Part 8

In fact, as one’s experience in these matters increases day by day, one is fain to acknowledge that the work of the unknown or little known professional critic, faulty though it be, has certain modest advantages over the similar work of _his_ critics, the poets and novelists when they take to the business of reviewing. There are several very successful story-writers who are just now handling criticism after a fashion which recalls that delightful scene in “The Monks of Thelema,” where an effort to make the village maidens vote a golden apple to the prettiest of their number is frustrated by the unforeseen contingency of each girl voting for herself. In the same artless spirit, the novelist turned critic confines his good will so exclusively to his own work, or at best to that school of fiction which his own work represents, that, while we cannot sufficiently admire his methods, we do not feel greatly stimulated by their results. As for the poet umpire, he is apt to bring an uncomfortable degree of excitability to bear upon his task. It is readily granted that Mr. Swinburne manifests at times an exquisite critical discernment, and a broad sympathy for much that is truly good; but when less gifted souls behold him foaming in Berserker wrath over insignificant trifles, they are wont to ask themselves what in the world is the matter. We can forgive him, or at least we can strive to forgive him, for reviling Byron, snubbing George Eliot, underrating George Sand, ignoring Jane Austen, calling poor Steele a “sentimental debauchee,” and asserting that the only two women worthy to stand by the side of Charlotte Brontë,” “the fiery-hearted vestal of Haworth”--though why “vestal,” only Mr. Swinburne knows--are her sister Emily and Mrs. Browning. But when he has been permitted to do all this and a great deal more, why should he fall into a passion, and use the strongest of strong language, because there are details in which everybody does not chance to agree with him? In so wide a world there must of necessity be many minds, and the opinions of a poet are not always beacon fires to light us through the gloom. Even the musician has been for some time prepared to step into the critical arena, and Mr. E. S. Dallos, in “The Gay Science,” quotes for us a characteristic extract from Wagner, which probably means something, though only a very subtle intellect could venture to say what.

“If we now consider the activity of the poet more closely, we perceive that the realization of his intention consists solely in rendering possible the representation of the strengthened actions of his poetized forms through an exposition of their motives to the feelings, as well as the motives themselves. Also by an expression that in so far engrosses his activity, as the invention and production of this expression in truth first render the introduction of such motives and actions possible.”

After this splendid example of style and lucidity, it may be that even the ordinary, every-day, unostentatious reviewer whom we so liberally despise will be admitted to possess some few redeeming virtues.

And, in truth, patience is one of them. Think of the dull books which lie piled upon his table! Think how many they are, and how long they are, and how alike they are, and how serious they are, and how little we ourselves would care to read them! If the reviewer sometimes misses what is really good, or praises what is really bad, this does not mean that he is incompetent, dishonest, or butcherly. It means that he is human, that he is tired, perhaps a little peevish, and disposed to think the world would be a merrier place if there were fewer authors in it. The new novelist or budding poet who comes forward at this unpropitious moment is not hailed with acclamations of delight; while the conscientious worker who has spent long months in compiling the weighty memoirs of departed mediocrity is outraged by the scant attention he receives. Meanwhile the number of books increases with fearful speed. Each is the embodiment of a sanguine hope, and each claims its meed of praise. A fallible reviewer struggles with the situation as best he can, saying pleasant things which are scantily merited, and sharp things which are hardly deserved; but striving intelligently, and with tolerable success to tell a self-indulgent public something about the volumes which it is too lazy to read for itself.

“O dreams of the tongues that commend us, Of crowns for the laureate pate, Of a public to buy and befriend us, Ye come through the Ivory Gate. But the critics that slash us and slate, But the people that hold us in scorn, But the sorrow, the scathe, and the hate, Through the portals of horn.”

PASTELS: A QUERY.

