Part 13

I come now to another point in our careers as critics, and not such a very pleasant point either. We are the victims of toadyism. The little men of the Press, the dwarfs of journalism, toady us to the verge of distraction, as soon as we attain to Half-a-Guinea-a-Column power. Of course we are really somebodies then, and we have to pay the penalty of greatness. Still it is a bore. We are told all sorts of things that we know are not true, concerning our "fine literary abilities," our "keen discrimination," and our "quiet humour," but we are perfectly aware all the time that such "flattering unction" is merely the distilled essence of the most strongly concentrated humbug. No sane man, unless he has some private end in view which he hopes to gain by blandishment, would dream of giving us credit for "fine literary abilities," because if we had such abilities we should be doing something more paying than criticism. But our pigmy flatterers think we can swallow anything. Here is a small specimen of what I call Press-toadyism, which was bestowed on my dearest Andrew in _Galignani's Messenger_ by somebody calling himself a _London Correspondent_. It purported to be a "review" of that amazingly dreary production, "The World's Desire," which, whatever its faults, had at least the effect of showing the joint authors thereof exactly what position they occupied as compared to Homer. Otherwise they might possibly have made some mistake about precedence. And thus ran the glib remarks of the _London Correspondent_:--

"That some parts are well written (Mr. Lang's) and some badly written (Mr. Haggard's), and that fights are many and blood is plentiful, and that there are many bits of delightful verse (Mr. Lang's, of course), and a cackling old person (the invention of Mr. Haggard evidently);" but there! I need not go on. The inquisitive individual who yearns to read the whole so-called "critique" can refer back to _Galignani_ of December 8, 1890. The gratuitous and unnecessary insolence to Mr. Haggard, and the equally unnecessary and gratuitous licking-of-the-boots of Mr. Lang must have been decidedly offensive to both authors. This _London Correspondent_ may be a man, but he certainly is not a brother.

_Apropos_ of the subject of Press-toadyism, _in re_ my friend Andrew, I must not forget here to chronicle my boundless admiration for that elaborate and beautiful witticism once contained in the _Saturday Review_. Criticising Andrew's "Essays in Little," the _Saturday_ said:--"The public may like Little, but they certainly prefer it Lang!" _O mirabile dictu!_ Shade of Joe Miller, retire discomfited! Was ever heard the like? What are the quips and cranks of a Yorick compared to this? Poor and feeble are the epigrammatic sentences of Molière; miserable to the verge of bathos every "happy thought" beside this sparkling production of the _Saturday_; this scintillating firework of atticism, launched with so much delicacy! Let me wipe my fevered brow, moist with the dews of ecstasy; I had always hoped the _Saturday_ might one day be witty, but I never thought to see the fond anticipation realised. "Moribund," quotha? Never was the Jumbo of Reviews so frisky or so full of life before! Glorious old _Saturday Slasher_! As our American cousins say, "_Lang_ may you wave!" Whoever perpetrated that delicious conceit on Andrew--Andrew, the very Pythias of my Damon worship--let him look me up at the Savile Club, and if I am there when he chances to call, he shall have such wine and welcome as can only be offered by a Critic with cash to a Critic of humour!

XVIII.

EULOGISETH ANDREW.

In speaking of Andrew I wish it to be very distinctly understood that there is only one Andrew; and he is "the" Andrew as pronouncedly and positively as "the" Mactavish or "the" Mackintosh. He is, to use the words of the old Scottish song, "Lang, Lang, Lang a'comin'," always "a'comin'" it in every English printed journal and newspaper under the sun. His finger is in every literary pie. His shrill piping utterance is even as the voice of Delphic oracles, pronouncing judgment on all men and all things. He is the Author's Own Patent Incubator. His artificial warmth hatches all sorts of small literary fledglings who might otherwise have perished in the shell; and out they come chirping, all fuss and feathers, with as much good stamina as though they had been nursed into being under the wings of that despised old hen, Art. Andrew is better than Art, because he is the imitation of Art, and he comes cheaper than the real article. The way in which the old hen hatches her chicks is slow and infinitely laborious; the Lang Patent Incubator does the work in half the time and ever so much less worry. If you can only manage to place a literary egg close enough to the Incubator for him to "take notice" as it were, why there you are; out comes a chuckling author immediately and begins to pick his food from the paragraph-men with quite an appetite. He is quite a curious and wonderful institution in literature, is my dear Andrew. The pensters have had all sorts of things "occur" to them in their profession, such as "booms," "blackmail," "puffs," "burkings," "cliques," "literary societies," and the like, but I believe it has been left to our time to produce a literary Incubator. Of course Art goes on hatching strange birds in her own tedious and trying way--birds that soar sky-high and refuse paragraph-crumbs--but then they are a special breed that would have died of suffocation in the Lang Incubator. And they are a troublesome sort of fowl at best; they will never fly where they are told, never sing when they are bidden, and are never to be found scratching up dust in the press-yard by any manner of means. Now the Incubator produces no wild brood of this kind. He hatches excellent tame chicks, who make the prettiest little clucking noise imaginable, and scratch among the press-dust with grateful and satisfied claws, the while they prune each other's feathers occasionally with the tenderest "Savile" solicitude. Even timid spinsters could take up such pretty poultry in their aprons without harm. There are no horrible, snapping, strong-winged eagles among them? Lord bless you, no! Andrew would never be bothered with an eagle. It might bite his nose off! Eagles--_i.e._, geniuses--are detestable creatures; you never know where to have them. And the Incubator must know where to have his chicks, else how could he look after them? Besides, geniuses always cause disaster and confusion in the press-yard--they find fault with the food there, and object to roost on the critically appointed perches. Fortunately, however, they are rare; and when Art does let loose such big troublesome chickabiddies the world generally lets them forage for themselves. Andrew certainly never troubles his head about them--indeed, he does his best to forget the unpleasant fact that they are flying about and might at any moment pounce on his "yairdie" and make havoc of his own carefully-incubated little literary brood.

