Part 12

This is brilliant and picturesque rhetoric touched into poetry by the “Venus Chapell clerkis,” and the magical note in the last line; so too the touch in _The Golden Terge_, likening the faery ship to “blossom upon the spray.” But in his allegorical poem he is too fond of the “quainte enamalit termes,” and his verse has a certain metallic ring. It will be admitted, we suppose, that the best of his moral poems would be _The Merle and the Nightingale_ and “Be Merrie Man”; but the utmost which can be said for them is, that the philosophy is excellent and its expression adequate; that is, that they have little to distinguish them from hundreds of other poems of the same class.

In speaking of Dunbar’s satires, Mr. Smeaton indulges himself in the following nonsense, “From the genial, jesting, and ironical incongruities of Horace and Persius we are introduced at once into the bitter, vitriolic scourgings of Juvenal,” and in the following rhodomontade, telling us that they unite “the natural directness of Hall, the subtle depth of Donne, the delicate humour of Breton, the sturdy vigour of Dryden, the scalding, vitriolic bitterness of Swift, the pungency of Churchill, the rural smack of Gay, united to an approach at least to the artistic perfection of Pope.” Stuff like this and indiscriminate eulogy are, no doubt, much easier to produce than an estimate of a writer’s historical position and importance. Of the relation of Dunbar to his predecessors and contemporaries in England and Scotland, of his prototypes and models in French and Provençal literature, of the influence which he undoubtedly exercised on subsequent poetry, and especially on Spenser, Mr. Smeaton has nothing to say. It never seems to occur to him that his hero, like every one else, must have had his limitations, that “the many-sidedness of that genius which has a ring”--the metaphors are not ours, but Mr. Smeaton’s--“almost Shakespearian, about it,” could hardly have been distinguished by uniformity of excellence; that “that painter of contemporary manners, who had all the vividness of a Callot, united to the broad humour of a Teniers and the minute touch of a Meissonier,” who “reflected in his verse the most delicate _nuances_, as well as the most startling colours of the age wherein he lived,” must have had degrees in success.

We have singled out this volume for special notice, not because of any intrinsic title it possesses to serious attention, but because it is typical of a species of literature which is rapidly becoming one of the pests of our time. While every encouragement should be given to sober, judicious, and competent reviews of our older writers, every discouragement should be given, out of respect to the dead, as well as in the interests of the living, to such books as the present. For they are as mischievous as they are ridiculous. They misinform; they mislead; they corrupt, or tend to corrupt, taste. After laying down a volume like this we feel, and we expect Dunbar would have felt, that there is something much more formidable than the old horror, “the candid friend,” even that indicated by Tacitus--_pessimum inimicorum genus--laudantes_.

A GALLOP THROUGH ENGLISH LITERATURE[25]

[Footnote 25: _A Literary History of the English People from the Origins to the Renaissance._ By J. J. Jusserand.]

There is a breeziness and hilarity, a gay irresponsibility and abandon, about M. Jusserand which is perfectly delightful. He is the very Autolycus of History and Criticism. What more sober students, who have some conscience to trouble them, are “toiling all their lives to find” appears to be his as a sort of natural right. The fertility of his genius is such, that it seems to blossom spontaneously into erudition. Like the lilies he toils not, but unlike the lilies he spins, and very pretty gossamer too. It is impossible to take him seriously.

The truth is that M. Jusserand belongs to a class of writers which, thanks to indulgent publishers, a more indulgent public, and most indulgent reviewers, is just now greatly in the ascendant. “Encyclopædical heads,” who took all knowledge for their province, probably died with Bacon, but encyclopædical heads who take all Literature or all History for their province appear to be as common as the “excellence” which, in opposition to Matthew Arnold’s opinion, the American lady maintained was so abundant on both sides of the Atlantic. These are the gentlemen who complacently sit down “to edit the Literatures of the world,” or “to trace the development of the human race, from its picturesque cradle in the valleys of Central Asia, to its infinite ramifications in our own day”--within “the moderate compass of an octavo volume.”