I should like to be told by one of the accomplished critics of the day what is--or rather what is not--a pastel? Dictionaries, with their wonted rigidity, define the word as “a colored crayon,” ignoring its literary significance, and affording us no clue to its elusive and mutable characteristics. When Mr. Stewart Merrill christened his pretty little volume of translations “Pastels in Prose,” he gave us to understand, with the assistance of Mr. Howells’ prefatory remarks, that the name was an apt one for those brief bits of unrhymed, unrhythmical, yet highly poetic composition in the execution of which the French have shown such singular felicity and grace. Some of these delicate trifles have the concentrated completeness of a picture, and for them the name is surely not ill-chosen. Sombre, or joyous, or faintly ironical, they bring before our eyes with vivid distinctness every outline of the scene they portray. “Padre Pugnaccio” and “Henriquez,” by Louis Bertrand, and that strange lovely “Captive,” by Ephraïm Mikhaël, are as admirable in their limitations as in their finish. They show us one thing only, and show it with swift yet comprehensive lucidity. But if “Padre Pugnaccio” be a pastel, then, by that same token, “Solitude” is not. It is a moderately long and wholly allegorical story, and its merits are of a different order. As for Maurice de Guérin’s “Centaur,” that noble fragment has nothing in common with the fragile delicacy of the pretty little picture poems which surround it. It is a masterpiece of breadth and virility. Its sonorous sentences recall the keener life of the antique world, and it stands among its unsubstantial companions like a bust of Hermes in a group of Dresden figures, all charming, but all dwarfed to insignificance by the side of that strong young splendor. To call “The Centaur” a pastel is as absurd as to call “Endymion” an etching.

However, Mr. Merrill’s translations are far from defining the limits of the term. On the contrary, we have M. Paul Bourget’s group of stories, “Pastels of Men,” which are not prose poems at all, nor brief pen pictures; but tales of a rather elaborate and unclean order, full of wan sentiment, and that cheerless vice which robs the soul without gratifying the body. Occasionally, as in the sketch of the poor old teacher living his meagre life from hour to hour, M. Bourget draws for us, with melancholy skill, a single scene from the painful drama of existence. This is perhaps a pastel, since the word must be employed; but why should an interminable and shifting tale about a rich young widow, who cannot make up her mind in less than a hundred pages which of her four lovers she will marry, be called by the same generic title? If it be equally applicable to every kind of story, short or long, simple or involved, descriptive or analytic, then it has no real meaning at all, and becomes a mere matter of capricious selection. “Wandering Willie’s Tale,” and “The Cricket on the Hearth” could with propriety have been termed pastels.

Nor does the matter stop here. In Mr. Gosse’s recent volume of essays, he has included two admirable criticisms on Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson’s poetry, and on Mr. Rudyard Kipling’s prose. These papers, discriminating, sympathetic, and exhaustive, are called pastels. They do not differ in any way from other critical studies of equal length and merit. They abound in agreeable quotations, and show a clear and genial appreciation of their themes. They are simply reviews of an unusually good order, and if their title be correctly applied, then it is serviceable for any piece of literary criticism which deals with a single author. Macaulay’s “Madame D’Arblay,” Mr. Birrell’s “Emerson,” Mr. Saintsbury’s “Peacock,” might all have been named pastels.

By this time the subject begins to grow perplexing. Miss Wilkins wanders far from her true gods, and from the sources of her genuine inspiration, to write a handful of labored sketches--pen pictures perhaps, albeit a trifle stiff in execution--which she calls pastels. Mr. Brander Matthews gives us, as his contribution to the puzzle, a vivid description of Carmencita dancing in a New York studio, and calls it a pastel. If we stray from prose to verse, we are tripped up at every step. Nebulous little couplets, songs of saddening subtlety, weird conceits and high-pacing rhymes are thoughtfully labeled pastels, so as to give us a clue to their otherwise impenetrable obscurity. Sullen seas, and wan twilights, and dim garden paths, relieved with ghostly lilies, and white-armed women of dubious decorum, are the chief ingredients of these poetic novelties; but here is one, picked up by chance, which reads like a genial conundrum:--

“The light of our cigarettes Went and came in the gloom; It was dark in the little room.

