1848 and the years immediately following, and in various tracts and pamphlets, Mrs. Kingsley gives a full and candid account. This period was the high-water mark of Kingsley's liberalism, and there is something very fine in the completeness of his self-surrender to a cause which, though popular in the literal sense of the word, was fatally unpopular in another and would have seemed quite of a nature to blight, by contact, the future prospects of a clergyman of the Church of England. Kingsley burnt his ships; he threw himself into the Chartist movement in order to check it and regulate it -- in order to get near to the working-classes and make himself heard by them. The impulse was generous and disinterested, but from our present standpoint the whole affair wears the look of a small playing at revolution. The Chartists were not real revolutionists, and Charles Kingsley and his friends were not real radicals. There is something patronizing and dilettantish in Mr. Kingsley's relations with his obscure protgs; it is always the tone of the country parson who lives in an ivied rectory with a pretty lawn. Those who have a sense of the dark, subterraneous forces of English misery will hardly repress a smile at those letters upon "Giovanni Bellini," "The British Museum,"
Mrs. Kingsley says that her husband was for a long time under a cloud, in society and in the church, in consequence of the part he played in these years; and it would perhaps be interesting to trace the process by which he emerged from the shade into the comfortable glow of some of his later preferments
Nation, January 25,
1877
Henry Kingsley (35)
The Hillyars and the Burtons: A Story of Two Families. By Henry Kingsley. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1865.
Mr. Henry Kingsley may be fairly described as a reduced copy of his brother. He lacks, indeed, many of his brother's gifts; especially that tone of authority which the Rev. Charles Kingsley derives from his connection with the Church and the University. He cherishes, publicly, at least, no original theory of history. He has less talent, to begin with; and less knowledge, to end with. But he is nevertheless, as perhaps indeed for these very reasons, a capital example of the pure Kingsley spirit. In him we see the famous muscular system of morality presented in its simplest form, disengaged from the factitious graces of scholarship. Our feeling for Mr. Henry Kingsley, for which under other circumstances we could not positively vouch, is almost kindled into gratitude when we consider the good service he has rendered the rising generation in divesting the name of Kingsley of its terror. As long as Mr. Charles Kingsley wrote about the age of Elizabeth and the age of Hypatia, and exercised his powerful and perverse imagination upon the Greeks of the fifth century and the Englishmen of the sixteenth, those young persons who possessed only the common-school notions of the rise of Protestantism and the fall of Paganism had nothing to depend upon during their slow convalescence from the Kingsley fever -- which we take to be a malady natural to youth, like the measles or the scarlatina, leaving the subject much stronger and sounder -- but a vague uncomfortable sensation of the one-sidedness of their teacher. Those persons, on the other hand, who had inquired for themselves into the manners of the Elizabethan era, discovered, what they had all along expected, that both Mr. Kingsley's Englishmen and his Spaniards, although in a certain way wonderfully life-like, were yet not the characters of history; that these persons were occupied with far other thoughts than that of posing for the confusion of the degenerate Anglo-Saxons of the present day; that they were infinitely brutal, indeed, and sentimental in their own fashion; but that this fashion was very unlike Mr.
The author of the volume before us tells us in a brief preface that his object has been to paint the conflict between love and duty in the breast of an uneducated girl, who, after a year and a half at boarding-school, "might have developed into a very noble lady." He adds that this question of the claims of duty as opposed to love is one which, "thanks to the nobleness of our women," is being continually put before us. To what women the possessive pronoun refers is left to conjecture: but judging from the fact than whenever the Messrs. Kingsley speak of the human race in general they mean their own countrymen in particular, we may safely apply it to the daughters of England. But however this may be, the question in point is one which, in spite of Mr. Kingsley's preface, and thanks to his incompetency to tell a straight story, is not put before us here. We are treated to nothing so beautiful, so simple, or so interesting. Does the author really believe that any such severe intention is discernible among his chaotic, inartistic touches? We can hardly think that he does; and yet, if he does not, his preface is inconceivably impudent. It is time that this fashion were done away with, of tacking a subject upon your story on the eve of publication. As long as Mr. Kingsley's book has a subject, what matters it whether it be outside of the story or inside? The story is composed on the plan of
The main object of the novels of Mr. Charles Kingsley and his brother has seemed to us to be to give a strong impression of what they would call "human nobleness." Human nobleness, when we come across it in life, is a very fine thing; but it quite loses its flavor when it is made so cheap as it is made in these works. It is emphatically an occasional quality; it is not, and, with all due respect for the stalwart Englishmen of Queen Elizabeth's time and eke of Queen Victoria's, it never was the prime element of human life, nor were its headquarters at any time on the island of Great Britain. By saying it is an occasional quality, we simply mean that it is a great one, and is therefore manifested in great and exceptional moments. In the ordinary course of life it does not come into
A great French critic recently characterized Mr. Carlyle in a sentence which we are confident he did not keep for what we have called the noble school of fiction, the muscular system
Nation, July 6, 1865
Thomas Laurence Kington-Oliphant (36)
The Duke and the Scholar, and Other Essays. By T. L. Kington- Oliphant, M.A. New York: Macmillan & Co., 1875.
Readers of French literature during the last thirty years have often encountered the name of the Duc de Luynes as of a person at whose expense this or that splendid literary or archaeological enterprise has been carried forward, and have received an impression that, in a shadowy fashion, the tradition of Maecenas and of Cosmo de' Medici was still preserved. Visitors to the National Library in Paris will not have forgotten the magnificent collection of medals and bronzes in rooms inscribed with the Duke's name, and how they wondered at the wealth which could afford to gather it, and then could afford to part with it. Mr. Kington-Oliphant offers us here a short biography of this generous nobleman, in which his claims to the gratitude of historical students are set forth in detail. This memoir is mainly translated from a notice of the Duc de Luynes published by a modest but exemplary scholar who worked largely under his encouragement -- M. Huillard-Brholles, of whom also Mr. Kington-Oliphant gives an interesting account. The Duc de Luynes combined many attributes which are not often found together, and which, when they concur, seem the justification of a patriciate. He not only had the means for disinterested research, but he had an enlightened curiosity and a scrupulous scientific conscience. What he desired was not to patronize learning in a striking way, but in a way for which the truly initiated, the modest toilers, would be grateful. He belonged to a type of nobleman which is seen perhaps less frequently in France than in England, but which is not common anywhere. He was that rare phenomenon, a rich scholar, and he not only encouraged good work in others, but he produced it himself. Mr. Oliphant, himself an historical student, and in a position to appreciate the Duke's services to certain periods of history, enumerates his publications, researches, collections, antiquarian expeditions. He was born in 1802; he died in 1867. He was at most points a liberal Conservative, in others a narrow one. He was an uncompromising enemy
Among the works of learning executed at the Duke's expense was a translation of the chronicle of Matthew Paris, in nine volumes. Another and a greater was a collection of all the surviving documents, charters, memorials, and letters connected with the reign of the great Emperor Frederic II. For these labors, and many more of the same kind (the one we have just mentioned engrossed seventeen years of the compiler's life), historical science is indebted to the learning and industry of M. J. L. A. Huillard-Brholles, of whom Mr. Oliphant gives a short memoir. Huillard-Brholles was a genuine scholar, and his life was uneventful; he was, in historical research, the right-hand man of the Duc de Luynes. They worked together with great mutual esteem, and rendered each other indispensable assistance. Brholles was happy in his intelligent patron, and the Duke was worthy of his indefatigable investigator. Brholles seems to have been a modern reproduction of those heroic editors, the seventeenth-century Benedictines. He was, says Mr. Oliphant, "in certain branches of learning simply without a rival." He did an enormous quantity of work, but he belonged to that class of workers whose labors are, so to speak, subterranean, and of whom the general public never hears. They excavate, they move into place the great blocks and beams upon which the men who become famous rear their shapely superstructures. The more reason that justice should occasionally be done them, competently and sympathetically, as Mr. Oliphant has done it here. The author has affixed to these two biographical notices a
Nation, September 30,
1875
Rudyard Kipling (37)
INTRODUCTION TO MINE OWN PEOPLE
It would be difficult to answer the general question whether the books of the world grow, as they multiply, as much better as one might suppose they ought, with such a lesson of wasteful experiment spread perpetually behind them. There is no doubt, however, that in one direction we profit largely by this education: whether or no we have become wiser to fashion, we have certainly become keener to enjoy. We have acquired the sense of a particular quality which is precious beyond all others -- so precious as to make us wonder where, at such a rate, our posterity will look for it, and how they will pay for it. After tasting many essences we find freshness the sweetest of all. We yearn for it, we watch for it and lie in wait for it, and when we catch it on the wing (it flits by so fast), we celebrate our capture with extravagance. We feel that after so much has come and gone it is more and more of a feat and a tour de force to be fresh. The tormenting part of the phenomenon is that, in any particular key, it can happen but once -- by a sad failure of the law that inculcates the repetition of goodness. It is terribly a matter of accident; emulation and imitation have a fatal effect upon it. It is easy to see, therefore, what importance the epicure may attach to the brief moment of its bloom. While that lasts we all are epicures.
This helps to explain, I think, the unmistakable intensity of the general relish for Mr. Rudyard Kipling. His bloom lasts, from month to month, almost surprisingly -- by which I mean that he has not worn out even by active exercise the particular property that made us all, more than a year ago, so precipitately drop everything else to attend to him. He has many others which he will doubtless always keep; but a part of the potency attaching to his freshness, what makes it as exciting as a drawing of lots, is our instinctive conviction that he cannot, in the nature of things, keep that; so that our enjoyment of him, so long as the miracle is still wrought, has both the charm of confidence and the charm of suspense. And then there is the further charm, with Mr. Kipling, that this
By the critic who likes to meet such a bristling adventurer as Mr. Kipling I mean of course the critic for whom the happy accident of character, whatever form it may take, is more of a bribe to interest than the promise of some character cherished in theory -- the appearance of justifying some foregone conclusion as to what a writer or a book "ought," in the Ruskinian sense, to be; the critic, in a word, who has, priori, no rule for a literary production but that it shall have genuine life. Such a critic (he gets much more out of his opportunities, I think, than the other sort,) likes a writer exactly in proportion as he is a challenge, an appeal to interpretation, intelligence, ingenuity, to what is elastic in the critical mind -- in proportion indeed as he may be a negation of things familiar and taken for granted. He feels in this case how much more play and sensation there is for himself.
Mr. Kipling, then, has the character that furnishes plenty of play and of vicarious experience -- that makes any perceptive reader foresee a rare luxury. He has the great merit of being a compact and convenient illustration of the surest
This hardness of the conduit, cemented with a rare assurance, is perhaps the most striking idiosyncrasy of Mr. Kipling; and what makes it more remarkable is that accident of his extreme youth which, if we talk about him at all, we cannot affect to ignore. I cannot pretend to give a biography or a chronology of the author of "Soldiers Three," but I cannot overlook the general, the importunate fact that, confidently as he has caught the trick and habit of this sophisticated world, he has not been long of it. His extreme youth is indeed what I may call his window-bar -- the support on which he somewhat rowdily leans while he looks down at the human scene with his pipe in his teeth: just as his other conditions (to mention only some of them,) are his prodigious facility, which is only less remarkable than his stiff selection; his unabashed temperament, his flexible talent, his smoking-room manner, his familiar friendship with India -- established so rapidly, and so completely under his control; his delight in battle, his "cheek" about women -- and indeed about men and about everything; his determination not to be duped, his "imperial" fibre, his love of the inside view, the private soldier and the primitive man. I must add further to this list of attractions the remarkable way in which he makes us aware that he has been put up to the whole thing directly by life (miraculously,
These, then, are some of the reasons why Mr. Kipling may be dear to the analyst as well as, M. Renan says, to the simple. The simple may like him because he is wonderful about India, and India has not been "done"; while there is plenty left for the morbid reader in the surprises of his skill and the fioriture of his form, which are so oddly independent of any distinctively literary note in him, any bookish association. It is as one of the morbid that the writer of these remarks (which doubtless only too shamefully betray his character) exposes himself as most consentingly under the spell. The freshness arising from a subject that -- by a good fortune I do not mean to under- estimate -- has never been "done," is after all less of an affair to build upon than the freshness residing in the temper of the artist. Happy indeed is Mr. Kipling, who can command so much of both kinds. It is still as one of the morbid, no doubt -- that is, as one of those who are capable of sitting up all night for a new impression of talent, of scouring the trodden field for one little spot of green -- that I find our young author quite most curious in his air, and not only in his air but in his evidently very real sense, of knowing his way about life. Curious in the highest degree and well worth attention is such an idiosyncrasy as this in a young Anglo-Saxon. We meet it with familiar frequency in the budding talents of France, and it startles and haunts us for an hour.
It is a part of the satisfaction the author gives us that he can make us speculate as to whether he will be able to complete his picture altogether (this is as far as we presume to go in meddling with the question of his future,) without bringing in the complicated soul. On the day he does so, if he handles it with anything like the cleverness he has already shown, the expectation of his friends will take a great bound. Meanwhile, at any rate, we have Mulvaney, and Mulvaney is after all tolerably complicated. He is only a six-foot saturated Irish private, but he is a considerable pledge of more to come. Hasn't he, for that matter, the tongue of a hoarse syren, and hasn't he also mysteries and infinitudes almost Carlylese? Since I am speaking of him I may as well say that, as an evocation, he has probably led captive those of Mr. Kipling's readers who have most given up resistance. He is a piece of portraiture of the largest, vividest kind, growing and growing on the painter's hands without ever outgrowing them. I can't help regarding him, in a certain sense, as Mr. Kipling's tutelary deity -- a landmark in the direction in which it is open to him to look furthest. If the author will only go as far in this direction as Mulvaney is capable of taking him (and the inimitable Irishman is, like Voltaire's Habakkuk, capable de tout), he may still discover a treasure and find a reward for
Nothing is more refreshing than this active, disinterested sense of the real; it is doubtless the quality for the want of more of which our English and American fiction has turned so wofully stale. We are ridden by the old conventionalities of type and small proprieties of observance -- by the foolish baby-formula (to put it sketchily) of the picture and the subject. Mr. Kipling has all the air of being disposed to lift the whole business off the nursery carpet, and of being perhaps even more able than he is disposed. One must hasten of course to parenthesise that there is not, intrinsically, a bit more luminosity in treating of low life and of primitive man than of those whom civilisation has kneaded to a finer paste: the only luminosity in either case is in the intelligence with which the thing is done. But it so happens that, among ourselves, the frank, capable outlook, when turned upon the vulgar majority, the coarse, receding edges of the social perspective, borrows a charm from being new; such a charm as, for instance, repetition has already despoiled it of among the French -- the hapless French who pay the penalty as well as enjoy the glow of living intellectually so much faster than we. It is the most inexorable part of our fate that we grow tired of everything, and of course in due time we may grow
Many of these, certainly, are into a region not to be designated as superficially dim, though indeed the author always reminds us that India is above all the land of mystery. A large part of his high spirits, and of ours, comes doubtless from the amusement of such vivid, heterogeneous material, from the irresistible magic of scorching suns, subject empires, uncanny religions, uneasy garrisons and smothered-up women -- from heat and colour and danger and dust. India is a portentous image, and we are duly awed by the familiarities it undergoes at Mr. Kipling's hands and by the fine impunity, the sort of fortune that favours the brave, of his want of awe. An abject humility is not his strong point, but he gives us something instead of it -- vividness and drollery, the vision and the thrill of many things, the misery and strangeness of most, the personal sense of a hundred queer contacts and risks. And then in the absence of respect he has plenty of knowledge, and if knowledge should fail him he would have plenty of invention. Moreover, if invention should ever fail him, he would still have the lyric string and the patriotic chord, on which he plays admirably; so that it may be said he is a man of resources. What he gives us, above all, is the feeling of the English manner and the English blood in conditions they have made at once so much and so little their own; with manifestations grotesque enough in some of his satiric sketches and deeply impressive in some of his anecdotes of individual responsibility.
His Indian impressions divide themselves into three groups, one of which, I think, very much outshines the others. First to be mentioned are the tales of native life, curious glimpses of custom and superstition, dusky matters not beholden of the many, for which the author has a remarkable
Are not those literary pleasures after all the most intense which are the most perverse and whimsical, and even indefensible? There is a logic in them somewhere, but it often lies below the plummet of criticism. The spell may be weak in a writer who has every reasonable and regular claim, and it may be irresistible in one who presents himself with a style corresponding to a bad hat. A good hat is better than a bad one, but a conjurer may wear either. Many a reader will never be able to say what secret human force lays its hand upon him when Private Ortheris, having sworn "quietly into the blue sky," goes mad with home-sickness by the yellow river and raves for the basest sights and sounds of London. I can scarcely tell why I think "The Courting of Dinah Shadd" a masterpiece (though, indeed, I can make a shrewd guess at one of the reasons), nor would it be worth while perhaps to attempt to defend the same pretension in regard to "On Greenhow Hill" -- much less to trouble the tolerant reader of these remarks with a statement of how many more performances in the nature of "The End of the Passage" (quite admitting
One more of them, at any rate, I must add to these unsystematised remarks -- it is the one I spoke of a shrewd guess at in alluding to "The Courting of Dinah Shadd." The talent that produces such a tale is a talent eminently in harmony with the short story, and the short story is, on our side of the Channel and of the Atlantic, a mine which will take a great deal of working. Admirable is the clearness with which Mr. Kipling perceives this -- perceives what innumerable chances it gives, chances of touching life in a thousand different places, taking it up in innumerable pieces, each a specimen and an illustration. In a word, he appreciates the episode, and there are signs to show that this shrewdness will, in general, have long innings. It will find the detachable, compressible "case" an admirable, flexible form; the cultivation of which may well add to the mistrust already entertained by Mr. Kipling, if his manner does not betray him, for what is clumsy and tasteless in the time-honoured practice of the "plot." It will fortify him in the conviction that the vivid picture has a greater communicative value than the Chinese puzzle. There
But I am speaking of our author's future, which is the luxury that I meant to forbid myself -- precisely because the subject is so tempting. There is nothing in the world (for the prophet) so charming as to prophesy, and as there is nothing so inconclusive the tendency should be repressed in proportion as the opportunity is good. There is a certain want of courtesy to a peculiarly contemporaneous present even in speculating, with a dozen deferential precautions, on the question of what will become in the later hours of the day of a talent that has got up so early. Mr. Kipling's actual performance is like a tremendous walk before breakfast, making one welcome the idea of the meal, but consider with some alarm the hours still to be traversed. Yet if his breakfast is all to come the indications are that he will be more active than ever after he has had it. Among these indications are the unflagging character of his pace and the excellent form, as they say in athletic circles, in which he gets over the ground. We don't detect him stumbling; on the contrary, he steps out quite as briskly as at first and still more firmly. There is something zealous and craftsman-like in him which shows that he feels both joy and responsibility. A whimsical, wanton reader, haunted by a recollection of all the good things he has seen spoiled; by a sense of the miserable, or, at any rate, the inferior, in so many continuations and endings, is almost capable of perverting poetic justice to the idea that it would be even positively well for so surprising a producer to remain simply the fortunate, suggestive, unconfirmed and unqualified representative of what he has actually done. We can always refer to that.
New York: United States Book Company,
1891
Cornelia Knight (38)
Personal Reminiscences of Cornelia Knight and Thomas Raikes. Edited by R. H. Stoddard. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co., 1875.
Always premising that we are not fond of books of extracts, which give us a disagreeable sense of being fed with a spoon, we may admit that Mr. Stoddard is doing a tolerably useful work. "Useful," indeed, is perhaps strong language, for Mr. Stoddard's process converts his authors into gossip-mongers pure and simple, and his compilations appeal especially to that class of readers whose first glance in their morning paper is always for the "personal" column. Mr. Stoddard undertakes to furnish them with as much gossip as possible, at the least possible trouble to themselves. He not only does their reading for them, but he does their skipping, or most of it, and saves them all necessity for the exercise of discrimination. It often seems to us, we confess, that the art of reading-made-easy is going a trifle too far. The resolving of literary matter into gelatinous broth, warranted to demand none of the onerous labor of mastication, is a practice which doubtless keeps the literary cuisine, as we may say, in a thriving state, but which can hardly fail in the long run to have a relaxing effect on the literary appetite. Triviality is at a premium and gravity is at a discount; books on serious subjects have to apologize for taking a serious tone, and shrewd publishers are observed to slip in hints that things have been so arranged that such works do not really require the reader to think so very hard as might be feared.
We must not preach a sermon out of season, however, for it is doubtless not an unpardonable desecration to chop up into convenient morsels the voluminous prose of Miss Knight and Mr. Raikes. Miss Knight's `Memoirs,' published in London some fifteen years ago, have a livelier interest than the Reminiscences of her companion. It is often said that the average bright woman tells a better story and talks to better purpose than the average clever man; here, perhaps, is an example of it. The strong point with both of these venerable gossips was rather in their remarkable opportunities than in any great natural wit. Miss Knight, indeed, had evidently
Mr. Raikes's reminiscences, as here extracted, relate principally to the Duke of Wellington, Talleyrand, and the Orleans family -- Louis Philippe being with him a pet object of aversion. It is mostly, as we have said, rather thin gossip, and not redeemed by any very acute perception of character on the author's part. Here is a mot of Talleyrand which we do not remember to have seen before. A person asked him "to explain to him the real meaning of the word non- intervention." His reply was: "C'est un mot mtaphysique et politique qui signifie peu pr s la mme chose qu'intervention." Another, perhaps, is better known. A gentleman complained to Talleyrand of having been insulted by a charge of cheating at play, and a threat of being thrown out of the window on a repetition of the offence. Indignant and smarting, he asked for advice. "I advise you," said Talleyrand, "never to play again but in the basement." Of the various unflattering memories of George IV. that have lately been given to the world, one that Mr. Raikes quotes from the Duke of Wellington is perhaps the worst: "I found him in bed dressed in a dirty silk jacket and a turban night-cap, one as greasy as the other; for notwithstanding his coquetry about dress in public, he was extremely
Nation, June 24, 1875
John A. Lawson (39)
Wanderings in the Interior of New Guinea. By Captain J. A. Lawson. London: Chapman & Hall, 1875.
A very curious literary fraud (as it really seems no more than just to call it) has lately been perpetrated by Captain J. A. Lawson, author of `Wanderings in the Interior of New Guinea.' We read his book shortly after its appearance, and found it a remarkably entertaining record of travel. There was a certain vagueness about some of the author's statements, and many of his stories bordered closely upon the marvellous; but his manner of narration seemed most plausible, he gave, first and last, a good deal of detail, his work was published by a most respectable house (Messrs. Chapman & Hall), and, above all, the things he had seen and done were so curious that, if they were not true, the more was the pity. New Guinea (or at least its innermost recesses) has remained, in spite of the actual mania for exploration, very much of a terra incognita, and the author had, we confess, a capital accomplice in the vagueness of our own information, as also in that of most other readers. We say accomplice advisedly, for it now appears that Captain Lawson is an inordinate romancer -- a Baron Mnchausen who never so much as winks at you, to save his conscience. His volume has been attacked by several specialists -- travellers, mountaineers, and naturalists, with the London Athenaeum for their mouthpiece -- all clamoring for proof of his extraordinary assertions. These have been so riddled by criticism that it is hard to see what remains as pure fact. We suppose it is a fact that Captain Lawson did repair, in the spring of 1872, from Sidney in New South Wales to the New Guinea coast (although even this fundamental statement has been seriously impugned), and that at Houtree, in the latter region, he did engage four servants and parties to accompany him into the interior. His own story is that, with three companions and a moderate amount of baggage, he dived into the unknown, and in the month of February following reappeared at his starting-point, exhausted, despoiled of his luggage, and with but two companions surviving. In the interval, he had apparently faced
Nation, June 24, 1875
Henrietta Louisa (Farrer) Lear (40)
A Christian Painter of the Nineteenth Century: Being the Life of Hyppolite Flandrin. By the author of A Dominican Artist, etc. New York: Pott, Young & Co., 1875.
The story of Hyppolite Flandrin's laborious, remarkable, and prematurely-arrested career has been related here in a tone a trifle "goody," perhaps -- a trifle too suggestive of what is called "Sunday reading" -- but with great good taste and sympathy, and much of what the writer himself (who is either an English Catholic or a sublimated Ritualist) would call unction. Flandrin's life and labors, however, are a very fair subject for unction, and the author exaggerates nothing in calling him above all things a "Christian painter." The great mass of American travellers know him chiefly through the noble mural paintings of the beautiful church of St. Germain-des-Prs -- that smaller sister of Notre Dame. These may be called a great achievement, in spite of all deficiencies, and when it is observed that they represent but a small portion of the artist's work, and that he died, wearied and with sight impaired, at the age of fifty-five, it will be seen that he deserves a substantial memorial. Except a certain number of fine portraits, he painted nothing of consequence all his life but religious subjects. He may almost be called a theological painter. His long processions of saints along the entablature of nave and aisles, seen through the dim, colored light of St. Germain-des-Prs and Saint Vincent de Paul, have, if not the archaic rigidity, much at least of the simplicity and dignity, and of the look of being fashioned in serene good faith, which belong to the great mosaic figures wrought by the early Christian artists in the churches of Ravenna. If one had inclined to doubt that Flandrin worked in perfect moral harmony with his pious themes, his biography would offer a complete refutation. Modern religious painting is, we confess, rarely to our taste; but Hyppolite Flandrin's is among the best. Flandrin is less skilful in certain ways than Mr. Holman Hunt, but we prefer him either to that artist or to the mystical Overbeck. He is not at all mystical -- he is not even very largely symbolic; but he commends himself by an extreme sincerity and naturalness, and by a mild solemnity which has not
He was born at Lyons in 1809, and his early years were spent in that hard apprenticeship to misery which has been the lot of so surprisingly large a number of eminent Frenchmen. His father was a struggling miniature-painter, with seven children, and two of his brothers manifested an inclination for the brush. One of them, Auguste, died young, after achieving respectable promise; the other, Paul, is a distinguished painter of the old classical landscape of composition. Paul and Hyppolite came up to Paris when the latter was twenty, and entered the studio of Ingres, then the leader of the liberal movement. Ingres was in the full sense of the word Flandrin's master, and Flandrin was completely submissive to his influence. What Flandrin eventually became was a less frigid and less classical but also a less accomplished and less various Ingres. As with Ingres, his strong point was outline and his weak point color. He competed in 1832 for one of the prix de Rome, and gained it, went almost immediately to the Villa Medici, and remained there for more than five years. In Paris he had felt, in all its cruelty, the pinch of poverty, and even in Rome, having nothing beyond his very moderate pension, he was uncomfortably impecunious. But
Nation, August 26,
1875
David Livingstone (41)
The Last Journals of David Livingstone in Central Africa, from 1866 to his Death. Continued by a Narrative of his Last Moments and Sufferings, etc. By Horace Waller, F.R.G.S. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1875.
If this large volume is a very interesting book, it is so in spite of a great many drawbacks. It is an enormous mass of raw material, which the author alone could have put into coherent and presentable form. But the author died at his work, in the African forests; and, under the circumstances, it is matter of surprise and gratitude that the record of his labors, imperfect as it is, should have survived him and found its way back to civilization. His African servants, with an admirable instinct of what might be desired of them, preserved every line of his diaries and memoranda, and brought them, with his remains, through an almost heroic journey, back to his starting-point at Zanzibar. His ashes were conveyed to solemn interment in Westminster Abbey, and his journals, on their side, have been buried, as one may almost call it, in this ponderous volume. The editor's work has been simply to decipher and transcribe; selection, arrangement, elucidation, have been left out of the question. The mere task of making out the MS. was often a formidable one; for, in the absence of available writing material, Dr. Livingstone was at times reduced to the most awkward devices -- such as scrawling with extemporized ink on old scraps of English newspapers. A facsimile of a page of this portion of the journal is given by Mr. Waller, with the result of producing an almost equal admiration for the energy which produced and the energy which deciphered it. But it is a question whether the editor might not with advantage have understood his duties in a rather larger way. The advantage would have been greatly that of the general reader if the matter had, in the common phrase, been "boiled down" to half its present bulk. As the work stands, it bears no small analogy to the pathless forest, intersected with large districts of "sponge," through which Livingstone himself had often to pursue his own uncertain way. What has dictated the course actually adopted -- that of simply stringing together and printing verbatim every
This volume covers a period of something more than seven years. Dr. Livingstone left Zanzibar, on the east African coast, in the month of March, 1866, and he succumbed to exposure and exhaustion on the borders of the great Lake Bangweolo, which he himself had discovered, on the last of April, 1873. He had intended this expedition to be his last, and his hope, shortly before his death, was to finish his work and return home in a year or two more. His work was to establish certain geographical facts which he had left in uncertainty, notably of course the real nature of the sources of the Nile, and to do what missionary work he might in the way of humanizing the natives and mitigating, if he was powerless to arrest, the abominations of the slave-trade. This he regarded as his solemn duty, although evidently it was a duty in the performance of which he took an immense satisfaction. He made sacrifices, he suffered hardship, he performed heroic feats; but the life he found in Africa had become with him a personal passion, and we doubt whether his strong sense of
Dr. Livingstone started with eight attendants, some Asiatics (he had come from Bombay, where he had been making a long visit, and found important furtherance in his schemes),
At Ujiji, to which place he made his way back laboriously, in a state of great destitution and exhaustion, he met Mr. Stanley. This episode figures very briefly in his journals, though it was evidently a very welcome one. Naturally, it completely re-equipped him, and the reader really feels a kind of personal relief when he perceives that the exhausted old man obtained some more quinine. Mr. Stanley was with him for upwards of five months, and when Stanley returned to the coast, after having vainly urged him to do likewise, he started to make his way back to Lake Bangweolo. It is not unkind to say that this was the very fanaticism of enterprise, and the interest of the book, from this point to the close, is of a very painful nature. Dr. Livingstone enters a region of apparently eternal rain, and lives in a drenched condition for the following year and a half. His health fails rapidly; he makes great marches in spite of it, and only gives up the attempt to advance when his hand is too weak to trace the entries in his diary. The story of his death is compiled very successfully from the statements of those two faithful servants who made their weary pilgrimage back to Zanzibar with his remains. They found him on his knees in the attitude of prayer, beside his bed, with life extinct. This was extremely characteristic. Half the interest of this volume will be found in the reflection it offers of his devotion (when we feel we have a right to observe it), his candor, his singleness of purpose and simplicity. The combination of these qualities, with his unshrinking pluck, his extraordinary endurance, his faculty of universal observation, and of what we may call geographical constructiveness, made him of all great travellers one of the very greatest.
Nation, March 11,
1875
William Charles Macready (42)
Macready's Reminiscences, and Selections from his Diaries and Letters. Edited by Sir Frederick Pollock, Bart. New York: Macmillan & Co., 1875.
English literature contains more than one entertaining volume relating to the player's art; but these memoirs of Mr. Macready are more interesting than the `Apology' of Colley Cibber, or even than the charming autobiography of Holcroft. There is nowhere so copious and confidential a record of an actor's personal and professional experience. Mr. Macready died two years ago, at the age of eighty, and his last appearance in America had been in 1849, so that to the younger generations of the present time he is little more than an impressive name. But this thick volume will have the effect both of reviving the regret of all late-comers for lost opportunity, and of making the man, as he stands portrayed, interesting to those who have never seen the actor. In one way and another, though with very little method and often rather awkward art, what we have here is the elaborate portrait of a character. There is a good deal of evidence that Macready was a cold actor -- according, at least, to the latest taste of the time; that he was stately, impressive, and accomplished, but mechanical, artificial, and stilted. The work is full of comments upon the plays and parts in which he performed, and from year to year there is constant mention of his playing "The Stranger"; but we do not remember a single note of disapproval of the false taste and false style of this now intolerable melodrama. If he were to reappear in life and play before us as he played in 1835, it is very possible that we might find him wanting in warmth, in nature, and in what is popularly termed magnetism. But there is no doubt that his acting would, in its way, seem very strong and individual; and of this strong, individual temperament these pages offer a vivid reflection. The character they reveal seems, at times, not especially sympathetic, and even scantily amiable; but, as one continues to read, one's kindness for it increases; and one lays down the book with the sense of having made the acquaintance of a man who on the whole was very much a man, and who had an ample share of honorable and elevated qualities.