M. Jusserand’s first feat is to dispose of some six centuries in ninety-three pages, in a narrative which simply tells over again, though certainly after a more jaunty fashion, what Ten Brink, Henry Morley, and others have told much more seriously, and, we may add, much more effectively. The Norman Conquest and an account of the Anglo-Norman literature occupy about a hundred and ten pages, while some eighty pages more, dealing with the fusion of the races and the gradual evolution of the English people and language, bring us to Chaucer. It might have been expected that M. Jusserand would have justified his survey of a period so often reviewed before, either by tracing, with more fulness and precision than his predecessors, the successive stages in the development of our nationality and its expression in literature, or by adding to our knowledge of the characteristics and peculiarities of the literature itself. He has done neither. He has, on the contrary, obscured the first by the constant introduction of irrelevant matter, and he has apparently no notion of the relative importance of the authors on whose works he dilates or touches. Thus Richard Rolle of Hampole fills more space than Layamon, whose work is despatched in a page! Thus two lines in a note suffice for the _Ormulum_, two lines for Mannyng’s _Handlyng of Synne_, a singularly interesting and significant work, ten lines for Robert of Gloucester, who is rather perplexingly described as “a distant ancestor of Gibbon and Macaulay,” while four pages are accorded to _Tristan_ and five to the _Roman du Renart_. How the Latin Chroniclers fare may be judged from the fact that a little more than a page serves for Geoffrey of Monmouth, a line for Ordericus Vitalis, and two for Giraldus Cambrensis. In the chapter on Chaucer M. Jusserand does more justice to his subject, and it is to be regretted for his own sake that he has not confined himself to such essays. He is never safe except when he is on the beaten path. Nothing could be more inadequate than the section on Gower. It certainly indicates that M. Jusserand is not very familiar with the _Confessio Amantis_. Not one word is said about the remarkable prologue, and to dismiss such a work in less than three pages, observing that “it contains a hundred and twelve short stories, two or three of which are very well told, one, the adventure of Florent, being, perhaps, related even better than in Chaucer,” is not quite what we should expect in a work purporting to narrate the “literary history of the English people.” M. Jusserand has not even taken the trouble to keep pace with modern investigation in his subject, but actually tells us that Gower’s _Speculum Meditantis_ is lost! If Gower’s writings are not of much intrinsic value, they are of immense importance from an historical point of view. John de Trevisa, a most important name in the history of English prose, is despatched in eight lines of mere bibliographical information, without a word being said about his great services to our literature, and without any reference being made either to the remarkable preface to his great work, or to his version of the Dialogue attributed to Occam.

The only satisfactory chapter in the book is the chapter dealing with Langland and his works; but it is certainly surprising that no account should be given of the very remarkable anonymous poem entitled _Piers Ploughman’s Crede_. Again, whole departments of literature, such as the Metrical Romances, the Laies, Fabliaux, early lyrics and ballads, are most inadequately treated, some of the most memorable and typical being not even specified. Surely Minot was not a man to be dismissed, with a flippant joke, in half a page, or _King Horn_ and _Havelok_ poems to be relegated to passing reference in a note.

But it is in dealing with the literature of the fifteenth century that M. Jusserand’s superficiality and, to put it plainly, incompetence for his ambitious task become most deplorably apparent. In treating the earlier periods he had trustworthy guides even in common manuals, and he could not go far wrong in accepting their generalizations and statements. Books easily attainable, and indeed in everybody’s hands, could enable him to dance airily through the Anglo-Saxon literature and through the period between Layamon and Chaucer. No one can now very well go wrong in Chaucer and his contemporaries, who has at his side some half-dozen works which any library can supply. But it is otherwise with the literature of the fifteenth century. Here, as every one who happens to have paid particular attention to it knows, popular manuals and histories are most misleading guides. Deterred, no doubt, by the prolixity of the poetry and by the comparatively uninteresting nature of the prose literature, modern historians and critics have contented themselves with accepting the verdicts of Warton and his followers, who probably had as little patience as themselves; and so a kind of conventional estimate has been formed, which appears and reappears in every manual and handbook. We turned, therefore, with much curiosity to this portion of M. Jusserand’s work. We had, we own, our suspicions about his first-hand knowledge of the literature through which he glided so easily in the earlier portions of his book, and here, we thought, would be the crucial test of his pretension to original scholarship. Would he do voluminous Lydgate the justice which, as the specialist knows, has so long been withheld from him? Would he point out the strong human interest of Hoccleve; the great historical interest of Hardyng; the power and beauty of the ballads; or, if he included Hawes within the century, would he show what a singularly interesting poem, intrinsically and historically, the _Pastime of Pleasure_ really is? If, again, he included the Scotch poets, how would he deal with the problems presented by Huchown? Would he accord the proper tribute to the genius of Dunbar; would he estimate what poetry owes respectively to James I., Henry the Minstrel, Robert Henryson, and Gavin Douglas? In our prose literature, would he comment on the great importance of Pecock’s memorable work, of Fortescue’s two treatises, of the _Paston Letters_, of Caxton’s various publications? How would he deal with the one “classical” work of the century, Malory’s _Morte d’Arthur_?