Dark, and then in the dark, Sudden, a flash, a glow, And a hand and a ring I know.

And then, through the dark, a flush, Ruddy and vague, the grace-- A rose--of her lyric face.”

Now, if that be a pastel, and Mr. Gosse’s reviews are pastels, and M. Bourget’s stories are pastels, and Maurice de Guérin’s “Centaur” is a pastel, and Mr. Brander Matthews’ realistic sketches are pastels, and Ephraïm Mikhaël’s allegories are pastels, I should like to be told, by some one who knows, just where the limits of the term is set.

GUESTS.

A very charming and vivacious old lady, who had spent most of her early life in the country, once said to me that the keenest pleasure of her childhood was the occasional arrival of her mother’s guests; the keenest regret, their inevitable and too speedy departure. “They seldom stayed more than a fortnight,” she observed, plaintively; “though now and then some cousins prolonged their visits for another week. What I most enjoyed on these occasions was the increased good temper of my own family. Annoyances were laughed at, our noisy behavior was overlooked, conversation took an agreeable turn, and a delightful air of cheerfulness and good humor pervaded the entire household. It seemed to my infant eyes that life would be a matter of flawless enjoyment if we could only have visitors always in the house.”

A little of this frankly expressed sentiment will find an echo in many hearts, and perhaps awaken some pangs of conscience on the way. It is the restraint we put upon ourselves, the honest effort we make at amiability, which renders social intercourse possible and pleasant. When the restraint grows irksome, the amiability a burden, we pay to those we love best on earth the dubious compliment of being perfectly natural in their company. “What is the use of having a family if you cannot be disagreeable in the bosom of it?” was the explicit acknowledgment I once overheard of a service which seldom meets with such clear and candid recognition. Hazlitt himself could have given no plainer expression to a thought which few of us would care to trick out in all the undisguised sincerity of language.

Guests are the delight of leisure, and the solace of ennui. It is the steady and merciless increase of occupations, the augmented speed at which we are always trying to live, the crowding of each day with more work and amusement than it can profitably hold, which have cost us, among other good things, the undisturbed enjoyment of our friends. Friendship takes time, and we have no time to give it. We have to go to so many teas, and lectures, and committee meetings; we have taken up so many interesting and exacting careers; we have assumed so many duties and responsibilities, that there is not a spare corner in our lives which we are free to fill up as we please. Society, philanthropy, and culture divide our waking hours. Defrauded friendship gets a few moments now and again, and is bidden to content itself, and please not to be troublesome any more. I once rashly asked a girl of twenty if she saw a great deal of a young married woman whom she had just declared to be her dearest and most cherished friend. “I never see her at all,” was the satisfied answer, “except by chance, at a tea or a club meeting. We live so very far apart, as you know. _It would take the heart of an afternoon to try and make her a visit._”

Now, to understand the charm of leisurely and sympathetic intercourse, we should read the letters of Madame de Sévigné; to appreciate the resources of ennui, we should read the novels of Jane Austen. With Madame de Sévigné guests were not useful as an alleviation of boredom; they were valuable because they added to the interest, the beauty and the zest of life. It never occurred to this charming Frenchwoman, nor to her contemporaries, that time could be better spent than in entertaining or being entertained by friends. Conversation was not then small coin, to be paid our hastily like car-fare, merely in order to get from one necessary topic to another. It was the golden mean through which a generous regard, a graceful courtesy, or a sparkling wit lent beauty and distinction to every hour of intercourse. A little group of friends in a quiet countryside, with none of the robust diversions of English rural life. It has a sleepy sound; yet such was the pleasure-giving power of hostess and of guest that this leisurely companionship was fraught with fine delight, and its fruits are our inheritance to-day, lingering for us in the pages of those matchless letters from which time can never steal the charm.