Mr. Macready began in 1855 to write an account of his life for the use of his children. But he carried his narrative, which is copious and minute, no further than the year 1826 -- the time of the first of his three visits to America. In 1827, however, he began to keep a diary, and continued the practice for the rest of his long life. The early entries are brief and scanty, but they expand as the years elapse, and at last are very agreeable reading. Like most men of his profession, Mr. Macready was rather fond of a large phraseology, and it is perhaps an advantage to the reader that he is not always really pretending to write. His jottings are often as explicit and leisurely as many people's finished periods. Sir Frederick Pollock is a very unobtrusive editor, but he has done all that was necessary. He has given us the long fragment of autobiography and, as a sequel, the whole mass of the author's diaries up to the time of his retirement from the stage -- a period of twenty-four years. To these he has added a few letters, written from the country during Mr. Macready's last years, and throughout he has supplied the needful notes as to names, dates, and persons. The work, therefore, is modestly but sufficiently edited. The first thing in it that strikes us is that -- strange as it may appear -- Macready greatly disliked his profession. It offers the singular spectacle of a man acting, almost nightly, for forty years, and yet never loving and often hating what he was doing. Macready went upon the stage almost as a matter of course, his father being a country manager, and his patrimony nil. He remained upon it because he had a wife and many children to support; but his disgust with his career, prosperous and brilliant though it had been from the first, was at times so oppressive that at one moment he was on the point of quitting the stage, emigrating to America, and taking up his residence at Cambridge, Mass., to escape social expenditure and establish his children. We take it that, if we may make the distinction, his intellect was in his profession, and his heart out of it. He was as little as possible of a Bohemian -- he was what is commonly called very much of a gentleman. There is a happy line about him in Tennyson's sonnet, read at the very brilliant dinner given him in London on his retirement from the stage:
"Farewell, Macready; moral, grave, sublime!"
How sublime he was we who did not see his Lear, his Macbeth, or his Virginius have no means of knowing, but he was evidently very moral and grave. He was devoutly religious, as his journal abundantly proves, and he was very fond, as we observe in the same record, of stoical Latin epigraphs and invocations. Compared with most members of the theatrical profession, he was an accomplished scholar; he was zealous, conscientious, rigidly dutiful, decorous, conservative in his personal tastes and habits. He was never popular, we believe, with the members of his own profession, who thought him arrogant and unsociable, and for whom he fixed the standard, in every way, uncomfortably high. It was perhaps an irritating sense of all this that prompted an anonymous ruffian, while Mr. Macready was acting at Cincinnati in 1849, to protest by hurling upon the stage, from the gallery, the half of the raw carcass of a sheep; and it was certainly the same instinctive hostility of barbarism to culture that led Edwin Forrest to denounce his rival in a vulgar letter to the London Times as a "superannuated driveller," and to suffer his followers to organize the disgraceful scenes of the Astor- Place Riot. Of these scenes Macready's journal contains a very interesting account; a street-row in which seventeen persons were killed deserves a place in history. Macready was an unsparing critic of his own performance, and he is perpetually berating himself for falling below his ideal. His artistic conscience was evidently very serious and delicate. "My acting to-night was coarse and crude, no identification of myself with the scene, and, what increased my chagrin on the subject, some person in the pit gave frequent vent to indulgent and misplaced admiration. The consciousness of unmerited applause makes it quite painful and even humiliating to me." "I went," he elsewhere says, "to the theatre thinking first of my dress, and secondly of King John. I am ashamed, grieved, and distressed to acknowledge the truth. I acted disgracefully, worse than I have done for years; I shall shrink from looking into a newspaper tomorrow, for I deserve all that can be said in censure of me." "Acted with tolerable spirit," he writes in 1832, "to the worst benefit house I ever played before in London; but thank God
Both Mr. Macready's reminiscences and his diaries are filled with quotable matter of which, to our regret, we lack space to avail ourselves. He came into contact with most of the eminent men and women of his time, and lived on intimate terms with many of them. No actor since Garrick had so completely won a place in what is called society; and Macready had won it by his own strength and skill. There are innumerable memoranda of dinners at his own house during the last twenty years of his professional life, which, judging by the company assembled, must have been as agreeable as any then taking place. He had relations with all the eminent actors of the century, from Mrs. Siddons and Master Betty down to Mlle. Rachel and Miss Cushman. He played young Norval to Mrs. Siddons's Lady Randolph, and was called into the great actress's room after the play to receive some stately but most
But for information on this and other points connected with theatrical history we must refer the reader to the volume before us. Our own interest in it, we confess, has had less regard to its theatrical than to what we may call its psychological side. Macready, as a whole, strikes us as essentially histrionic. When he reads in a newspaper of the death of an American gentleman with whom he was apparently but slightly acquainted, he notes in his diary that he was "struck down with anguish." He was playing, in a manner, before himself. But there is something very fine in his combination of the dramatic temperament with a rigid conscience and a strenuous will.
Nation, April 29,
1875
Anne E. Manning (43)
The Household of Sir Thomas More and Jacques Bonneval; or, The Days of the Dragonnades. By the Author of Mary Powell. New York: M. W. Dodd, 1867.
That this species of composition still retains its hold on the popular taste may be inferred from the fact that two New York publishing houses have constituted themselves agents for the supply of the commodity. One of these houses offers a series of translations from the works of a prolific German authoress, which unveil to our democratic gaze the vie intime of a dozen monarchical courts, from that of Henry VIII. downward. The other deals in the historical tales of the author of "Mary Powell," a writer of extraordinary fecundity, of a most comprehensive range of information, and of a degree of "reconstructive" skill upon which Mr. Andrew Johnson may look with envy. We have not read the novels of Madame Mhlbach, and are unable to discuss their merits; but we have a sufficient acquaintance with those of the second- mentioned lady to warrant us in saying that they are neither so good nor so bad as they might easily be. We take it that they belong to the large class of works designed for the use of "young persons," and that if their purpose is to be commended, their effect, on the whole, and considering the abuse that is made of them, is rather to be deplored. They attempt to give the reader an idea of a given phase of the past in a degree less abstract than the manner of professed historians, and less rudely and dangerously concrete than that of the original documents of which text-books are composed. The result, of course, is somewhat anomalous. Histories are very long and dull; chronicles, memoirs, and reports, besides being inaccessible, are far too heavily charged with local colors. So the writer extracts the moral from the one source, and expresses the story from the other, and shakes them up together into a gentle and wholesome potion. The common expedient is to rescue from oblivion a supposititious diary or note-book, or collection of letters written in troublous times by some one of the supernumeraries of the play. The great novelists, Scott, Bulwer, Victor Hugo, Dumas, boldly lay hands on the principals (Elizabeth, Mary, Rienzi, Louis XI.,
Sir Thomas More, as we all remember, had a daughter, a Mrs. Roper, of whom he was extremely fond, and who bore him company during his imprisonment. Our authoress accordingly takes this lady for her heroine, and relates -- grand renfort of capitals, italics, terminal e's, and other simple antiquarianisms -- the history of her early days. The effect is sufficiently pleasing, even if it is somewhat insipid, and it would seem that if the shades of Sir Thomas and his daughter exhibit no signs of offence, we disinterested moderns might allow the harmless device to pass without protest. A protest addressed to the author, indeed, we have no desire to make: we take it rather that the reader should here be put on his guard. Young girls divide their reading, we believe, into two sharply distinguished provinces -- light and heavy; or, in other words, into novels and histories. No harm can come to them from the most assiduous perusal of our authoress so long as they read her books as stories pure and simple. They will find some difficulty, doubtless, in doing so, but the sacrifice is no more than a just one to the long-suffering historic muse. It requires some strength of mind on a young girl's part to persuade herself that a book with red edges, with archaic type, and with the various syntactical and orthographical quaintness which characterizes the volumes of which we speak -- a book, in short, in which the heroine speaks familiarly of "dear old Erasmus" -- does not possess some subtile and infallible authority with regard to the past. This, of course, is not the case. Such books embody a great deal of diligence and cleverness and fancy, but it is needless to say that history is quite a different matter. The reader who bears this in mind may spend a pleasant half-hour over the fortunes of Mrs. Mary Powell and her various companions.
If the books in question are extensively read, slight as are their merits, it is logical to suppose that people are still kindly disposed toward the real historical novel; and that if in these latter days it has had but few representatives, the fault is rather among writers than readers. The study of history has
These remarks, however, will be thought to confer an undue extension upon the meaning of our term, and we hasten to restrict it to those works of fiction which deal exclusively with the past. Every one is familiar with the old distinction among historical tales into those in which actual persons are introduced, and those in which actual events are transacted by merely imaginary persons, as is the case, for instance (if we are not mistaken), with Charles Dickens's "Tale of Two Cities," in which a very vivid impression is given of the French Revolution without the assistance of any of the known actors. Novels of the former class are certainly the
Nation, August 15,
1867
Theodore Martin (44)
The Life of His Royal Highness the Prince Consort. By Theodore Martin. Volume I. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1875.
It must be admitted that Mr. Theodore Martin had a difficult task. He was obliged to be fair and at the same time to be flattering - - to please his own conscience and yet to please the Queen. Her Majesty, it is known, has established what the French call a culte of the memory of her late husband. She has been, throughout Mr. Martin's work, his constantly implied coadjutor; she has furnished the greater part of the material used; and she has, in a measure, prescribed the key in which the performance was to be pitched. Mr. Martin, on the other hand, strikes us as a man of sense and of taste -- not a man to enjoy working with his hands tied -- tied even with golden cords. He has solved the problem very happily, and succeeded in being courtly without being fulsome. The reader, indeed, forgives an extra genuflexion now and then in view of the cause at issue. All biographers stand pledged to take their heroes very seriously, and it is not always that exaggeration of praise is so venial a sin as in the case of the subject of Mr. Martin's memoir. The Prince Consort was an eminently honorable and amiable man, and in being summoned to admire him we are summoned to admire the great amenities and decencies of life. It is probable that if he had not been elevated by fortune into a position of great dignity, the eyes of the world would never have found themselves very attentively fixed upon him. But his merit and the interest of his life lay precisely in the fact that, without brilliant powers, he contrived to adorn a brilliant position. Fortune offered him a magnificent opportunity to show good taste. The Prince Consort appreciated his chance, availed himself of it to the utmost, and has bequeathed to posterity an image of the discreet prince par excellence. We take it that, if he had chosen, he might have done quite otherwise. His marriage was a love-match, and the Queen to the end seems to have been determined it should remain one. Her Majesty admits us into her confidence on this point with a frankness which is worthy to become a classic example of virtuous conjugal fidelity.
Mr. Martin gives an agreeable sketch of Prince Albert's early years, which were apparently passed in no more brilliant fashion than those of any well-born young gentleman with a taste for study. He was handsome, amiable, very well-behaved, and, if anything, a trifle too serious and high-toned. He was not fond of ladies and compliments, and thought they made one waste a great deal of time. From the first he was religious, as became a descendant of the first German prince who had come to the help of Luther. Mr. Martin gives a great many extracts from letters and journals, which, however, rarely offer anything salient enough to quote. The Prince's writing, like that of the Queen, though in a much less degree, is rather pale and cold, and tends to give one the impression that, in royal circles, the standard of wit is not necessarily high. Here are a few lines from one of the Queen's letters, written during a visit to Louis Philippe in 1843: "The people are very respectable-looking and very civil, crying `Vive la Reine d'Angleterre!' The King is so pleased. The caps of the women are very picturesque, and they also wear colored handkerchiefs and aprons, which looks very pretty. . . . It is the population and not the country which strikes me as so extremely different from England -- their faces, dress, manners, everything." Quite the best writing in this first volume of Mr. Martin's is to be found in his numerous quotations from the Baron Stockmar, a personage who has not enjoyed a wide celebrity, but who, without exactly being called one of the occult forces of history, exerted a very large private influence. He was a simple citizen of Coburg, where he practised medicine and became intimate with the Queen's maternal uncle, Prince Leopold, later King of the Belgians. Through him he was made known to the young prince and princess, before their marriage. He occupied no high positions, and though he was charged with an occasional political mission, the part he played was generally that of informal, confidential adviser. He was admirably fitted for it by his extreme integrity and sagacity, and the advice he gave -- and which seems to have ranged over the most various points of public and private conduct - - was remarkable both for its shrewdness and for its elevation and purity. His relation to the young Prince and to the Queen was one of paternal solicitude,
Mr. Martin's first volume is a record of the domestic life of the royal couple up to the year 1848. He touches a good deal, of course, upon public matters -- often to an extent that leads one to charge him with being conscious of a want of lively interest in the Prince's more immediately personal history. The long and detailed chapter on the Spanish Marriages, for instance, strikes one as not being in the least biographical matter. The only relation these events had to the Prince was that during a visit of the Queen to Louis Philippe, in which he accompanied her, the French King had given a verbal assurance that no such projects were entertained. The Prince reformed the royal household, and put it on an economical footing, became Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, proposed to the Duke of Wellington the establishment of "courts of honor" to replace duelling in the army (a proposal which the "Iron Duke," thinking perhaps that it savored of German transcendentalism, received without enthusiasm), bought, with the Queen, the domain of Osborne, and spent much time and thought in planting and decorating it, established and conducted, baton in hand (as we infer) the so-called "antient concerts," set on foot the fresco- painting in the Houses of Parliament (ungrateful memento as this now appears), ordered pictures, composed songs, laid foundation-stones, studied industrial processes, and through all and above all was the most caressed and adored of husbands. Such conjugal felicity as that of the Queen and Prince would be remarkable in any walk of life, and we suppose that in their exalted station it is peculiarly exemplary. The Queen is determined we shall not lose a single detail of it. She chronicles that after her various confinements his "care and devotion were quite beyond expression. No one but himself ever lifted her from her bed to her sofa, and he always helped to wheel her on her bed or her sofa into the next room. For this purpose he would come instantly when sent for from any part of the house; . . . he ever came with a sweet smile on his face. In short, his care of her was that of a mother, nor could there be a kinder, wiser, or more judicious nurse." When he makes
Mr. Theodore Martin's ingenuity must find itself a good deal more taxed as he advances in this official biography. In the first volume, which was noticed in these pages at the time of its appearance, he had occasion to handle a good many matters which were personal to the Prince -- the history of his early years, of his education, his marriage, his first steps in the career which this event opened to him. Of these things Mr. Martin made an agreeable narrative, and his pages were sufficiently entertaining; but when his hero settles down to the quiet life of father to the Queen's children he ceases to have any history that the general reader (at least the American reader) will deem worth relating on the extensive scale adopted by Mr. Martin. The author shows us that the Prince led a very busy life, interested himself in a great many different things, and played his part with a most laudable combination of zeal and discretion. But his activity is (without speaking invidiously) of a second-rate sort, and the record of his occupations reminds us of the diaries kept by certain cultivated young persons of leisure who desire to lead "serious" lives, and who note down the profitable books they have read, the charitable visits they have paid, and the edifying reflections they have made. The fault in all this is not with the Prince, for whom the reader feels an extreme kindness, but rather with his biographer, or at least with the conditions imposed upon his biographer. Of course no life of the Prince Consort save an official life would be written, and of course an official life would have to be diffuse and majestic. The frame, consequently, is too large for the picture, the portrait too small for the background. To eke out his material Mr.
Baron Stockmar figures in the present volume, as in the former one, and his letters of advice to the Queen and Prince are quoted in extenso by the biographer, who has for this domestic counsellor of royalty an admiration with which we suspect he will succeed but partly in inoculating the reader. Stockmar's advice is apparently safe and sensible, but it is offered in a dry, dogmatic manner which the reader will sometimes find irritating. The Prince Consort's personal record during these years is made up of a presidency of the Society for the Improvement of the Condition of the Working Classes; a governorship of the Royal Agricultural Society (incidental to which was a dinner -- "infamous, without method and without viands, no wine, muddy water, no potatoes, and the fish without sauce!"); of various visits to Osborne and Balmoral (which latter estate the Prince purchased in 1852); of a Chancellorship of the University of Cambridge, which he made something better than a sinecure, exerting himself for a reform in the arrangement of studies; of plans for the education of his children and for making, under Baron Stockmar's inspiration, a "moral character" of the Prince of Wales; of a visit to Ireland (the first made by the Queen) in 1849; of a decision, dictated apparently by great good sense, not to
Mr. Theodore Martin had expected to terminate with the present volume the elaborate and painstaking work of whose two previous instalments some account was duly given in these columns. But with the third volume he had entered into a phase of his subject which at the present moment -- from a court-biographer's point of view, at least -- there were various cogent reasons for not passing over rapidly; the consequence of which has been that it will take another five hundred pages to exhaust the materials with which he has found himself so liberally supplied. This third volume
It must be added that Mr. Theodore Martin pleads his cause very creditably, and tells this part of his story with the well-ordered abundance and the fulness of illustration which has marked its progress hitherto. He has had to consult an immense number of documents -- the Prince's correspondence alone was most copious, and a large portion of it has had to be translated from the German -- and he has suffered from that embarras de richesses which is the affliction of the contemporary historian, and which he would doubtless often willingly exchange for the hardly more serious obstruction of evidence reduced to conjecture. The trouble with Mr. Theodore Martin's book continues to be the same that we formerly noticed -- the fact, namely, that the Prince Consort, in spite of his amiable character and cultivated intelligence, had no personal history that was particularly worth relating; and that to make up his book the author is obliged to place before us the various events of Queen Victoria's reign, at which her
Of the vicissitudes, blunders, depressions of the Crimean War, as they were felt and resented in England, Mr. Martin's chapters present a vivid and interesting record. The sense of mismanagement and incompetency at last, in the country, reached the point of exasperation, and the Prince, who had already known what it was to be used as a scapegoat, was called upon again to shoulder some hard responsibilities. He was accused of being the source of the errors and delays at the seat of war; but Mr. Martin is able to show that the accusation was most unjust. The Prince's attitude here, as before, was excellent, and he easily out-weathered the storm. He was of the war-party to the last. Late in the spring of 1855 he produces a Memorandum with regard to a "general European defensive league for Turkey as against Russia." "Can such a coalition be obtained?" he asks; "I think it can" -- although
Nation, June 6, 1878
David Masson (45)
Three Devils: Luther's, Milton's, and Goethe's. With other Essays. By David Masson, M.A., LL.D., etc. London and New York: Macmillan & Co., 1874.
We always read Professor Masson with interest, but never without a certain feeling of disappointment. He is clear, shrewd, and vigorous, and his style (when it is not Mr. Carlyle's) is quite his own. He attempts to deal with subjects in a first-rate manner, and yet, at the last, he fails to give an impression of first-rate power. He is, in a word, in thought and expression the least bit vulgar. He is fond of rhetoric, which is perfectly legitimate; but his taste has odd lapses. He writes literary history in the picturesque manner; but it is amusing to have a writer of his apparent sincerity reminding us of Mr. Hepworth Dixon. When Chatterton, in the author's biography of the young poet, writes to Horace Walpole, we are told that "whether from the suddenness and na vet of the attack, or from the stupefying effects of the warm air in his library of a March evening, Walpole was completely taken in." Dryden made an attack on Elkanah Settle, the bad poet. "Settle," says Professor Masson, "replied with some spirit, with little effect, and was, in fact, `settled' for ever." We doubt whether Mr. Hepworth Dixon, indeed, would have risked that. Professor Masson has been republishing some of his early essays, and one volume of the series was lately noticed in these pages. They were worth such care as he chose to bestow upon them; but it is a pity that this should not have included a little chastening of the style. The first of the volumes before us contains a study of the differences in Luther's, Milton's, and Shakspere's conception of the Devil, a parallel not particularly effective between Shakspere and Goethe; a sketch -- the best thing, perhaps, in the book - - of Milton's youth; an essay on Dryden; a "picturesque" account of Dean Swift; and some reflections, noticeably very acute, on "One of the Ways Literature May Illustrate History." These things are all entertaining, and some of them interesting. It is particularly interesting, perhaps, to investigate people's ideas about the Devil, and Professor Masson sets forth very justly the respective characteristics of Milton's
Professor Masson writes particularly well about Milton, whom he has made an object of devoted study, and draws a very handsome portrait of him as he stood on the threshold of manhood. He was what would be called nowadays a very high-toned young man -- what even in some circles would be termed a prig. But Milton's priggishness was in the grand style, and it had a magnificent consistency. It is on the pervading consistency of his character that Professor Masson dwells, while he attempts to reconcile his austerity, his rigidity, his self-complacency, his want of humor with his possession of supreme poetic genius. Milton records it as a conviction of his early youth that "he who would not be frustrated
One may bestow the praise of suggestiveness, however, on the last paper in the volume -- an ingenious plea for the indirect testimony of past literatures as to contemporaneous refinement and virtue. The accumulation of science, says Professor Masson, not only adds to the stock of what the mind possesses, but modifies the mind in what it is per se. Operating on its new acquisitions, the mental apparatus enlarges its functions and, as a greater quantity of grist is brought to the mill, becomes a more powerful machine. This at least is the common assumption, and this would prove that we of the present day are (besides our character as mere trustees of new discoveries) people of a higher intellectual value than our remote precursors. Professor Masson contests the deduction, in a spirit which most disinterested students of history and literature will probably sympathize with. "Shakspere lived and died, we may say, in the prescientific period; he lived and died in the belief of the fixedness of our earth in space and the diurnal whirling round her of the ten spectacular spheres. Not the less was he Shakspere; and none of us dares to say that there is now in the world, or has recently been, a more expert thinking apparatus of its order than his mind was, a spiritual transparency of larger diameter, or vivid with grander gleamings and pulses. Two hundred and fifty years therefore, chockful though they are of new knowledges and discoveries, have not been a single knife-edge of visible advance in the world's power of producing splendid individuals." And the author continues that, adding two hundred
Nation, February 18,
1875
Thomas Moore and William Jerdan (46)
Bric--Brac Series. Personal Reminiscences of Moore and Jerdan. Edited by R. H. Stoddard. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co., 1875.
We are not, as a general rule, fond of books of "extracts" of any sort; but it must be allowed that Mr. Stoddard is performing a useful work. There are a great many books that people are curious about which are too long or too dull or too much out of fashion to be attacked at first hand at the present hour. Mr. Stoddard may, apparently, be trusted to skim through them and cut out the most characteristic and entertaining pages. "Memoirs" are notoriously diffuse, and yet half the best anecdotes in the language are to be found in their pages. The eight octavo volumes of Thomas Moore's `Diary' are, perhaps a conspicuous combination of the redundancy that the average reader dreads and the personal gossip that he longs to dabble in. Mr. Stoddard has compressed into a hundred and fifty small pages what he considers the most valuable portion of this copious record; but what he has given does not suggest that the present generation need greatly trouble itself about the remainder. Moore's period and circle of friends have become classic ground to people who possess what is called the historic consciousness, in a moderate degree of development. Rogers's breakfasts, Lord Holland's dinners, Byron's suppers, the hospitality of Abbotsford, the talks of Sydney Smith, the reunions of the Edinburgh Reviewers, were all occasions which have been in the habit of imposing themselves on our imagination with a suggestion of unattainable brilliancy -- of unpurchasable privilege. Moore was pars magna of all these; but the perusal of his reminiscences is certainly reassuring to over-regretful minds. Anything more idle than most of his journalizing it would be hard to conceive. It is probable that he always selected the lighter matters for record in preference to the grave; he was a man of an extremely frivolous imagination and weak jokes, and thin personalities were the things he loved best to commemorate. But allowing for this, he lived with the best talkers of his time and was one of the shining conversational lights. He heard, of course, a vast amount of
Nation, April 1, 1875
William Morris (47)
The Life and Death of Jason: a Poem. By William Morris. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1867.
In this poetical history of the fortunate -- the unfortunate -- Jason, Mr. Morris has written a book of real value. It is some time since we have met with a work of imagination of so thoroughly satisfactory a character, -- a work read with an enjoyment so unalloyed and so untempered by the desire to protest and to criticise. The poetical firmament within these recent years has been all alive with unprophesied comets and meteors, many of them of extraordinary brilliancy, but most of them very rapid in their passage. Mr. Morris gives us the comfort of feeling that he is a fixed star, and that his radiance is not likely to be extinguished in a draught of wind, -- after the fashion of Mr. Alexander Smith, Mr. Swinburne, and Miss Ingelow. Mr. Morris's poem is ushered into the world with a very florid birthday speech from the pen of the author of the too famous "Poems and Ballads," -- a circumstance, we apprehend, in no small degree prejudicial to its success. But we hasten to assure all persons whom the knowledge of Mr. Swinburne's enthusiasm may have led to mistrust the character of the work, that it has to our perception nothing in common with this gentleman's own productions, and that his article proves very little more than that his sympathies are wiser than his performance. If Mr. Morris's poem may be said to remind us of the manner of any other writer, it is simply of that of Chaucer; and to resemble Chaucer is a great safeguard against resembling Swinburne.
"The Life and Death of Jason," then, is a narrative poem on a Greek subject, written in a genuine English style. With the subject all reading people are familiar, and we have no need to retrace its details. But it is perhaps not amiss to transcribe the few pregnant lines of prose into which, at the outset, Mr. Morris has condensed the argument of his poem: --
"Jason the son of Aeson, king of Iolchos, having come to man's estate, demanded of Pelias his father's kingdom, which he held wrongfully. But Pelias answered, that if he
The style of this little fragment of prose is not an unapt measure of the author's poetical style, -- quaint, but not too quaint, more Anglo-Saxon than Latin, and decidedly laconic. For in spite of the great length of his work, his manner is by no means diffuse. His story is a long one, and he wishes to do it justice; but the movement is rapid and business-like, and the poet is quite guiltless of any wanton lingering along the margin of the subject-matter, -- after the manner, for instance, of Keats, -- to whom, individually, however, we make this tendency no reproach. Mr. Morris's subject is immensely rich, -- heavy with its richness, -- and in the highest degree romantic and poetical. For the most part, of course, he found not only the great contours, but the various incidents and episodes, ready drawn to his hand; but still there was enough wanting to make a most exhaustive drain upon his ingenuity and his imagination. And not only these faculties have been brought into severe exercise, but the strictest good taste and good sense were called into play, together with a certain final gift which we hardly know how to name, and which is by no means common, even among very clever poets, -- a comprehensive sense of form, of proportion, and of real completeness, without which the most brilliant efforts of the imagination are a mere agglomeration of ill-reconciled beauties. The legend of Jason is full of strangely constructed marvels and elaborate prodigies and horrors, calculated to task heavily an author's adroitness. We have so pampered and petted our sense of the ludicrous of late years, that it is quite the spoiled child of the house, and without its leave no guest can
A large number, however, of far greater drawbacks than any we are able to mention could not materially diminish the powerful beauty of this fantastic legend. It is as rich in adventure
"One man was left, alive but wounded sore,
Who, staring round about and seeing no more
His brothers' spears against him, fixed his eyes
Upon the queller of those mysteries.
Then dreadfully they gleamed, and with no word,
He tottered towards him with uplifted sword.
But scarce he made three paces down the field,
Ere chill death seized his heart, and on his shield
Clattering he fell."
We have not spoken of Mr. Morris's versification nor of his vocabulary. We have only room to say that, to our perception, the first in its facility and harmony, and the second in its abundance and studied simplicity, leave nothing to be desired. There are of course faults and errors in his poem, but there are none that are not trivial and easily pardoned in the light of the fact that he has given us a work of consummate art and of genuine beauty. He has foraged in a treasure- house; he has visited the ancient world, and come back with a massive cup of living Greek wine. His project was no light task, but he has honorably fulfilled it. He has enriched the language with a narrative poem which we are sure that the public will not suffer to fall into the ranks of honored but uncherished works, -- objects of vague and sapient reference, -- but will continue to read and to enjoy. In spite of its length, the interest of the story never flags, and as a work of art it never ceases to be pure. To the jaded intellects of the present moment, distracted with the strife of creeds and the conflict of theories, it opens a glimpse into a world where
North American Review, October 1867
Mr. Morris's last poem, "The Life and Death of Jason," proved him to possess so much intellectual energy, and so large a poetical capacity, that we are not surprised to find him, after only a year's interval, publishing a work equally considerable in size and merit. The author's treatment of the legend of Jason, whatever may be thought of the success of his manner and of the wisdom of an attempt to revive an antiquated and artificial diction, certainly indicated a truly vigorous and elastic genius. It exhibited an imagination copious and varied, an inventive faculty of the most robust character, and the power to sustain a heavy burden without staggering or faltering. It had, at least, the easy and abundant flow which marks the effusions of genius, and it was plainly the work of a mind which takes a serious pleasure in large and formidable tasks. Very much such another task has Mr. Morris set himself in the volume before us. He has not, indeed, to observe that constant unity of tone to which he had pledged himself in telling the adventures of Jason, but he is obliged, as in his former work, to move all armed and equipped for brilliant feats, and to measure his strength as frequently and as lustily.
"The Earthly Paradise" is a series of tales in verse, founded, for the most part, on familiar legends and traditions in the Greek mythology. Each story is told with considerable fulness, so that by the time the last is finished the volume numbers nearly seven hundred pages, or about twenty thousand lines. Seven hundred pages of fantastic verse, in these days of clamorous intellectual duties, run a very fair chance of being, at best, somewhat neglectfully read, and to secure a deferential inspection they must carry their excuse in very obvious characters. The excuse of Mr. Morris's volume is simply its
"The heavy trouble, the bewildering care
That weighs us down who live and earn our bread,
These idle verses have no power to bear;
So let me sing of names remembered,
Because they, living not, can ne'er be dead,
Or long time take their memory quite away
From us poor singers of an empty day."
He tells us then the story of Atalanta's race, the tale of Perseus and Andromeda, the story of Cupid and Psyche, the story of Alcestis, and that of Pygmalion; and along with these as many quaint mediaeval tales, equally full of picturesque beauty and of human meaning. In what better company could we forget the present? and remember not only the past, but the perpetual, the eternal, -- the constant loves and fears and sorrows of mankind? It is very pleasant to wander, as Mr. Morris leads us, among scenes and figures of no definite time, and often no definite place, -- except in so far as these are spots untrodden by our own footsteps, -- and mortals (and immortals) deeply distinct from our own fellows. The men and women are simpler and stronger and happier than we, and their haunts are the haunts of deities and half-deities. But
"Certain gentlemen and mariners of Norway [the argument runs] having considered all that they had heard of the Earthly Paradise, set sail to find it, and, after many troubles and the lapse of many years came, old men, to some Western land, of which they had never before heard; there they died, when they had dwelt there certain years, much honored of the strange people."
It is their "many troubles," as related by one of their number, that form the substance of the Prologue, -- troubles grim, terrible, and monstrous, -- memories all scented with ocean brine and dyed with deep outlandish hues. The charm of these wild Norse wanderings is the same charm as that which pervaded the author's "Jason," -- the mystery and peril of a long and vague sea-voyage, and the fellowship and mutual devotion of a hundred simple adventurous hearts. And the charm, moreover, is thoroughly genuine, -- the elements of interest are actually present, -- the author writes from the depths of his fancy. There blows through the poem a strong and steady ocean breeze, as it were, laden with island spices, and the shouts of mariners, and the changing music of shoreward tides. We have no space to retail the various adventures of these simple-souled explorers; we must direct the reader to the original source. We may say, in especial, that for boys and girls there can be no better reading, just now, than this breezy Prologue, -- none answering better the constant boyish need to project the fancy over the seas, and the no less faithful feminine impulse to revel in the beautiful and the tender.
The best earthly paradise which these storm-scathed mariners attain is to sit among the elders of the Western city which finally harbors them, and to linger out the autumn of their days in listening to springtide stories. It is in this
North American Review, July 1868
This new volume of Mr. Morris is, we think, a book for all time; but it is especially a book for these ripening summer days. To sit in the open shade, inhaling the heated air, and, while you read these perfect fairy tales, these rich and pathetic human traditions, to glance up from your page at the clouds and the trees, is to do as pleasant a thing as the heart of man can desire. Mr. Morris's book abounds in all the sounds and sights and sensations of nature, in the warmth of the sunshine, the murmur of forests, and the breath of ocean- scented breezes. The fulness of physical existence which belongs to climates where life is spent in the open air, is largely diffused through its pages:
. . . "Hot July was drawing to an end,
And August came the fainting year to mend
With fruit and grain; so 'neath the trellises,
Nigh blossomless, did they lie well at ease,
And watched the poppies burn across the grass,
And o'er the bindweed's bells the brown bee pass,
Still murmuring of his gains: windless and bright
The morn had been, to help their dear delight.
. . . . . . . . . Then a light wind arose
That shook the light stems of that flowery close,
And made men sigh for pleasure."
This is a random specimen. As you read, the fictitious universe of the poem seems to expand and advance out of its remoteness, to surge musically about your senses, and merge itself utterly in the universe which surrounds you. The summer brightness of the real world goes half-way to meet it; and the beautiful figures which throb with life in Mr. Morris's stories pass lightly to and fro between the realm of poetry and
The book is a collection of tales in verse -- found, without exception, we take it, rather than imagined, and linked together, somewhat loosely, by a narrative prologue. The following is the "argument" of the prologue -- already often enough quoted, but pretty enough, in its ingenious prose, to quote again:
"Certain gentlemen and mariners of Norway, having considered all that they had heard of the Earthly Paradise, set sail to find it, and, after many troubles and the lapse of many years, came old men to some Western land, of which they had never before heard: there they died, when they had dwelt there certain years, much honored of the strange people."