Now, of Lydgate, “to enumerate whose pieces,” says Warton, “would be to write the catalogue of a little library,” it is not too much to say that he was one of the most richly gifted of our old poets, that as a descriptive poet he stands almost on the level of Chaucer, that his pictures of Nature are among the gems of their kind, that his pathos is often exquisite, “touching,” as Gray said of him, “the very heartstrings of compassion with so masterly a hand as to merit a place among the greatest of poets.” His humour is often delightful, and his pictures of contemporary life, such as his _London Lickpenny_ and his _Prologue to the Storie of Thebes_, are as vivid as Chaucer’s. In versatility he has no rival among his predecessors and contemporaries. Gray notices that, at times, he approaches sublimity. His style often is beautiful,--fluent, copious, and at its best eminently musical. The influence which he exercised on subsequent English and Scotch literature would alone entitle him to a prominent position in any history of English poetry. But the handbooks think otherwise, and he occupies just three pages in M. Jusserand’s work, the only estimate of his work being confined to the assertion that “he was a worthy man if ever there was one, industrious and prolific,” etc., and the only criticism is the remark that his “prosody was rather lax.” And this is how poor Lydgate fares at our historian’s hands. To Hoccleve are assigned just one page and a few lines. Hardyng figures only in the bibliography at the bottom of a page. The ballads are despatched in fifteen lines. Hawes’ _Pastime of Pleasure_, memorable alike both for the preciseness with which it marks the transition from the poetry of mediævalism to that of the Renaissance, for its probable influence on Spenser, and for its intrinsic charm, its pathos, its picturesqueness, and its sweet and plaintive music, is curtly dismissed, as the handbooks dismiss it, as “an allegory of unendurable dulness.” If M. Jusserand would throw aside the manuals and turn to the original, he would probably see reason to modify his verdict. Our author’s breathless gallop through the Scotch poets, to whom he allots nine pages, can only be regarded with silent astonishment by readers who happen to known anything about those most remarkable men. Huchown is not so much as mentioned. The amazing nonsense which he writes in summing up Dunbar, we will transcribe, _ut ex uno discas omnia_:

“Dunbar, with never-flagging spirit, attempts every style.... His flowers are too flowery, his odours too fragrant; by moments it is no longer a delight, but almost a pain. It is not sufficient that his birds should sing; they must sing among perfumes, and these perfumes are coloured.”

Has M. Jusserand ever read _The Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins_, _The Twa Maryit Wemen and the Wedo_, and the minor poems of Dunbar? If he has, would he pronounce that these “flowers” are “too flowery”--these “odours” “too fragrant,” or would he feel the absurdity of generalizing on ludicrously insufficient knowledge? His verdicts on the other Scotch poets are marked by the same superficiality, and we regret to add flippancy. To class Henryson among poets whose style is “florid” and whose roses are “splendid but too full-blown” is to show that M. Jusserand knows as little about him as he seems to know about Dunbar. In all Henryson’s poems there are only three short passages which could by any possibility be described as florid. The prose of the fifteenth century fares even worse at his hands. Capgrave is mentioned only in the bibliography! Of the interest and importance of Pecock, historically and intrinsically, he appears to have no conception; on the real significance of the _Repressor_ he never even touches, and how indeed could he in the less than one page which is assigned to one of the most remarkable writers in the fifteenth century? A page suffices for the _Paston Letters_, and four lines for Malory’s _Morte d’Arthur_!

Now we would ask M. Jusserand, in all seriousness, what possible end can be served by a book of this kind, except the encouragement of everything that is detestable to the real scholar: superficiality, want of thoroughness, and false assumption, and what is more, the public dissemination of error, and of crude and misleading judgments. Such a work as the present, the soundness and trustworthiness of which ninety-nine readers in every hundred must necessarily take for granted, can only be justified when it proceeds from one who is a master of his immense subject, from one whose generalizations are based on amply sufficient knowledge, whose suppressions and omissions spring neither from carelessness nor from ignorance, but from discrimination, and in whose statements and judgments implicit reliance can be placed. To none of these qualifications has M. Jusserand the smallest pretension.

We have no wish to seem discourteous to M. Jusserand or to say anything which can cause him annoyance, but it is no more than simple duty in any critic with a becoming sense of responsibility to discountenance in every way the production of such books as these. They are not only mischievous in themselves, but they form precedents for books which are more mischievous still. We like M. Jusserand’s enthusiasm, but we would exhort him to reduce the flatulent dimensions, which his ambition has here so unhappily assumed, to that more tempered ambition which gave us the monographs on Piers Ploughman and on the Tudor novelists.

DE QUINCEY AND HIS FRIENDS[26]

[Footnote 26: _Personal Recollections, Souvenirs, and Anecdotes of Thomas De Quincey and his Friends and Associates._ Written and collected by James Hogg.]