It is Miss Austen, however, who, with relentless candor, has shown us how usefully guests may be employed as an antidote for the ennui of intellectual vacuity. They are the chosen relief for that direful dullness which country gentlemen “like Sir John Middleton,” experience from lack of occupation and ideas; they are the solace of sickly, uninteresting women who desire some one to share with them the monotonous current of existence. The Middletons, we are assured, “lived in a style of equal hospitality and elegance. They were scarcely ever without some friends staying with them in the house, and they kept more company of every kind than any other family in the neighborhood.” This indulgence, it appears, while equally welcome to host and hostess, was more necessary to Sir John’s happiness than to his wife’s; for she at least possessed one other source of continual and unflagging diversion. “Sir John was a sportsman, Lady Middleton a mother. He hunted and shot, and she humored her children; and these were their only resources. Lady Middleton, however, had the advantage of being able to spoil her children all the year round, while Sir John’s independent employments were in existence only half the time.”

Guests play an important part in Miss Austen’s novels, as they did in Miss Austen’s life, and in the lives of all the hospitable country-people of her time. Moreover, the visits her heroines and their friends pay are not little trifling modern affairs of a few days or a week. Distances counted for something when they had to be traveled in a carriage or a post-chaise; and when people came to see their friends in that fashion, they came to stay. Elizabeth Bennet and Maria Lucas spend six weeks with Charlotte Collins; and Lady Catherine, it will be remembered, does not at all approve of their returning home so quickly. “I expected you to stay two months,” she says severely--they are not her guests at all--“I told Mrs. Collins so, before you came. There can be no occasion for your going so soon.” Eleanor and Marianne Dashwood begin their visit to Mrs. Jennings the first week of January, and it is April before we find them setting forth on their return. Anne Elliot goes to Uppercross for two months, though the only inducement offered her is Mary Musgrove’s prophetic remark that she does not expect to have a day’s health all autumn; and her only pastime as a visitor appears to be the somewhat dubious diversion of making herself generally useful. It is a far cry from our busy age to either Miss Austen or Madame de Sévigné. The bounteous resources of a highly cultivated leisure have never been very clearly understood by the English-speaking race. The alleviations of inactivity and ennui are no longer with us a rigorous necessity. Our vices and our virtues conspire to defraud us of that charming and sustained social intercourse which is possible only when we have the undisturbed possession of our friends; when we are so happy as to be sheltered under the same roof, to pursue the same occupations, to enjoy the same pleasures, to exchange thoughts and sentiments with entire freedom and familiarity. “I cannot afford to speak much to my friend,” says Emerson, meaning that it is a privilege he neither values nor desires. We cannot afford to speak much to our friends, though we may desire it with our whole hearts, because we have been foolish enough to persuade ourselves that we have other and better things to do.

SYMPATHY.

“Sympathy,” says Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, “is a thing to be encouraged, apart from human considerations, because it supplies us with materials for wisdom. It is probably more instructive to entertain a sneaking kindness for any unpopular person than to give way to perfect raptures of moral indignation against his abstract vices.”

These are brave words, and spoken in one of those swift flashes of spiritual insight which at first bewilder and then console us. We have our share of sympathy; hearty, healthy, human sympathy for all that is strong and successful; but the force of moral indignation--either our own or our neighbors’--has well-nigh cowed us into silence. The fashion of the day provides a procrustean standard for every form of distinction; and, if it does not fit, it is lopped down to the necessary insignificance. Those stern, efficient, one-sided men of action who made history at the expense of their finer natures; those fiery enthusiasts who bore down all just opposition to their designs; those loyal servants who saw no right nor wrong save in the will of their sovereigns; those keen-eyed statesmen who served their countries with craft, and guile, and dissimulation; those light-hearted prodigals who flung away their lives with a smile;--are none of these to yield us either edification or delight? “Do great deeds, and they will sing themselves,” says Emerson; but it must be confessed the songs are often of a very dismal and enervating character. Columbus did a great deed when he crossed the ocean and discovered the fair, unknown land of promise; yet many of the songs in which we sing his fame sound a good deal like pæans of reproach. The prevailing sentiment appears to be that a person so manifestly ignorant and improper should never have been permitted to discover America at all.