The adventures of these wanderers, told by one of their number, Rolf the Norseman, born at Byzantium -- a happy origin for the teller of a heroic tale, as the author doubtless
"Atalanta's Race," the first of Mr. Morris's Greek legends, is to our mind almost the best. There is something wonderfully simple and child-like in the story, and the author has given it ample dignity, at the same time that he has preserved this quality. Most vividly does he present the mild invincibility of his fleet-footed heroine and the half- boyish simplicity of her demeanor -- a perfect model of a belle inhumaine. But the most beautiful passage in the poem is the description of the vigil of the love-sick Milanion in the lonely sea- side temple of Venus. The author has conveyed with exquisite art the sense of devout stillness and of pagan sanctity which invests this remote and prayerful spot. The yellow torch-light
"Wherein with fluttering gown and half-bared limb
The temple damsels sung their evening hymn;"
the sound of the shallow-flowing sea without, the young man's restless sleep on the pavement, besprinkled with the ocean spray, the apparition of the goddess with the early dawn, bearing the golden apple -- all these delicate points are presented in the light of true poetry. The narrative of the adventures of Dana and of Perseus and Andromeda is, with the exception of the tale of Cupid and Psyche which follows it, the longest piece in the volume. Of the two, we think we prefer the latter. Unutterably touching is the career of the tender and helpless Psyche, and most impressive the terrible hostility of Venus. The author, we think, throughout manages this lady extremely well. She appears to us in a sort of rosy dimness, through which she looms as formidable as she is beautiful, and gazing with "gentle eyes and unmoved smile,"
"Such as in Cyprus, the fair-blossomed isle,
When on the altar in the summer night
They pile the roses up for her delight,
Men see within their hearts."
"The Love of Alcestis" is the beautiful story of the excellent wife who, when her husband was ill, gave up her life, so that he might recover and live for ever. Half the interest here, however, lies in the servitude of Apollo in disguise, and in the touching picture of the radiant god doing in perfection the homely work of his office, and yet from time to time emitting flashes, as it were, of genius and deity, while the good Admetus observes him half in kindness and half in awe. The story of the "Son of Cr;oesus," the poor young man who is slain by his best friend because the gods had foredoomed it, is simple, pathetic, and brief. The finest and sweetest poem in the volume, to our taste, is the tale of "Pygmalion and the Image." The merit of execution is perhaps not appreciably greater here than in the other pieces, but the legend is so unutterably charming that it claims precedence of its companions. As beautiful as anything in all our later poetry, we think, is the description of the growth and dominance in the poor
"And at the last drew forth a book of rhymes,
Wherein were writ the tales of many climes,
And read aloud the sweetness hid therein
Of lovers' sorrows and their tangled sin."
He reads aloud to his marble torment: would Mr. Swinburne have touched that note?
We have left ourselves no space to describe in detail the other series of tales -- "The Man born to be King," "The
Nation, July 9, 1868
Laurence Oliphant (48)
The Tender Recollections of Irene Macgillicuddy. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1878.
The proprietors of Blackwood, issuing a new series of tales from that periodical, in neatly-printed little shilling volumes, have opened the list with that clever little story which a few months since was the occasion of a good deal of amusement and conjecture -- "The Tender Recollections of Irene Macgillicuddy" -- and which has been reprinted here by the Harpers in their "Half-Hour Series." Conjecture, as we say, was lively as to the authorship of this slightly audacious jeu d'esprit, and at last, after indulging in a good many fanciful guesses, has attributed the thing, without contradiction, we believe, to Mr. Laurence Oliphant. It is worth noticing as an attempt, which has evidently made a hit, to portray from a foreign point of view the manners of New York. Such attempts had already, in two or three cases, been made, but the authors had not that intimate acquaintance with the subject on which telling satire needs to rest. The author of `Irene Macgillicuddy,' on the other hand, is evidently versed to a considerable degree in the mysteries of Fifth Avenue. He might, we think, have made a good deal more skilful use of his knowledge; but it is interesting to notice what it is that has struck him as the leading characteristics of the society which chiefly congregates in that expensive quarter. The freedom and the "smartness" of the young ladies, and the part played by married men of a certain age in bringing them out, guiding their first steps in society, presiding at their dbut in the "German," entertaining them at evening repasts at Delmonico's -- these points had been already more or less successfully touched upon. But the great feature of New York fashion, as represented in the little satire in Blackwood, is the eagerness and energy displayed by marriageable maidens in what is vulgarly called "hooking" a member of the English aristocracy. The desire to connect itself by matrimony with the British nobility would seem to be, in the author's eyes, the leading characteristic of the New York "great world." A corresponding desire on the part of the British aristocracy not to become so connected, appears to complete the picture. It
Nation, May 30, 1878
Ouida (Marie Louise de la Rame) (49)
Signa: A Story. By Ouida, author of Strathmore, etc. Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott & Co., 1875.
Let no man hereafter despair of anything; even Ouida improves! She began several years ago with writing unmitigated nonsense, and she now writes nonsense very sensibly mitigated. The mitigation is due, doubtless, to various causes -- to experience, maturity, the Saturday Review, and, in a measure lately, we infer, a residence in Italy. Ouida is essentially a charlatan, and will never be anything else; but if `Signa' were her first book instead of her last, and if the damning list of its predecessors were not staring at you from the fly-leaf, you would almost suffer yourself to fancy that it was a work of promise. A certain garish and lascivious imagination was formerly this lady's stock-in-trade, but little by little it has consented to go into training, and it has been perceptibly refined and purified. Ouida's notion of training, apparently, has been to read a good deal of Victor Hugo and a little of Swinburne's prose, and to try and produce something which should suggest a compound of these masters. It speaks volumes, doubtless, for the author's original manner that the effect of this process has been chastening, but it is obvious that Ouida has been keeping better company intellectually than of yore, and has acquired in consequence a superior tone. `Signa' is at once the name of a place and the name of a person; of an old Tuscan city and of a foundling child who grows up there and springs into fame as a musical composer, in his teens, with the delightful facility of romance. There are various other people, but we are quite unable to give a coherent account of them. There is a dusky, moody, oppressively picturesque uncle of Signa, who brings him up and becomes exceedingly fond of him, and there is, of course, a "light woman out of France," who indeed turns out to be a very heavy woman out of Italy, and whom the uncle stabs in her bed for corrupting the innocent mind of the hero. The work is a perfect curiosity in the way of diffuseness, and there is hardly a sentence in all its high-flown length that means anything very particular; but Ouida has quite brought to perfection
Nation, July 1, 1875
Nassau W. Senior (50)
Essays on Fiction. By Nassau W. Senior. London, 1864.
We opened this work with the hope of finding a general survey of the nature and principles of the subject of which it professes to treat. Its title had led us to anticipate some attempt to codify the vague and desultory canons, which cannot, indeed, be said to govern, but which in some measure define, this department of literature. We had long regretted the absence of any critical treatise upon fiction. But our regret was destined to be embittered by disappointment.
The title of the volume before us is a misnomer. The late Mr. Senior would have done better to call his book Essays on Fictions. Essays on the Novelists, even, would have been too pretentious a name. For in the first place, Mr. Senior's novelists are but five in number; and in the second, we are treated, not to an examination of their general merits, but to an exposition of the plots of their different works. These Essays, we are told, appeared in four of the leading English Reviews at intervals from the year 1821 to the year 1857. On the whole, we do not think they were worth this present resuscitation. Individually respectable enough in their time and place, they yet make a very worthless book. It is not necessarily very severe censure of a magazine article to say that it contains nothing. Sandwiched between two disquisitions of real merit, it may subsist for a couple of weeks upon the accidental glory of its position. But when half a dozen empty articles are bound together, they are not calculated to form a very substantial volume. Mr. Senior's papers may incur the fate to which we are told that inanimate bodies, after long burial, are liable on exposure to the air, -- they crumble into nothing. Much better things have been said on these same authors than anything Mr. Senior has given us. Much wiser dicta than his lie buried in the dusty files of the minor periodicals. His remarks are but a dull restatement of the current literary criticism. He is superficial without being lively; he is indeed so heavy, that we are induced to wonder why his own weight does not force him below the surface.
But he brings one important quality to his task. He is evidently
But we have wandered from our original proposition; which was, that the judgments of intelligent half-critics, like Mr. Senior, are very pleasant to serious critics. That is, they would be very pleasant in conversation; but they are hardly worth the trouble of reading. A person who during a long life has kept up with the light literature of his day, if he have as good a memory as Mr. Senior, will be an interesting half-hour's companion. He will remind you of a great deal that you have forgotten. This will be his principal merit. This is Mr. Senior's chief merit in the present volume.
His five authors are Scott, Bulwer, Thackeray, Mrs. Stowe, and -- Colonel Senior. We are at loss to understand this latter gentleman's presence in so august a company. He wrote, indeed, a tale called "Charles Vernon," and we believe him to be a relative of the author. His presence was doubtless very good fun to the Messrs. Senior, but it is rather poor fun to the public. It must be confessed, however, that Mr. Seniorhas restrained the partiality of blood to decent limits. He useshis kinsman chiefly as a motive for an aesthetic dissertation of questionable soundness; and he praises his story no more than, to judge from two or three extracts, it deserves.
He begins with Sir Walter Scott. The articles of which the paper on Scott is composed were written while the Waverley Novels were in their first editions. In our opinion this fact is their chief recommendation. It is interesting to learn the original effect of these remarkable books. It is pleasant to see their classical and time- honored figures dealt with as the latest sensations of the year. In the year 1821, the authorship of the novels was still unavowed. But we may gather from several of Mr. Senior's remarks the general tendency of the public faith. The reviewer has several sly hits at the author of "Marmion." He points out a dozen coincidences in the talent and treatment of the poet and the romancer. And he leaves the intelligent reader to draw his own conclusions. After a short preface he proceeds to the dismemberment of each of the novels, from "Rob Roy" downward. In retracing one by one these long-forgotten plots and counter-plots, we yield once
Thirty years have elapsed since the publication of the last of the Waverley series. During thirty years it has been exposed to the public view. And meanwhile an immense deal has been accomplished in the department of fiction. A vast army has sprung up, both of producers and consumers. To the latter class a novel is no longer the imposing phenomenon it was in Sir Walter's time. It implies no very great talent; ingenuity is held to be the chief requisite for success. And indeed to write a readable novel is actually a task of so little apparent difficulty, that with many popular writers the matter is a constant trial of speed with the reading public. This was very much the case with Sir Walter. His facility in composition was almost as great as that of Mrs. Henry Wood, of modern repute. But it was the fashion among his critics to attribute this remarkable fact rather to his transcendent strength than to the vulgarity of his task. This was a wise conviction. Mrs. Wood writes three volumes in three months, to last three months. Sir Walter performed the same feat, and here, after the lapse of forty years, we still linger over those hasty pages. And we do it in the full cognizance of faults which even Mrs. Wood has avoided, of foibles for which she would blush. The public taste has been educated to a spirit of the finest discernment, the sternest exaction. No publisher would venture to offer "Ivanhoe" in the year 1864 as a novelty. The secrets of the novelist's craft have been laid bare; new contrivances have been
He was the inventor of a new style. We all know the immense advantage a craftsman derives from this fact. He was the first to sport a fashion which was eventually taken up. For many years he enjoyed the good fortune of a patentee. It is difficult for the present generation to appreciate the blessings of this fashion. But when we review the modes prevailing for twenty years before, we see almost as great a difference as a sudden transition from the Spenserian ruff to the Byronic collar. We may best express Scott's character by saying that, with one or two exceptions, he was the first English prose story-teller. He was the first fictitious writer who addressed the public from its own level, without any preoccupation of place. Richardson is classified simply by the matter of length. He is neither a romancer nor a story- teller: he is simply Richardson. The works of Fielding and Smollett are less monumental, yet we cannot help feeling that they too are writing for an age in which a single novel is meant to go a great way. And then these three writers are emphatically preachers and moralists. In the heart of their productions lurks a didactic raison d'tre. Even Smollett -- who at first sight appears to recount his heroes' adventures very much as Leporello in the opera rehearses the exploits of Don Juan - - aims to instruct and to edify. To posterity one of the chief attractions of "Tom Jones" is the fact that its author was one of the masses, that he wrote from the midst of the working, suffering mortal throng. But we feel guilty in reading the book in any such disposition of mind. We feel guilty, indeed, in admitting the question of art or science into our considerations. The story is like a vast episode in a sermon preached by a grandly humorous
We do not mean to say that Scott's great success was owing solely to this, the freshness of his method. This was, indeed, of great account, but it was as nothing compared with his own intellectual wealth. Before him no prose-writer had exhibited so vast and rich an imagination: it had not, indeed, been supposed that in prose the imaginative faculty was capable of such extended use. Since Shakespeare, no writer had created so immense a gallery of portraits, nor, on the whole, had any portraits been so lifelike. Men and women, for almost the first time out of poetry, were presented in their habits as they lived. The Waverley characters were all instinct with something of the poetic fire. To our present taste many of them may seem little better than lay-figures. But there are many kinds of lay-figures. A person who goes from the workshop of a carver of figure-heads for ships to an exhibition of wax-work, will find in the latter the very reflection of nature. And even when occasionally the waxen visages are somewhat inexpressive, he can console himself with the sight of unmistakable velvet and brocade and tartan. Scott went to his prose task with essentially the same spirit which he had brought to the composition of his poems. Between these two departments of his work the difference is very small. Portions of "Marmion" are very good prose; portions of "Old Mortality" are tolerable poetry. Scott was never a very deep, intense, poetic poet: his verse alone was unflagging. So when he attacked his prose characters with his habitual poetic inspiration, the harmony of style was hardly violated. It is a great peculiarity, and perhaps it is one of the charms of his historical tales, that history is dealt with in all poetic reverence. He is tender of the past: he knows that she is frail. He certainly knows it. Sir
Having come thus far, we are arrested by the sudden conviction that it is useless to dogmatize upon Scott; that it is almost ungrateful to criticise him. He, least of all, would have invited or sanctioned any curious investigation of his works. They were written without pretence: all that has been claimed for them has been claimed by others than their author. They are emphatically works of entertainment. As such let us cherish and preserve them. Say what we will, we should be very sorry to lose, and equally sorry to mend them. There are few of us but can become sentimental over the uncounted hours they have cost us. There are moments of high-strung sympathy with the spirit which is abroad when we might find them rather dull -- in parts; but they are capital books to have read. Who would forego the companionship of all those shadowy figures which stand side by side in their morocco niches in yonder mahogany cathedral? What youth would willingly close his eyes upon that dazzling array of female forms, -- so serried that he can hardly see where to choose, -- Rebecca of York, Edith Plantagenet, Mary of Scotland, sweet Lucy Ashton? What maiden would consent to drop the dear acquaintance of Halbert Glendinning, of Wilfred of Ivanhoe, of Roland Graeme and Henry Morton? Scott was a born story-teller: we can give him no higher praise. Surveying his works, his character, his method, as a whole, we can liken him to nothing better than to a strong and kindly elder brother, who gathers his juvenile public about him at eventide, and pours out a stream of wondrous improvisation. Who cannot remember
The only other name of equal greatness with Scott's handled by Mr. Senior is Thackeray's. His remarks upon Thackeray are singularly pointless. He tells us that "Vanity Fair" is a remarkable book; but a person whose knowledge of Thackeray was derived from Mr. Senior's article would be surely at a loss to know wherein it is remarkable. To him it seems to have been above all amusing. We confess that this was not our impression of the book on our last reading. We remember once witnessing a harrowing melodrama in a country playhouse, where we happened to be seated behind a rustic young couple who labored under an almost brutal incapacity to take the play as it was meant. They were like bloodhounds on the wrong track. They laughed uproariously, whereas the great point of the piece was that they should weep. They found the horrors capital sport, and when the central horror reached its climax, their merriment had assumed such violence that the prompter, at the cost of all dramatic vraisemblance, had to advance to the footlights and inform them that he should be obliged to suspend the performance until betwixt them they could compose a decent visage. We can imagine some such stern inclination on the part of the author of "Vanity Fair," on learning that there were those in the audience who mistook his performance for a comedy.
We have no space to advert to Mr. Senior's observations upon Bulwer. They are at least more lenient than any we ourselves should be tempted to make. As for the article on Mrs. Stowe, it is quite out of place. It is in no sense of the word a literary criticism. It is a disquisition on the prospects of slavery in the United States.
North American Review, October 1864
William Shakespeare (51)
INTRODUCTION TO THE TEMPEST
If the effect of the Plays and Poems, taken in their mass, be most of all to appear often to mock our persistent ignorance of so many of the conditions of their birth, and thereby to place on the rack again our strained and aching wonder, this character has always struck me as more particularly kept up for them by The Tempest; the production, of the long series, in which the Questions, as the critical reader of Shakespeare must ever comprehensively and ruefully call them and more or less resignedly live with them, hover before us in their most tormenting form. It may seem no very philosophic state of mind, the merely baffled and exasperated view of one of the supreme works of all literature; though I feel, for myself, that to confess to it now and then, by way of relief, is no unworthy tribute to the work. It is not, certainly, the tribute most frequently paid, for the large body of comment and criticism of which this play alone has been the theme abounds much rather in affirmed conclusions, complacencies of conviction, full apprehensions of the meaning and triumphant pointings of the moral. The Questions, in the light of all this wisdom, convert themselves, with comparatively small difficulty, into smooth and definite answers; the innumerable dim ghosts that flit, like started game at eventide, through the deep dusk of our speculation, with just form enough to quicken it and no other charity for us at all, bench themselves along the vista as solidly as Falstaff and as vividly as Hotspur. Everything has thus been attributed to the piece before us, and every attribution so made has been in turn brushed away; merely to glance at such a monument to the interest inspired is to recognise a battleground of opposed factions, not a little enveloped in sound and smoke. Of these copious elements, produced for the most part to the best intention, we remain accordingly conscious; so that to approach the general bone of contention, as we can but familiarly name it, for whatever purpose, we have to cross the scene of action at a mortal risk, making the fewest steps of it and trusting to the probable calm at the centre of the storm. There in fact,
The position of privilege of The Tempest as the latest example, to all appearance, of the author's rarer work, with its distance from us in time thereby shortened to the extent of the precious step or two, was certain to expose it, at whatever final cost, we easily see, to any amount of interpretative zeal. With its first recorded performance that of February 1613, when it was given in honour of the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth, its finished state cannot have preceded his death by more than three years, and we accordingly take it as the finest flower of his experience. Here indeed, as on so many of the Questions, judgments sharply differ, and this use of it as an ornament to the nuptials of the daughter of James I. and the young Elector Palatine may have been but a repetition of previous performances; though it is not in such a case supposable that these can have been numerous. They would antedate the play, at the most, by a year or two, and so not throw it essentially further back from us. The Tempest speaks to us, somehow, convincingly, as a pi ce de circonstance, and the suggestion that it was addressed, in its brevity, its rich simplicity, and its free elegance, to court-production, and above all to providing, with a string of other dramas, for the "intellectual" splendour of a wedding-feast, is, when once entertained, not easily dislodged. A few things fail to fit, but more fit strikingly. I like therefore to think of the piece as of 1613. To refer it, as it is referred by other reckonings, to 1611 is but to thicken that impenetrability of silence in which Shakespeare's latest years enfold him. Written as it must have been on the earlier calculation, before the age of forty-seven, it has that rare value of the richly mature note of a genius who, by our present measure of growth and fulness, was still young
His powers declined, that is -- but declined merely to obey the spring we should have supposed inherent in them; and their possessor's case derives from this, I think, half the secret of its so inestimably mystifying us. He died, for a nature so organized, too lamentably soon; but who knows where we should have been with him if he had not lived long enough so to affirm, with many other mysteries, the mystery of his abrupt and complete cessation? There is that in The Tempest, specifically, though almost all indefinably, which seems to show us the artist consciously tasting of the first and rarest of his gifts, that of imaged creative Expression, the instant sense of some copious equivalent of thought for every grain of the grossness of reality; to show him as unresistingly aware, in the depths of his genius, that nothing like it had ever been known, or probably would ever be again known, on earth,
To balance, for our occasion, this light scale, however, The Tempest affects us, taking its complexity and its perfection together, as the rarest of all examples of literary art. There may be other things as exquisite, other single exhalations of beauty reaching as high a mark and sustained there for a moment, just as there are other deep wells of poetry from which cupfuls as crystalline may, in repeated dips, be drawn; but nothing, surely, of equal length and variety lives so happily and radiantly as a whole: no poetic birth ever took place under a star appointed to blaze upon it so steadily. The felicity enjoyed is enjoyed longer and more intensely, and the art involved, completely revealed, as I suggest, to the master, holds
One can speak, in these matters, but from the impression determined by one's own inevitable standpoint; again and again, at any rate, such a masterpiece puts before me the very act of the momentous conjunction taking place for the poet, at a given hour, between his charged inspiration and his clarified experience: or, as I should perhaps better express it, between his human curiosity and his aesthetic passion. Then, if he happens to have been, all his career, with his equipment
The face that beyond any other, however, I seem to see The Tempest turn to us is the side on which it so superlatively speaks of that endowment for Expression, expression as a primary force, a consuming, an independent passion, which was the greatest ever laid upon man. It is for Shakespeare's power of constitutive speech quite as if he had swum into our ken with it from another planet, gathering it up there, in its wealth, as something antecedent to the occasion and the need, and if possible quite in excess of them; something that was to make of our poor world a great flat table for receiving the glitter and clink of outpoured treasure. The idea and the motive are more often than not so smothered in it that they scarce know themselves, and the resources of such a style, the provision of images, emblems, energies of every sort, laid up in advance, affects us as the storehouse of a king before a famine or a siege -- which not only, by its scale, braves depletion or exhaustion, but bursts, through mere excess of quantity or presence, out of all doors and windows. It renders the poverties and obscurities of our world, as I say, in the dazzling terms of a richer and better. It constitutes, by a miracle, more than half the author's material; so much more usually does it happen, for the painter or the poet, that life itself, in its appealing, overwhelming crudity, offers itself as the paste to be kneaded. Such a personage works in general in the very elements of experience; whereas we see Shakespeare working predominantly in the terms of expression, all in the terms of the artist's specific vision and genius; with a thicker cloud of images to attest his approach, at any point, than the comparatively meagre given case ever has to attest its own identity. He points for us as no one else the relation of style to meaning and of manner to motive; a matter on which, right and
All of which considerations indeed take us too far; what it is important to note being simply our Poet's high testimony to this independent, absolute value of Style, and to its need thoroughly to project and seat itself. It had been, as so seating itself, the very home of his mind, for his all too few twenty years; it had been the supreme source to him of the joy of life. It had been in fine his material, his plastic clay; since the more subtly he applied it the more secrets it had to give him, and the more these secrets might appear to him, at every point, one with the lights and shades of the human picture, one with the myriad pulses of the spirit of man. Thus it was that, as he passed from one application of it to another, tone became, for all its suggestions, more and more sovereign to him, and the subtlety of its secrets an exquisite interest. If I see him, at the last, over The Tempest, as the composer, at the harpsichord or the violin, extemporising in the summer twilight, it is exactly that he is feeling there for tone and, by the same token, finding it -- finding it as The Tempest, beyond any register of ours, immortally gives it. This surrender to the highest sincerity of virtuosity, as we nowadays call it, is to my perception all The Tempest; with no possible depth or delicacy in it that such an imputed character does not cover and provide for. The subject to be treated was the simple fact (if one may call anything in the matter simple) that refinement, selection, economy, the economy not of poverty, but of wealth a little weary of congestion -- the very air of the
There are judges for whom the piece is a tissue of symbols; symbols of the facts of State then apparent, of the lights of philosophic and political truth, of the "deeper meanings of life," above all, of a high crisis in its author's career. At this
So it is then; and it puts into a nutshell the eternal mystery, the most insoluble that ever was, the complete rupture, for our understanding, between the Poet and the Man. There are moments, admit, in this age of sound and fury, of connections, in every sense, too maddeningly multiplied, when we are willing to let it pass as a mystery, the most soothing, cooling, consoling too perhaps, that ever was. But there are others when, speaking for myself, its power to torment us intellectually seems scarcely to be borne; and we know these moments best when we hear it proclaimed that a comfortable clearness reigns. I have been for instance reading over Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, and I find him apparently of the opinion that it is all our fault if everything in our author's story, and above all in this last chapter of it, be not of a primitive simplicity. The complexity arises from our suffering our imagination to meddle with the Man at all; who is quite sufficiently presented to us on the face of the record. For critics of this writer's complexion the only facts we are urgently concerned with are the facts of the Poet, which are abundantly constituted by the Plays and the Sonnets. The Poet is there, and the
If our knowledge of the greatest of men consists therefore but of the neat and "proved" addition of two or three dozen common particulars, the rebuke to a morbid and monstrous curiosity is no more than just. We know enough, by such an implication, when we admire enough, and as difficulties would appear to abound on our attempting to push further, this is an obvious lesson to us to stand as still as possible. Not difficulties -- those of penetration, exploration, interpretation, those, in the word that says everything, of appreciation -- are the approved field of criticism, but the very forefront of the obvious and the palpable, where we may go round and round, like holiday- makers on hobby-horses, at the turning of a crank. Differences of estimate, in this relation, come back, too clearly, let us accordingly say, to differences of view of the character of genius in general -- if not, in truth, more exactly stated, to that strangest of all fallacies, the idea of the separateness of a great man's parts. His genius places itself, under this fallacy, on one side of the line and the rest of his
For it is never to be forgotten that we are here in presence of the human character the most magnificently endowed, in all time, with the sense of the life of man, and with the apparatus for recording it; so that of him, inevitably, it goes
In some such terms as that, one makes out, does the best attainable "appreciation" appear to invite us to let our great personage, the mighty adventurer, slink past. He slunk past in life: that was good enough for him, the contention appears to be. Why therefore should he not slink past in immortality? One's reply can indeed only be that he evidently must; yet I profess that, even while saying so, our poor point, for which The Tempest once more gives occasion, strikes me as still, as always, in its desperate way, worth the making. The question, I hold, will eternally interest the student of letters and of the human understanding, and the envied privilege of our play in particular will be always to keep it before him. How did the faculty so radiant there contrive, in such perfection, the arrest of its divine flight? By what inscrutable process was the extinguisher applied and, when once applied, kept in its place to the end? What became of the checked torrent, as a latent, bewildered presence and energy, in the life across which the dam was constructed? What other mills did it set itself turning,
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare,
edited by Sidney Lee, Vol. XVI,
New York: George D. Sproul, 1907
Samuel Smiles and Sarah Tytler (52)
The Huguenots; their Settlements, Churches, and Industries in England and Ireland. By Samuel Smiles. With an Appendix relating to the Huguenots in America. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1868. The Huguenot Family in the English Village. By Sarah Tytler. London: Alexander Strahan; New York: Geo. Routledge, and Harper & Bros., 1867.
We have before us two works illustrative of the history of the Huguenot refugees in Great Britain. One is a novel by Miss Tytler, and the other an essay by Mr. Smiles, author of the very good little book on "Self-Help." Of Miss Tytler's novel there is not a great deal to say. It first appeared, we believe, in a religious magazine, and partakes of the merits and defects which novels published under such circumstances are pretty sure to unite. There is a good deal more of moralizing than of romancing, and one is constantly reminded that the author is forcing herself to write in a lower key than that in which the genuine novel consents to be cast. One is reminded at the same time, however, that it is a very surprising thing to find such free-spoken compositions in a religious magazine, and one reflects with satisfaction that periodicals of this class are more cheerful reading than they were ten years ago. On her own merits, Miss Tytler is a very pleasant writer; with a pronounced style, and a fair appearance of knowing something about the times and manners with which she deals. She is intensely sentimental, but, after all, she does n't mean a great deal by it. She has a decided sense of the picturesque in nature and life, and the command of an exuberant vocabulary; and in the person of the old French lady whom she calls "Grand'm re" she has devised a figure sufficiently vivid, and extremely charming. The only serious trouble is that one feels that clever ladies who prepare these gentle infusions of history dilute its mighty essence to an undue feebleness. Mr. Smiles's book, a naked recital of facts and figures, brings us face to face with the era of the great Huguenot exodus, and makes us feel by mere weight of evidence what a vastly serious affair it was, and how full of matter for study and reflection. Miss Tytler, of course, has looked into certain of Mr. Smiles's authorities, but it is plain that she remains quite the same Miss Tytler as before, and that she has not extracted a great deal beside her subject. We may add that her book is far
Mr. Smiles's volume presents no claim to originality of matter or of treatment; it is simply a compilation from a number of published authorities. Those parts of his book touching upon the rise of Protestantism, the causes of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and the state of French society antecedent and consequent to that event, are especially commonplace and weak. Mr. Smiles is an economist with a taste for morals. He has not the penetration requisite for writing history, and when he attempts it he sets about it in quite the wrong way. It teaches us nothing at this time of day to sneer at the pretended "greatness" of Louis XIV., to assume that his course towards the Protestants wipes out all his splendor, and to characterize inveterately his various acts for the suppression of heresy as hideous and infamous. These very acts were just a part of his splendor, and were so regarded at the time by all who either wished him well or feared him, down to the Huguenots themselves. Properly to appreciate the virtues and the sufferings of the Huguenots we do not need to falsify the character of the king, and to make a monarch de circonstance to place them in relief. "The farce of Louis' `conversion' went on," writes Mr. Smiles, describing the manner in which the king was brought to revoke the Edict of Nantes. And then he proceeds to relate the sanguinary consequences of the king's growing piety, and the dreadful rigor with which the revocation was enforced. These things prove that it is a gross error to call the king's conversion a farce. It was a most substantial reality. The revocation was in the eyes of all good observers an immense political error, pregnant from the first with those effects which immediately revealed themselves -- provinces depopulated, manufactures arrested, and commerce paralyzed. It assuredly took something more than a "farce" to reconcile the king to the possibility of these calamities. "Not only did he lose his teeth," says Mr. Smiles, quoting from Michelet, "but caries in the jawbone developed itself; and when he drank, the liquid passed through his nostrils. In this shocking state Madame de Maintenon became his nurse." The "farce" was hatched between the king "in this shocking state" and Madame de Maintenon. The physiological detail mentioned
A most interesting story, surely, is this great emigration of persecuted Christians, and a truly noble exhibition of patience and courage. During the thirty years which elapsed between the promulgation of the Edict of Nantes and the civil troubles which terminated in the taking of Rochelle by Richelieu, and the issue of the so-called Edict of Pardon (1629), the Huguenots were able to maintain successfully the political privileges granted them by Henry IV., and continued to form, practically, a little sectarian state within the state. This position of things was altered by Richelieu; the Protestants were extinguished as a political body, and reduced to the simple enjoyment of their religious freedom. The result of this extinction of their civil organization was to turn their attention from politics to industry and trade, and to make them gradually acquainted with the practice of those arts and virtues by the assistance of which, when the hand of authority began to press heavily upon them, they were enabled to combat adversity and to defy the terrors of emigration. During the greater part of the seventeenth century, the Huguenots may be said to have been educating themselves for adoption into other lands; for, destined as they were to be without a future in France, their own country was to reap but little of the benefit of their virtues. It is, nevertheless, true that while they remained in France they formed, as a whole, decidedly the most effective part of the population. "They were acknowledged," says Mr. Smiles, "to be the best agriculturists, wine-growers, merchants, and manufacturers in France." They prosecuted with distinguished success, on their own soil, several of those forms of industry in which, thanks to their example when naturalized in England, the latter country acquired the eminence
The Edict of Nantes was revoked in 1685; but the way had been gradually paved for the act. One by one the disabilities of the Protestants had been multiplied, their freedom restricted, and the burden of life made heavy for them. Mr. Smiles relates with considerable fulness the successive degrees in the cruel legislation by which they were gradually deprived of their churches, their schools, their pastors, their parental authority, their property, their freedom, and the security of their lives. These measures were all calculated with the keenest sagacity, and directed to the grand consummation of making as many persons as possible disgusted with the discomforts attached to heresy, and so, finally, with heresy itself. The court became possessed with the mania for conversion, and gave itself up to it with the best conscience in the world. Madame de Maintenon had a little niece whose parents were Protestant. One day, in the absence of the latter, she stole away the little girl and immured her in a convent, and when her parents remonstrated, justified her course in letters of truly sublime impudence. In the course of time, after a good deal of external pressure, these people came over to the Church. But a trial to which the king's future wife did not hesitate to subject her own relatives was, of course, not deemed too grievous for the great mass of the heretics. Children were legally empowered to elect Catholicism at seven years of age, and were taken away from their homes under
The terms of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes were horribly rigorous. The Protestant ministers alone were allowed to leave the country; the rest of the faithful were to remain and recant, or be sent either to death or to the galleys. Even the ministers were allowed but two days for departure, and the few remaining churches but the same length of time to stand undemolished. Instantly there began a vast outward wave of emigration in all directions -- towards Germany, Holland, and England. The civil authorities in these three countries immediately published declarations to meet the occasion, making the Huguenots as welcome in their own states as they were obnoxious at home. One may almost say that the hospitable attitude of all Protestant Europe at this moment is as affecting as the appealing and destitute condition of the refugees. Of their fate in Germany and Holland we have no space to speak. It is enough to say that even as a mere speculation
We may add that the American publishers have furnished the volume with a short supplementary sketch of the Huguenots in our own country, from which we learn that the French Protestant element in our population, especially in the South, is considerably larger than it is generally supposed to be. But the only trace of the Huguenot character which survives, except the existence of a French church service in one or two Southern cities, is found in certain of those French names which are so common in American society.
