Part 11

Well, well! And what of Browning? Why, Browning is dead. Moreover, he is buried in damp, dirty, evil-smelling Westminster Abbey. What more would you have for him? Fame? Let be, let be; he had Notoriety. That must suffice, and that being done, why, all is done, and there is no more to be said. Notoriety is not Fame. Fame is not Notoriety. No man can have both, though he may cheat himself into taking the lesser for the greater, and die happy in the pleasing delusion. Even so Browning died; even so was he honourably interred. May he rest in peace. Amen.

XV.

OF MORE POETS.

Are there no other poets in the crowd save Tennyson and Swinburne? God bless my soul, you don't suppose I am going to offend a whole mob of verse-writers--no other poets? Of course there are others! no end of others. Poets over-run our land even as the locusts over-ran Egypt, and they are all "as good, and a darned sight better," as the Yankees say, than either the Laureate or Algernon Charles, in their own opinion. Mark that last clause, please; it is important. The number of "poets" so styled by themselves is legion; only I, who am a rudely-opiniated and fastidious masquer, decline to recognise their clamorous claims to the deathless laurel. But this does not matter. Who cares what I either decline or accept? My opinions are "nothing to nobody." I only express them for my own satisfaction and amusement; I have no other good to gain thereby. As for the chance of offending the "poets" alluded to, I certainly care not a jot. I have no desire to please them in any way, as I consider most of them an offence and an obstruction in literature. Some people run away with the notion that Edwin Arnold (I give him the full glory of his "Sir" and C.S.I. elsewhere) is a poet. Certainly his books sell. The "Light of Asia," with all its best bits taken out of the original "Mahabhârata," is a perfect triumph of verse-making. All the religious ladies read it because it is so very unexciting and heavenly and harmless, and because, like all pious poetry, it preaches virtue that no one ever dreams of practising. It is a capital book for school prizes, too; it will not hurt any boy or girl to read it, and it may providentially check them in time from trying to write verse themselves. As for the "Light of the World," it will probably meet with the same success among the same class of readers, though it is much inferior to the "Light of Asia," owing to having no "Mahabhârata" in it. But Lewis Morris is quite as great a favourite with the "goodys" of society as Sir Edwin. The "goodys" don't know, and don't want to know, anything about Dante's "Inferno," and are therefore quite satisfied to accept "The Epic of Hades" as _bonâ fide_ "original" matter,--and there are some "sweetly pretty" lines in "A Vision of Saints." Both productions are well adapted for gift-books, and will suit the taste of the demure provincial "misses" who wish to be discovered reading poetry under a shady tree what time the bachelor curate of the parish passeth by. All the same, I, who am a Nobody, decline to consider either Morris or Arnold poets. They are excellent verse-compilers though, and suit the tastes of those who do not care about either originality or inspiration.

I am nothing if not eccentric, and so I am disposed to place one Alfred C. Calmour among the poets. He has published no poems--he has only produced "poetical" plays, failures all, save "The Amber Heart," and he has been generally "sent to the right about" by persons with infinitely less brain than himself. It is curious to observe what spite and meanness waken in the manly breasts of certain of his fellows at the mere mention of his name. I spoke in praise of "The Amber Heart" on one occasion to a critical brother, and he at once said--"All filched out of Wills's waste-paper basket; he was Wills's secretary." "What of 'Cyrene'?" I asked. "Oh, I don't know anything about 'Cyrene'; but if there's anything good in it, depend upon it, it is stolen from Wills." I relapsed into silence, for I never thought and never shall think anything of Wills, whereas I do think something of Calmour. He is writing a drama, I hear, on "Dante and Beatrice," and I confess to anticipating it with intense interest. I want him to do as my dear friend Oscar Wilde has done--pulverise his enemies by a big success. And why? Because I hate to see a hard-working man "sat upon." And Calmour does work hard, lives hard too, and never complains or "girds" at fate, wherefore I venture to prophecy fame for him one of these days. I have been assured he is conceited. I have never found him so. Suppose he were, is conceit a singular fault in authors? Are we to believe that they are more boastfully disposed than actors, for instance?

"What do you think of Calmour?" I asked E. S. Willard on one occasion, when, in all the grave consciousness of "looking" _Judah_ to the life, he stood beside me sipping convivial tea in Wilson Barrett's drawing-room.

