Part 10

To discuss seriously the opinions or impressions of a writer of this kind would be as absurd as to attempt to fight gnats with a sword, and we shall merely content ourselves with transcribing, without comment, a few of the aphorisms with which these volumes are studded. “Criticism is the art of praise.” “Shakespeare is the greatest English poet, not because he created Hamlet and Lear, but because he could write that speech about Perdita’s flowers and Claudio’s speech on death in _Measure for Measure_.” “The perfection of prose is the essay, of poetry the lyric, and the most beautiful book is that which contains the most beautiful words.” These specimens will probably suffice. Mr. Le Gallienne is also of opinion that “culture is mainly a matter of temperament”--that “a man is born cultured,” that mere education and study are to such a one not simply superfluities, but impertinences. “What matters it,” he eloquently asks, “that one does not remember or even has never read great writers? Our one concern is to possess an organization open to great and refined impressions.” A paltry scholar, for example, may be able to construe Sappho, but it is only “an organization open to great and refined impressions” which can discern (in a crib) “the pathos of eternity in some twenty words” of “this passionate singer of Lesbos.” Plato may be studied by poor pedants, but to an organization of this kind the binding of a volume is sufficient enlightenment; “to merely hold in the hand and turn over its pages is a counsel in style,” for do not “the temperate beauty, the dry beauty beloved of Plato, find expression in the sweet and stately volume itself” [he is “reviewing” the late Mr. Pater’s lectures on Plato], “with its smooth night-blue binding, its rose-leaf yellow pages, its soft and yet grave type”? The value of Mr. Le Gallienne’s judgments, of his praise, and of his censure, which, ludicrous to relate, are quoted by some publishers as recommendations, or “opinions of the press,” may be estimated by these dicta, and by this theory of a critical education.

Macaulay somewhere speaks of a certain nondescript broth which, in some Continental inns, was kept constantly boiling, and copiously poured, without distinction, on every dish as it came up to table. The writer of these essays appears, metaphorically speaking, to be provided with a similar abomination. Whatever be his theme, poem, essay, novel, picture, he contrives to serve it up with the same condiment, a sickly and nauseous compound of preciosity and sentimentalism.

The melancholy thing about all this is the profound unconsciousness on the part of the author of these volumes that he is exciting ridicule; that he is, in Shakespeare’s phrase, making himself a motley to the view. But there are considerations more melancholy still. We should not have noticed these volumes had they not been representative and typical of a school of so-called critics which is becoming more and more prominent. Incredible as it may seem, there are certain sections of literary society and of the general public which take Mr. Le Gallienne and his dicta quite seriously, and to which the prodigious nonsense in these volumes does not present itself as absurdity, but as the articles of a creed. These essays have, moreover, appeared in publications the names of some of which carry authority. It is, therefore, high time that some stand should be made, some protest entered against writings which cannot fail to corrupt popular taste and to degrade the standard of popular literature. Of one thing we are very certain, that no self-respecting literary journal which undertook to review these volumes could allow them to pass without denunciation.

Of Mr. Le Gallienne we know nothing personally. He is, if we are rightly informed, still a young man, and we would in all kindness exhort him to turn the abilities which he undoubtedly possesses to better account. There is much in these essays which shows that he was intended for something better than to further the decadence. If, instead of sneering at scholars, affecting to despise learning and study, indulging in silly paradoxes, tinsel epigrams, and absurd generalisations, he would read and think, and endeavour to do justice to himself and to his opportunities, he might, we make no doubt, obtain an honourable reputation. There is much which is attractive in his work, and in the personality reflected in it. He is not a charlatan, for though he is ignorant, he is honest. Genial and sympathetic, he has much real critical insight, and, in going through his volumes, we have noted many remarks which were both sound and fine. At its best his style is excellent,--clear, lively, and engaging. Let him cease to play the buffoon, which can only end in his gaining the applause of mere fools and the contempt of every one else.

THE GENTLE ART OF SELF-ADVERTISEMENT

The illustrious Barnum once observed that, if a man’s capital consisted of a shilling, one penny of that shilling should be spent in purchasing something, and the remaining eleven-pence should be invested in advertising what was purchased. There was, perhaps, a touch of exaggeration in that great man’s remark, but it was founded on a profound knowledge both of human nature and of the world. Intrinsically nothing is valuable; things are what we make or imagine them. Even the diamond, as a costly commodity, exists on suffrage. If a man cannot persuade his fellow-creatures that he has genius, talent, learning, “’twere all alike as if he had them not.” What Persius asks with a sneer, “Scire tuum nihil est, nisi te scire hoc sciat alter?”--is your knowledge nothing, unless some one else know that you are knowing?--a wiser man would ask in all seriousness. Shakespeare was never nearer the truth than when he wrote--

“No man is the lord of anything, Though in and of him there be much consisting, Till he communicates his parts to others; Nor doth he of himself know them for aught, Till he behold them formed in the applause Where they are extended.”