Nation, January 9,
1868
George Barnett Smith (53)
Poets and Novelists: A Series of Literary Studies. By George Barnett Smith. New York: Appletons, 1875.
These essays are marked as having originally appeared in various periodicals -- the Edinburgh, New Quarterly, Fortnightly, and Contemporary Reviews, and the Cornhill Magazine. The information is valuable, for we should never have supposed that Mr. Barnett Smith's "literary studies" had been ushered into the world by these illustrious journals. They treat of Thackeray, Mrs. Browning, Peacock the novelist, Hawthorne, the Misses Bront , Fielding, and Robert Buchanan. Of Thackeray Mr. Smith tells us that "his mode of narrative consists in a series of pictures after the manner of Hogarth." He goes on to say that Pendennis's "love-passages with Miss Fotheringay are na vely related," and that the young man's university career "is described with no sparing pen." "The subjectiveness of Thackeray," Mr. Smith pursues, "is another quality which has greatly enhanced the value of his works"; and he adds that, "leading out of his subjectiveness, or, rather, being a broader and grander development of it, we come to his humanity. That is the crown and glory of his work. And yet this man, who was sensitive almost beyond parallel, was charged with having no heart! . . . So superficial are the judgments of the world!" The author concludes with a compliment to Thackeray's style. "To the faithfulness with which he spake the English tongue we believe future generations will testify." This last is surely ambiguous. For future generations the English tongue will probably have greatly changed, and we should say that the testimony of Thackeray's own generation as to the way he "spake" it was the more valuable. But the error is perhaps slighter than to discover that Thackeray's narrative is like a series of pictures by Hogarth, or that the episode of Miss Fotheringay is "na vely" related. Satirists are not usually remarkable for their na vet, and if ever a man had little of this virginity of perception we should say it was the world-worn creator of the Pendennises and Costigans. For Mrs. Browning Mr. Smith has a boundless admiration. He devotes some space to considering
Nation, December 30,
1875
Robert Louis Stevenson (54)
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
If there be a writer of our language at the present moment who has the effect of making us regret the extinction of the pleasant fashion of the literary portrait, it is certainly the bright particular genius whose name I have written at the head of these remarks. Mr. Stevenson fairly challenges portraiture, as we pass him on the highway of literature (if that be the road, rather than some wandering, sun- chequered by-lane, that he may be said to follow), just as the possible model, in local attire, challenges the painter who wanders through the streets of a foreign town looking for subjects. He gives us new ground to wonder why the effort to fix a face and figure, to seize a literary character and transfer it to the canvas of the critic, should have fallen into such discredit among us, and have given way, to the mere multiplication of little private judgment-seats, where the scales and the judicial wig, both of them considerable awry, and not rendered more august by the company of a vicious-looking switch, have taken the place, as the symbols of office, of the kindly, disinterested palette and brush. It has become the fashion to be effective at the expense of the sitter, to make some little point, or inflict some little dig, with a heated party air, rather than to catch a talent in the fact, follow its line, and put a finger on its essence: so that the exquisite art of criticism, smothered in grossness, finds itself turned into a question of "sides." The critic industriously keeps his score, but it is seldom to be hoped that the author, criminal though he may be, will be apprehended by justice through the handbills given out in the case; for it is of the essence of a happy description that it shall have been preceded by a happy observation and a free curiosity; and desuetude, as we may say, has overtaken these amiable, uninvidious faculties, which have not the glory of organs and chairs.
We hasten to add that it is not the purpose of these few pages to restore their lustre or to bring back the more penetrating
That is, frankly, half the charm he has for us, that he wears a dress and wears it with courage, with a certain cock of the hat and tinkle of the supererogatory sword; or in other words that he is curious of expression and regards the literary form
The main thing that he demonstrates, to our own perception, is that it is a delight to read him, and that he renews this delight by a constant variety of experiment. Of this anon, however; and meanwhile, it may be noted as a curious characteristic of current fashions that the writer whose effort is perceptibly that of the artist is very apt to find himself thrown on the defensive. A work of literature is a form, but the author who betrays a consciousness of the responsibilities involved in this circumstance not rarely perceives himself to be regarded as an uncanny personage. The usual judgment is that he may be artistic, but that he must not be too much so; that way, apparently, lies something worse than madness. This queer superstition has so successfully imposed itself, that the mere fact of having been indifferent to such a danger constitutes in itself an originality. How few they are in number and how soon we could name them, the writers of English prose, at the present moment, the quality of whose prose is personal, expressive, renewed at each attempt! The state of things that would have been expected to be the rule has become the exception, and an exception for which, most of the time, an apology appears to be thought necessary. A mill that grinds with regularity and with a certain commercial fineness -- that is the image suggested by the manner of a good many of the fraternity. They turn out an article for which there is a demand, they keep a shop for a speciality, and the business is carried on in accordance with a useful, well-tested prescription. It is just because he has no speciality that Mr. Stevenson is an individual, and because his curiosity is the only receipt by which he produces. Each of his books is an independent effort -- a window opened to a different view. Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is as dissimilar as possible from Treasure Island; Virginibus Puerisque has nothing in common with The New Arabian Nights, and I should never have supposed A Child's Garden of Verses to be from the hand of the author of Prince Otto.
Though Mr. Stevenson cares greatly for his phrase, as every writer should who respects himself and his art, it takes no very attentive reading of his volumes to show that it is not what he cares for most, and that he regards an expressive style only, after all, as a means. It seems to me the fault of Mr.
The part of life which he cares for most is youth, and the direct expression of the love of youth is the beginning and the end of his message. His appreciation of this delightful period amounts to a passion, and a passion, in the age in which we live, strikes us on the whole as a sufficient philosophy.
This amounts to saying that what he is most curious of in life is heroism -- personal gallantry, if need be with a manner, or a banner, though he is also abundantly capable of enjoying it when it is artless. The delightful exploits of Jim Hawkins, in Treasure Island, are unaffectedly performed; but none the less "the finest action is the better for a piece of purple," as the author remarks in the paper on "The English Admirals" in Virginibus Puerisque, a paper of which the moral is, largely, that "we learn to desire a grand air in our heroes; and such a knowledge of the human stage as shall make them put the dots on their own i's, and leave us in no suspense as to when they mean to be heroic." The love of brave words as well as brave deeds -- which is simply Mr. Stevenson's essential love of style -- is recorded in this little paper with a charming, slightly sophistical ingenuity. "They served their guns merrily when it came to fighting, and they had the readiest ear for a bold, honourable sentiment of any class of men the world ever produced." The author goes on to say that most men of high destinies have even high-sounding names. Alan Breck, in Kidnapped, is a wonderful picture of the union of courage and swagger; the little Jacobite adventurer, a figure worthy of Scott at his best, and representing the highest point that Mr. Stevenson's talent has reached, shows us that a marked taste for tawdry finery -- tarnished and tattered, some of it indeed,
As it is not odd, but extremely usual, to marry, he deprecates that course in Virginibus Puerisque, the collection of short essays which is most a record of his opinions -- that is, largely, of his likes and dislikes. It all comes back to his sympathy with the juvenile and that feeling about life which leads him to regard women as so many superfluous girls in a boy's game. They are almost wholly absent from his pages (the main exception is Prince Otto, though there is a Clara apiece in The Rajah's Diamond and The Pavilion on the Links), for they don't like ships and pistols and fights, they encumber the decks and require separate apartments, and, almost worst of all, have not the highest literary standard. Why should a person marry when he might be swinging a cutlass or looking for a buried treasure? Why should he waste at the nuptial altar precious hours in which he might be polishing periods? It is one of those curious and to my sense fascinating inconsistencies that we encounter in Mr. Stevenson's mind, that though he takes such an interest in the childish life he takes
"A girl at school, in France, began to describe one of our regiments on parade to her French schoolmates; and as she went on, she told me, the recollection grew so vivid, she became so proud to be the countrywoman of such soldiers, that her voice failed her and she burst into tears. I have never forgotten that girl; and I think she very nearly deserves a statue. To call her a young lady, with all its niminy associations, would be to offer her an insult. She may rest assured of one thing; although she never should marry a heroic general, never see any great or immediate result of her life, she will not have lived in vain for her native land."
There is something of that in Mr. Stevenson; when he begins to describe a British regiment on parade (or something of that sort), he too almost breaks down for emotion: which is why I have been careful to traverse the insinuation that he is primarily a chiseller of prose. If things had gone differently with him (I must permit myself this allusion to his personal situation, and I shall venture to follow it with two or three others), he might have been an historian of famous campaigns -- a great painter of battle-pieces. Of course, however, in this capacity it would not have done for him to break down for emotion.
Although he remarks that marriage "is a field of battle and not a bed of roses," he points out repeatedly that it is a terrible renunciation and somehow, in strictness, incompatible even with honour - - the sort of roving, trumpeting honour that appeals most to his sympathy. After that step,
"There are no more bye-path meadows where you may innocently linger, but the road lies long and straight and dusty to the grave. . . . You may think you had a conscience
If there be a grimness in that it is as near as Mr. Stevenson ever comes to being grim, and we have only to turn the page to find the corrective -- something delicately genial, at least, if not very much less sad.
"The blind bow-boy who smiles upon us from the end of terraces in old Dutch gardens laughingly hurls his bird-bolts among a fleeting generation. But for as fast as ever he shoots, the game dissolves and disappears into eternity from under his falling arrows; this one is gone ere he is struck; the other has but time to make one gesture and give one passionate cry; and they are all the things of a moment."
That is an admission that though it is soon over, the great sentimental surrender is inevitable. And there is geniality too, still over the page (in regard to quite another matter), geniality, at least, for the profession of letters, in the declaration that there is
"One thing you can never make Philistine natures understand; one thing which yet lies on the surface, remains as unseizable to their wit as a high flight of metaphysics -- namely, that the business of life is mainly carried on by the difficult art of literature, and according to a man's proficiency in that art shall be the freedom and fulness of his intercourse with other men."
Yet it is difficult not to believe that the ideal in which our author's spirit might most gratefully have rested would have been the character of the paterfamilias, when the eye falls on such a charming piece of observation as these lines about children in the admirable paper on Child's Play:
"If it were not for this perpetual imitation we should be tempted to fancy they despised us outright, or only considered us in the light of creatures brutally strong and brutally silly, among whom they condescended to dwell in obedience, like a philosopher at a barbarous court."
We know very little about a talent till we know where it grew up, and it would halt terribly at the start, any account of the author of Kidnapped which should omit to insist promptly that he is a Scot of the Scots. Two facts, to my perception, go a great way to explain his composition: the first of which is that his boyhood was passed in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle, and the second that he came of a family that had set up great lights on the coast. His grandfather, his uncle, were famous constructors of light-houses, and the name of the race is associated above all with the beautiful and beneficent tower of Skerryvore. We may exaggerate the way in which, in an imaginative youth, the sense of the "story" of things would feed upon the impressions of Edinburgh -- though I suspect it would be difficult really to do so. The streets are so full of history and poetry, of picture and song, of associations springing from strong passions and strange characters, that, for our own part, we find ourselves thinking of an urchin going and coming there as we used to think (wonderingly, enviously), of the small boys who figured as supernumeraries, pages or imps, in showy scenes at the theatre: the place seems the background, the complicated "set" of a drama, and the children the mysterious little beings who are made free of the magic world. How must it not have beckoned on the imagination to pass and repass, on the way to school, under the Castle rock, conscious, acutely yet familiarly, of the gray citadel on the summit, lighted up with the tartans and bagpipes
Indeed the colour of Scotland has entered into him altogether, and though, oddly enough, he has written but little about his native country, his happiest work shows, I think, that she has the best of his ability, the best of his ambition. Kidnapped (whose inadequate title I may deplore in passing) breathes in every line the feeling of moor and loch, and is the finest of his longer stories; and Thrawn Janet, a masterpiece in thirteen pages (lately republished in the volume of The Merry Men), is, among the shorter, the strongest in execution. The latter consists of a gruesome anecdote of the supernatural, related in the Scotch dialect, and the genuineness which this medium (at the sight of which, in general, the face of the reader grows long) wears in Mr. Stevenson's hands is a proof of how living the question of form always is to him, and what a variety of answers he has for it. It would never have occurred to us that the style of Travels with a Donkey or Virginibus Puerisque and the idiom of the parish of Balweary could be a conception of the same mind. If it be a good fortune for a genius to have had such a country as Scotland for its primary stuff, this is doubly the case when there has been a certain process of detachment, of extreme secularisation. Mr. Stevenson has been emancipated: he is, as we may say, a Scotchman of the world. None other, I think, could have drawn with such a mixture of sympathetic and ironical observation
I have been wondering whether there is something more than this that our author's pages would tell us about him, or whether that particular something is in the mind of an admirer because he happens to have had other lights on it. It has been possible for so acute a critic as Mr. William Archer to read pure high spirits and the gospel of the young man rejoicing in his strength and his matutinal cold bath between the lines of Mr. Stevenson's prose. And it is a fact that the note of a morbid sensibility is so absent from his pages, they contain so little reference to infirmity and suffering, that we feel a trick has really been played upon us on discovering by accident the actual state of the case with the writer who has indulged in the most enthusiastic allusion to the joy of existence. We must permit ourselves another mention of his personal situation, for it adds immensely to the interest of volumes through which there draws so strong a current of life, to know that they are not only the work of an invalid, but that they have largely been written in bed, in dreary "health-resorts," in the intervals of sharp attacks. There is almost nothing in them to lead us to guess this: the direct evidence indeed is almost all contained in the limited compass of The Silverado Squatters. In such a case, however, it is the indirect that is the most eloquent, and I know not where to look for that, unless in the paper called "Ordered South," and its companion "Aes Triplex," in Virginibus Puerisque. It is impossible to read "Ordered South" attentively without feeling that it is personal: the reflections it contains are from experience, not from fancy. The places and climates to which the invalid is carried to recover or to die are mainly beautiful, but
"In his heart of hearts he has to confess that [they are] not beautiful for him. . . . He is like an enthusiast leading about with him a stolid, indifferent tourist. There is some one by who is out of sympathy with the scene, and is not
The second of the short essays I have mentioned has a taste of mortality only because the purpose of it is to insist that the only sane behaviour is to leave death and the accidents that lead to it out of our calculations. Life "is a honeymoon with us all through, and none of the longest. Small blame to us if we give our whole hearts to this glowing bride of ours." The person who does so "makes a very different acquaintance with the world, keeps all his pulses going true and fast, and gathers impetus as he runs, until if he be running towards anything better than wildfire, he may shoot up and become a constellation in the end." Nothing can be more deplorable than to "forego all the issues of living in a parlour with a regulated temperature." Mr. Stevenson adds that as for those whom the gods love dying young, a man dies too young at whatever age he parts with life. The testimony of "Aes Triplex" to the author's own disabilities is after all very indirect. It consists mainly in the general protest not so much against the fact of extinction as against the theory of it. The reader only asks himself why the hero of Travels with a Donkey, the historian of Alan Breck, should think of these things. His appreciation of the active side of life has such a note of its own that we are surprised to find that it proceeds in a considerable measure from an intimate acquaintance with the passive. It seems too anomalous that the writer who has most cherished the
These little histories -- the first volumes, if I mistake not, that introduced Mr. Stevenson to lovers of good writing -- abound in charming illustrations of his disposition to look at the world as a not exactly refined but glorified, pacified Bohemia. They narrate the quest of personal adventure, on one occasion in a canoe on the Sambre and the Oise and on another at a donkey's tail over the hills and valleys of the Cvennes. I well remember that when I read them in their novelty, upwards of ten years ago, I seemed to see the author, unknown as yet to fame, jump before my eyes into a style. His steps in literature presumably had not been many; yet he had mastered his form -- it had in these cases perhaps more substance than his matter -- and a singular air of literary experience.
"One evening he asked the miller where the river went. . . . `It goes out into the lowlands, and waters the great corn country, and runs through a sight of fine cities (so they say) where kings live all alone in great palaces, with a sentry walking up and down before the door. And it goes under bridges, with stone men upon them, looking down and smiling so curious at the water, and living folks leaning on their elbows on the wall and looking over too. And then it goes on and on, and down through marshes and sands, until at last it falls into the sea, where the ships are that bring tobacco and parrots from the Indies.'"
It is impossible not to open one's eyes at such a paragraph as that, especially if one has taken a common texture for granted. Will of the Mill spends his life in the valley through which the river runs, and through which, year after year, post-chaises and waggons and pedestrians, and once an army, "horse and foot, cannon and tumbrel, drum and standard," take their way, in spite of the dreams he once had of seeing the mysterious world, and it is not till death comes that he goes on his travels. He ends by keeping an inn, where he converses with many more initiated spirits; and though he is an amiable man he dies a bachelor, having broken off with more plainness than he would have used had he been less untravelled (of course he remains sadly provincial), his engagement to the parson's daughter. The story is in the happiest key and suggests all kinds of things: but what does it in particular represent? The advantage of waiting, perhaps -- the
I find myself speaking of Mr. Stevenson's last volume (at the moment I write), before I have spoken, in any detail, of its predecessors: which I must let pass as a sign that I lack space for a full enumeration. I may mention two more of his productions as completing the list of those that have a personal reference. The Silverado Squatters describes a picnicking episode, undertaken on grounds of health, on a mountain-top in California; but this free sketch, which contains a hundred humorous touches, and in the figure of Irvine Lovelands one of Mr. Stevenson's most veracious portraits, is perhaps less vivid, as it is certainly less painful, than those other pages in which, some years ago, he commemorated the twelvemonth he spent in America -- the history of a journey from New York to San Francisco in an emigrant train, performed as a sequel to a voyage across the Atlantic in the same severe conditions. He has never made his points better than in this half-humorous, half-tragical recital, nor given a more striking instance of his talent for reproducing the feeling of queer situations and contacts. It is much to be regretted that this little masterpiece had not been brought to light a second time, as also that he has not given the world (as I believe he came very near doing), his observations in the steerage of an Atlantic liner. If, as I say, our author has a taste for the impressions of Bohemia, he has been very consistent, and has not shrunk from going far afield in search of them. And as I have already been indiscreet, I may add that if it has been his fate to be converted in fact from the sardonic view of matrimony, this occurred under an influence which should have the particular sympathy of American readers. He went to California for his wife, and Mrs. Stevenson, as appears moreover by the title-page
Mr. Stevenson has a theory of composition in regard to the novel on which he is to be congratulated, as any positive and genuine conviction of this kind is vivifying so long as it is not narrow. The breath of the novelist's being is his liberty, and the incomparable virtue of the form he uses is that it lends itself to views innumerable and diverse, to every variety of illustration. There is certainly no other mould of so large a capacity. The doctrine of M. Zola himself, so jejune if literally taken, is fruitful, inasmuch as in practice he romantically departs from it. Mr. Stevenson does not need to depart, his individual taste being as much to pursue the romantic as his principle is to defend it. Fortunately, in England to-day, it is not much attacked. The triumphs that are to be won in the portrayal of the strange, the improbable, the heroic, especially as these things shine from afar in the credulous eye of youth, are his strongest, most constant incentive. On one happy occasion, in relating the history of Doctor Jekyll, he has seen them as they present themselves to a maturer vision. Doctor Jekyll is not a "boy's book," nor yet is Prince Otto; the latter, however, is not, like the former, an experiment in mystification -- it is, I think, more than anything else, an experiment in style, conceived one summer's day when the author had given the reins to his high appreciation of Mr. George Meredith. It is perhaps the most literary of his works, but it is not the most natural. It is one of those coquetries, as we may call them for want of a better word, which may be observed in Mr. Stevenson's activity -- a kind of artful inconsequence. It is easy to believe that if his strength permitted him to be a more abundant writer he would still more frequently play this eminently literary trick -- that of dodging off in a new direction -- upon those who might have fancied they knew all about him. I made the reflection, in speaking of Will of the
The novelist who leaves the extraordinary out of his account is liable to awkward confrontations, as we are compelled to reflect in this age of newspapers and of universal publicity. The next report of the next divorce case (to give an instance) shall offer us a picture of astounding combinations of circumstance and behaviour, and the annals of any energetic race are rich in curious anecdote and startling example. That interesting compilation Vicissitudes of Families is but a superficial record of strange accidents: the family (taken of course in the long piece), is as a general thing a catalogue of odd specimens and tangled situations, and we must remember that the most singular products are those which are not exhibited. Mr. Stevenson leaves so wide a margin for the wonderful -- it impinges with easy assurance upon the text -- that he escapes the danger of being brought up by cases he has not allowed for. When he allows for Mr. Hyde he allows for everything, and one feels moreover that even if he did not wave so gallantly the flag of the imaginative and contend that the improbable is what has most character, he would still insist that we ought to make believe. He would say we ought to make believe that the extraordinary is the best part of life even if it were not, and to do so because the finest feelings -- suspense, daring, decision, passion, curiosity, gallantry, eloquence, friendship -- are involved in it, and it is of infinite importance that the tradition of these precious things should not perish. He would prefer, in a word, any day in the week, Alexandre Dumas to Honor de Balzac, and it is indeed my
The New Arabian Nights offer us, as the title indicates, the wonderful in the frankest, most delectable form. Partly extravagant and partly very specious, they are the result of a very happy idea, that of placing a series of adventures which are pure adventures in the setting of contemporary English life, and relating them in the placidly ingenuous tone of Scheherazade. This device is carried to perfection in The Dynamiter, where the manner takes on more of a kind of high-flown serenity in proportion as the incidents are more "steep." In this line The Suicide Club is Mr. Stevenson's greatest success, and the first two pages of it, not to mention others, live in the memory. For reasons which I am conscious of not being able to represent as sufficient, find something ineffaceably impressive -- something really haunting -- in the incident of Prince Florizel and Colonel Geraldine, who, one evening in March, are "driven by a sharp fall of sleet into an Oyster Bar in the immediate neighbourhood of Leicester Square," and there have occasion to observe the entrance of a young man followed by a couple of commissionaires, each of whom carries a large dish of cream tarts under a cover -- a young man who "pressed these confections on every one's acceptance with exaggerated courtesy." There is no effort at a picture here, but the imagination makes one of the lighted interior, the London sleet outside, the company that we guess, given the locality, and the strange politeness of the young man, leading on to circumstances stranger still. This is what may be called putting one in the mood for a story. But Mr. Stevenson's
Is Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde a work of high philosophic intention, or simply the most ingenious and irresponsible of fictions? It has the stamp of a really imaginative production, that we may take it in different ways; but I suppose it would generally be called the most serious of the author's tales. It
I have left Mr. Stevenson's best book to the last, as it is also the last he has given (at the present speaking) to the public -- the tales comprising The Merry Men having already appeared; but I find that on the way I have anticipated some of the remarks that I had intended to make about it. That which is most to the point is that there are parts of it so fine as to suggest that the author's talent has taken a fresh start, various as have been the impulses in which it had already indulged, and serious the hindrances among which it is condemned to exert itself. There would have been a kind of perverse humility in his keeping up the fiction that a production so literary as Kidnapped is addressed to immature minds, and, though it was originally given to the world, I believe, in a "boy's paper," the story embraces every occasion that it meets to satisfy the higher criticism. It has two weak spots, which need simply to be mentioned. The cruel and miserly uncle, in the first chapters, is rather in the tone of superseded tradition, and the tricks he plays upon his ingenuous nephew are a little like those of country conjurers. In these pages we feel that Mr. Stevenson is thinking too much of what a "boy's paper" is expected to contain. Then the history stops without ending, as it were; but I think I may add that this accident speaks for itself. Mr. Stevenson has often to lay down his pen for reasons that have nothing to do with the failure of inspiration, and the last page of David Balfour's adventures is an honourable plea for indulgence. The remaining five-sixths of the book deserve to stand by Henry Esmond as a fictive autobiography in archaic form. The author's sense of the English idiom of the last century, and still more of the Scotch, has enabled him to give a gallant companion to Thackeray's tour
Century Magazine, April 1888
Reprinted in Partial Portraits, 1888
It was the happy fortune of Robert Louis Stevenson to have created beyond any man of his craft in our day a body of readers inspired with the feelings that we for the most part place at the service only of those for whom our affection is personal. There was no one who knew the man, one may safely assert, who was not also devoted to the writer -- conforming in this respect to a general law (if law it be) that shows us many exceptions; but, naturally and not inconveniently, it had to remain far from true that all devotees of the writer were able to approach the man. The case was nevertheless that the man somehow approached them, and that to read him -- certainly to read him with the full sense of his charm -- came to mean for many persons much the same as to "meet" him. It was as if he wrote himself outright and altogether, rose straight to the surface of his prose, and still more of his happiest verse; so that these things gave out, besides whatever else, his look and motions and voice, showed his life and manners, all that there was of him, his "tremendous secrets" not excepted. We grew in short to possess
The effect of it all none the less was such that his Correspondence has only seemed to administer delightfully a further push to a door already half open and through which we enter with an extraordinary failure of any sense of intrusion. We feel indeed that we are living with him, but what is that but what we were doing before? Through his Correspondence certainly the ego does, magnificently, shine -- which is much the best thing that in any correspondence it can ever do. But even the "Vailima Letters," published by Mr. Sidney Colvin in 1895, had already both established that and allayed our diffidence. "It came over me the other day suddenly that this diary of mine to you would make good pickings after I am dead, and a man could make some kind of book out of it without much trouble. So, for God's sake, don't lose them."
Being on these terms with our author, and feeling as if we had always been, we profit by freedoms that seem but the consecration of intimacy. Not only have we no sense of intrusion, but we are so prepared to penetrate further that when we come to limits we quite feel as if the story were mutilated and the copy not complete. There it is precisely that we seize the secret of our tie. Of course it was personal, for how did it operate in any connection whatever but to make us live with him? We had lived with him in "Treasure Island," in "Kidnapped" and in "Catriona," just as we do, by the light of these posthumous volumes, in the South Seas and at Vailima; and our present confidence comes from the fact of a particularly charming continuity. It is not that his novels were "subjective," but that his life was romantic, and in the very same degree in which his own conception, his own presentation, of that element touches and thrills. If we want to know even more it is because we are always and everywhere in the story.
To this absorbing extension of the story then the two volumes of Letters now published by Mr. Sidney Colvin beautifully contribute. The shelf of our library that contains our
There is no absolute privacy -- save of course when the exposed subject may have wished or endeavoured positively to constitute it; and things too sacred are often only things that are not perhaps at all otherwise superlative. One may hold both that people -- that artists perhaps in particular -- are well advised to cover their tracks, and yet that our having gone behind, or merely stayed before, in a particular case, may be
His descent and his origin all contribute to the picture, which it seems to me could scarce -- since we speak of "endings" -- have had a better beginning had he himself prearranged it. Without prearrangements indeed it was such a cluster of terms as could never be wasted on him, one of those innumerable matters of "effect," Scotch and other, that helped to fill his romantic consciousness. Edinburgh, in the first place, the "romantic town," was as much his "own" as it ever was the great precursor's whom, in "Weir of Hermiston" as well as elsewhere, he presses so hard; and this even in spite of continual absence -- in virtue of a constant imaginative reference and an intense intellectual possession. The immediate background formed by the profession of his family -- the charge of the public lights on northern coasts -- was a setting that he could not have seen his way to better; while no less happy a condition was met by his being all lonely in his father's house -- the more that the father, admirably commemorated by the son and after his fashion as strongly marked, was antique and strenuous, and that the son, a genius to be and of frail constitution, was (in the words of the charming anecdote of an Edinburgh lady retailed in one of these volumes), if not exactly what could be called bonny, "pale, penetrating and interesting." The poet in him had from the first to be pacified -- temporarily, that is, and from hand to mouth, as is the manner for poets; so that with friction and tension playing their part, with the filial relation quite classically troubled, with breaks of tradition and lapses from faith, with restless
All this obviously, however, was the sort of thing that the story the most generally approved would have had at heart to represent as the mere wild oats of a slightly uncanny cleverness -- as the life handsomely reconciled in time to the common course and crowned, after a fling or two of amusement, with young wedded love and civic responsibility. The actual story, alas, was to transcend the conventional one, for it happened to be a case of a hero of too long a wind and too well turned out for his part. Everything was right for the discipline of Alan Fairford but that the youth was after all a ph;oenix. As soon as it became a case of justifying himself for straying -- as in the enchanting "Inland Voyage" and the "Travels with a Donkey" -- how was he to escape doing so with supreme felicity? The fascination in him from the first is the mixture, and the extraordinary charm of his letters is that they are always showing this. It is the proportions moreover that are so admirable -- the quantity of each different thing that he fitted to each other one and to the whole. The free life would have been all his dream if so large a part of it had not been that love of letters, of expression and form, which is but another name for the life of service. Almost the last word about him, by the same law, would be that he had at any rate consummately written, were it not that he seems still better characterised by his having at any rate supremely lived.
Perpetually and exquisitely amusing as he was, his ambiguities and compatibilities yielded, for all the wear and tear of them, endless "fun" even to himself; and no one knew so well with what linked diversities he was saddled or, to put it the other way, how many horses he had to drive at once. It took his own delightful talk to show how more than absurd it might be, and, if convenient, how very obscurely so, that such an incurable rover should have been complicated both with such an incurable scribbler and such an incurable invalid, and that a man should find himself such an anomaly as a drenched yachtsman haunted with "style," a shameless Bohemian
It is doubtless after his settlement in Samoa that his letters have most to give, but there are things they throw off from the first that strike the note above all characteristic, show his imagination always at play, for drollery or philosophy, with his circumstances. The difficulty in writing of him under the personal impression is to suggest enough how directly his being the genius that he was kept counting in it. In 1879 he writes from Monterey to Mr. Edmund Gosse, in reference to certain grave symptoms of illness: "I may be wrong, but . . . believe I must go. . . . But death is no bad friend; a few aches and gasps, and we are done; like the truant child, I am beginning to grow weary and timid in this big, jostling city, and could run to my nurse, even although she should have to
The fear remained with him, sometimes greater, sometimes less, during the first years after his marriage, those spent abroad and in England in health resorts, and it marks constantly, as one may say, one end of the range of his humour -- the humour always busy at the other end with the impatience of timidities and precautions and the vision and invention of essentially open-air situations. It was the possibility of the open-air situation that at last appealed to him as the cast worth staking all for -- on which, as usual in his admirable rashnesses, he was extraordinarily justified. "No man but myself knew all my bitterness in those days. Remember that, the next time you think regret my exile. . . . Remember the pallid brute that lived in Skerryvore like a weevil in a biscuit."
He found after an extraordinarily adventurous quest the treasure island, the climatic paradise that met, that enhanced his possibilities; and with this discovery was ushered in his completely full and rich period, the time in which -- as the wondrous whimsicality and spontaneity of his correspondence testify -- his genius and his character most overflowed. He had done as well for himself in his appropriation of Samoa as if he had done it for the hero of a novel, only with the complications and braveries actual and palpable. "I have no more hope in anything" -- and this in the midst of magnificent production -- "than a dead frog; I go into everything with a composed despair, and don't mind -- just as I always go to sea with the conviction I am to be drowned, and like it before all other pleasures." He could go to sea as often as he liked and not be spared such hours as one of these pages vividly evokes -- those of the joy of fictive composition in an otherwise prostrating storm, amid the crash of the elements and with his grasp of his
He speaks in one of the "Vailima Letters," Mr. Colvin's publication of 1895, to which it is an office of these volumes promptly to make us return, of one of his fictions as a "long tough yarn with some pictures of the manners of to-day in the greater world -- not the shoddy sham world of cities, clubs and colleges, but the world where men still live a man's life." That is distinct, and in the same letter he throws off a summary of all that in his final phase satisfied and bribed him which is as significant as it is racy. His correspondent, as was inevitable now and then for his friends at home, appears to have indulged in one of those harmless pointings of the moral -- as to the distant dangers he would court -- by which we all were more or less moved to relieve ourselves of the depressed consciousness that he could do beautifully without us and that our collective tameness was far (which indeed was distinctly the case) from forming his proper element. There is no romantic life for which something amiable has not to be sweepingly sacrificed, and of us in our inevitable category the sweep practically was clean.
Your letter had the most wonderful "I told you so" I ever heard in the course of my life. Why, you madman, I wouldn't change my present installation for any post, dignity, honour, or advantage conceivable to me. It fills the bill; I have the loveliest time. And as for wars and rumours of wars, you surely know enough of me to be aware that I like that also a thousand times better than decrepit peace in Middlesex. do not quite like politics. I am too aristocratic, I fear, for that. God knows I don't care who I chum with; perhaps like sailors best; but to go round and sue and sneak to keep a crowd together -- never.
His categories satisfied him; he had got hold of "the world where men still live a man's life" -- which was not, as we have just seen, that of "cities, clubs and colleges." He was supremely
He is never more delightful than when he is most egotistic, most consciously charmed with something he has done.
And the papers are some of them up to dick, and no mistake. agree with you, the lights seem a little turned down.
When we learn that the articles alluded to are those collected in "Across the Plains" we quite assent to this impression made by them after a troubled interval, and envy the author who,
And however low the lights are, the stuff is true, and believe the more effective; after all, what I wish to fight is the best fought by a rather cheerless presentation of the truth. The world must return some day to the word "duty," and be done with the word "reward." There are no rewards, and plenty duties. And the sooner a man sees that and acts upon it, like a gentleman or a fine old barbarian, the better for himself.