"Think of Calmour?" he replied, with an inimitable air of self-sufficiency. "I never think of Calmour!"

Magnificent wind-bag assertiveness! but hopelessly unreasonable. Calmour is more worth thinking about than Willard, only Willard doesn't see it. The creator of a part merits greater consideration than the mime who performs it. I confess to being a lover of fair play, and when a lot of people try to "hustle" a man, I am disposed to fight for him. Anyway, Calmour has a clean and delicate pen, and does not pander to vulgar vice like that wretched old Scandinavian humbug, Ibsen. Why we should abuse Calmour and praise Ibsen passes my comprehension. Except that "foreign" scribblers are all "geniuses" with us at once--they must be, you know, simply because they _are_ foreign; they have a "subtlety," a "flavour," an "ardour," a "naturalism," and--a Nastiness which is not the legitimate inheritance of the English School. Had any one of our own men dared to offer us a "Hedda Gabler," or a "Rosmersholm," or Maeterlinck's piece of bathos, "L'Intruse," he would have been shrieked and howled down with derisive laughter.

I often wonder what on earth the faddists of the poor old doddering, doting _Athenæum_ mean by poking and prodding about for sparks of genius in their new "heavy man," William Watson? It is very funny to call him a poet--very funny, indeed. He is a sort of fifth-rate Wordsworth--and while we can just stand the sonnets and shorter poems of Wordsworth at first-hand, a diluted example of his pattern in these days is too much for our patience. I know a good many people--in fact, I meet in social intercourse nearly everybody worth knowing--but as yet I have come upon nobody who reads Watson's poems, or who appear to know anything about Watson. Curious, isn't it? The _Athenæum_ seems to carry no conviction whatever to the Ass-public.

Messrs. Trübner sent to me some time ago a book of poems, which first surprised and then fascinated me into the belief that I had discovered an English Petrarch. I think I have, too. If absolute music, perfect rhythm, and exquisite wording of love-thoughts are Petrarchian, then my man is a Petrarch. His book is called "A Lover's Litanies," and the "litanies" are the poems. There are ten of them, and each one has a title borrowed from the old church missal--rather a quaint idea. It would be difficult to match the one called "Vox Amoris" among all the love-poems of the world. Does the dear old purblind _Athenæum_ know anything about this real poet, who has perhaps not been "discovered" by Mr. Grant Allen or Andrew Lang? Cheer up, old _Athenæum_, put on thy spectacles, and look about for the author of these "Litanies," lest the outer world should say thou art napping! People are reading "A Lover's Litanies"--those people who do not know anything about William Watson.

Robert Louis Stevenson started as a "poet," I believe. Now he has become the "Thucydides of literature"--_vide Pall Mall Gazette_. Such nice, pretty classical names the _Pall Mall_ discovers for its particular darlings. Has the _Pall Mall_ read Thucydides? I rather doubt it. I have, and find no resemblance to Mr. Stevenson. And, truth to tell, I preferred Mr. Stevenson's past poetry to his present prose. Yet why should I murmur, remembering the sweet, sound slumber into which I fell over "The Wrecker"--that trying mixture of Marryat and Clark Russell. I think it is a capital story for schoolboys though, and that is why the _Pall Mall_ admires it. I am not a schoolboy; the _Pall Mall_ is; a dear, bright, gamesome, peg-top-and-marble creature, who thinks the greatest joke in life is to break a neighbour's window or ring a neighbour's bell, and then run away laughing. Its animal spirits are too delightfully boisterous for it to appreciate any sort of deep sentiment; a story of strong human passions, or a romance in which love has the most prevailing share, would not appeal to its unlessoned fancy. And, very naturally, it appreciates Stevenson, because he gives it no hard, uncomfortable life-problems to think about.