And never was a man more mistaken than the old preacher who said to his congregation, “If you have a talent in your napkin, you should take care not to hide it; but if you have no talent, but only a napkin, you should not so flourish your napkin as to create the impression that it is full of talents.” Why, this is just what nine men in ten who court fame have to do. Nature is kind, but seldom profuse. If she really endows a man with what, if trumpeted, would make him famous, the odds are she couples with her gifts pride, modesty, or self-respect, which, to say the least, heavily handicap him in the race for reputation. When she does not endow with the reality, she compensates by bestowing the power of acquiring the credit for it. She is, as a rule, much too thrifty to heap on the same man the keen pleasures of genuine enthusiasm and the sweets of popular applause. An impartial mother, she loves all her children, and divides her favours equally between shams and true men. This Churchill marks in his brutal way; speaking of a certain contemporary, he describes him as endowed with

“That low cunning which in fools supplies, And amply too, the place of being wise, Which Nature, kind, indulgent parent, gave To qualify the blockhead for a knave.”

But our business is not with knaves and blockheads, but with “gentler cattle,” and the quotation demands an apology.

The importance of the art of self-advertisement, as must be abundantly clear from the preceding remarks, can scarcely be overestimated. Though it is perhaps still in its infancy, its progress during the last few years has been most encouraging. The old coarse methods so familiar to us in the past, and still successfully practised in the present--we mean mutual admiration cliques, log-rolling, and what is vulgarly known as “pulling the strings”--have been greatly improved upon and refined. Bentley’s famous remark when, explaining how it was that he took to commentating, he said, that as he despaired of standing on his own legs in the Temple of Fame, he got on to the shoulders of the Ancients, appears to have suggested one of the most ingenious of modern expedients. This consists of “getting up” a memorial to some distinguished man--a statue, it may be, or modest bust. Some labour, some ability, and some learning are involved in the more cumbrous device of Bentley. But here all is simple and very easy. You are on the shoulders of your great man at a bound, and stand side by side with him in a trice. There is nothing which redounds to his credit which does not redound to your own. As the Red Indian is under the impression that in possessing himself of a scalp he possesses himself of the virtues belonging to the former owner of the scalp, so this tribute of enthusiastic admiration quietly assumes, without trouble, all that enthusiastic admiration naturally implies. Is the object of your homage a poet, a critic, a scholar, the very fact that you pay him homage is, in itself, testimony of your own right to one or other of these honourable titles. If, moreover it should happen that you know very little about the writings of the author whom you have elected to honour, this is of no consequence; for of all the disguises which ignorance can assume, “enthusiasm” is the most effective. Nor are these the only advantages of this particular method of getting reputation. The collection of subscriptions and the formation of a committee bring you into contact, or may, if judiciously managed, bring you into contact with all your distinguished contemporaries; and we know what the proverb says--“Noscitur a sociis”--a man is what his companions are.

But nothing is more effectual, for purposes of self-advertisement, than a device which has lately been practised with signal success. This consists of scraping up an acquaintance with some person, whose name is not unknown to the public,--even a second-rate novelist will do--and waiting till he dies. As there is a tide in the affairs of men, so, as we all know, there is a moment at the demise of literary men when the voracity of public curiosity knows neither distinction nor satiety. This is the moment for the self-advertiser to nick; this is the time for him to float, with his defunct friend, on the lips of men. He will find readers for anything he may choose to print--that letter with its exquisite compliments, that conversation in which his poor attainments were so generously over-estimated, or the importance of his slight literary services so much exaggerated. Of course, the value of such advertisements will be in proportion to the eminence of the subject of the reminiscences--and happy, thrice happy, those who were able to turn men like Darwin, Tennyson, and Browning to this account; their reputation may be regarded as made. But it is not always necessary to wait till great men die, though it is an experiment too bold and perilous for most aspirants to make this sort of capital out of them while they are still alive. Still _audentes fortuna juvat_, and it has been done. A certain minor poet published in an American magazine, not many years ago, an article entitled “A Day with Lord Tennyson,” in which he represented the Laureate as turning the conversation on his (the minor bard’s) poetry. We are told how the great man, after fervently reiterating a stanza of that minor bard which pleased him, requested his son to take it down in writing; how that son, though the day was cold and blowy, took it down; how Tennyson grasped, at parting, his brother poet’s hand, and begged in transport that he would “come again and come often.” He came, we believe, no more. But what of that? He had accomplished a feat so simple and yet so original that it may fairly be questioned whether what Mr. Burnum used to call his masterpiece was in any way comparable to it. To interview a great man, even on an assumption of equality, is, as we all know, a comparatively easy matter, but to turn the conversation of the great man into a seasonable puff of yourself requires a combination of qualities not often united in a single person. The worst of feats like these is that they must have a tendency to make great men a little shy of encouraging the acquaintance of those to whom they can be so useful. But simplicity, as Thucydides remarks, is one of the chief ingredients of greatness, and it is a quality very difficult to wear out.