It would perhaps be difficult to quote a single paragraph giving more than that of the whole of him. But there is abundance of him in this too:
How do journalists fetch up their drivel? . . . It has taken me two months to write 45,500 words; and, be damned to my wicked prowess, am proud of the exploit! . . . A respectable little five-bob volume, to bloom unread in shop windows. After that I'll have a spank at fiction. And rest? I shall rest in the grave, or when I come to Italy. If only the public will continue to support me! I lost my chance not dying; there seems blooming little fear of it now. I worked close on five hours this morning; the day before, close on nine; and unless I finish myself off with this letter I'll have another hour and a half, or aiblins twa, before dinner. Poor man, how you must envy me as you hear of these orgies of work, and you scarce able for a letter. But Lord! Colvin, how lucky the situations are not reversed, for I have no situation, nor am fit for any. Life is a steigh brae. Here, have at Knappe, and no more clavers!
If he talked profusely -- and this is perfect talk -- if he loved to talk above all of his work in hand, it was because, though perpetually frail, he was never inert, and did a thing, if he did it at all, with passion. He was not fit, he says, for a situation,
His overflow on such matters is meanwhile amusing enough as mere spirits and sport -- interesting as it would yet be to catch as we might, at different moments, the congruity between the manner of his feeling a fable in the germ and that of his afterwards handling it. There are passages again and again that light strikingly what I should call his general conscious method in this relation, were I not more tempted to call it his conscious -- for that is what it seems to come to -- negation of method. A whole delightful letter -- to Mr. Colvin, February 1, 1892 -- is a vivid type. (This letter, I may mention, is independently notable for the drollery of its allusion to a sense of scandal -- of all things in the world -- excited in some editorial breast by "The Beach of Fales;" which leads him to the highly pertinent remark that "this is a poison bad world for the romancer, this Anglo- Saxon world;
He communicates to his confidant with the eagerness of a boy confabulating in holidays over a Christmas charade; but I remember no instance of his expressing a subject, as one may say, as a subject -- hinting at what novelists mainly know, one would imagine, as the determinant thing in it, the idea out of which it springs. The form, the envelope, is there with him, headforemost, as the idea; titles, names, that is, chapters, sequences, orders, while we are still asking ourselves how it was that he primarily put to his own mind what it was all to be about. He simply felt this, evidently, and it is always the one dumb sound, the stopped pipe or only unexpressed thing, in all his contagious candour. He finds none the less in the letter to which refer one of the problems of the wonderful projected "Sophia Scarlet" "exactly a Balzac one, and I wish I had his fist -- for I have already a better method -- the kinetic -- whereas he continually allowed himself to be led into the static." There we have him -- Stevenson, not Balzac - - at his most overflowing, and after all radiantly capable of conceiving at another moment that his "better method" would have been none at all for Balzac's vision of a subject, least of all of the subject, the whole of life. Balzac's method was adapted to his notion of presentation -- which we may accept, it strikes me, under the protection of what he presents. Were it not, in fine, as I may repeat, to embark in a bigger boat than would here turn round I might note further that Stevenson has elsewhere -- was disposed in general to have -- too short a way with this master. There is an interesting
These, however, are comparatively small questions; the impression, for the reader of the later letters, is simply one of singular beauty -- of deepening talent, of happier and richer expression, and in especial of an ironic desperate gallantry that burns away, with a finer and finer fire, in a strange alien air and is only the more touching to us from his own resolute consumption of the smoke. He had incurred great charges, he sailed a ship loaded to the brim, so that the strain under which he lived and wrought was immense; but the very grimness of it all is sunny, slangy, funny, familiar; there is as little of the florid in his flashes of melancholy as of the really grey under stress of his wisdom. This wisdom had sometimes on matters of art, I think, its lapses, but on matters of life it was really winged and inspired. He has a soundness as to questions of the vital connection, a soundness all liberal and easy and born of the manly experience, that it is a luxury to touch. There are no compunctions nor real impatiences, for he had in a singular degree got what he wanted, the life absolutely discockneyfied, the situation as romantically "swagger" as if it had been an imagination made real; but his practical anxieties necessarily spin themselves finer, and it is just this production of the thing imagined that has more and more to meet them. It all hung, the situation, by that beautiful golden thread, the swinging of which in the wind, as he spins it in alternate doubt and elation, we watch with much of the suspense and pity with which we sit at the serious drama. It is serious in the extreme; yet the forcing of production, in the case of a faculty so beautiful and delicate, affects us almost as the straining of a nerve or the distortion of a feature.
I sometimes sit and yearn for anything in the nature of an income that would come in -- mine has all got to be gone and fished for with the immortal mind of man. What I want is the income that really comes in of itself, while all
To read over some of his happiest things, to renew one's sense of the extraordinarily fine temper of his imagination, is to say to one's self "What a horse to have to ride every week to market!" We must all go to market, but the most fortunate of us surely are those who may drive thither, and on days not too frequent, nor by a road too rough, a ruder and homelier animal. He touches in more than one place -- and with notable beauty and real authority in that little mine of felicities the "Letter to a Young Gentleman" -- on the conscience for "frugality" which should be the artist's finest point of honour; so that one of his complications here was undoubtedly the sense that on this score his position had inevitably become somewhat false. The literary romantic is by no means necessarily expensive, but of the many ways in which the practical, the active, has to be paid for this departure from frugality would be, it is easy to conceive, not the least. And we perceive his recognising this as he recognised everything -- if not in time, then out of it; accepting inconsistency, as he always did, with the gaiety of a man of courage -- not being, that is, however intelligent, priggish for logic and the grocer's book any more than for anything else. Only everything made for keeping it up, and it was a great deal to keep up; though when he throws off "The Ebb-Tide" and rises to "Catriona," and then again to "Weir of Hermiston," as if he could rise to almost anything, we breathe anew and look longingly forward. The latest of these letters contain such admirable things, testify so to the reach of his intelligence and in short vibrate so with genius and charm, that we feel him at moments not only unexhausted but replenished, and capable perhaps, for all we know to the contrary, of new experiments and deeper notes. The intelligence and attention are so fine that he misses nothing from unawareness; not a gossamer thread of the "thought of the time" that, wafted to him on the other side of the globe, may not be caught in a branch and played with; he puts such a soul into nature and such human meanings, for comedy and tragedy, into what surrounds him, however
So far at any rate from growing thin for want of London he can transmit to London or to its neighbourhood communications such as it would scarce know otherwise where to seek. A letter to his cousin, R. A. M. Stevenson, of September 1894, touches so on all things and, as he would himself have said, so adorns them, brimming over with its happy extravagance of thought, that, far again from our feeling Vailima, in the light of it, to be out of the world, it strikes us that the world has moved for the time to Vailima. There is world enough everywhere, he quite unconsciously shows, for the individual, the right one, to be what we call a man of it. He has, like every one not convenienced with the pleasant back-door of stupidity, to make his account with seeing and facing more things, seeing and facing everything, with the unrest of new impressions and ideas, the loss of the fond complacencies of youth.
But as I go on in life, day by day, I become more of a bewildered child; I cannot get used to this world, to procreation, to heredity, to sight, to hearing; the commonest things are a burthen. The prim obliterated polite face of life, and the broad, bawdy and orgiastic -- or maenadic -- foundations, form a spectacle to which no habit reconciles me; and "I could wish my days to be bound each to each" by the same open-mouthed wonder. They are anyway, and whether I wish it or not. . . . I remember very well your attitude to life -- this conventional surface of it. You have none of that curiosity for the social stage directions, the trivial ficelles of the business; it is simian; but that is how the wild youth of man is captured.
The whole letter is enchanting.
But no doubt there is something great in the half success that has attended the effort of turning into an emotional
The last letter of all, it will have been abundantly noted, has, with one of those characteristically thrown-out references to himself that were always half a whim, half a truth and all a picture, a remarkable premonition. It is addressed to Mr. Edmond Gosse.
It is all very well to talk of renunciation, and of course it has to be done. But for my part, give me a roaring toothache! I do like to be deceived and to dream, but I have very little use for either watching or meditation. I was not born for age. . . . I am a childless, rather bitter, very clear-eyed, blighted youth. I have, in fact, lost the path that makes it easy and natural for you to descend the hill. am going at it straight. And where I have to go down it is a precipice. . . . You can never write another dedication that can give the same pleasure to the vanished Tusitala.
Two days later he met his end in the happiest form, by the straight swift bolt of the gods. It was, as all his readers know, with an admirable unfinished thing in hand, scarce a quarter written -- a composition as to which his hopes were, presumably with much justice and as they were by no means always, of the highest. Nothing is more interesting than the rich way in which, in "Weir of Hermiston" and "Catriona," the predominant imaginative Scot reasserts himself after gaps and lapses, distractions and deflections superficially extreme. There are surely few backward jumps of this energy more joyous and pieds joints, or of a kind more interesting to a critic. The imaginative vision is hungry and tender just in proportion as the actual is otherwise beset; so that we must sigh always in vain for the quality that this purified flame, as we call it, would have been able to give the metal. And how many things for the critic the case suggests -- how many possible reflections cluster about it and seem to take light from
These things he does with a gusto, moreover, for which it must be granted that his literary treatment of the islands and the island life had ever vainly waited. Curious enough that his years of the tropics and his fraternity with the natives never drew from him any such "rendered" view as might have been looked for in advance. For the absent and vanished Scotland he has the image -- within the limits (too narrow ones we may perhaps judge) admitted by his particular poetic; but the law of these things in him was, as of many others, amusingly, conscientiously perverse. The Pacific, in which he materially delighted, made him "descriptively" serious and even rather dry; with his own country, on the other hand, materially impossible, he was ready to tread an endless measure. He easily sends us back again here to our vision of his mixture. There was only one thing on earth that he loved as much as literature -- which was the total absence of it; and to the present, the immediate, whatever it was, he always made the latter offering. Samoa was susceptible of no "style" -- none of that, above all, with which he was most conscious of an affinity -- save the demonstration of its rightness for life; and this left the field abundantly clear for the Border, the Great North Road and the eighteenth century. I have been reading over "Catriona" and "Weir" with the purest pleasure with which we can follow a man of genius -- that of seeing him abound in his own sense. In "Weir" especially, like an improvising
of their common ancestors now dead, of their rude wars composed, their weapons buried with them, and of these strange changelings, their descendants, who lingered a little in their places and would soon be gone also, and perhaps sung of by others at the gloaming hour. By one of the unconscious arts of tenderness the two women were enshrined together in his memory. Tears, in that hour of sensibility, came into his eyes indifferently at the thought of either; and the girl, from being something merely bright and shapely, was caught up into the zone of things serious as life and death and his dead mother. So that, in all ways and on either side, Fate played his game artfully with this poor pair of children. The generations were prepared, the pangs were made ready, before the curtain rose on the dark drama.
It is not a tribute that Stevenson would at all have appreciated, but I may not forbear noting how closely such a page recalls many another in the tenderest manner of Pierre Loti. There would not, compared, be a pin to choose between them. How, we at all events ask ourselves as we consider "Weir," could he have kept it up? -- while the reason for
North American Review, January 1900
Reprinted under the title "Robert Louis Stevenson"
in Notes on Novelists, 1914
(note-ch57-1) R.L. Stevenson, his Style and Thought," Time, November 1885
(note-ch57-2) A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured."
Republished, since the above was written, in Memories and Portraits,
1887.
Algernon Charles Swinburne (55)
Chastelard. A Tragedy. By Algernon Charles Swinburne. New York: Hurd & Houghton, 1866.
Chastelard" is not destined, in our judgment, to add to the reputation of the author of "Atalanta in Calydon." It has been said -- we know not on what authority -- that it is an early production, which the author was encouraged to publish by the success of the latter work. On perusal, this rumor becomes easily credible. "Chastelard" bears many signs of immaturity. The subject, indeed, is one which a man might select at any age; but the treatment of it, as it seems to us, is that of a man still young. The subject is one of the numerous flirtations of Queen Mary of Scotland, which makes, like so many of the rest, a very good theme for a tragedy. A drama involving this remarkable woman has, by the fact of her presence alone, a strong chance of success. The play or the novel is half made by the simple use of her name. Her figure has been repeatedly used, and it is likely it will continue to be used for a long time to come; for it adapts itself to the most diverse modes of treatment. In poetry, after all, the great point is that the objects of our interest should be romantic, and from every possible point of view Queen Mary answers this requisite, whether we accept her as a very conscientious or as a very profligate woman; as a martyr or simply as a criminal. For the fact remains that she was supremely unhappy; and when to this fact we add the consideration that she was in person supremely lovely, that she embodied, if not all the virtues, at least all the charms, of her sex, we shall not be at loss to understand the ready application of her history to purposes of sentiment. And yet, whoever takes her in hand is held to a certain deliberate view of her character -- the poet quite as much as the historian. Upon the historian, indeed, a certain conception is imposed by his strict responsibility to facts; but the poet, to whom a great license is usually allowed in the way of modifying facts, is free to take pretty much the view that pleases him best. We repeat, however, that upon some one conception he is bound to take his stand, and to
Mr. Swinburne has printed at the beginning of his play a short passage from that credulous old voyager, Sir John Mandeville, wherein he speaks of a certain isle toward the north, peopled by beautiful and evil women with eyes of precious stones, which, when they behold any man, forthwith slay him with the beholding. The author's intention, then, has been to indicate a certain poetic analogy between these fatal syrens and his heroine. The idea is pretty; the reader makes the rapprochement and proceeds; but when, as he advances in his reading, it dawns upon him that it is upon this idea, as much as upon any other appreciable one, that the tragedy rests, he experiences a feeling of disappointment which, we are bound to say, accompanies him to the end. He recurs to the title-page and finds another epigraph, from Ronsard, which the author has very prettily translated in the body of the play;
"With coming lilies in late April came
Her body, fashioned whiter for their shame;
And roses, touched with blood since Adam bled,
From her fair color filled their lips with red."
The reader's growing disappointment comes from his growing sense of the incompetency of any idea corresponding at all exclusively with these poetic fancies to serve as the leading idea of the work. Out of this disappointment, indeed, there comes a certain quiet satisfaction; the satisfaction, namely, of witnessing the downfall of a structure reared on an unsound basis. Mr. Swinburne, following the fashion of the day, has endeavored throughout his work to substitute color for design. His failure is, to the reader's mind, an homage
"Make way there for the lord of Bothwell; room --
Place for my lord of Bothwell next the Queen."
There is, moreover, a slight under-plot, resting upon the unrequited passion of Mary Beaton, the queen's woman, for Chastelard, and upon her suppressed jealousy of her mistress. There is assuredly in all this the stuff of a truly dramatic work; but as the case stands, it appears to us that the dramatic element is flagrantly missed. We can hardly doubt, indeed, that there was an intention in the faint and indefinite lines in which all the figures but that of the Queen are drawn. There is every reason to suppose that Mr. Swinburne had advisedly restricted himself to the complete and consistent exhibition of her character alone. Darnley, Murray, and the four Marys are merely the respective signs of a certain number of convenient speeches. Chastelard, too, is practically a forfeit, or, rather, he and Mary are but one. The only way, in our judgment, to force home upon the reader the requisite sense of Mary's magical personal influence was to initiate him thoroughly into its effects upon Chastelard's feelings. This, we repeat, Mr. Swinburne has not even attempted to do. Chastelard descants in twenty different passages of very florid and eloquent verse upon the intoxicating beauties of his mistress; but meanwhile the play stands still. Chastelard is ready to damn himself for Mary's love, and this fact, dramatically so great, makes shift to reflect itself in a dozen of those desperately descriptive speeches in which the poetry of the day delights. Chastelard is in love, the author may argue, and a lover is at best a highly imaginative rhapsodist. Nay, a lover is at the worst a man, and a man of many feelings. We should be very sorry to be understood as wishing to suppress such talk as Chastelard's. On the contrary, we should say -- let him talk as much as he pleases, and let him deal out poetry by the handful, the more the better. But meanwhile let not the play languish, let not the story halt. As for Mary, towards whom the reader is to conceive Mr. Swinburne as having assumed serious responsibilities, we may safely say that he has left her untouched. He has consigned her neither to life nor to death. The light of her great name illumines his page, and here and there the imagination of the cultivated reader throbs responsive to an
Nation, January 18, 1866
Mr. Swinburne has by this time impressed upon the general public a tolerably vivid image of his literary personality. His line is a definite one; his note is familiar, and we know what to expect from him. He was at pains, indeed, a year ago to quicken the apprehension of American readers by an effusion directed more or less explicitly to themselves. This piece of literature was brief, but it was very remarkable. Mr. Emerson had had occasion to speak of Mr. Swinburne with qualified admiration, and this circumstance, coming to Mr. Swinburne's ears, had prompted him to uncork on the spot the vials of his wrath. He addressed to a newspaper a letter of which it is but a colorless account to say that it embodied the very hysterics of gross vituperation. Mr. Swinburne has some extremely just remarks about Byron's unamenableness to quotation, his having to be taken in the gross. This is almost equally true of our author himself; he must be judged by all he has done, and we must allow, in our judgment, the weight he would obviously claim for it to his elaborate tribute to the genius of Mr. Emerson. His tone has two distinct notes -- the note of measureless praise and the note of furious denunciation. Each is in need of a correction, but we confess that, with all its faults, we prefer the former. That Mr. Swinburne has a kindness for his more restrictive strain is, however, very obvious. He is over-ready to sound it, and he is not particular about his pretext. Some people, he
The essays before us are upon Victor Hugo, D. G. Rossetti, William Morris, Matthew Arnold as a poet, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, and John Ford. To these are added two papers upon pictures -- the drawings of the old masters at Florence and the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1868. Mr. Swinburne, in writing of poets, cannot fail to say a great many felicitous things. His own insight into the poetic mystery is so deep, his perception in matters of language so refined, his power of appreciation so large and active, his imagination, especially, so sympathetic and flexible, that we constantly feel him to be one who has a valid right to judge and pass sentence. The variety of his sympathies in poetry is especially remarkable, and is in itself a pledge of criticism of a liberal kind. Victor Hugo is his divinity -- a divinity whom indeed, to our sense, he effectually conceals and obliterates in the suffocating fumes of his rhetoric. On the other hand, one of the best papers in the volume is a disquisition on the poetry of Mr. Matthew Arnold, of which his relish seems hardly less intense and for whom he states the case with no less prodigious a redundancy of phrase. Matthew Arnold's canons of style, we should have said, are a positive negation of those of Mr. Swinburne's, and it is to the credit of the latter's breadth of taste that he should have entered in to an intellectual temperament which is so little his own. The other articles contain similar examples of his vivacity and energy of perception, and offer a number of happy judgments and suggestive observations. His estimate
"No poet is less forgettable than Ford; none fastens (as it were) the fangs of his genius and his will more deeply in your memory. You cannot shake hands with him and pass him by; you cannot fall in with him and out again at pleasure; if he touch you once he takes you, and what he takes he keeps his hold of; his work becomes part of your thought and parcel of your spiritual furniture for ever; he signs himself upon you as with a seal of deliberate and decisive power. His force is never the force of accident; the casual divinity of beauty which falls, as though direct from heaven, upon stray lines and phrases of some poets, falls never by any such heavenly chance on his; his strength of impulse is matched by his strength of will; he never works more by instinct than by resolution; he knows what he would have and what he will do, and gains his end and does his work with full conscience of purpose and insistance of design. By the might of a great will seconded by the force of a great hand he won the place he holds against all odds of rivalry in a race of rival giants."
On the other hand, Mr. Swinburne is constantly liable on this same line to lapse into flagrant levity and perversity of taste; as in saying that he cannot consider Wordsworth "as mere poet" equal to Coleridge as mere poet; in speaking of Alfred de Musset as "the female page or attendant dwarf" of Byron, and his poems as "decoctions of watered Byronism"; or in alluding jauntily and en passant to Gautier's `Mademoiselle de Maupin' as "the most perfect and exquisite book of modern times." To note, however, the points at which Mr. Swinburne's judgment hits the mark, or the points at which it misses it, is comparatively superfluous, inasmuch as both these cases seem to us essentially accidental. His book is not at all a book of judgment; it is a book of pure imagination.
"About midnight, the thunder-cloud was full overhead, full of incessant sound and fire, lightening and darkening so rapidly that it seemed to have life, and a delight in its life. At the same hour, the sky was clear to the west, and all along the sea-line there sprang and sank as to music a restless dance or chase of summer lightnings across the lower sky: a race and riot of lights, beautiful and rapid as a course of shining Oceanides along the tremulous floor of the sea. Eastward, at the same moment, the space of clear sky was higher and wider, a splendid semicircle of too intense purity to be called blue; it was of no color namable by man; and midway in it, between the stars and the sea, hung the motionless full moon; Artemis watching with serene splendor of scorn the battle of Titans and the revel of nymphs from her stainless and Olympian summit of divine indifferent light. Underneath and about us, the sea was
But with this extravagant development of the imagination there is no commensurate development either of the reason or of the moral sense. One of these defects is, to our mind, fatal to Mr. Swinburne's style; the other is fatal to his tone, to his temper, to his critical pretensions. His style is without measure, without discretion, without sense of what to take and what to leave; after a few pages, it becomes intolerably fatiguing. It is always listening to itself -- always turning its head over its shoulders to see its train flowing behind it. The train shimmers and tumbles in a very gorgeous fashion, but the rustle of its embroidery is fatally importunate. Mr. Swinburne is a dozen times too verbose; at least one-half of his phrases are what the French call phrases in the air. One-half of his sentence is always a repetition, for mere fancy's sake and nothing more, of the meaning of the other half -- a play upon its words, an echo, a reflection, a duplication. This trick, of course, makes a writer formidably prolix. What we have called the absence of the moral sense of the writer of these essays is, however, their most disagreeable feature. By this we do not mean that Mr. Swinburne is not didactic, nor edifying, nor devoted to pleading the cause of virtue. We mean simply that his moral plummet does not sink at all, and that when he pretends to drop it he is simply dabbling in the relatively very shallow pool of the picturesque. A sense of the picturesque so refined as Mr. Swinburne's will take one a great way, but it will by no means, in dealing with things whose great value is in what they tell us of human character, take one all the way. One breaks down with it (if one treats it as one's sole support) sooner or later in aesthetics; one breaks down with it very soon indeed in psychology. We do not remember in this whole volume a single instance of delicate moral discrimination
Nation, July 29, 1875
Note of an English Republican on the Muscovite Crusade' is the title of a characteristic pamphlet lately put forth by Mr. Swinburne, in reply to the letter on behalf of Russia published by the friends of Mr. Carlyle towards the last of November. Mr. Swinburne in these pages is as hysterical and vociferous as usual; but he has found a better text for his vaticinations than it sometimes befalls him to do. The burden of his discourse is that the Turks may be great brutes, despoilers, and murderers, but who and what is Mr. Carlyle that he comes down on them for it? Mr. Swinburne charges the panegyrist of "Frederick the Second" with the grossest inconsistency, and makes good his case, in his own fashion,
Nation, January 11,
1877
William Makepeace Thackeray (56)
Thackerayana. Notes and Anecdotes. Illustrated by hundreds of sketches. By William Makepeace Thackeray, etc. New York: Scribner, Welford & Co., 1875.
This is a very frank piece of bookmaking; but it may be said that if a book was to be made, the subject might have been less happily chosen. The first effect of this bulky and handsome volume is to renew our regret that Thackeray's life should apparently be destined to remain unwritten. Why does not Miss Thackeray attempt a biography of her illustrious father? We should be more grateful for it than for the imaginary memoirs of Angelica Kauffmann. It is certain at least that a most agreeable work might be performed in collecting Mr. Thackeray's letters. These are known to have been delightful, and nobody, surely, ever received one without jealously preserving it. That they were chiefly humorous, and that the humor frequently overflowed in some comical little pen-drawing, are facts of equally general knowledge. A large part of the purpose of this anonymously-edited volume is to reproduce a number of such of Thackeray's sketches as are scattered through early and forgotten publications and over the fly-leaves and margins of old (and otherwise valueless) books, procured at the sale, after his death, of his library. The editor has been a collector of these things, and, so far as knowledge of the subject goes, he appears very competent to perform his task. But it is a question how far this task was worth performing. Thackeray is to our sense very far from being the first-rate caricaturist the editor considers him, and it seems to us a decided mistake to thrust him forward in this light. We cannot agree with the critic in the North British Review, whom the editor quotes so commendingly, that the drawing in Thackeray's sketches is always excellent. The drawing seems to us to have almost as little skill as might be; even for an amateur it is exceedingly amateurish. The merit is in a certain frank expressiveness of a broadly comical idea -- an expressiveness obvious, but never subtle. It is curious that, while Thackeray's humor in writing was so complex and refined, his comicality as a draughtsman is always rather bald and primitive. There are few of the rapid scrawls disinterred
This volume excites our curiosity for biographical detail without very largely gratifying it. It relates some interesting circumstances about Thackeray's earlier years -- such as the history of the establishment of the Constitutional newspaper, the luckless enterprise in which he sank the greater part of his patrimony; and it recalls some passages in his career about which most people have vague impressions, such as the very large amount of time which, first and last, he spent in Paris, the very quiet manner in which at first `Vanity Fair' came into the world, etc.; but it is not apparent that the editor has had access to any recondite sources of information. His strong point is the Thackerayan bibliography. He knows, apparently, everything that Thackeray wrote in his 'prentice years -- he knows all the books that he owned, and most of those that he read. Many of these latter seem to be in his hands, and he transfers whole pages of them to the present volume. When we call this a piece of book-making extraordinary, it is to the formidable scale of these interpolations that we allude. The practice of relating a man's life by stringing together whole chapters from books found in his library, and which he may be presumed to have handled, is one which promises to give a formidable extension to the writing of biography. We have here a copious condensation of Walpole's `Castle of Otranto,' seventeen pages of dreary extracts from Rollin's `Ancient History,' and a long account of Fielding's `Joseph Andrews.' The pretext is that Thackeray made some boyish sketches in satirical illustration of these works. Text, therefore, and sketches are given us at formidable length. The reproduction of all might have been spared; the latter have but the minimum of skill. Thus there is a long and minute description, plate by plate, of a certain set of lithographic drawings, entitled "Flore et Zphire" -- a caricature of the ballet of the period, published by Thackeray in his youth. The plates are described as minutely and seriously as if they were drawings by Albert Drer or Raphael; but, even were they more valuable than is to be supposed, the description would be rather ponderous
"Desolate Afric, thou art lovely yet!
One heart yet beats which ne'er thee shall forget!
What though thy maidens are a blackish brown?
Does virtue dwell in whiter breasts alone?
Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no!
It shall not, must not, cannot e'er be so!"