This sickly tone is mirrored in much of the depressing literature of our day. It finds amplest expression in such joyless books as “The Heavenly Twins,” the heroine of which remarks with commendable self-confidence that “The trade of governing is a coarse pursuit;” and also that “War is the dirty work of a nation; one of the indecencies of life.” She cannot even endure to hear it alluded to when she is near; but, like Athene, whose father, Zeus, “by chance spake of love matters in her presence,” she flies chastely from the very sound of such ill-doing. Now on first reading this sensitive criticism, one is tempted to a great shout of laughter, quite as coarse, I fear, as the pursuit of governing, and almost as indecent as war. Ah! founders of empires, and masters of men, where are your laurels now? “If some people in public life were acquainted with Mrs. Wititterly’s real opinion of them,” says Mr. Wititterly to Kate Nickleby, “they would not hold their heads perhaps quite as high as they do.” But in moments of soberness such distorted points of view seem rather more melancholy than diverting. Evadne is, after all, but the feeble reflex of an over-anxious age which has lost itself in a labyrinth of responsibilities. Shelley, whose rigidity of mind was at times almost inconceivable, did not hesitate to deny every attribute of greatness wherever he felt no sympathy. To him, Constantine was a “Christian reptile,” a “stupid and wicked monster;” while of Napoleon he writes with the invincible gravity of youth. “Buonaparte’s talents appear to me altogether contemptible and commonplace; incapable as he is of comparing connectedly the most obvious propositions, or relishing any pleasure truly enrapturing.”

To the mundane and unpoetic mind it would seem that there were several propositions, obvious or otherwise, which Napoleon was capable of comparing quite connectedly, and that his ruthless, luminous fashion of dealing with such made him more terrible than fate. As for pleasures, he knew how to read and relish “Clarissa Harlowe,” for which evidence of sound literary taste, one Englishman at least, Hazlitt, honored and loved him greatly. If we are seeking an embodiment of unrelieved excellence who will work up well into moral anecdotes and journalistic platitudes, the emperor is plainly not what we require. But when we have great men under consideration, let us at least think of their greatness. Let us permit our little hearts to expand, and our little eyes to sweep a broad horizon. There is nothing in the world I dislike so much as to be reminded of Napoleon’s rudeness to Madame de Staël, or of Cæsar’s vain attempt to hide his baldness. Cæsar was human; that is his charm; and Madame de Staël would have sorely strained the courtesy of good King Arthur. Had she attached herself unflinchingly to his court, it is probable he would have ended by requesting her to go elsewhere.

On the other hand, it is never worth while to assert that genius repeals the decalogue. We cannot believe with M. Waliszewski that because Catherine of Russia was a great ruler she was, even in the smallest degree, privileged to be an immoral woman, to give “free course to her senses imperially.” The same commandment binds with equal rigor both empress and costermonger. But it is the greatness of Catherine, and not her immorality, which concerns us deeply. It is the greatness of Marlborough, of Richelieu, and of Sir Robert Walpole which we do well to consider, and not their shortcomings, though from the tone assumed too often by critics and historians, one would imagine that duplicity, ambition and cynicism were the only attributes these men possessed; that they stood for their vices alone. One would imagine also that the same sins were quite unfamiliar in humble life, and had never been practised on a petty scale by lawyers and journalists and bank clerks. Yet vice, as Sir Thomas Browne reminds us, may be had at all prices. “Expensive and costly iniquities which make the noise cannot be every man’s sins; but the soul may be foully inquinated at a very low rate, and a man may be cheaply vicious to his own perdition.”