If Tennyson’s interviewer has ever had a rival in the important art which has been discussed--for the benefit of youthful ambition--in this article, we are inclined to think that that rival was the Rev. Aris Willmott. This now almost forgotten writer was a very voluminous author both in verse and prose; but his merits were not appreciated by an ungrateful public so much as they ought to have been. He resorted, therefore, to the following exquisitely ingenious device. He published a handsome volume, which is now before us, entitled _Gems from English Literature_, thus arranged: Bacon, Rev. Aris Willmott, Jeremy Taylor, Rev. Aris Willmott, Barrow, Rev. Aris Willmott, sandwiching himself regularly through the prose classics, and in the same way through the poets--Shakespeare, Rev. Aris Willmott, Milton, Rev. Aris, etc. As birthday books, press notices, interviews at home, portraits of distinguished authors in their studies, and the like are getting a little stale, we cordially recommend this rev. gentleman’s expedient--it may be judiciously modified--to the notice of all who are unable to distinguish fame from notoriety.

R. L. STEVENSON’S LETTERS[22]

[Footnote 22: _The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson to his Family and Friends._ Selected and Edited with Notes and Introduction by Sidney Colvin. 2 vols.]

The late Robert Louis Stevenson is a writer who has every title to commiseration, and the appearance of the volumes before us may be said to mark the climax of his misfortunes. Diseased and sickly from his birth, with his life frequently hanging on a thread, he probably never knew the sensation of perfect health. During the impressionable years of early youth his surroundings appear to have been most uncongenial; he was forced into a profession for which he had no taste and no aptitude. In constant straits for money, at times he was miserably poor; his apprenticeship to letters was long and arduous, for he was not one of Nature’s favourites, and attained what he did attain by unsparing and severe labour. His wandering and restless life, bringing him as it did into contact with all phases of humanity and with all parts of the world, was of course in many respects favourable to his work, but it had at the same time serious disadvantages. It gave him little time for reflection; it imported a certain feverishness into his energy, and rendered that concentration and steadiness, without which no really great work can be accomplished, impossible. That in these circumstances Stevenson should have produced so much, and so much which is of a high order of merit, is most creditable to him, and not a little surprising. “He stands,” says his friend Professor Colvin, “as the writer who in the last quarter of the nineteenth century has handled with the most of freshness and inspiriting power the widest range of established literary forms--the moral, critical and personal essay, travels sentimental and other, parables and tales of mystery, boys’ stories of adventure, memoirs; nor let lyrical and meditative verse both English and Scottish, and especially nursery verse, a new vein for genius to work in, be forgotten.” With some reservation this may be conceded, and this is as far as eulogy can legitimately be stretched.

But, unhappily, some of Stevenson’s admirers have made themselves and their idol ridiculous, by raising him to a position his claims to which are preposterous. If he be measured with his contemporaries the comparison will generally be in his favour--he certainly did best what hundreds can do well. His essays have distinction and excellence; his novels, travels, and short tales, though scarcely entitled to the praise of originality, as they strike no new notes and are mere variants of the work of Scott, Kingston, Ballantyne, De Quincey and Poe, bear the impress of genius as distinguished from mere talent, and reflect a very charming personality; his verse, too, is pleasing and skilful. But when we are told that he will stand the third in a trio with Burns and Scott, and when we have to listen to serious appeals to Edinburgh to raise a statue to him beside the author of _Marmion_ and the Waverley Novels, all who truly appreciate his work may well tremble for the reaction which is certain to succeed such extravagant overestimation. The truth is that poor Stevenson, himself one of the simplest, sincerest and most modest of men, got involved with a clique who may be described as manufacturers of factitious reputations,--the circulators of a false currency in criticism. In these days of appeals to the masses it is as easy to write up the sort of works which are addressed to them--popular essays, tales and novels--as it is to write up the commodities of quack doctors and the shares of bogus companies. The production of popular literature is now a trade, and in some cases this kind of puffery is the work of deliberate fraud, originating from various motives. In many cases it simply springs from ignorance and critical incompetence, current criticism being, to a considerable extent, in the hands of very young men who, having neither the requisite knowledge nor the proper training, are unable to judge a writer comparatively. In other cases it is to be attributed to good nature and the tendency in the genial appreciation of real merit to indulge in extravagant expression. But the result is the same. A reputation, so grotesquely out of proportion to what is really merited that sober people are inclined to suspect that all is imposture, is gradually inflated. Eulogy kindles eulogy; hyperbole is heaped on hyperbole; a ludicrous importance is attached to every trifle which falls, or which ever has fallen, from this Press-created Fetish. While he is alive he is encouraged, or rather importuned, to force his power of production to keep pace with the demand for everything bearing his signature; when he is dead the very refuse of his study finds eager publishers.