The editor gives also a good deal of miscellaneous gossip about Thackeray's personal and literary career, much of which is welcome, even if not of the newest. There is no writer of whom one bears better being reminded, none from whom any chance quotation, to whom any chance allusion or reference,
Nation, December 9, 1875
I have recently had a literary adventure which, though not followed by the prostration that sometimes ensues on adventures, has nevertheless induced meditation. The adventure itself indeed was not astounding, and I mention it, to be frank, only in the interest of its sequel. It consisted merely, on taking up an old book again for the sake of a certain desired and particular light, of my having found that the light was in fact not there to shine, but was, on the contrary, directly projected upon the book from the very subject itself as to which I had invoked assistance. The case, in short, to put it simply, was that Thackeray's charming fragment of "Denis Duval" proved to have much less than I had supposed to say about the two little old towns with which the few chapters left to us are mainly concerned, but that the two little old towns, on the other hand, unexpectedly quickened reflection on "Denis Duval." Reading over Thackeray to help me further to Winchelsea, I became conscious, of a sudden, that Winchelsea -- which already in a manner knew -- was only helping me further to Thackeray. Reinforced, in this service, by its little sister-city of Rye, it caused a whole question to open, and the question, in turn, added a savour to a sense already, by good fortune, sharp. Winchelsea and Rye form together a very curious small corner, and the measure, candidly undertaken, of what the unfinished book had done with
I daresay I speak of "Denis Duval" as "old" mainly to make an impression on readers whose age is less. I remember, after all, perfectly, the poetry of its original appearance -- there was such a thrill, in those days, even after "Lovel the Widower" and "Philip," at any new Thackeray -- in the cherished "Cornhill" of the early time, with a drawing of Frederick Walker to its every number and a possibility of its being like "Esmond" in its embroidered breast. If, moreover, it after a few months broke short off, that really gave it something as well as took something away. It might have been as true of works of art as of men and women, that if the gods loved them they died young. "Denis Duval" was at any rate beautiful, and was beautiful again on reperusal at a later time. It is all beautiful once more to a final reading, only it is remarkably different: and this is precisely where my story lies. The beauty is particularly the beauty of its being its author's -- which is very much, with book after book, what we find ourselves coming to in general, I think, at fifty years. Our appreciation changes -- how in the world, with experience always battering away, should n't it? -- but our feeling, more happily, doesn't. There are books, of course, that criticism, when we are fit for it, only consecrates, and then, with association fiddling for the dance, we are in possession of a literary pleasure that is the highest of raptures. But in many a case we drag along a fond indifference, an element of condonation, which is by no means of necessity without its strain of esteem, but which, obviously, is not founded on one of our deeper satisfactions. Each can but speak, at all events, on such a matter, for himself. It is a matter also, doubtless, that belongs to the age of the loss -- so far as they quite depart -- of illusions at large. The reason for liking a particular book becomes thus a better, or at least a more generous, one than the particular book seems in a position itself at last to supply. Woe to the mere official critic, the critic who has never felt the man. You go on liking "The Antiquary" because it is Scott. You go on liking "David Copperfield" -- I don't say you go on
The recital here, as every one remembers, is autobiographic; the old battered, but considerably enriched, world-worn, but finely sharpened Denis looks back upon a troubled life from the winter fire- side and places you, in his talkative and contagious way, -- he is a practised literary artist, -- in possession of the story. We see him in a placid port after many voyages, and have that amount of evidence -- the most, after all, that the most artless reader needs -- as to the "happy" side of the business. The evidence indeed is, for curiosity, almost excessive, or at least premature; as he again and again puts it before us that the companion of his later time, the admirable wife seated there beside him, is nobody else at all, any hopes of a more tangled skein notwithstanding, than the object of his infant passion, the little French orphan, slightly younger than himself, who is brought so promptly on the scene. The way in which this affects us as undermining the "love-interest" bears remarkably on the specific question of the subject of the book as the author would have expressed this subject to his own mind. We get, to the moment the work drops, not a glimpse of his central idea; nothing, if such had been his intention, was in fact ever more triumphantly concealed. The darkness therefore is intensified by our seeming to gather that, like the love-interest, at all events, the "female interest" was not to have been largely invoked. The narrator is in general, from the first, full of friendly hints, in Thackeray's way, of what is to come; but the chapters completed deal only with his childish years, his wondrous boy-life at Winchelsea and Rye, the public and private conditions of which -- practically, in the last century, the same for the two places -- form the background for this exposition. The southeastern counties, comparatively at hand, were enriched at that period by a considerable French immigration, the accession of Huguenot fugitives too firm in their faith to have bent their necks to the dire rigours with which the revocation of the Edict of Nantes was followed up. This corner of Sussex received -- as it had received in previous centuries -- its forlorn
Little hilltop communities sensibly even yet, with the memory of their tight walls and stiff gates not wholly extinct, Rye and Winchelsea hold fast to the faint identity which remains their least fragile support, their estate as "Antient Towns" involved (with the distincter Five and raising the number to seven), in that nominal, though still occasionally pompous Wardenship, the image -- for our time -- of the most famous assignment of which is preserved in Longfellow's fine verses on the death of the Duke of Wellington. The sea, in previous times half friend, half foe, began long since to fight, in each character, shy of them, and now, in wrinkled wistfulness, they look across at the straight blue band, two miles or so away, that tells of the services they rendered, the illusions they cherished, -- illusions in the case of poor Winchelsea especially absurd, -- and the extreme inconvenience they repeatedly suffered. They were again and again harried and hacked by the French, and might have had, it would seem, small appetite for the company, however reduced and disarmed, of these immemorial neighbours. The retreating waters, however, had even two centuries ago already placed such dangers on a very different footing, and the recovery and evocation of some of the old processes of actual absorption may well have presented
Evidently, none the less, the setting, little as it has got itself "rendered," did somehow come into the painter's ken; we know this, moreover, independently, and we make out that he had his inner mysteries and his reasons. The little house of Duval, faring forth from the stress of the Alsatian fatherland, seeks safety and finds business in the shrunken city, scarce at last more than a hamlet, of Edward the First's defeated design, where, in three generations, well on into the century, it grinds and sleeps, smuggles and spends, according to the fashions of the place and time. These communities appear to have had, in their long decline, little industry but their clandestine traffic with other coasts, in the course of which they quite mastered the art of going, as we say, "one better" than the officers of the revenue. It is to this hour a part of the small romance of Rye that you may fondly fancy such scant opulence as rears its head to have had its roots in the malpractice
A dozen wonderments rise here, and a dozen curiosities and speculations; as to which, in truth, I am painfully divided between the attraction of such appeals and a certain other aspect of my subject to which I shall attempt presently to do justice. The superior stroke, remind myself -- possibly not in vain -- would be to deal handsomely with both solicitations. The almost irresistible fascination, critically speaking, of the questions thus abruptly, after long years, thrust forth by the
Never was a secret more impenetrably kept. Read over the fragment itself -- which reaches, after all, to some two hundred and fifty pages; read over, at the end of the volume, the interesting editorial notes; address yourself, above all, in the charming series of introductions lately prepared by Mrs. Richmond Ritchie for a new and, so far as possible, biographical edition of her father's works, to the reminiscences briefly bearing on Denis, and you will remain in each case equally distant from a clew. It is the most puzzling thing in the world, but there is no clew. There are indications, in respect to the book, from Thackeray's hand, memoranda on matters of detail, and there is in especial a highly curious letter to his publisher; yet the clew that his own mind must have held never shows the tip of its tail. The letter to his publisher, in which, according to the editor of the fragment, he "sketches his plot for the information of" that gentleman, reads like a mystification by which the gentleman was to be temporarily kept quiet. With an air of telling him a good deal, Thackeray really tells him nothing -- nothing, I mean, by which he himself would have been committed to (any more than deterred from) any idea kept up his sleeve. If he were holding this card back, to be played at his own time, he could not have proceeded in the least differently; and one can construct to-day, with a free hand, one's picture of his private amusement at the success of his diplomacy. All the while, what was the card? The production of a novel finds perhaps its nearest analogy in the ride across country; the competent novelist -- that is, the novelist with the real seat -- presses his subject, in spite of hedges and ditches, as hard as the keen fox-hunter presses the game that has been started for his day with the hounds. The fox is the novelist's idea, and when he rides straight, he rides, regardless of danger, in whatever direction that animal takes. As we lay down "Denis Duval," however, we feel not only that we are off the scent, but that we never really have been, with the author, on it. The fox has got quite away. For it carries us no further, surely, to say -- as may possibly be objected -- that the author's subject was to have been neither more nor less than the adventures of his hero; inasmuch as, turn the thing as we will, these "adventures" could at the best have constituted nothing more than
If I spoke just now of Winchelsea as haunted, let this somewhat overworked word stand as an ineffectual tribute to the small, sad, civic history that the place appeals to us to reconstruct as we gaze vaguely about. I have a little ancient and most decorative map of Sussex -- testifying remarkably to the changes of relation between sea and land in this corner of the coast -- in which "Old Winchelsey Drowned" figures as the melancholy indication of a small circular spot quite out at sea. If new Winchelsea is old, the earlier town is to-day but the dim ghost of a tradition, with its very site -- distant several miles from that of its successor -- rendered uncertain by the endless mutation of the shore. After suffering, all through the thirteenth century, much stress of wind and weather, it was practically destroyed in 1287 by a great storm which cast up masses of beach, altered the course of a river, and roughly handled the face of many things. The reconstruction of the town in another place was thereupon decreed by a great English king, and we need but a little fuller chronicle to help us to assist at one of those migrations of a whole city of which antiquity so often gives us the picture. The survivors of Winchelsea were colonised, and colonised in much state. The "new" community, whose life was also to be so brief, sits on the pleasant table of a great cliff-like hill which, in the days of the Plantagenets, was an admirable promontory washed by the waves. The sea surrounded its base, came up past it to the east and north in a long inlet, and stretched away, across the level where the sheep now graze, to stout little neighbouring Rye, perched -- in doubtless not quite equal pride -- on an eminence more humble, but which must have counted then even for more than to-day in the pretty figure made, as you stand off, by the small, compact, pyramidal port. The "Antient
While Winchelsea dreamed, at any rate, she worked, and the noble fragment of her great church, rising solid from the abortive symmetry of her great square, helps us to put our hand on her deep good faith. She built at least as she believed -- she planned as she fondly imagined. The huge ivy-covered choir and transepts of St. Thomas of Canterbury -- to whom the structure was addressed -- represent to us a great intention. They are not so mighty, but they are almost as brave, as the wondrous fragment of Beauvais. Walled and closed on their unfinished side, they form at present all the church, and, with its grand lines of arch and window, its beautiful gothic tombs and general hugeness and height, the church -- mercifully exempt as yet from restoration -- is wonderful for the place. You may at this hour -- if you are given to such emotions -- feel a mild thrill, not be unaware even of the approach of tears, as you measure the scale on which the building had been planned and the ground that the nave and aisles would have covered. You murmur, in the summer twilight, a soft "Bravo!" across the ages -- to the ears of heaven knows what poor nameless ghosts. The square -- apparently one of many -- was to have been worthy of New York or of Turin; for the queerest, quaintest, most touching thing of all
Rye continued indeed, under her old brown south cliff, to build big boats till this industry was smitten by the adoption of iron. That was the last stroke; though even now you may see things as you stand on the edge of the cliff: best of all on the open, sunny terrace of a dear little old garden -- a garden brown-walled, red-walled, rose-covered on its other sides, divided by the width of a quiet street of grass-grown cobbles from the house of its master, and possessed of a little old glass-fronted, panelled pavilion which I hold to be the special spot in the world where Thackeray might most fitly have figured out his story. There is not much room in the pavilion, but there is room for the hard- pressed table and the tilted chair -- there is room for a novelist and his friends. The panels have a queer paint and a venerable slant; the small chimney-place is at your back; the south window is perfect, the privacy bright and open. How can I tell what old -- what young -- visions of visions and memories of images come back to me under the influence of this quaint receptacle, into which, by
The tidal river, on the left, wanders away to Rye Harbour and its bar, where the black fishing-boats, half the time at lop-sided rest in the mud, make a cluster of slanting spears against the sky. When the river is full we are proud of its wide light and many curves; when it is empty we call it, for vague reasons, "rather Dutch;" and empty or full we sketch it in the fine weather as hard as ever we can. When I say "we" I mean they do -- it is to speak with hospitality. They mostly wear, as I have hinted, large sunbonnets, and they crouch on low camp- stools; they put in, as they would say, a bit of white, in places often the least likely. Rye is in truth a rudimentary drawing-lesson, and you quite embrace the question when
It was about her spacious solitude that we had already begun to stroll; for the purpose, however, mainly, of measuring the stretch, south and north, to the two more crumbled of her three old gates. They are very far gone, each but the ruin of a ruin; but it is their actual countrified state that speaks of the circuit -- one hundred and fifty acres -- they were supposed to defend. Under one of them you may pass, much round about, by high-seated villages and in constant sight of the sea, toward Hastings; from the other, slightly the less dilapidated, you may gather, if much so minded, the suggestion of some illustration or tail-piece in a volume of Italian travel.
Close beside the east gate, so close that one of its battered towers leans heavily on the little garden, is a wonderfully perched cottage, of which the mistress is a very celebrated lady who resorts to the place in the intervals of an exacting profession -- the scene of her renown, I may go so far as to mention, is the theatre -- for refreshment and rest. The small grounds of this refuge, supported by the old town- wall and the steep plunge of the great hill, have a rare position and view. The narrow garden stretches away in the manner of a terrace to which the top of the wall forms a low parapet; and here it is that, when the summer days are long, the sweet old soul of all the land seems most to hang in the air. It is almost a question indeed whether this fine Winchelsea front, all silver-grey and ivy-green, is not even better when making a picture itself from below than when giving you one, with much immensity, from its brow. This picture is always your great effect, artfully prepared by an absence of prediction, when you take a friend over from Rye; and it would appear quite to settle the small discussion -- that may be said to come up among us so often -- of which is the happier abode. The great thing is that if you live at Rye you have Winchelsea to show; whereas if you live at Winchelsea you have nothing but Rye. This latter privilege I should be sorry to cry down; but nothing
Scribner's Magazine, January 1901
Reprinted in English Hours, 1905
John Thomson (57)
The Straits of Malacca, Indo-China, and China; or, Ten Years' Travels, Adventures, and Residence Abroad. By J. Thomson, F. R. G. S. New York: Harper & Bros., 1875.
This bulky volume may stand high, as works of travels go. The author is a vigorous Englishman, who explores, observes, and recounts with the energy that goes hand-in-hand with high animal spirits; he apparently knows his field very thoroughly, he has seen a vast number of curious places and things, and he has made an entertaining and readable work. He has been able to enrich it with a great many admirable wood- cuts, reproduced from his own photographs. These engravings are singularly careful and elaborate; we have not lately seen any of so fine a kind. They are all very clear, and some of the smaller ones are remarkable. Mr. Thomson was himself a photographer, and to discover interesting subjects appears to have been the principal aim of his wanderings. He carried his camera and lens into regions unconscious of the mystic process, and he relates a number of odd stories about the terror and hostility they generally provoked. The Chinese, even of the upper classes (who seem to combine in an ingenious manner most of the vices of civilization and of barbarism, and to possess few of the virtues of either state), consider that to be photographed is a certain forerunner of death, and Mr. Thomson had reason to congratulate himself on having arrived at Nanking just after the death of the great General Tseng-kuo-fan, rather than just before it. He had hoped to take a portrait of the eminent warrior -- one of the chief agents in the suppression of the Taiping rebellion -- and if the General's demise had occurred just after his sitting for his likeness Mr. Thomson might have been in an uncomfortable position. The most interesting portion of his work is the first half, treating of his observations in Siam and Cambodia. He travelled thence up the China Sea, visiting all the great cities and coast settlements -- Hong-Kong, Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Shanghai, Nanking, and Peking, besides making various deflections into the interior, exploring the magnificent island of Formosa, and sailing, adventurously, over death-dealing rapids, some thirteen hundred miles up the great
"This rapid is one of the grandest spectacles in the whole panorama of the river. The water presents a smooth surface as it emerges from the pass; then suddenly seems to bend like a polished cylinder of glass, falls eight or ten feet, and finally curves forward in a glorious crest of foam as it surges away in wild tumult down the gorge. At this season sundry rocks enhance the peril of shooting the rapids. On our way down we persuaded Chang to come into the boat with us, but as the vessel plunged and groaned in an agony of straining timbers, he became perfectly sick with panic-fear. It was indeed hardly to be wondered at. The pilot we employed at this time was a tall, bony man, with dark, piercing eyes, a huge black mustache, and a mouth full of foxy fangs. He and his assistant guided the boat into what seemed to be the worst part of the rapid, and then launched her into the raging waters, broadside on. After the first plunge she swept round bow foremost, tearing and writhing, until I thought she would go to pieces and disappear. Meanwhile, the pilot, flinging his arms on high, danced and yelled like a fiend about the deck, conveying the notion that the craft was doomed, although in reality he was only guiding his men at the helm. But the boat, regardless of oars and rudder, sped forward with a fearful impetus, bearing right down for the rocks, dodged them at the last moment, when the pilot had been seized with a fit of frantic despair, and then, with a groan of relief, darted into comparatively smooth water far below. The pilot's buffoonery is probably part of his game. It pays when he at last presents himself for his legitimate fee, and for the trifle extra which he expects for saving our lives at the risk of his own."
Mr. Thomson, in general, in the latter part of his narrative loses some of his animation, and also some of his clearness. He makes rather unexplained jumps and sudden transitions, and one does not always understand how he journeyed from one point to another. But he gives a vivid and entertaining
Mr. Thomson's most interesting adventure was his journey into the interior of the island of Formosa, which lies at a distance of a hundred miles off the southern Chinese coast. The Chinese occupy but one side of it, the other being thickly tenanted by aborigines of reputed cannibalistic tendencies. The late invasion of the island by the Japanese was based upon the fact that Japanese subjects wrecked upon the coast had been repeatedly plundered and massacred by these barbarous tribes. Mr. Thomson plunged energetically into the interior, in spite of many warnings of dangerous encounters, and found mountain scenery of extraordinary magnificence. The Pepohoans (semi-civilized aborigines) were extremely mild and friendly, though very miserable, both of which characteristics may perhaps be inferred from the incident of a crowd of them asking for a pull at the author's cigar and returning it carefully when it had been passed around. Mr. Thomson gives a large mass of information about China, the tea-trade, the silk-trade, the manufactories, the mines, the arsenals,
"We made another halt to visit a village fair, where we saw a poor conjuror perform tricks for a few cents that would make his fortune on the London stage; and yet his greatest trick of all was transforming three copper cash into gold coin. His arms were quite bare, and, having taken his cash in the palm of his hand, he permitted me to close the fingers over them. Then passing the wand above the clenched fist, he opened it again, and feasted the greedy eyes of his rustic admirers on what looked extremely like glittering gold. He also killed a small boy whom he had with him by plunging a knife into his body. The youth became suddenly pale, seemed to expire, then, jumping up again, removed the knife with one hand while he solicited patronage with the other. There was one feat which this conjuror performed with wonderful dexterity. He placed a square cloth flat upon the ground, and taking it by the centre between his forefingers and thumb with one hand, he waved the wand with another, and, gradually raising the cloth, disclosed a huge vase, brimful of pure water, beneath it."
Mr. Thomson's pages remind one afresh of the extraordinary disparity between Chinese material industry and skill and Chinese moral civilization. He found excellent iron-clad steamers in course of manufacture by native labor, and the various arsenals -- though these were under foreign supervision -- in a state of high efficiency. The author's view of the future of China, in the absence of immense radical changes, is naturally not a hopeful one, and he eyes with suspicion these active efforts towards the multiplication of the matriel of war. They seem to him to point not only to views of self-defence
Nation, April 22,
1875
Anthony Trollope (58)
Miss Mackenzie. A novel. By Anthony Trollope. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1865.
We have long entertained for Mr. Trollope a partiality of which we have yet been somewhat ashamed. Perhaps, indeed, we do wrong to say that we have entertained it. It has rather usurped our hospitality, and has resisted several attempts at forcible expulsion. If it remains, therefore, in however diminished vigor, we confess that it will be through our weakness.
Miss Mackenzie is a worthy gentlewoman, who, coming at the age of thirty-six into a comfortable little fortune, retires to enjoy it at a quiet watering-place, where, in the course of time, she is beset by a brace of mercenary suitors. After the lapse of a year she discovers that she holds her property by a wrongful title, and is compelled to transfer it to her cousin, a widowed baronet, with several children, who, however, gallantly repairs the injury thus judicially inflicted, by making her his wife. The work may be qualified, therefore, in strictness, as the history of the pecuniary embarrassments of a middle- aged spinster. The subject has, at least, the charm of novelty, a merit of which the author has wisely appreciated the force. We had had heroines of many kinds, maidens in their teens, yea, even in their units, and matrons in their twenties, but as yet we had had no maidens in their thirties. We, for our part, have often been called upon to protest against the inveterate and excessive immaturity of the ladies in whose fortunes we are expected to interest ourselves, and we are sincerely grateful to Mr. Trollope for having practically recognized the truth that a woman is potentially a heroine as long as she lives. To many persons a middle-aged woman in love trenches upon the ridiculous. Such persons may be assured, however, that although there is considerable talk about this passion in "Miss Mackenzie," there is very little of its substance. Mr. Trollope has evidently been conscious of the precarious nature of his heroine's dignity, and in attempting to cancel the peril to which it is exposed, he has diminished the real elements of passion. This is apt to be the case in Mr. Trollope's stories. Passion has to await the convenience of so many other claimants
We do not expect from the writers of Mr. Trollope's school (and this we esteem already a great concession) that they shall contribute to the glory of human nature; but we may at least exact that they do not wantonly detract from it. Mr. Trollope's offence is, after all, deliberate. He has deliberately selected vulgar illustrations. His choice may indeed be explained by an infirmity for which he is not responsible: we mean his lack of imagination. But when a novelist's imagination is weak, his judgment should be strong. Such was the case with Thackeray. Mr. Trollope is of course wise, in view of the infirmity in question, in devoting himself to those subjects which least expose it. He is an excellent, an admirable observer; and such an one may accomplish much. But why does he not observe great things as well as little ones? It was by doing so that Thackeray wrote ``Henry Esmond." Mr. Trollope's devotion to little things, inveterate, self- sufficient as it is, begets upon the reader the very disagreeable impression that not only no imagination was required for the work before
This is all very well; and we are perhaps ill advised to expect sympathy for any harsh strictures upon a writer who
Nation, July 13, 1865
This new novel of Mr. Trollope's has nothing new to teach us either about Mr. Trollope himself as a novelist, about English society as a theme for the novelist, or, failing information on these points, about the complex human heart. Take any one of his former tales, change the names of half the characters, leave the others standing, and transpose the incidents, and you will have "Can You Forgive Her?'' It is neither better nor worse than the tale which you will select. It became long ago apparent that Mr. Trollope had only one manner. In this manner he very soon showed us his maximum. He has recently, in "Miss Mackenzie," showed us his minimum. In the work before us he has remained pretty constantly at his best. There is, indeed, a certain amount of that inconceivably vulgar love-making between middle-aged persons by which "Miss Mackenzie" was distinguished; but the burden of the story rests upon the young people.
For so thick a book, there is certainly very little story. There are no less than three different plots, however, if the word can be applied to Mr. Trollope's simple machinations. That is, there is a leading story, which, being foreseen at the outset to be insufficient to protract the book during the requisite number of months, is padded with a couple of underplots, one of which comes almost near being pathetic, as the other falls very far short of being humorous. The main narrative, of course, concerns the settlement in life -- it is hard to give it a more sentimental name -- of a beautiful young lady. Alice Vavasor, well-born, high-spirited, motherless, and engaged to Mr. John Grey, the consummate model of a Christian gentleman, mistrusting the quality of her affection,
Mr. Trollope's book presents no feature more remarkable than the inveteracy with which he just eludes being really serious; unless it be the almost equal success with which he frequently escapes being really humorous. Both of these results are the penalty of writing so rapidly; but as in much rapid writing we are often made to regret the absence of that sober second thought which may curtail an extravagance - - that critical movement which, if you will only give it time, is sure to follow the creative one -- so in Mr. Trollope we perpetually miss that sustained action of the imagination, that creative movement which in those in whom this faculty is not supreme may, if you will give it time, bear out the natural or critical one, which would intensify and animate his first conception. We are for ever wishing that he would go a little further, a little deeper. There are a hundred places in "Can You Forgive Her?" where even the dullest readers will be sure to express this wish. For ourselves, we were very much disappointed that when Alice returns to her cousin George she should not do so more frankly, that on eventually restoring herself to Grey she should have so little to expiate or to forget, that she should leave herself, in short, so easy an issue by her refusal to admit Vavasor to a lover's privilege. Our desire for a different course of action is simply founded on the fact that it would have been so much more interesting. When it is proposed to represent a young girl as jilting her lover in such a way as that the moral of the tale resolves itself into the question of the venality of her offence, it evinces in the novelist
To Mr. Trollope all the possible incidents of society seem to be of equal importance and of equal interest. He has the same treatment, the same tone, for them all. After narrating the minutest particulars of a certain phase of his heroine's experience, he will dwell with equal length and great patience upon the proceedings of a vulgar widow (the heroine's aunt), who is engaged in playing fast and loose with a couple of vulgar suitors. With what authority can we invest the pen which treats of the lovely niece, when we see it devoted with the same good-will to the utterly prosaic and unlovely aunt? It is of course evident that Mr. Trollope has not intended to make the aunt either poetic or attractive. He has intended, in the first place, to swell his book into the prescribed dimensions, and, incidentally, to make the inserted matter amusing. A single chapter of it might be amusing; a dozen chapters are inexpressibly wearisome. The undue prominence assigned to this episode is yet not so signal an offence against good judgment as the subordination of Lady Glencora Palliser's story to that of Alice Vavasor's. It is a great mistake in speaking of a novel to be over-positive as to what ought to be and what ought not; but we do not fear to dogmatize when we say that by rights Lady Glencora is the heroine of the book. Her adventure is more important, more dramatic, more interesting than Alice Vavasor's. That it is more interesting is not a matter of opinion, but a matter of fact. A woman who forsakes her husband belongs more to the technical heroic than a woman who merely forsakes her lover. Lady Glencora, young and fascinating, torn from the man of her heart and married to a stranger, and pursued after marriage by her old lover, handsome, dissolute, desperate, touches at a hundred points almost upon the tragical. And yet her history gets itself told as best it may, in the intervals of what is after all, considering the dnoment, but a serious comedy. It is, to use a common illustration, as if Mr. Forrest should appear on the "off-nights" of no matter what fainter dramatic luminary. It signifies little in the argument that Lady Glencora's adventure came also to an anti-climax; for in this case the reader rejects
Nation, September 28, 1865
Here, in the natural order of events, is a new novel by Mr. Trollope. This time it is Miss Clara Amedroz who is agitated by conflicting thoughts. Like most of Mr. Trollope's recent heroines, she is no longer in the first blush of youth; and her story, like most of Mr. Trollope's recent stories, is that of a woman standing irresolute between a better lover and a worse. She first rejects the better for the worse, and then rejects the worse for the better. This latter movement is final, and Captain Aylmer, like Crosbie, in "The Small House at Allington," has to put up with a red-nosed Lady Emily. The reader will surmise that we are not in "The Belton Estate" introduced to very new ground. The book is, nevertheless, to our mind, more readable than many of its predecessors. It is comparatively short, and has the advantage of being a single story, unencumbered by any subordinate or coordinate plot. The interest of Mr. Trollope's main narrative is usually so far from being intense that repeated interruption on behalf of the actors charged with the more strictly humorous business is often very near proving altogether fatal. To become involved in one of his love stories is very like sinking into a gentle slumber; and it is well known that when you are aroused from your slumber to see something which your well-meaning intruder considers very entertaining, it is a difficult matter to woo it back again. In the tale before us we slumber on gently to the end. There is no heroine but Miss Clara Amedroz, and no heroes but her two suitors. The lady loves amiss, but discovers it in time, and invests her affections more safely. Such, in strictness, is the substance of the tale; but it is filled out as Mr. Trollope alone knows how to fill out the primitive meagreness of his dramatic skeletons. The three
Looking at "The Belton Estate," then, from Mr. Trollope's own point of view, it is a very pleasing tale. It contains not a word against nature. It relates, with great knowledge, humor, and grace of style, the history of the affections of a charming young lady. No unlawful devices are resorted to in order to interest us. People and things are painted as they stand. Miss Clara Amedroz is charming only as two-thirds of her sex are charming -- by the sweetness of her face and figure, the propriety of her manners, and the amiability of her disposition. Represented thus, without perversion or exaggeration, she engages our sympathy as one whom we can understand, from having known a hundred women exactly like her. Will Belton, the lover whom she finally accepts, is still more vividly natural. Even the critic, who judges the book strictly from a reader's stand-point, must admit that Mr. Trollope has drawn few better figures than this, or even (what is more to the purpose) that, as a representation, he is an approach to ideal excellence. The author understands him well in the life, and the reader understands him well in the book. As soon as he begins to talk we begin to know and to like him, as we know and like
The other lover, Captain Aylmer, is not as successful a figure as his rival, but he is yet a very fair likeness of a man who probably abounds in the ranks of that society from which Mr. Trollope recruits his characters, and who occurs, we venture to believe, in that society alone. Not that there are not in all the walks of life weak and passionless men who allow their mothers to bully their affianced wives, and who are utterly incompetent to entertain an idea. But in no other society than that to which Captain Aylmer belongs do such frigidity and such stupidity stand so little in the way of social success. They seem in his case, indeed, to be a passport to it. His prospects depend upon his being respectable, and his being respectable depends, apparently, on his being contemptible. We do not suppose, however, that Mr. Trollope likes him any better than we. In fact, Mr. Trollope never fails to betray his antipathy for mean people and mean actions. And antipathetic to his tastes as is Captain Aylmer's nature, it is the more creditable to him that he has described it so coolly, critically, and temperately. Mr. Trollope is never guilty of an excess in any direction, and the vice of his villain is of so mild a quality that it is powerless to prejudice him against his even milder virtues. These seem to us insufficient to account for Clara's passion, for we are bound to believe that for her it was a passion. As far as the reader sees, Captain Aylmer has done nothing
Such praise as this we may freely bestow on the work before us, because, qualified by the important stricture which we have kept in reserve, we feel that it will not seem excessive. Our great objection to "The Belton Estate" is that, as we read it, we seemed to be reading a work written for children; a work prepared for minds unable to think; a work below the apprehension of the average man and woman, or, at the very most, on a level with it, and in no particular above it. "The Belton Estate" is a stupid book; and in a much deeper sense than that of being simply dull, for a dull book is always a
Nation, January 4, 1866
Among the new books of the present moment there are many more noteworthy than the little story whose name we transcribe; but we have read "Linda Tressel" because it is by the author of "Nina Balatka," and because it is as clear as noonday to our penetrating intellect that the author of "Nina Balatka" is but another title of the author of "Barchester Towers" and "The Small House at Allington." Mr. Trollope's style is as little to be mistaken as it is to be imitated, and we find it in this anonymous tale in all its purity -- with its flatness and simpleness, its half-quaint ponderosity and verbosity, and all its roundabout graces. Mr. Trollope has, of
"Nina Balatka," our readers will probably remember, was a young bourgeoise of Prague, who, being minded to take a husband, was determined to take a lover at the same time, and had the bad taste to prefer a Jew. Persecuted and reviled by her family, and finally alienated from her lover and reduced to the extremity of suffering, she is ultimately redeemed from her sorrows by the gentleman himself and locked fast within the gates of matrimony. The story was told in so simple and uninspired a fashion as to be absolutely dull, and yet if you could bring yourself to have patience with its dulness -- which was certainly a great deal to ask -- it seemed full of truthfulness and pathos. In "Linda Tressel" you have to make the same concession to the author; but here the reward is even richer. Toward the close, without in the least departing from its dulness, without raising its key or smuggling in any leavening substance from abroad, or calling upon the averted muse, but by simply keeping its sturdy shoulders to the wheel, the story forces its way up into truly tragic interest and dignity. We doubt that Mr. Trollope has ever written anything more touching and forcible -- more replete with that abject human quality in which he is master -- than the pages from the passage in which Linda is described as receiving her lover at the door of her room to the end of the book. And it is really a matter of which he may be proud that he should have written these pages in the way we have attempted to
Linda Tressel is an orphan, with a small property, living in Nuremberg under the care of her aunt, Madame Stanbach, a woman of rigid virtue and exemplary piety. In the same house lives an elderly man, a town-clerk, Peter Steinmarc by name, as lodger of the two ladies. It occurs to Madame Stanbach that it would be a good thing that her niece, excellent girl, should marry this old Steinmarc -- this rusty coeval of Linda's father, with his big shoes adapted to his protuberant corns, his scanty hair, his greasy hat, and his vulgar probity. We mention these little traits as the chief items in the description given by Mr. Trollope. The reader will see that they do not penetrate very far into the realms of psychology and cannot exactly be said to embody the essence of the man. And yet for the author they form an all-sufficient starting-point. With a hundred touches like these Peter Steinmarc is placed before us quite vividly enough to make us feel in our own hearts all of poor Linda's antipathy, and yet at the same time all of her suitor's own half-conscientious obstinacy and self-contentment. The idea of such a match is, of course, revolting to Linda; she refuses, resists, and rebels. Her aunt and her aunt's protg persist and press upon her with a pitilessness which,
Nation, June 18, 1868
Women, a few months ago, Anthony Trollope laid down his pen for the last time, it was a sign of the complete extinction of that group of admirable writers who,
His great, his inestimable merit was a complete appreciation of the usual. This gift is not rare in the annals of English fiction; it would naturally be found in a walk of literature in which the feminine mind has laboured so fruitfully. Women are delicate and patient observers; they hold their noses close, as it were, to the texture of life. They feel and perceive the real with a kind of personal tact, and their observations are recorded in a thousand delightful volumes. Trollope, therefore, with his eyes comfortably fixed on the familiar, the actual, was far from having invented a new category; his great distinction is that in resting there his vision took in so much of the field. And then he felt all daily and immediate things as well as saw them; felt them in a simple, direct, salubrious way, with their sadness, their gladness, their charm, their comicality, all their obvious and measurable meanings. He never wearied of the pre-established round of English customs -- never needed a respite or a change -- was content to go on indefinitely watching the life that surrounded him, and holding up his mirror to it. Into this mirror the public, at first especially, grew very fond of looking -- for it saw itself reflected in all the most credible and supposable ways, with that curiosity that people feel to know how they look when they are represented, "just as they are," by a painter who does not desire to put them into an attitude, to drape them for an effect, to arrange his light and his accessories. This exact and on the whole becoming image, projected upon a surface without a strong intrinsic tone, constitutes mainly the entertainment that Trollope offered his readers. The striking thing to the critic was that his robust and patient mind had no particular
To touch successively upon these points is to attempt a portrait, which I shall perhaps not altogether have failed to produce. The source of his success in describing the life that lay nearest to him, and describing it without any of those artistic perversions that come, as we have said, from a powerful imagination, from a cynical humour or from a desire to look, as George Eliot expresses it, for the suppressed transitions that unite all contrasts, the essence of this love of reality was his extreme interest in character. This is the fine and admirable quality in Trollope, this is what will preserve his best works in spite of those flatnesses which keep him from standing on quite the same level as the masters. Indeed this quality is so much one of the finest (to my mind at least), that it makes me wonder the more that the writer who had it so abundantly and so naturally should not have just that distinction which Trollope lacks, and which we find in his three brilliant contemporaries. If he was in any degree a man of genius (and I hold that he was), it was in virtue of this happy, instinctive perception of human varieties. His knowledge of the stuff we are made of, his observation of the common behaviour of men and women, was not reasoned nor acquired, not even particularly studied. All human doings deeply interested him, human life, to his mind, was a perpetual story; but he never attempted to take the so-called scientific view, the view which has lately found ingenious advocates among the countrymen and successors of Balzac. He had no airs of being able to tell you why people in a given situation would conduct themselves in a particular way; it was enough for him that he felt their feelings and struck the right note, because he had, as it were, a good ear. If he was a knowing psychologist he was so by grace; he was just and true without apparatus and without effort. He must have had a great taste for the moral
His stories, in spite of their great length, deal very little in the surprising, the exceptional, the complicated; as a general thing he has no great story to tell. The thing is not so much a story as a picture; if we hesitate to call it a picture it is because the idea of composition is not the controlling one and we feel that the author would regard the artistic, in general, as a kind of affectation. There is not even much description,
Trollope has described again and again the ravages of love, and it is wonderful to see how well, in these delicate matters, his plain good sense and good taste serve him. His story is always primarily a love-story, and a love-story constructed on an inveterate system. There is a young lady who has two lovers, or a young man who has two sweethearts; we are treated to the innumerable forms in which this predicament may present itself and the consequences, sometimes pathetic, sometimes grotesque, which spring from such false situations. Trollope is not what is called a colourist; still less is he a poet: he is seated on the back of heavy-footed prose. But his account of those sentiments which the poets are supposed to have made their own is apt to be as touching as demonstrations more lyrical. There is something wonderfully vivid in the state of mind of the unfortunate Harry Gilmore, of whom have just spoken; and his history, which has no more pretensions to style than if it were cut out of yesterday's newspaper, lodges itself in the imagination in all sorts of classic
I alighted, just now, at a venture, upon the history of Frank Fenwick; it is far from being a conspicuous work in the immense list of Trollope's novels. But to choose an example one must choose arbitrarily, for examples of almost anything that one may wish to say are numerous to embarrassment. In speaking of a writer who produced so much and produced always in the same way, there is perhaps a certain unfairness in choosing at all. As no work has higher pretensions than any other, there may be a certain unkindness in holding an individual production up to the light. "Judge me in the lump," we can imagine the author saying; "I have only undertaken to entertain the British public. I don't pretend that each of my novels is an organic whole." Trollope had no time
The good and gentle Mr. Harding, precentor of Barchester Cathedral, also holds the post of warden of Hiram's Hospital, an ancient charity where twelve old paupers are maintained in comfort. The office is in the gift of the bishop, and its emoluments are as handsome as the duties of the place are small. Mr. Harding has for years drawn his salary in quiet gratitude; but his moral repose is broken by hearing it at last begun to be said that the wardenship is a sinecure, that the salary is a scandal, and that a large part, at least, of his easy income ought to go to the pensioners of the hospital. He is sadly troubled and perplexed, and when the great London newspapers take up the affair he is overwhelmed with confusion and shame. He thinks the newspapers are right -- he perceives that the warden is an overpaid and rather a useless functionary. The only thing he can do is to resign the place. He has no means of his own -- he is only a quiet, modest, innocent old man, with a taste, a passion, for old church-music and the violon-cello. But he determines to resign, and he does resign in spite of the sharp opposition of his friends. He does what he thinks right, and goes to live in lodgings over a shop in the Barchester High Street. That is all the story, and it has exceeding beauty. The question of Mr. Harding's resignation becomes a drama, and we anxiously wait for the catastrophe. Trollope never did anything happier than the picture of this sweet and serious little old gentleman, who on most of the occasions of life has shown a lamblike softness and compliance, but in this particular matter opposes a silent, impenetrable obstinacy to the arguments of the friends who insist on his keeping his sinecure -- fixing his mild, detached gaze on the distance, and making imaginary passes with his fiddle-bow while they demonstrate his pusillanimity. The subject of The Warden, exactly viewed, is the opposition of the two natures of Archdeacon Grantley and Mr. Harding, and there is nothing finer in all Trollope than the vividness with which this opposition is presented. The archdeacon is as happy a portrait as the precentor -- an image of the full-fed, worldly churchman, taking his stand squarely upon his rich temporalities, and regarding the church frankly as a fat social pasturage.