Another "poet" who calls himself so is Hall Caine. He says the "Scapegoat" is not so much a novel as a drama, and not so much a drama as a "poem." Very good indeed! Excellent fooling, upon my life. Hall Caine can be very funny if he likes, though you wouldn't think it to look at him. When he called his story of the "Bondman" a "New Saga," it was only his fun. His wit is quite irrepressible. Among other humorous things, he has had his portrait taken in a loose shirt and knickers, seated facing the bust of Shakespeare, like a day-labourer fronting the Sphynx. It is altogether refreshing to find a Lilliputian literary ephemera so entirely delighted with himself as Hall Caine. He is much more convinced of the intrinsic value of his own genius than Oscar Wilde, with less reason than Oscar for his conviction. Oscar is a really clever man; Hall Caine tries to be clever and does not succeed. Oscar is a born wit, moreover, and though he does crib a few _bon-mots_ from Molière and a few paradoxes from Rochefoucauld, what does it matter for the English who do not understand French, and have to get "books of the words" in order to "follow" Sarah Bernhardt. Besides, Hall Caine borrows from the French also; the plot of his "Scapegoat" is taken from the French, so one of my critical friends assures me, and critics are always right. Francis Adams (also a "poet") "went" for Hall Caine not long ago in the _Fortnightly_--a regular good knock-down thrust it was, too. But Adams's prowess is of no avail in these things. The more you abuse a fellow, the more his books sell. The best way to utterly damn an author is to say that his novels are "nicely written," "prettily told," "harmless fiction," or "innocuous literature." If these phrases do not finish him off, nothing will. An original, powerful, passionate writer is always "slated," and always "sells." Witness the career of one Emile Zola. With all his faults, the man is a great poet; realism and romance unite in strange colours on his literary palette, and with his forceful brush he paints life in all its varied aspects fearlessly and without any regard for outside opinions. His one blemish is the blemish of the whole French nation--moral Nastiness. But if we talk of "poets" who, though making their bread-and-butter out of the writing of prose, still insist on belonging to the gods of Parnassus, none of the stringers of rhyme and jinglers of ballads, and weavers of "sagas" and the like, that afflict this enlightened and imaginative nation, could write such a true poem from end to end as "Le Rêve." Such consummate art, such unravelling of exquisite romance out of commonplace material, is not to be discovered in the English literary brain. The English literary brain is dull, lumpish, and heavy--the English literary worker is dominated by one idea, and that is, how much hard cash shall he get for his work? And thus it is that poets, real poets, are rarer than swallows in snow; so that is why I am slightly exercised in my mind respecting the Petrarch sort of minstrel I spoke of a while ago. He is unquestionably a poet, and seems to get on without any "booming." This strikes me as very odd. However, most of the "best" men go unboomed. No occasion to puff a good article. As for the pretended poets, countless as the sands of the sea, there is a great consolation in the reflection that in a few more years they will all be as though they never had been. Good old Posterity will know nothing about them, and herein Posterity is to be heartily congratulated. Poetical gnats must live like other gnats, I suppose--they are rather troublesome, and make a buzzing noise in one's ears, but as their whole existence lasts no more than a day, we must have patience till the sun sets.

XVI.

TO A MIGHTY GENIUS.

"O Rudyard Kipling! Phœbus! What a name, To fill the speaking trump of future Fame!"

This, with apologies to the shade of the "loose ungrammatical" Byron, as the perfectly grammatical Gosse calls him. Dear Gosse! He has cause to be somewhat irritated with his own career as a poet, for he has not yet "set the Thames on fire," as he expected to do with the torch of his inspiration. Hence he was compelled to vent his pent-up spleen somehow, and what better dead giant to fall upon and beat with pigmy blows of pigmy personal vexation than Byron, whose Apollo-like renown (with scarce an effort on his own part) sent thunders through Europe. Oh, grammatical Gosse!--but never mind him just now; I must concentrate my soul on Kip; on Rudyard; on the glory of this literary age. Let me look at you, you blessed baby! treasure of its own Grandmother Journalism's heart! There you are, crowing and chuckling, small but "virile," every inch of you, though you are not overstocked with hair on the top of that high head of yours, and it is hard to begin life by viewing it through spectacles. But _as_ you are, there you are! and my pulses leap at the sight of you. Fielding, Sterne, Thackeray, Dickens, all these parted spirits have, as it were, distilled themselves into a fiery fluid wherewith to animate your miniature form; was ever such a thrilling wonder? Hear we good Uncle _Blackwood_, the while he dances you upon his gouty knee:--"If her Majesty's Ministers will be guided by us (which perhaps is not extremely probable; yet we confess we should like the command of a Minister's ear for several shrewd suggestions) they will bestow a Star of India without more ado upon this young man of genius who has shown us all what the Indian Empire means."