This kind of thing has obviously many advantages, which are by no means confined to the object of the idolatry itself. In the first place it means business; it is the creation of a goose which can lay golden eggs, and it is, in the second place, a creation which reflects no little glory on the creators. Is it nothing to be the satellites of so radiant a luminary? When the familiar correspondence of the great man is printed, will not what he was pleased to say, with all the friendly license of private intercourse, in the way of compliment and eulogy, be proclaimed from the house-tops?

All this is exactly what has happened in the case of poor Stevenson. No man ever took more justly his own measure, or would have been more annoyed at the preposterous eulogies of which he has been made the subject, on the part of interested or ill-judging friends. We wonder what he would himself have said, could he have seen the letters before us described, as they were described in one of the current Reviews, as “the most exhaustive and distinguished literary correspondence which England has ever seen.” We entirely absolve Professor Colvin from any suspicion of being actuated by unworthy motives in publishing them. It is abundantly clear that he has not published them to puff himself, that his labour has been a labour of love, and that he believed himself to be piously fulfilling a duty to his friend. But they ought never to have been given to the world. More than two-thirds have nothing whatever to justify their appearance in print, and merely show, what will surprise those who knew Stevenson by his literary writings, how vapid, vulgar and commonplace he could be. In their slangy familiarity and careless spontaneity they remind us of Byron’s, but what a contrast do these trivial and too often insipid tattlings present to Byron’s brilliance and point, his wit, his piquancy, his insight into life and men! Only here and there, in a touch of description, or in a casual reflection, do we find anything to distinguish them from the myriads of letters which are interchanged between young men every day in the year. Their one attraction lies in the glimpses they reveal of Stevenson’s own charming personality, his kindliness, his sympathy, his great modesty, his manliness, his transparent truthfulness and honesty. It is amusing to watch him with one of his correspondents who was evidently endeavouring to establish a mutual exchange of flattery. The urbane skill with which this gentleman’s persistently fulsome compliments are either fenced or waived aside, the ironical delicacy with which, when a return is extorted, they are repaid, in a measure strictly adjusted to desert and yet certain not to disappoint expectant vanity, are quite exquisite. “The suns go swiftly out,” he writes to him, referring to the death of Tennyson and Browning and others, “and I see no suns to follow, nothing but a universal twilight of the demi-divinities, with parties like you and me beating on toy drums, and playing on penny whistles about glow-worms.” The indignant letter to the _New York Tribune_, in defence of James Payn, who had been accused of plagiarising from one of Stevenson’s fictions, well deserves placing on permanent record, as an illustration of his chivalrous loyalty to his friends.

We are sorry, we repeat, that these letters have been given to the world. So far as Stevenson’s reputation is concerned they can only detract from it. When they illustrate him on his best side they merely emphasise what his works illustrate so abundantly that further illustration is a mere work of supererogation. When they present him, as for the most part they do, in dishabille, they exhibit him very greatly to his disadvantage. If Professor Colvin had printed about one-third of them, and retained his excellent elucidatory introductions, which form practically a biography of Stevenson, he would have produced a work for which all admirers of that most pleasing writer would have thanked him. As it is, he has been guilty, in our opinion, of a grave error of judgment.

LITERARY ICONOCLASM[23]

[Footnote 23: _The Authorship of the Kingis Quair._ A New Criticism by J. T. T. Brown.]

Among the worthies of the fifteenth century there is no more interesting and picturesque figure than the Poet-King of Scotland, James I. Long before the poem on which his fame rests was given to the world, tradition had assigned him a high place among native makers, and his countrymen had been proud to add to the names of Dunbar and Douglas, of Henryson and Lyndsay, the name of the best of their kings. Great was their joy, therefore, when, in 1783, William Tytler gave public proof that the good King’s title to the laurel was no mere title by courtesy, but that he had been the author of a poem which could fairly be regarded as one of the gems of Scottish literature. There cannot, in truth, be two opinions about the _Kingis Quair_. It is a poem of singular charm and beauty, and, though it is modelled closely on certain of Chaucer’s minor poems, and is in other respects largely indebted to them, it is no servile imitation; it bears the impress of original genius, not so much in details and incident as in tone, colour, and touch; it is a brilliant and most memorable achievement, and Rossetti hardly exaggerates when he describes it as

“More sweet than ever a poet’s heart Gave yet to the English tongue.”