I may take occasion to remark here upon a very curious fact -- the fact that there are certain precautions in the way of producing that illusion dear to the intending novelist which Trollope not only habitually scorned to take, but really, as we may say, asking pardon for the heat of the thing, delighted
It is a part of this same ambiguity of mind as to what constitutes evidence that Trollope should sometimes endow his people with such fantastic names. Dr. Pessimist Anticant and Mr. Sentiment make, as we have seen, an awkward appearance
I would speak in some detail of Barchester Towers if this did not seem to commit me to the prodigious task of appreciating each of Trollope's works in succession. Such an attempt as that is so far from being possible that I must frankly confess to not having read everything that proceeded from his pen. There came a moment in his vigorous career (it was even a good many years ago) when I renounced the effort to "keep up" with him. It ceased to seem obligatory to have read his last story; it ceased soon to be very possible to know which
There is perhaps little reason in it, but I find myself comparing this tone of allusion to many lands and many things, and whatever it brings us of easier respiration, with that narrow vision of humanity which accompanies the strenuous, serious work lately offered us in such abundance by the votaries of art for art who sit so long at their desks in Parisian quatri mes. The contrast is complete, and it would be interesting, had we space to do so here, to see how far it goes. On one side a wide, good-humoured, superficial glance at a good many things; on the other a gimlet-like consideration of a few. Trollope's plan, as well as Zola's, was to describe the life that lay near him; but the two writers differ immensely as to what constitutes life and what constitutes nearness. For Trollope the emotions of a nursery-governess in Australia would take precedence of the adventures of a depraved femme du monde in Paris or London. They both undertake to do the same thing -- to depict French and English manners; but the English writer (with his unsurpassed industry) is so occasional, so accidental, so full of the echoes of voices that are not the voice of the muse. Gustave Flaubert, Emile Zola, Alphonse Daudet, on the other hand, are nothing if not concentrated and sedentary. Trollope's realism is as instinctive, as inveterate as theirs; but nothing could mark more the difference between the French and English mind than the difference in the application, on one side and the other, of this system. We say system, though on Trollope's part it is none. He has no visible, certainly no explicit care for the literary part of the business; he writes easily, comfortably, and profusely, but his style has nothing in common either with the minute stippling of Daudet or the studied rhythms of Flaubert. He accepted all the common restrictions, and found that even within the barriers there was plenty of material. He attaches a preface to one of his novels -- The Vicar of Bullhampton, before mentioned -- for the express purpose of explaining why he has introduced a young woman who may, in truth, as he says, be called a "castaway"; and in relation to this episode
But it would be hard to say (within the circle in which he revolved) what material he neglected. I have allowed myself to be detained so long by general considerations that I have almost forfeited the opportunity to give examples. I have spoken of The Warden not only because it made his reputation,
There are many more things to say about him than I am able to add to these very general observations, the limit of which I have already passed. It would be natural, for instance, for a critic who affirms that his principal merit is the portrayal of individual character, to enumerate several of the figures that he has produced. have not done this, and I must ask the reader who is not acquainted with Trollope to take my assertion on trust; the reader who knows him will easily make a list for himself. No account of him is complete in which allusion is not made to his practice of carrying certain actors from one story to another -- a practice which he may be said to have inherited from Thackeray, as Thackeray may be said to have borrowed it from Balzac. It is a great mistake, however, to speak of it as an artifice which would not naturally occur to a writer proposing to himself to make a general portrait of a society. He has to construct that society, and it adds to the illusion in any given case that certain other cases correspond with it. Trollope constructed a great many things -- a clergy, an aristocracy, a middle-class, an administrative class, a little replica of the political world. His political novels are distinctly dull, and I confess I have not been able to read them. He evidently took a good deal of pains with his aristocracy; it makes its first appearance, if I remember right, in Doctor Thorne, in the person of the Lady Arabella de Courcy. It is difficult for us in America to measure the success of that picture, which is probably, however, not absolutely to the life. There is in Doctor Thorne and some other works a certain
Trollope did not write for posterity; he wrote for the day, the moment; but these are just the writers whom posterity is apt to put into its pocket. So much of the life of his time is reflected in his novels that we must believe a part of the record will be saved; and the best parts of them are so sound and true and genial, that readers with an eye to that sort of entertainment will always be sure, in a certain proportion, to turn to them. Trollope will remain one of the most trustworthy, though not one of the most eloquent, of the writers who have helped the heart of man to know itself. The heart of man does not always desire this knowledge; it prefers sometimes to look at history in another way -- to look at the manifestations without troubling about the motives. There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: the
Century Magazine, July 1883
Reprinted in Partial
Portraits, 1888
T. Adolphus Trollope (59)
Lindisfarn Chase. A Novel. By T. Adolphus Trollope. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1864.
This is a fair specimen of a second-rate novel, a species of work which commands a certain degree of respect; for second-rate novels are the great literary feature of the day. It is the work of a man who has no vocation for his task except a well-practised hand, and who would yet find it very hard that he should not write his novel with the rest. In the present condition of literature, when novel-writing is at once a trade and a pastime, books of this class are inevitable. Let us take them for what they are worth. Both in England and in this country they find an immense public of excellent persons, whose chief delight in literature is the contemplation of respectable mediocrity. Such works as "Lindisfarn Chase" are plentiful, because they are so easy to write; they are popular, because they are so easy to read.
To compose a novel on the model before us, one must have seen a good many well-bred people, and have read a good many well-written novels. These qualifications are easily acquired. The novel of a writer who possesses them will be (if it is successful) a reflection of the manner of his social equals or inferiors and of his literary superiors. If it is unsuccessful, the reason will probably be that the author has sought inspiration in his social superiors. In the case of an attempted portraiture of a lower order of society, a series of false representations will not be so likely to prove fatal, because the critics and the reading public are not so well informed as to the facts. A book like "Lindisfarn Chase" might almost be written by recipe; so much depends upon the writer's familiarity with good society, and upon his good taste; so little depends upon his real dramatic perception. The first requisite is to collect a large number of persons, so many that you have no space to refine upon individuals, even if you should sometimes feel dangerously tempted to do so; to give these persons pleasant, expressive names, and to scatter among them a few handfuls of clever description. The next step is to make a fair distribution of what may be called pre-historic facts, -- facts
Mr. Trollope desires to represent a vicious and intriguing young girl; so he takes an English maiden, and supposes her to have been educated in Paris. Vice and intrigue are conjured up by a touch of the pen. Paris covers a multitude of sins. Mr. Trollope fills his young lady's mouth with French phrases and allusions, assures us that she was a very hard case, and lo! she does service as a complex human creature. Margaret Lindisfarn is a weak repetition of Thackeray's Blanche Amory. Heu quanto minus! Mr. Trollope is very far from possessing even his brother's knowledge of the workings of young girls' hearts. Young girls are seldom so passionless as Margaret Lindisfarn. Beautiful, wealthy, still in her teens, she is represented as possessing the deep diplomatic heart of an old gentlewoman who has half a dozen daughters on her hands. But granting that it is possible that she should be as coldly selfish as she is made out to be, why refer it all to Paris? It is surely not necessary to have lived in Paris to be heartless. Margaret is full of grace and tact, and is always well-dressed: a residence in the French capital may have been required to explain these advantages. She is cold-hearted, scheming, and has her beautiful eyes perpetually fastened upon the main chance. We see no reason why these attributes should not have been of insular growth. The only definite character we are able to assign to the book is that of an argument against educating English youth in Paris. A paltry aim, the reader may say, for a work of art of these dimensions. He will say truly: but from such topics as this is the English fiction of the present day glad to draw inspiration.
North American Review, January 1865
John Tyndall (60)
Hours of Exercise in the Alps. By John Tyndall, LL. D., F.R.S. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1871.
Professor Tyndall's volume has not only great merits, but a great and constant charm. Few writers on scientific topics possess in such degree the art of flinging over their stern subject-matter that mellow light of sentiment which conciliates the uninitiated mind without cheapening, as it were, the theme. Science we imagine has few such useful friends in literature: it were much to be wished that literature had a few such friends in science. By which we mean that literary topics would largely gain if writers would wander as far afield in search of a more rigorous method, as Professor Tyndall has travelled hitherward in search of a graceful one. But indeed Professor Tyndall seems to us so admirable a writer chiefly because he is so clear, so educated a thinker. It would be hard to make an unsymmetrical statement of conceptions so definite as those in which he deals. The habit of accurate thought gives a superb neatness to his style. "The mind," he excellently says, in his recent "Fragments of Science," "is, as it were, a photographic plate, which is gradually cleansed by the effort to think rightly, and which, when so cleansed, and not before, receives impressions from the light of truth." This sentence may serve at once as an example of the author's admirable way of putting things, and as a text for remark on the highly clarified condition of the Professor's own intellect. The reader moves in an atmosphere in which the habit of a sort of heroic attention seems to maintain a glare of electric light. On every side he sees shining facts, grouped and piled like the Alpine ice-masses the author commemorates in the present volume.
When Professor Tyndall starts forth in the early morning to climb an Alpine peak, or when he stands triumphant and still vigilant on the summit, he resolves the mysteries of the atmosphere, the weather, the clouds, the glaciers, into various hard component facts, which, to his eye, deepen rather than diminish the picturesqueness of the scene. In the midst of chaos and confusion the analytic instinct rises supreme. "As
The volume which has given us a pretext for these remarks is a record of Professor Tyndall's various exploits in the Alps. He has pursued Nature into her highest places and gathered observations at the cost of much personal exertion and exposure. Some of his chapters have already appeared; all of them were substantially written at the time of the adventures they relate, and are full of the immediate freshness, the air of business, of genuine mountaineering. Those who will read at the same time Mr. Leslie Stephen's recent delightful "Playground
We must not enter into the details of our author's various adventures. They were all as bravely achieved as they are vividly narrated. Professor Tyndall concedes more than some authorities to the much-discussed perils of mountaineering. Mr. Leslie Stephen appears to place them at a minimum, -- so long, that is, as vigilance is at its maximum. But Professor Tyndall hints at contingencies in which even the utmost care leaves an all-sufficient margin for calamity. Such was the occasion in which the guide Joseph Bennen, here commemorated, found his death; apropos of which one may remark that the author's portraiture of Bennen, -- the "Garibaldi der Fhrer," -- a series of firm touches scattered here and there through the volume, is one of the best things it contains. There has recently been much talk in England about Alpine perils, and an attempt manifested to draw the line between lawful and wanton self-exposure. The details of this question need not occupy us here, removed as we are, compared with the English, from this particular field of enterprise: though indeed it may well have been raised recently among readers of this magazine by the admirable narratives of a gentleman himself profoundly indifferent to such fine distinctions. Professor Tyndall's volume, suggestive of so many things, has been so of none more than of just this point of the vanity of saying to human audacity, curiosity, -- the great motive energy of our Anglo-Saxon race, by whatever names we call it, -- that it shall, in any direction, go thus far and no farther. We shall live to see it go farther than we can yet forecast its course. Mr. Clarence King and his friend, for instance, have been setting fresh examples, in our own Western Alps, for which coming years will surely furnish a sufficient following, -- and yet awhile without that "perpetual leather gaiter and ostentation of bath-tub" which they apprehend. What man can attempt, by hook or by crook, he will never consent to abjure on a priori grounds even the most elaborately rational. There is no rest for him but after the fact, and in the
Atlantic Monthly, November
1871
Mackenzie Wallace (61)
Russia. By D. Mackenzie Wallace. London: Cassell, Potter & Galpin; New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1877.
This excellent and interesting work would under any circumstances have attracted attention; but the great success it has attained in England is to be attributed in some degree to the anxiety with which the "Eastern Question" is watched and to the somewhat delicate relations existing between that country and Russia. There is a natural curiosity to know more than has hitherto been known about that "vast and squalid empire," as one of Mr. Wallace's critics has called it, whose interests in the East are supposed to clash with those of the rulers of India. This curiosity Mr. Mackenzie Wallace satisfies in a manner worthy of the highest praise. His two volumes are not a piece of clever book-making, like most of the works in which the literary writers of our day have embodied their "impressions," but the result of a large amount of serious study and thorough research, conducted with method and sincerity and without parti pris of any kind. The author, moreover, has lived in Russia, not as a tourist but as a resident and a student. Going to the country on a particular errand, for a short stay, he found it so interesting that he remained for six years. His opening chapters contain some account of personal experiences and adventures, but he presently abandons this method and treats his subject under special heads, remarking, probably with justice, that the autobiographical form would end by wearying the reader. "I should have to take him with me to a secluded village, and make him wait for me till I had learned to speak the language. Thence he would have to accompany me to a provincial town and spend months in a public office, whilst I endeavored to master the mysteries of local self-government. After this he would have to spend two years with me in a big library." But Mr. Wallace evidently spent his six years in an active fashion. He traversed many parts of the country, he spared no pains to put himself in relation with the most characteristic or least-known classes of the population; he dwelt among the Molok ni, or Dissenters ("Presbyterians," as he calls them), with
Mr. Wallace does not describe European Russia as offering many attractions to the mere tourist. Of anything to be called scenery there are absolutely no specimens, and his picture of the Russian village or country town suggests all the ugliness and shabbiness of such places in America, without the relief, so frequent here, of landscape and natural coloring. Even the great Russian rivers fail, through their prevailing shallowness, to contribute to the prospect. On the Don, "I remember one day seeing the captain of a large flat-bottomed steamer slacken speed to avoid running down a man on horseback, who was attempting to cross his bows in the middle of the stream." The hotels, moreover (such at least as are not, as we should say among ourselves, upon the European plan), are not places of repose but of agitation. You have to haggle beforehand over the price of your room; you have to bring your own bedding and towels, and it is apparently considered so much the better if you bring, to some extent, your own provisions. On these conditions you are handed over to the tender mercies of the domestic insects. Finding that he could learn nothing valuable about the country without first mastering the language, and satisfied that, however favorable life at St. Petersburg was to exercise in the French and German tongues, it offered no opportunities for practice in the vernacular, Mr. Wallace had the courage to transport himself to a small village in the northern forests, where to understand and speak Russian became a necessity of self-preservation from death by ennui. His instructor was the village priest, a worthy man personally, but apropos of whom the author gives an unflattering picture of the Russian clergy at large -- of its indolence, ignorance, and intemperance, and its tendency to a merely mercantile and mercenary view of its profession; a natural consequence of its being an exclusive caste, handing down its trade from father to son, without regard to personal aptitudes. Mr. Wallace's tutor informed him that the bishop had picked out his wife for him, and that it was the practice of the bishop to select mates for the priests
In describing his residence in the depths of a province the author sketches some types of Russian proprietors in a few pages which will probably be found by hurried readers the most entertaining parts of his volume -- placing in opposition a complete portrait of a country gentleman of the old school and that of two or three landowners who have been inoculated, in various doses, with the spirit of the age. The sketches will have a great verisimilitude for the readers of Ivan Turgenef (whom, by the way, curiously enough, the author never mentions, just as he fails to mention Nicholas Turgenef in his enumeration of the persons connected with the agitation for the emancipation of the serfs). The old proprietor is as antiquated a figure as it is possible to find in Europe, and the new one, on the other hand, would probably conceive himself to be thoroughly fitted out with the most modern intellectual
The chapters, however, which we ourselves have found most interesting are those which treat, with much fulness and clearness, of the Mir, or Russian village community. Mr. Wallace studied the Russian village attentively, and he constructs an account of it which may be called philosophic. It is a sort of enlargement of the organization of the peasant family, this itself being in its way sufficiently curious. The family is a kind of joint stock association, to which each member contributes a certain sum of labor, in virtue of which (and not in virtue of blood-relationship) he shares in ownership of the household goods. When these are divided, a married daughter, living with her husband's family, has no share, not having worked for it. Her share is in the other family. So the name by which the head of the house is designated (Khoza n) means not paterfamilias, but simply administrator, and when he dies, as the author says, "there is properly no inheritance or succession, but simply liquidation and distribution of property among the members." Of the Mir -- the constitution of their village commune -- Mr. Wallace says that the Russians are very proud, which they may well be, as they take to themselves the comfort of deeming that it is a guarantee of the non-development of a proletariat; its characteristic feature being the allotment of a certain amount of land to each family of which the village is composed. When Mr. Wallace asked an intelligent peasant "What is the Mir?" he scratched the back of his head and said, "How am I to tell you." And yet, though he could not give a definition of the affair, he was, like his fellows, a perfectly submissive factor in its operation. The simplest definition is to say that the Commune is a magnified family, inasmuch as it is extremely cohesive and interdependent
Mr. Wallace remarks that if the proletariat, where it exists, has been formed by the expropriation from the soil of small landholders, no system so effectual as the Mir for preventing such expropriation has yet been devised. "About one-half of the arable land of the empire is reserved for the peasantry, and cannot be encroached upon by the great landowners or the capitalists, and every peasant, by the fact of his birth, has an almost inalienable share in this land." As it is extremely difficult for a peasant to sever his connection with his commune, Mr. Wallace concludes, apparently with justice, that whatever dangers and troubles may be in store for Russia (and they are sufficiently various), the rise of pauperism will not, for a long time to come, be one of them. The author does not deny the possibility of the formation of a town proletariat, but he says that it has been greatly retarded by the fact that the peasants who come to towns to work continue to belong to their villages, and, having usually left a wife and children behind, sooner or later return to them. He mentions, however, the regrettable results of this separation of the temporary town-peasant from his family -- results not favorable to good morals on either side. It is to be added with regard to pauperism that its development is further held in check by the paucity of towns in Russia -- a point as to which the
We have been able to touch upon but a small number of the matters discussed by Mr. Wallace; we can only commend his book as a very valuable account of a very interesting people. We have barely alluded to the contents of the second volume, which contains among other things a detailed account of the emancipation of the serfs, preceded by a picture of their condition before this event, and followed by two chapters of considerations upon its consequences as regards the proprietors and as regards the peasants themselves. Upon these consequences, in their fulness, Mr. Wallace thinks it early to pronounce; as yet they strike him as less favorable to the peasantry than the enthusiasts of the measure expected. Russia is an interesting country (in spite of her natural meagreness of attraction), because the existence of an autocratic power has rendered possible a series of deliberate social, political, and economical experiments, most of which were intended to be progressive, and many of which have been so, but which, at any rate, have a sort of distinctness that they would not have had elsewhere. Few countries care to experiment on themselves; but when a country possesses an omnipotent czar, the thing may be done for the possible profit of his subjects and the certain entertainment of their neighbors. We may add that Mr. Wallace devotes an interesting chapter to the results of the Crimean War (as to which it is noticeable that few wars have left behind them so little rancor in the vanquished), and some final pages to the Eastern Question and the "expansive" tendencies of Russia. He views the advance of Russia in the East with less distrust than many Englishmen, and thinks that the natural solution of the difficulty is for England to go to meet her. Her advance has always had for its pretext the depredations of uncivilized races upon her frontier; let a civilized power come into contact with her and the pretext will cease, and with it, as Mr. Wallace thinks, the advance. So it is to be hoped! We conclude in congratulating the author on having written a book of which it may be said that, as to its topic, it has, in the French phrase,
Nation, March 15,
1877
Mrs. Humphry Ward (62)
MRS. HUMPHRY WARD
An observer of manners, called upon to name to-day the two things that make it most completely different from yesterday (by which mean a tolerably recent past), might easily be conceived to mention in the first place the immensely greater conspicuity of the novel, and in the second the immensely greater conspicuity of the attitude of women. He might perhaps be supposed even to go on to add that the attitude of women is the novel, in England and America, and that these signs of the times have therefore a practical unity. The union is represented, at any rate, in the high distinction of Mrs. Humphry Ward, who is at once the author of the work of fiction that has in our hour been most widely circulated and the most striking example of the unprecedented kind of attention which the feminine mind is now at liberty to excite. Her position is one which certainly ought to soothe a myriad discontents, to show the superfluity of innumerable agitations. No agitation, on the platform or in the newspaper, no demand for a political revolution, ever achieved anything like the publicity or roused anything like the emotion of the earnest attempt of this quiet English lady to tell an interesting story, to present an imaginary case. "Robert Elsmere," in the course of a few weeks, put her name in the mouths of the immeasurable English-reading multitude. The book was not merely an extraordinarily successful novel; it was, as reflected in contemporary conversation, a momentous public event.
No example could be more interesting of the way in which women, after prevailing for so many ages in our private history, have begun to be unchallenged contributors to our public. Very surely and not at all slowly the effective feminine voice makes its ingenious hum the very ground-tone of the uproar in which the conditions of its interference are discussed. So many presumptions against this interference have fallen to the ground that it is difficult to say which of them practically remain. In England to-day, and in the United States, no one thinks of asking whether or no a book be by a woman, so completely, to the Anglo-American sense, has the
This weakness finds itself confronted with the circumstance that the most serious, the most deliberate, and most comprehensive attempt made in England in this later time to hold the mirror of prose fiction up to life has not been made by one of the hitherto happier gentry. There may have been works, in this line, of greater genius, of a spirit more instinctive and inevitable, but I am at a loss to name one of an intenser intellectual energy. It is impossible to read "Robert Elsmere" without feeling it to be an exceedingly matured conception, and it is difficult to attach the idea of conception at all to most of the other novels of the hour; so almost invariably do they seem to have come into the world only at the hour's notice, with no pre-natal history to speak of. Remarkably interesting is the light that Mrs. Ward's celebrated study throws upon the expectations we are henceforth entitled to form of the critical faculty in women. The whole complicated picture is a slow, expansive evocation, bathed in the air of reflection, infinitely thought out and constructed, not a flash of perception nor an arrested impression. It suggests the image of a large, slow-moving, slightly old-fashioned ship, buoyant enough and well out of water, but with a close-packed cargo in every inch of stowage-room. One feels that
Of the ground covered by this broad-based story the largest part, I scarcely need mention, is the ground of religion, the ground on which it is reputed to be most easy to create a reverberation in the Anglo-Saxon world. "Easy" here is evidently easily said, and it must be noted that the greatest reverberation has been the product of the greatest talent. It is difficult to associate "Robert Elsmere" with any effect cheaply produced. The habit of theological inquiry (if indeed the term inquiry may be applied to that which partakes of the nature rather of answer than of question) has long been rooted in the English- speaking race; but Mrs. Ward's novel would not have had so great a fortune had she not wrought into it other bribes than this. She gave it indeed the general quality of charm, and she accomplished the feat, unique so far as I remember in the long and usually dreary annals of the novel with a purpose, of carrying out her purpose without spoiling her novel. The charm that was so much wind in the sails of her book was a combination of many things, but it was an element in which culture -- using the term in its largest sense -- had perhaps most to say. Knowledge, curiosity, acuteness, a critical faculty remarkable in itself and very highly trained, the direct observation of life and the study of history, strike the reader of "Robert Elsmere" -- rich and representative as it is -- as so many strong savors in a fine moral ripeness, a genial, much-seeing wisdom. Life, for Mrs. Humphry Ward, as the subject of a large canvas, means predominantly the life of the thinking, the life of the sentient creature, whose chronicler at the present hour, so little is he in fashion, it has been almost an originality on her part to become. The novelist is often reminded that he must put before us an action; but it is, after all, a question of terms. There are actions and actions, and Mrs. Ward was capable of recognizing possibilities of palpitation without number in that of her hero's passionate conscience, that of his restless faith. Just so in her admirable appreciation of the strange and fascinating Amiel, she found in his throbbing stillness a quantity of life that she would not have found in the snapping of pistols.
This attitude is full of further assurance; it gives us a grateful faith in the independence of view of the new work which she is believed lately to have brought to completion and as to which the most absorbed of her former readers will wish her no diminution of the skill that excited, on behalf of adventures and situations essentially spiritual, the suspense and curiosity that they had supposed themselves to reserve for mysteries and solutions on quite another plane. There are several considerations that make Mrs. Ward's next study of acute contemporary states as impatiently awaited as the birth of an heir to great possessions; but not the least of them is the supreme example its fortune, be it greater or smaller, will offer of the spell wrought to- day by the wonderful art of fiction. Could there be a greater proof at the same time of that silent conquest that I began by speaking of, the way in which, pen in hand, the accomplished sedentary woman has come to represent with an authority widely recognized the multitudinous, much- entangled human scene? I must in conscience add that it has not yet often been given to her to do so with the number of sorts of distinction, the educated insight, the comprehensive ardor of Mrs. Humphry Ward.
English Illustrated Magazine, February 1892
Reprinted in Essays in London and
Elsewhere, 1893
Andrew Wilson (63)
The Abode of Snow: Observations on a Tour from Chinese Tibet to the Indian Caucasus, etc. By Andrew Wilson. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1875.
This extremely interesting volume is composed of a series of articles which originally appeared in Blackwood's Magazine, where they attracted some attention. Mr. Wilson has lately republished his articles, with some additions and alterations, but the volume before us (the American edition) is, as the publishers state with a frankness not always practised, reprinted directly from the magazine. The absence of the amplifications contained in the English edition will, however, perhaps not spoil it for the general reader. If `The Abode of Snow' has a fault, it is rather too long. It makes a stout volume in the form which Messrs. Putnam have given it, and though it is not a book in which one is more than just tempted to skip, a little extra matter might make one succumb to the temptation. Mr. Wilson has added another volume to that record of what may be called heroic travel to which Englishmen have of late years contributed so largely. One by one, all the difficult things in the world are being done -- every conceivable combination of the apparently impossible has been attacked and mastered. Mr. Wilson has done the Him liya (we adopt his orthography). He desired to go from Simla -- the great Indian watering-place -- to the Vale of Kashmir, as well as to take a dip into Transhim liyan regions (Chinese Tibet) on the way. There are comparatively easy and commonplace routes which Mr. Wilson might have taken, but they would have kept him at a low altitude on the mountains, and his health (for which his journey was undertaken) appears to have demanded, and to have flourished in, the atmosphere of the highest places in which human life can be sustained. His project, therefore, was to keep perpetually above the region of the scorching monsoon and to make his way to Kashmir exclusively along the high levels -- literally, almost from peak to peak. He crossed over first into Chinese Tibet, where he received, chiefly from the women and dogs, a very cold welcome, and was implacably checked at the frontier. His glimpse of the country, however, does not indicate
Mr. Wilson had a number of adventures of a sufficiently portentous kind. He slept upon snow-fields (it is interesting to know that his malady was rheumatism) with white Tibetan bears hovering in the neighborhood; he came near being snowed up for the winter in a Tartar village; he narrowly escaped perishing in a snow-storm on a pass 18,000 feet high. This last was the maximum of Mr. Wilson's climbing, but it was very well. In compensation for all this, he had the constant view of stupendously grand scenery. "An enormous semicircle," he says, on resuming his journey after his illness at the Moravian missionary's, "was visible of grand precipices, high mountain peaks, and snowy summits, over 20,000 feet high. Resting on the grass, looking on that beautiful yet awful scene -- on the boundless wild of serrated ridges, rock-needles, mountain-battlements, storm-scathed precipices, silvery domes, icy peaks, and snowy spires -- and breathing the pure, keen, exhilarating air, it almost seemed as if during my illness at P# I had indeed passed from the torturing life of earth and had now alighted upon a more glorious world." Yet in spite of the enormous scale of the scenery of the Him liya, it does not appear that in beauty of detail it can compare with that of the Alps. Mr. Wilson draws an extended parallel between the two ranges, in which, while allowing everything to the tremendous ruggedness and desolation of the Him liya, he complains of their monotony and want of vegetation. That this latter deficiency should be observed upon mountains where such products as the apricot grow at 10,000 feet, and where cultivation is found at 13,000, gives one an idea of the huge scale of the Him liya.
Mr. Wilson, pushing toward Kashmir, traversed the desolate and curious country of Zanskar, a Tibetan province, almost virgin soil to the traveller, and whose population presented to Mr. Wilson many striking analogies with the Scotch Highlanders. It was here that he was threatened with a premature descent of winter which would have compelled him to pass that season in a hut with a hole in the roof and another in the floor, in company with an old Tibetan grandame for ever mumbling the orthodox national prayer ("O God, the jewel in the lotus!") and two young children of the most "terrible" propensities. The Vale of Kashmir was all Mr. Wilson's fancy had painted it, and he makes it seem a very desirable pilgrimage to his reader. On leaving it he pushed still westward into the British Trans-Indus possessions and the border of pugnacious Afghanistan. He crossed over and hob-a-nobbed, for curiosity's sake, with some worthies who had just been striving to put a rival faction in their town to the sword, and all his observations of Afghan manners are extremely entertaining. From these neighborhoods he made his way south and east again across the Panjab (Mr. Wilson overturns all the familiar forms of Indian names) to Lahore and the railway. Apropos of Indian names, they swarm in his pages to a bewildering degree. What is one to say to the Amir of Kaubool, the Akoond of Swat, or the Mullah of Topi? We have been able to give but a very imperfect synopsis of Mr. Wilson's book, but we recommend it as a decidedly superior specimen of a class which, in these days of combined travelling and scribbling, sometimes exhibits rather forlorn recruits. It is extremely full, it deals with a multitude of points which we have not been able to mention, and it is always interesting. The author is evidently a man of large experience and of large and various ability, and he discusses all things -- his personal adventures, Indian politics, the Tibetan religion, questions of ethnography -- with excellent point and force.
Nation, November 11,
1875
Andrew Wynter (64)
Fruit between the Leaves. By Andrew Wynter, M.D., M.R.C.P., etc. In two volumes. New York: Scribner, Welford & Armstrong, 1875.
We do not profess to understand Dr. Wynter's title, but we cannot deny having been much entertained by his book. This may be described as a compilation of out-of-the-way facts upon familiar subjects. Dr. Wynter's skill in getting up a subject and raking together curious information is most commendable, and though his style pretends to no greater purity than is convenient for the lighter magazines, his two pretty volumes may be pronounced equally useful and agreeable. Dr. Wynter is apparently a walking encyclopaedia of so- called practical knowledge; his brain seems stuffed with those secondary and tertiary facts which constitute the filling in, and as it were the padding, of the central masses of science. We are oppressively reminded, as we turn his pages, of the vast and daily increasing number of things that demand to be known about, and what a serious matter it is constantly becoming to attempt to appear well-informed. Dr. Wynter discourses upon such topics as "Clever Dogs" (the strictly canine, not the human); the idiosyncrasies of "Female Convicts"; "How and where Toys are made"; the "Skeleton Trade," and the manner in which it is kept up; the economy of life-boats; the habits of the domestic -- the too domestic -- rat; "Tunnels and Tunnelling"; the innumerable forms of adulteration of food and drink; the final destiny of what goes into dust-bins and ash-barrels; the eccentricities of cats; the question whether bad odors cause disease; the gruesome mysteries of infanticide, as practised in the serving classes; and various other lowly themes which, partaking at once of the commonplace and the recondite (so that people are apt to assume both that they are not worth knowing about and that they themselves know all about them), might easily lack a chronicler if it were not for Dr. Wynter's taste for curious and, in some cases, unsavory detail. With the growing complexity of our civilization, every object around us is getting to have a history and to play a part -- often even to have a literature and a special science of its own. We have been interested
Nation, July 1, 1875
Charlotte Mary Yonge and Francis Awdry (65)
Life of John Coleridge Patteson, Missionary Bishop to the Melanesian Islands. By C. M. Yonge. In two volumes. The Story of a Fellow-Soldier. By Francis Awdry. London and New York: Macmillan & Co., 1875.