To a thoughtful reader there is, perhaps, no sadder spectacle than those sixteen volumes which represent all that remains to us of Thomas De Quincey. What superb powers, what noble and manifold gifts, what capacity for invaluable and imperishable achievements had Nature lavished on this extraordinary man! Metaphysics might for all time have been a debtor to that vigorous, acute, and subtle intellect, at once so speculative and logical, so inquisitive and discriminating. Æsthetic criticism might have found in him a second Lessing, and literary criticism a superior Sainte-Beuve. For, in addition to all that would have enabled him to excel in abstract thought, he had--and in ample measure--the qualities which make men consummate critics: rare power of analysis, the nicest perception, sensibility, sympathy, good taste, good sense, immense erudition. He might have contributed masterpieces to Theology, to History, to Economic Science. But they know not his name. He has set his seal on nothing but on English style. About a hundred and fifty articles contributed to magazines and encyclopædias, some of them of a high order of literary merit, many of them simply worthless, the majority of them containing what is inferior so disproportionately in excess of what is valuable that they may be likened to dustbins, with jewels here and there glittering among the rubbish;--this is what represents him. It is as a master of style, by virtue of what he accomplished as a rhetorician and prose poet only, that he will live. But this, comparatively scanty as it is, is of pre-eminent, of unique value, and will suffice to secure him a place for ever among the classics of English prose. He has also another claim, if not to our reverence, at least to our curious attention and interest,--and that attention and interest he can scarcely fail to excite in every generation,--his autobiographical writings give us a picture, and that with fascinating power, of one of the most extraordinary personalities on record.

Indiscriminating admiration is among the most pleasing traits of youth, but in men of mature years it loses its attractiveness. When it is no longer the effervescence of juvenile enthusiasm for which all make allowance, it becomes, like the levities of boyhood affected in middle life, merely vapid folly. In relation to its object it not only defeats its own ends, but is apt to make recipient and donor alike ridiculous. Nor is this all. By some curious law of association which we cannot pretend to explain, its almost inevitable ally is dulness, and dulness of a peculiarly wearisome and exasperating kind. During the last few years these peculiarities have become so alarmingly epidemic that it really seems high time to form, on the principle of Mr. Morris’s Society for the Preservation of Ancient Monuments, a Society for the Preservation of Literary Reputations. When those “of whom to be dispraised were no small praise” take to eulogy and editing, an unhappy Classic may well look to his true friends. It is nothing less than appalling to behold the mountains of rubbish now gradually accumulating over the work--the real work--of such poets as Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats; rubbish of their own, rescued with cruel industry from the oblivion to which they would themselves have consigned it, rubbish of their commentators and editors, dulness and inanity unutterable. “What, sir,” asked an Eton boy of Foote, “was the best thing you ever said?” “Well,” was the reply, “I once saw a chimney-sweep on a high prancing, high-mettled horse. ‘There,’ said I, ‘goes Warburton on Shakespeare.’” But it is not in the Warburtons, not in the chimney-sweepers, that the mischief lies; it is in those who may be called the scavengers and sextons of literature, in those who, utterly unable to discern between what is precious and what is worthless in a man’s work, thrust all, without distinction, into prominence, and thus not only enable an author to “write himself down,” but, by their indiscriminating eulogies, assist him in his suicide. The subtlest form, indeed, which detraction can assume is over-praise, for a man is thus forced to give the lie to his own reputation.

No one, perhaps, has suffered so much from ill-judging admirers as De Quincey. If ever an author needed a judicious adviser, when preparing his works for publication in a permanent form, and a judicious editor, when the time had come for that final edition on which his title to future fame should rest, it was the English opium-eater. But, unhappily, he had no such adviser in his lifetime, and he has had no such editor since. He consequently reprinted much which ought never to have been reprinted at all, and he omitted to reprint some things which would have done honour to him. His besetting faults, even in his vigour, were loquacity and silliness, a habit of “drawing out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument”--a tendency to peddle and dawdle, as well as to indulge in a sort of pleasantry, so attenuated as to border closely on inanity. As he grew older these habits became more confirmed. His puerility and garrulousness in his later writings are often intolerable. But this was not the worst. In revising some of his earlier papers, and particularly the _Confessions_, he not only imported into them tiresome irrelevancies and superfluities, but, in emending, ruined the glorious passages on which his fame as a rhetorician and prose poet rests; such has been the fate, among others, of the exquisite description of the powers of opium,--the superb passage beginning, “The town of L.. represented the earth with its sorrows and its graves,”[27] and of the dreams in the second part of the _Confessions_, particularly of the sublime one beginning, “The dream commenced with a music.”[28]