No doubt, good 'nuncle! no doubt the Ministry will listen to thy "shrewd suggestions" what time the moon is made of ripe green cheese. Go on, old man, go on, in thy cracked and aged pipe, growing wheezy with emotion. "The battle in the 'Main Guard' is like Homer or Sir Walter.... If her Majesty herself, who knows so much, desires a fuller knowledge of her Indian Empire, we desire respectfully to recommend to the Secretary for India that he should place no sheaves of despatches in the royal hands, but Mr. Rudyard Kipling's books.... What Mr. Rudyard Kipling has done is an imperial work, and worthy of an imperial reward!"

Bravo, worthy 'nuncle! Homer begged his bread, but the pen-and-ink sketcher of "Mrs. Hauksbee" shall have rewards imperial! To it again, garrulous 'nuncle--to it and cease not! "Here, by the dignified hand of Maga the ever young, we bid the young genius All hail! and more power to his elbow, to relapse into vernacular speech, which is always more convincing than the high-flown." Should it not have been written "to relapse into bathos," good 'nuncle? And beware of declaring thyself to be "ever young," for nothing lives that shall not grow old, and the younger generation already profanely dub thee "antiquated." Wipe thine eyes, Uncle _Blackwood_, polish thy spectacles, and set down our precious baby for an instant the while his other nurses, godfathers and godmothers, look at him, and speculate upon his probable growth.

Let us listen to the hysterical _D. T._ the while it raveth in strophes of gin-and-water:--"Mr. Rudyard Kipling is, and seems likely to remain, a literary enigma. Who can deny his strength, his virility, his dramatic sense, his imaginative wealth, his masterful genius? He is like a young and sportive Titan, piling Pelion on Ossa in his reckless ambition to scale Olympus; he is always renewing his strength like an eagle, and rejoicing like a giant to run his course. Nothing comes amiss to him; he will produce out of his boundless stores things new and old--tragedies, comedies, farces, epics, ballads, or lyrical odes. His earliest Anglo-Indian stories revealed a new world to the astonished West; his "Soldiers Three" have attained almost the reputation of the "Three Musketeers"; his Learoyd, his Ortheris, his Mulvaney, his Mrs. Hauksbee, his Torpenhow are household words; while his barrack-room ditties, and his ballads of East and West have not only startled by their daring frankness, but conquered all criticism by their picturesqueness and truth."

All this, an' so please you, on two or three volumes of small magazine stories and rhymed doggerel! That "Soldiers Three" should have attained the reputation of the "Three Musketeers" is of course only the delirious frenzy of the _D. T._ asserting itself in gasping shrieks of illiterate mindlessness--Europe knows better than to place the intellect of a smart newspaper man like Kipling on the same level with that of Dumas. Kipling is the Jumbo of the _D. T._ for the present, and journalists would not be what they are if they could not get up a "boom" somehow. Now hark we to the fond maudlin murmur of an evening journal!