These two books deal with the history of an extremely interesting man. `The Story of a Fellow-Soldier,' we may say parenthetically, is simply an abstract of the larger work, put into simple language for the use of children -- a happy idea, for Bishop Patteson's career is one of which even infant minds may perceive the beauty and impressiveness. Miss Yonge's memoir is a voluminous but extremely careful and intelligent compilation, based almost exclusively upon Patteson's numerous letters. She has done her work with noticeable taste and discretion, and has modestly contented herself with being almost simply an editor. As an editor, she is most exemplary; and where, here and there (as in the first half of her first volume), she is obliged to be a narrator, she performs her task very agreeably. The charge to which her work is most obviously open is that it is written for a particular group of people -- for a particular family, almost -- and couched more or less in a vocabulary into which the general public (the general American public, at least) needs in some slight degree to be initiated. It is a product of highly conservative Anglicanism, and its tone is the tone of limited local culture rather than of general culture. But this we have not found an objection, and at any rate, if it is an objection, it is essential to the subject. If we are to be brought into connection with conservative Anglicanism -- with a circle of people who date their letters on saints' days, and intersperse them largely with D.G. and D.V., who refer freely to the "Octave Services" and "Ember-Week" -- we certainly cannot do so on easier and more comfortable terms than those offered us by Miss Yonge. "Dilettanteism," one may often say as one goes, but say it unresentfully, for we are dealing with people whose dilettanteism is highly human and conscientious, and who do a good part of the useful work of the world. John Coleridge Patteson was born and bred in this atmosphere; but he gathered up into his admirable character its most earnest and practical elements,
He was born in 1827, of an honorable stock on both sides. His mother's family (the Coleridges) has produced an exceptional number of distinguished members; his father, Sir John Patteson, was an eminent lawyer. Miss Yonge gives a very pleasant account of his early years, passed among those happy school-scenes and home-scenes with which English childhood is blessed, and of which Patteson, at Eton and amid his large family circle in Devonshire, had an abundant share. He went to Oxford and obtained a fellowship, he travelled abroad and worked at philology (for which he had an especial fancy) in Germany, then came home, entered the church, and took a living near his own family. He was of a deeply religious disposition, which early showed itself; and yet though a delightfully
From the moment he left home never to return, his life, his occupations, and his thoughts are copiously and minutely reflected in his letters to his family. Miss Yonge has apparently had an enormous correspondence to select from, and her selection has been comprehensive. It includes a mass of detail which will not interest the general reader, though he will not fail to notice the constant good sense and high feeling of everything that Patteson writes. He writes only, or almost only, about his daily labors, his pupils and proselytes, his multitudinous cruises, his landings (effected in primitive fashion by wading and swimming) upon islands where the appearance of perfect trustfulness had to go hand in hand with constant caution, and about those mild religious impulses which were the lining of all his thoughts. Naturally, Melanesia and his work there absorbed him every year more and more; they became his world; they filled his whole vision, and Europe grew dimmer and more distant. It is hard to imagine a more complete self-surrender to an accepted task. In 1861 his zeal was rewarded by the assent of the English Government to the establishment of a missionary episcopate, independent of the diocese of New Zealand, of which Patteson was consecrated
Nation, April 8, 1875
London Notes (66)
London, January 15, 1897
Im am afraid the interest of the world of native letters is not at this moment so great as to make us despise mere translation as an aid to curiosity. There is indeed no reason why we should forbear to say in advance what we are certain, every time, to say after (after the heat has cooled, I mean:) namely, that nothing is easier to concede than that Ibsen -- contentious name! -- would be much less remarked if he were one of a dozen. It is impossible, in London at least, to shut one's eyes to the fact that if to so many ingenious minds he is a kind of pictorial monster, a grotesque on the sign of a side-show, this is at least partly because his form has a monstrous rarity. It is one of the odd things of our actual aesthetics that the more theatres multiply the less any one reads a play -- the less any one cares, in a word, for the text of the adventure. That no one ever does read a play has long been a commonplace of the wisdom of booksellers. Ibsen, however, is a text, and Ibsen is read, and Ibsen contradicts the custom and confounds the prejudice, with the effect thereby, in an odd way, of being doubly an exotic. His violent substance imposes, as it were, his insidious form; it is not (as would have seemed more likely) the form that imposes the substance. Mr. William Archer has just published his version of John Gabriel Borkman, of which, moreover, French and German versions reach us at the same moment. There are therefore all the elements of a fresh breeze in the wind -- one has already a sense as of a cracking of whips and a girding of loins. You may by this time be terribly tired of it all in America; but, as I mentioned a fortnight ago, we have had very recent evidence that languor, here, in this connection, is by no means as yet the dominant note. It is not the dispute itself, however, that most interests me: let me pay it, for what it has been and what it still may be, the mere superficial tribute of saying that it constitutes one of the very few cases of contagious discussion of a matter not political, a question not of mere practice, of which I remember to have felt, in a heavy air, the engaging titillation. In London, in general, I think,
The author who at the age of seventy, a provincial of provincials, turns out John Gabriel is frankly, for me, so much one of the peculiar pleasures of the day, one of the current strong sensations, that, erect as he seems still to stand, I deplore his extreme maturity and, thinking of what shall happen, look round in vain for any other possible source of the same kind of emotion. For Ibsen strikes me as an extraordinary curiosity, and every time he sounds his note the miracle, to my perception, is renewed. I call it a miracle because it is a result of so dry a view of life, so indifferent a vision of the comedy of things. His idea of the thing represented is never the comic idea; though this is evidently what it often only can be for many of his English readers and spectators. Comedy, moreover, is a product mainly of observation, and I scarcely know what to say of his figures except that they haven't the signs. The answer to that is doubtless partly that they haven't the English, but have the Norwegian. In such a case one of the Norwegian must be in truth this very lack of marks.
They have no tone but their moral tone. They are highly animated abstractions, with the extraordinary, the brilliant property of becoming, when represented, at once more abstract and more living. If the spirit is a lamp within us, glowing through what the world and the flesh make of us as through a ground-glass shade, then such pictures as Little Eyolf and John Gabriel are each a chassez-croisez of lamps burning, as in tasteless parlors, with the flame practically exposed. There are no shades in the house, or the Norwegian groundglass is singularly clear. There is a positive odor of spiritual paraffine. The author nevertheless arrives at the dramatist's great goal -- he arrives, for all his meagreness, at intensity. The meagreness, which is after all but an unconscious, an admirable economy, never interferes with that: it plays straight into the hands of his rare mastery of form. The contrast
I am afraid then, that, for the hour, it is no unfair account of the matter to say of the few books that are most interesting that they are either not indigenous or not new. Lord Roberts's rich history of his Forty-one Years in India belongs rather to military science than to literature -- though indeed in what much deeper depths of specialism than such brave volumes may the literary reader -- if he have the real wolfish tooth for the real stray lamb -- not find his account! The admirable autobiography of Gibbon, at last disengaged from the weight of a hundred years of editorial ineptitude, comes out to-day as a flaming novelty. I shall have to wait another
To speak of them in the order of an ascending interest, Mrs. Edward Ridley's Story of Aline expresses, for so tentative a production, a certain distinction of feeling. I make the qualification because there are degrees of the tentative (we may see wherever we look) as to which we sorely strain a point in saying the "expression" of anything whatever abides in them. I don't mean that, in so far as that is a lost art, Mrs. Ridley has found it again, but that her touching tale has a charm that affects us like a faint, unconscious fragrance. Its merit, above all, is that it happens to have a subject, and a subject, oddly enough, a good deal stronger than the author's hand. There are novels enough in which there is neither manner nor matter, and there are others, less numerous, but forming a group,
In Mr. Clement Shorter's very interesting volume on the Bront s -- Charlotte Bront and her Circle: a collection mainly of Charlotte's letters and of those of some of her correspondents -- there are very few bright windows and there is very little "playing," least of all with concision. But this is so far from being a book to dismiss in a phrase that its fulness of suggestion bore, to my perception, on the very fact that the decisive word about the unhappy family it commemorates has still to be written. It gives us afresh the image of how much their unhappiness was the making of their fame. In the presence of that sore stress on the one hand, and of a sounder
Harper's Weekly, February 6, 1897
There are always, goodness knows, books; there are often, too often, pictures; there are sometimes even plays: and it would be easier in each case to stick to the question, were we likely never to meet such a happy anomaly as Mr. J. G. Marks's Life and Letters of Frederick Walker -- a work of which I might scarce find occasion to speak should I regard its place only as that of a volume among volumes. This would be a pity, for I have read it with a pleasure to which the only drawback is a view of the difficulty of giving all reasons when so many are reasons of sentiment. The book is, at any rate, on its highly liberal scale, so full of interesting reproduction of Walker's work that the kindly way to treat it is as a gallery, an exhibition, of which the voluminous catalogue consists of extracts from the artist's correspondence. Mr. Marks is Walker's brother-in-law, and it is perhaps the added anxiety of relationship that has kept his biography back till twenty years after the death of the subject. That is indeed, in general, I think, an excellent time to wait -- it tends so much to settle the question of particular urgency. Only the tone of commemoration, in this case, is advisably not the same as in that of a record more immediate. The twenty years, for Mr. Marks, have put his hero in no fore-shortened perspective, and the light of the present is not, for him, the light of criticism. Let me hasten to add, however, that the reader affected in a certain fond fashion toward that exquisite genius will not in the least regret these things. If such a reader cannot himself
Walker was, for that matter, not critical of himself -- I mean he had none of the expression of it; and nothing is more curious, more replete with the lesson of the pure instinctiveness of genius, than -- considering the noble delicacy of the work he produced -- the absence in his letters of most reflections and questions, of anything like intellectual emotion. His talent was all his utterance and his success all his philosophy. I don't mean by this indeed that his letters -- all of the necessary order, and mainly to his homely and admirable mother -- are not, in their young roughness and sweetness, very personal, articulate and touching. They have the effect that the man evidently had in life -- they make us surrender to a charm. The charm, for all that he was essential of the irritable race, was, to his contemporaries, irresistible, and the echo of it is a thing to gather, almost with piety, from the talk of those of his friends -- they are, naturally, many -- who still survive him. For one of these, not now a survivor, but, like himself, finally gathered in and niched, he was, in memory, the embodiment of young distinction and young inspiration, as well as of the particular beauty of association that comes from early death. He was, in Du Maurier's mind a fixed image -- almost a happy obsession. American readers of the most circulated of novels needn't be reminded of the part played by this vivid image in the text and the illustration of Trilby. Very diminutive, of distinguished aspect, Walker was sensitive, unreasonable, lovable-pathetic, somehow, from the beginning, and yet boyish and privileged to the end. For the rest -- a large remainder, his mass of exquisite production -- Mr. Marks's book reawakens much more our sense of what he had than of what he lacked. He had, above all, an extraordinary completeness; in the little full, composed, condensed dramatic world of which each of his pictures consists, it is curiously impossible to say that one element of interest or one
Harper's Weekly, February 20, 1897
There are this time books enough, if one were to go into them, to make the question of dealing with them in a few words a problem still more mathematical than literary; and I speak, I rejoice to say -- though, indeed, I might rather regret it -- only of those that have a sensible quality. There is help in the fact that these are so much the least numerous. Quantity alone is, of course, always with us, but to that element, in its simplicity, we learn to offer a front as unblushing as its own. What renders formidable the two big volumes of Lord Roberts's military record -- to which I alluded the other day, when they were fresher than now -- is not their mass, though that is great, but their surpassing, their admirable interest. Forty-one Years in India is a work I shall not pretend to classify more particularly than by saying that it, in the first place, has already had a great fortune, and, in the second, exposes the unwary reader to the catastrophe of deep emotion. It tells, with extraordinary lucidity, the story of a great soldier, but it has left me quite unable to say whether it belongs properly to literature or to war. Is it really military, or is it only "popular," and has the expert or the outsider most the right to rejoice in it? I can speak, at any rate, for one outsider, whose rejoicing, from beginning to end and for one
This sensibility must be difficult to reach in any reader in whom the story of the English in India fails to reach it. That general story has been, I think, from the first, the great romance of our age -- the great romance of action, with an endless capacity for throwing up new chapters. Lord Roberts's career -- or, as, fresh from his book, we feel impelled to put it, Lord Roberts himself -- is simply a fine paragraph in a tremendous text; which is the convenient explanation of his being projected upon us with a force, reaching us with a momentum, that enables him to be, as I have said, a magician without a wand and a writer without a style. The style of the march to Kandahar, the style of the taking of Delhi and the relief of Lucknow, the style of all the wonderful facts, begotten of all the other wonders, form perhaps a medium which could scarce have been bettered. Let this by no means involve, however -- speaking for myself -- a failure of the admonition to meditate on the question eternally interesting,
Ah, the look, the living look! we long pleadingly to say to him, turning as we do in pain and with the baffled suspicion of what the living look must have been. But we must take what we can get, and it is extraordinary how, if a certain vibration be established, it brings home to us even the smallest sacrifices to the idea of presentation. "As parted with each corps in turn, its band played `Auld Lang Syne,' and have never since heard that memory-stirring air without its bringing before my mind's eye the last view I had of the Kabul-Kandahar Field Force. I fancy myself crossing and recrossing the river, which winds through the pass: I heard the martial beat of drums and plaintive music of the pipes; and I see
It was behind Sir William Wilson Hunter (the eminent Indian official and author of the almost classic Annals of Rural Bengal) on the occasion of his producing, the other day, that delightful little volume The Thackerays in India, a volume that makes us feel also how much it was behind the author of Vanity Fair. Sir William Hunter, moreover, really writes, even though his small and charming book be as essentially a mere drop in the bucket of a special literature as the lives it commemorates were a drop in the bucket of the ravenous, the prodigious Service; wherefore I commend him heartily to readers whose feeling for Thackeray is still a living sentiment. Thackeray's people, on both sides, for generations, had been drops in the great bucket, and the author lifts with a light and competent hand, an art that animates his few pages, the veil from a kind of mephitic obscurity, the huge, hot, horrible century of English pioneership, the wheel that ground the dust for a million early graves. The Thackerays and the Bechers helped to feed the machine, and the machine, at the same time, turned them out with the big special stamp that sometimes, for variety, didn't crush to death. It gave only life to the greatest of the former race, whose birth at Calcutta we have always fancifully felt, I think, as making for his distinction. It is a fact, at any rate, into which the volume before me puts more meaning than before -- a meaning that fills a little the void of his unwritten biography. Is it only a vain imagination, or is there in his large and easy genius an echo of those masteries and dominations which sometimes straightened and sometimes broke the backs of so many of his ancestors
It is unfair, perhaps, not to add that if the note of India has been in the air Mrs. Steel's On the Face of the Waters has done much to make it resound: all indeed that more than a dozen editions can do -- I assume that we are all aware of how much and how little that may be. Let me make, however, the graceless confession that even with a tooth sharpened, as I have hinted, for her general subject, I have, as yet, bitten into Mrs. Steel no further than her preface, which I fear found none the less tough a morsel for being a very small one. It indicates with admirable, with enviable serenity -- an effect to which her brevity contributes -- exactly where her "story ends," her "history begins," and sets forth that she has not allowed "fiction to interfere with fact in the slightest degree." She has found the subject of On the Face of the Waters in the events of the Mutiny, and I dare say I shall still read her novel and recognize all the grounds of her success. But for the moment I am more arrested than precipitated by admiration of her easy distinctions and by reflecting, in connection with them, on the question opened up by the few quiet words, followed by a few others that I have quoted; that of the possibility of direct correspondence or continuity between the objects outside and the objects inside a work of art. Such a work is a crucible in which the former have absolutely, before becoming the latter, to enter into glowing fusion; happy the author, therefore, who can pick the identical pieces out of the pot as he picks his letters out of the post-bag. The correspondence, in my experience, becomes a pulp -- the letters have all to be rewritten.
To deny it seems to me to belong to the basest prose. These are perhaps mysteries, let me hasten to add, that should either be quite laid bare or be passed by with averted head; so that I am willing to seek a more presentable reason for postponing Mrs. Steel in the almost maddening nature of the solicitation exercised in a different quarter.
If I spoke just now of the pedestal placed under Thackeray's
Harper's Weekly, March 27, 1897
I continued last month to seek private diversion, which I found to be more and more required as the machinery of public began to work. Never was a better chance apparently for the great anodyne of art. It was a supreme opportunity to test the spell of the magician, for one felt one was
The only amount I can compute is the force of the author, for that is directly registered in my attention, my submission. A hundred things naturally go to make it up; but he knows so much better than what they are that I should blush to give him a glimpse of my inferior account of them. The anodyne is not the particular picture, it is our own act of surrender, and therefore most, for each reader, what he most surrenders to. This latter element would seem in turn to vary from case to case, were it not indeed that there are readers prepared, I believe, to limit their surrender in advance. With some, we gather, it declines for instance to operate save on an exhibition of "high life." In others again it is proof against any solicitation but that of low. In many it vibrates only to "adventure"; in many only to Charlotte Bront ; in various groups, according to affinity, only to Jane Austen, to old Dumas, to Miss Corelli, to Dostoievsky or whomever it may be. The readers easiest to conceive, however, are probably those
I am afraid that, profiting by my license, I drag forward Mr. George Gissing from an antiquity of several weeks. I blow the dust of oblivion from M. Pierre Loti and indeed from all the company -- they have been published for days and days. I foresee, however, that I must neglect the company for the sake of the two members I have named, writers -- I speak for myself -- always in order, though not, I admit, on quite the same line. Mr. Gissing would have been particularly in order had he only kept for the present period the work preceding his latest; all the more that "In the Year of Jubilee" has to my perception some points of superiority to "The Whirlpool." For this author in general, at any rate, I profess, and have professed ever since reading "The New Grub Street," a persistent taste -- a taste that triumphs even over the fact that he almost as persistently disappoints me. I fail as yet to make out why exactly it is that going so far he so sturdily refuses to go further. The whole business of distribution and composition he strikes me as having cast to the winds; but just this fact of a question about him is a part of the wonder -- I use the word in the sense of enjoyment -- that he excites. It is not every day in the year that we meet a novelist about whom there is a question. The circumstance alone is almost sufficient to beguile or to enthrall; and seem to myself to have said almost everything in speaking of something that Mr. Gissing "goes far" enough to do. To go far enough to do anything is, in the conditions we live in, a lively achievement.
"The Whirlpool," I crudely confess, was in a manner a grief to me, but the book has much substance, and there is no light privilege in an emotion so sustained. This emotion perhaps it is that most makes me, to the end, stick to Mr. Gissing -- makes me with an almost nervous clutch quite cling to him. I shall not know how to deal with him, however, if I withhold the last outrage of calling him an interesting case. He seems to me above all a case of saturation, and it is mainly his saturation that makes him interesting -- I mean especially in the
The English novel has as a general thing kept so desperately, so nervously clear of it, whisking back compromised skirts and bumping frantically against obstacles to retreat, that we welcome as the boldest of adventurers a painter who has faced it and survived. We have had low life in plenty, for, with its sores and vices, its crimes and penalties, misery has colour enough to open the door to any quantity of artistic patronage. We have shuddered in the dens of thieves and the cells of murderers, and have dropped the inevitable tear over tortured childhood and purified sin. We have popped in at the damp cottage with my lady and heard the quaint rustic, bless his simple heart, commit himself for our amusement. We have fraternised on the other hand with the peerage and the county families, staying at fine old houses till exhausted nature has, for this source of intoxication, not a wink of sociability left. It has grown, the source in question, as stale as the sweet biscuit with pink enhancements in that familiar jar of the refreshment counter from which even the attendant young lady in black, with admirers and a social position, hesitates to extract it. We have recognised the humble, the wretched, even the wicked; also we have recognised the "smart." But save under the immense pressure of Dickens we have never done anything so dreadful as to recognise the vulgar. We have at the very most recognised it as the extravagant, the grotesque. The case of Dickens was absolutely special; he dealt intensely with "lower middle," with "lowest" middle, elements, but he escaped the predicament of showing them as vulgar by showing them only as prodigiously droll. When his people are not funny who shall dare to say what they are? The critic may draw breath as from a responsibility averted when he reflects
So he is serious -- almost imperturbably -- about them, and, as it turns out, even quite manfully and admirably sad. He has the great thing: his saturation (with the visible and audible common) can project itself, let him get outside of it and walk round it. I scarcely think he stays, as it were, outside quite as much as he might; and on the question of form he certainly strikes me as staying far too little. It is form above all that is talent, and if Mr. Gissing's were proportionate to his knowledge, to what may be called his possession, we should have a larger force to reckon with. That -- not to speak of the lack of intensity in his imagination -- is the direction in which one would wish him to go further. Our Anglo-Saxon tradition of these matters remains surely in some respects the strangest. After the perusal of such a book as "The Whirlpool" I feel as if I had almost to explain that by "these matters" I mean the whole question of composition, of foreshortening, of the proportion and relation of parts. Mr. Gissing, to wind up my reserves, overdoes the ostensible report of spoken words; though I hasten to add that this abuse is so general a sign, in these days, of the English and the American novel as to deprive a challenge of every hope of credit. It is attended visibly -- that is visibly to those who can see -- with two or three woeful results. If it had none other it would still deserve arraignment on the simple ground of what it crowds out -- the golden blocks themselves of the structure, the whole divine exercise and mystery of the exquisite art of presentation.
The ugliest trick it plays at any rate is its effect on that side of the novelist's effort -- the side of most difficulty and thereby of most dignity -- which consists in giving the sense of duration, of the lapse and accumulation of time. This is
"Dialogue," as it is commonly called, is singularly suicidal from the moment it is not directly illustrative of something given us by another method, something constituted and presented. It is impossible to read work even as interesting as Mr. Gissing's without recognising the impossibility of making people both talk "all the time" and talk with the needful differences. The thing, so far as we have got, is simply too hard. There is always at the best the author's voice to be kept out. It can be kept out for occasions, it can not be kept out always. The solution therefore is to leave it its function, for it has the supreme one. This function, properly exercised, averts the disaster of the blight of the colloquy really in place -- illustrative and indispensable. Nothing is more inevitable than such a blight when antecedently the general effect of the process has been undermined. We then want the report of the spoken word -- want that only. But, proportionately, it doesn't come, doesn't count. It has been fatally cheapened. There is no effect, no relief.
I am writing a treatise when I meant only to give a glance; and it may be asked if the best thing I find in Mr. Gissing is after all then but an opportunity to denounce. The answer to that is that I find two other things -- or should find them rather had I not deprived myself as usual of proper space. One of these is the pretext for speaking, by absolute rebound, as it were, and in the interest of vivid contrast, of Pierre Loti; the other is a better occasion still, an occasion for the liveliest sympathy. It is impossible not to be affected by the frankness and straightness of Mr. Gissing's feeling for his subject, a subject almost always distinctly remunerative to the ironic and even to the dramatic mind. He has the strongest deepest sense of common humanity, of the general struggle and the general grey grim comedy. He loves the real, he renders it, and though he has a tendency to drift too much with his tide, he gives us, in the great welter of the savourless, an individual manly strain. If he only had distinction he would make the suburbs "hum." I don't mean of course by his circulation there -- the effect Ibsen is supposed to have on them; I mean objectively and as a rounded whole, as a great theme treated.
I am ashamed of having postponed "Ramuntcho," for "Ramuntcho" is a direct recall of the beauty of "Pcheur d'Islande" and "Mon Fr re Yves" -- in other words a literary impression of the most exquisite order. Perhaps indeed it is as well that a critic should postpone -- and quite indefinitely -- an author as to whom he is ready to confess that his critical instinct is quite suspended. Oh the blessing of a book, the luxury of a talent, that one is only anxious not to reason about, only anxious to turn over in the mind and to taste! It is a poor business perhaps, but I have nothing more responsible to say of Loti than that I adore him. I love him when he is bad -- and heaven knows he has occasionally been so -- more than I love other writers when they are good. If therefore he is on the whole quite at his best in "Ramuntcho" I fear my appreciation is an undertaking too merely active for indirect expression. I can give it no more coherent form than to say that he makes the act of partaking one of the joys that, as things mainly go, a reader must be pretty well provided to be able not to jump at. And yet there are readers, apparently, who are so provided. There are readers who don't jump and
It is well to content one's self, at all events, with affection; so stiff a job, in such a case, is understanding or, still more, explanation. There is a kind of finality in Loti's simplicity -- if it even be simplicity. He performs in an air in which, on the part of the spectator, analysis withers and only submission lives. Has it anything to do with literature? Has it anything to do with nature? It must be, we should suppose, the last refinement either of one or of the other. Is it all emotion, is it all calculation, is it all truth, is it all humbug? All we can say as readers is that it is for ourselves all experience, and of the most personal intensity. The great question is whether it be emotion "neat" or emotion rendered and reduced. If it be resolved into art why hasn't it more of the chill? If it be sensibility pure why isn't it cruder and clumsier? What is exquisite is the contact of sensibility made somehow so convenient -- with only the beauty preserved. It is not too much to say of Loti that his sensibility begins where that of most of those who use the article ends. If moreover in effect he represents the triumph of instinct, when was instinct ever so sustained and so unerring? It keeps him unfailingly, in the matter of "dialogue," out of the overflow and the waste. It is a joy to see how his looseness is pervaded after all by proportion.
Harper's Weekly, July 31, 1897
Reprinted as "London Notes, July 1897"
in Notes on Novelists, 1914
I shrink at this day from any air of relapsing into reference to those Victorian saturnalia of which the force may now be taken as pretty well spent; and if I remount the stream for an instant it is but with the innocent intention of plucking
I found, on the morrow in question -- the great day had been the 22nd -- the main suggestion of a journey from the south of England up to Waterloo and across from Waterloo to Paddington to be that of one of those deep gasps or wild staggers, losses of wind and of balance, that follow some tremendous effort or some violent concussion. The weather was splendid and torrid and London a huge dusty cabless confusion of timber already tottering, of decorations already stale, of badauds already bored. The banquet-hall was by no means deserted, but it was choked with mere echoes and candle-ends; one had heard often enough of a "great national awakening," and this was the greatest it would have been possible to imagine. Millions of eyes, opening to dust and glare from the scenery of dreams, seemed slowly to stare and to try to recollect. Certainly at that distance the omens were poor for such concentration as a French critic might have been moved to count upon, and even on reaching Oxford I was met by the sense that the spirit of that seat of learning, though accustomed to intellectual strain, had before the afternoon but little of a margin for pulling itself together. Let me say at once that it made the most of the scant interval and that when five o'clock came the bare scholastic room at the Taylorian offered
For one auditor of whom I can speak, at all events, the occasion had an intensity of interest transcending even that of Flaubert's strange personal story -- which was part of M. Bourget's theme -- and of the new and deep meanings that the lecturer read into it. Just the fact of the occasion itself struck me as having well-nigh most to say, and at any rate fed most the all but bottomless sense that constitutes to-day my chief receptacle of impressions; a sense which at the same time I fear I cannot better describe than as that of the way we are markedly going. No undue eagerness to determine whether this be well or ill attaches to the particular consciousness I speak of, and can only give it frankly for what, on the whole, it most, for beguilement, for amusement, for the sweet thrill of perception, represents and achieves -- the quickened notation of our "modernity." feel that I can pay this last-named lively influence no greater tribute than by candidly accepting as an aid to expression its convenient name. To do that doubtless is to accept with the name a host of other things. From the moment, at any rate, the quickening I speak of sets in it is wonderful how many of these other things play, by every circumstance, into the picture.
That the day should have come for M. Bourget to lecture at Oxford, and should have come by the same stroke for Gustave Flaubert to be lectured about, filled the mind to a degree, and left it in an agitation of violence, which almost excluded the question of what in especial one of these spirits was to give and the other to gain. It was enough of an emotion, for the occasion, to live in the circumstance that the author of "Madame Bovary" could receive in England a public baptism of such peculiar solemnity. With the vision of that, one could bring in all the light and colour of all the rest of the picture and absolutely see, for the instant, something momentous in the very act of happening, something certainly that might easily become momentous with a little interpretation. Such are the happy chances of the critical spirit, always yearning to interpret, but not always in presence of the right mystery.
There was a degree of poetic justice, or at least of poetic
One may perhaps take these things too hard and read into them foolish fancies; but the hush in question was filled to my imagination - - quite apart from the listening faces, of which there would be special things to say that I wouldn't for the world risk -- with the great picture of all the old grey quads and old green gardens, of all the so totally different traditions and processions that were content at last, if only for the drowsy end of a summer afternoon, to range themselves round and play at hospitality. What it appeared possible to make out was a certain faint convergence: that was the idea of which, during the whole process, I felt the agreeable obsession. From the moment it brushed the mind certainly the impulse was to clutch and detain it: too doleful would it have been to entertain for an instant the fear that M. Bourget's lecture could leave the two elements of his case facing each other only at the same distance at which it had found them. No, no; there was nothing for it but to assume and insist that with each tick of the clock they moved a little nearer together. That was the process, as I have called it, and none the less interesting to the observer that it may not have been, and may not yet be, rapid, full, complete, quite easy or clear or successful. It was the seed of contact that assuredly was sown; it was the friendly beginning that in a manner was
There are movements of the classic torch round modern objects - - strange drips and drops and wondrous waverings -- that have the effect of putting it straight out. The range of reference that I allude to and that is most the fashion draws its credit from being an education of the taste, and it doubtless makes on the prescribed lines and in the close company of the ancients tremendous tests and triumphs for that principle. Nothing, however, is so singular as to see what again and again becomes of it in the presence of examples for which prescription and association are of no avail. I am speaking here of course not of unexpected reserves, but of unexpected raptures, bewildering revelations of a failure of the sense of perspective. This leads at times to queer conjunctions, strange collocations in which Euripides gives an arm to Sarah Grand and Octave Feuillet harks back to Virgil. It is the breath of a madness in which one gropes for a method -- probes in vain the hiatus and sighs for the missing link. I am far from meaning to say that all this will find itself amended by the discreet dose administered the other day at the Taylorian of even so great an antidote as Flaubert; but I come back to my theory that there is after all hope for a world still so accessible to salutary shocks. That was apparent indeed some years ago. Was it not at the Taylorian that Taine and Renan successively lectured? Oxford, wherever it was, heard them even then to
It is possible to have glanced at some of the odd estimates that the conversation of the cultivated throws to the surface and yet to say quite without reserve that the world of books has suffered no small shrinkage by the recent death of Mrs. Oliphant. She had long lived and worked in it, and from no individual perhaps had the great contemporary flood received a more copious tribute. I know not if some study of her remarkable life, and still more of her remarkable character, be in preparation, but she was a figure that would on many sides still lend itself to vivid portraiture. Her success had been in its day as great as her activity, yet it was always present to me that her singular gift was less recognised, or at any rate less reflected, less reported upon, than it deserved: unless indeed she may have been one of those difficult cases for criticism, an energy of which the spirit and the form, straggling apart, never join hands with that effect of union which in literature more than anywhere else is strength.
Criticism, among us all, has come to the pass of being shy of difficult cases, and no one, for that matter, practised it more in the hit-or-miss fashion and on happy-go-lucky lines than Mrs. Oliphant herself. She practised it, as she practised everything, on such an inordinate scale that her biographer, if there is to be one, will have no small task in the mere drafting of lists of her contributions to magazines and journals in general and to "Blackwood" in particular. She wrought in "Blackwood" for years, anonymously and profusely; no writer of the day found a porte-voix nearer to hand or used it with an easier personal latitude and comfort. I should almost suppose in fact that no woman had ever, for half a century, had her personal "say" so publicly and irresponsibly. Her facilities of course were of her own making, but the wonder was that once made they could be so applied.
The explanation of her extraordinary fecundity was a rare original equipment, an imperturbability of courage, health and brain, to which was added the fortune or the merit of her having had to tune her instrument at the earliest age. That instrument was essentially a Scotch one; her stream flowed
Her capacity for labour was infinite -- for labour of the only sort that, with the fine strain of old Scotch pride and belated letterless toryism that was in her, she regarded as respectable. She had small patience with new-fangled attitudes or with a finical conscience. What was good enough for Sir Walter was good enough for her, and I make no doubt that her shrewd unfiltered easy flow, fed after all by an immensity of reading as well as of observation and humour, would have been good enough for Sir Walter. If this had been the case with her abounding history, biography and criticism, it would have been still more the case with her uncontrolled flood of fiction. She was really a great improvisatrice, a night-working spinner of long, loose, vivid yarns, numberless, pauseless, admirable, repeatedly, for their full, pleasant, reckless rustle over depths and difficulties -- admirable indeed, in any case of Scotch elements, for many a close engagement with these. She showed in no literary relation more acuteness than in the relation -- so profitable a one as it has always been -- to the inexhaustible little country which has given so much, yet has ever so much more to give, and all the romance and reality of which she
Reading since her death "Kirsteen" -- one of the hundred, but published in her latest period and much admired by some judges -- I was, though beguiled, not too much beguiled to be struck afresh with that elusive fact on which I just touched, the mixture in the whole thing. Such a product as "Kirsteen" has life -- is full of life, but the critic is infinitely baffled. It may of course be said to him that he has nothing to do with compositions of this order -- with such wares altogether as Mrs. Oliphant dealt in. But he can accept that retort only with a renunciation of some of his liveliest anxieties. Let him take some early day for getting behind, as it were, the complexion of a talent that could care to handle a thing to the tune of so many pages and yet not care more to "do" it. There is a fascination in the mere spectacle of so serene an instinct for the middle way, so visible a conviction that to reflect is to be lost.
Mrs. Oliphant was never lost, but she too often saved herself at the expense of her subject. I have no space to insist, but so much of the essence of the situation in "Kirsteen" strikes me as missed, dropped out without a thought, that the wonder is all the greater of the fact that in spite of it the book does in a manner scramble over its course and throw up a fresh strong air. This was certainly the most that the author would have pretended, and from her scorn of precautions springs a gleam of impertinence quite in place in her sharp and handsome physiognomy, that of a person whose eggs are not all in one basket, nor all her imagination in service at once. There is scant enough question of "art" in the matter, but there is a friendly way for us to feel about so much cleverness, courage and humanity. We meet the case in wishing that the timid talents were a little more like her and the bold ones a little less.
Harper's Weekly, August 21, 1897 Reprinted as "London Notes, August 1897" in Notes on Novelists, 1914