"Where did Kipling get his ideas about Art from?" This is indeed a pathetic question. It crops up in a paragraph-ecstasy over "The Light that Failed." It is as if one should ask, "Where did Shakespeare get his knowledge of the human soul from?" Where, oh where? We cannot, we will not believe he has any imagination, this dear Kipling of ours, because imagination is a thing we abhor. The triumphal and eternal books of the world have all been purely imaginative, but this does not matter to us. We, in this modern day, refuse to accept the idea that anybody can describe a thing they have not seen and felt and turned over and over under a microscope; we are so exact. And oh, where then did Shakespeare (to revert to him again, because his is the only name we can conscientiously compare with Kipling), where did Shakespeare find Ariel and Caliban, and Puck and Titania, and Julius Cæsar, and Antony and Cleopatra? He could not have seen these people? No. Then, alas! he had that fatal gift, that monstrous blemish of the brain which spoils true genius, Imagination--the grossest form of cerebral disease. In this he was inferior to our Rudyard, our hop-skip-and-a-jump Rudyard, who is actually going bald in his youth from the strain of his minute observation of life, and the profundity of his meditations thereon. Our "delectable one!" Our precious Kip! Who would not join in the chorus of the paragraph-men when they propound the fond, almost maternally-admiring query, "Where did he get his ideas about Art from?" And then, when we find out that he has "artistic" relations; that his papa is, or has been, painting a ceiling or a wall in Windsor Castle, we naturally feel almost beside ourselves with delight, because we find our baby's ideas are the result of heritage, and have nothing to do with that curse of literature, Imagination. As for me, I weep whenever I turn the sacred leaves of "Plain Tales from the Hills," because I know I have in its pages all that ever was or will be excellent in the way of fiction. There is nothing more to be said--nothing more to come after. It is a sad thought that fiction should have culminated here--it is always sad to think that anything should have an end--but when the end is so glorious, who shall complain? And so I have sold my set of Waverley novels (the real Abbotsford edition); I have put my Shakespeare on an almost unreachable top shelf (I only keep him for reference); I have sent my Dickens volumes to a hospital, and my Thackeray to a "home for incurables." I shall not want these things any more. The only natural reflex of life as it is lived nowadays is to be found in the works of Rudyard; on Rudyard I mentally feed and thrive. To Kip I cling as the drowning sailor to a rope; all difficulties and perplexities in Art, Literature, Science, Politics, Manners and Morals vanish at the touch of his mighty pen--he is the one, the only Kip;--the crowning splendour of our time. Why should we make any parliamentary pother over the preservation of old buildings at Stratford-on-Avon? What do we want with Stratford-on-Avon? since our Kip was born in India, or we believe he was. Now, India is something like a place for a Genius to be born in--big, vast, legendary, historical--and yet the American Interviewer, conscious of Kipling's might, thinks it possible he may have already exhausted its capabilities for literary treatment; swallowed it off at one gulp as it were, like the precious pearl Hafiz consumed in his cup of wine.

"Do you consider Mr. Kipling has exhausted India?" anxiously inquired the American Interviewer of Rider Haggard, when the weary author of "She" landed in New York.

"India is a big place," was the simple answer, given with a patient gentleness for which Haggard deserves great credit, seeing how he has lately been despitefully used and persecuted by the very reviewers who once flattered him.

Yes, India _is_ a big place; not too big for our Kip though. He requires to take life in Gargantuan gulps in order to support the giant forces of his mind. But Stratford-on-Avon! A mere English country town--hardly more than a village--what do we care about it now? Shakespeare, after all, was perhaps only Bacon--but Kip is Kip--there's no doubt about him--he is his own noble _bonâ-fide_ self, whose bootlaces we are not worthy to untie. There is "stern strength," there is "virility," there is a "strong strain of humour," there is "masculine vigour" in everything he writes. Mark the following passage from "Watches of the Night":--

"Platte, the subaltern, being poor, had a Waterbury watch and a plain leather guard.

"The Colonel had a Waterbury watch also, and for guard the lip-strap of a curb chain."

Now, note that carefully--"_The lip-strap of a curb chain._"

What a luscious flowing sound there is in those few exquisitively chosen words! "_The lip-strap of a curb chain!_" It is positively fascinating. One could dream of it all day and all night too, for that matter, like Mark Twain's famous refrain of "Punch in the presence of the passenjare." But going on from this delicious line, which is almost poetry, one finds instant practical information.

"Lip-straps make the best watch-guards. They are strong and short. Between a lip-strap and an ordinary leather guard there is no great difference; between one Waterbury watch and another, none at all."

Now, there we have the "strain of humour." No difference between one Waterbury watch and another, "none at all." Ha, ha, ha! No difference between one--ha, ha, ha!--Waterbury, ha, ha!--watch--ha, ha, ha!--and another--ha, ha, ha!--none at all. Ha, ha! That "none at all" is so exquisitely facetious! It comes in so well! Was ever such a delightful little bit of sly, dry, brilliant, sparkling Wit, with a big W, as this peculiar manner of our Kip! Turning over the leaves of this glorious, this immortal "Plain Tales," you cannot help coming upon humour, spontaneous, rollicking humour everywhere. It bristles out of each particular page "like quills upon the fretful porcupine." Take this, for example--

"One of the Three men had a cut on his nose, caused by the kick of a gun. _Twelve-bores kick rather curiously._"