Needless to say I am devoted to Andrew. He has done me the greatest kindness in the world. He does not know how kind he has been; in fact, he has such an open, guileless disposition that I believe he is quite unconscious of the heavy debt of gratitude I owe him. I have often thought I would try to express my sentiments towards him in some way, but my emotions have choked me, and I have refrained. Besides, great souls do not require to be thanked, and Andrew has a great soul. A great soul and "brindled hair." These qualities make him what he is, worthy of the admiration of all true Scots and inferior men. And of the "inferior" I will stand second to none in Lang-worship. Have I not followed him at a respectful distance when he has started off to rummage old bookstalls in search of literary provender? And have I not always admired the "pawkie" manner in which he has fathomed the childlike ignorance of the British public? For are not the contents of the books he picks up secondhand, forgotten, or unknown by the British public? and is it not well and seemly that he, Andrew, should revive them once more as specimens of pure Lang wit and wisdom? Certainly. No one would do the Incubator the hideous injustice of imagining him to be capable of any new ideas. New ideas have from time immemorial been an affront and an offence to the reviewer, and Andrew is not only a reviewer himself but the friend of reviewers. New ideas are therefore very properly tabooed from his list. But for old ideas, carefully selected and re-worded, no one can beat Andrew. He is a wandering "complete edition" of ideas taken from "dead" as well as living authors. As for poetry, I don't suppose any one will dispute the right he has to the Laureateship. The stamp of immortality rests on "Ballads in Blue China"--that same immortality which attends Kipling's "Barrack-Room" marvels. These things will be read what time future generations ask vaguely, "Who was Tennyson?"

Yes, Andrew, it is even so. You are a great creature, and a useful creature too, because you can turn your hand to anything. You are not dominated by any cerebral monomania. You are a Press jack-of-all-trades, and, like G. A. S., could write as smartly about a pin as about a creed. It is very clever of you, and I appreciate your cleverness thoroughly. I have had the patience to listen to some lectures of yours, sitting at your feet as at the feet of another Gamaliel, drinking in the wisdom of the secondhand bookstalls without a murmur. Only the most intense admiration of your qualities could have made me do that. I have even managed to spell out some of your calligraphy, which resembles nothing so much as the casual pattern which might be made by a spider crawling on the paper after having previously fallen into the ink. That was a feat performed in your honour--a feat of which I am justly proud. Then again I shall always love you for your frankly-open detestation of literary females. Females who presume to take up our writing weapons--and use them almost as well as we do ourselves--these are our pet aversion. We hate scribblers in petticoats, don't we, good Andrew? Yea, verily! We loathe their verses, we abominate their novels; we would kick them if we dared. We do kick them, metaphorically, whenever we can, in whatever journals we command; but that is not half as much as we would like to do. Almost we envy Hodge who can (and does) give an interfering woman a good dig in the ribs with his heavy hob-nailed boot whenever she provokes him; and in the close competition for literary honours we would fain be Hodges too, every man-jack of us. It is an absurdity that should not be tolerated in any civilised nation, this admission of women into the literary profession. What has she done there? What will she ever do? Ask Walter of the _Times_ (he is a great authority) what he thinks of women who write. He will tell you that they are merely the weak imitators of men, and that they are absolutely incapable of humour or epigram. And I am convinced he is right. Mrs. Browning, Charlotte Bronté, Georges Sand, George Eliot, and others whose names assume to be "celebrated," are really nobodies after all. Walter of the _Times_ could himself beat them out of the field--if he liked. But he is too mercifully disposed for this: he reserves his genius. Sparkling all over with witticism, he only permits occasional flashes of it to appear in the columns of his magnificent journal, lest the public should be too much dizzied and dazzled. No wonder the _Times_ costs threepence; you could not expect to get even a glimpse of a man like Walter for less. We ought to be glad and grateful for his opinions at any price.

And these epithets "glad" and "grateful" occur to me as the only suitable terms to apply to you, most super-excellent Andrew; my good friend to whom I owe so much. I am glad and grateful to know that your "lang" personality is a familiar object at so many newspaper offices. I am delighted to feel that English literature would come to a dead halt without your pleasantly long finger to push it on. It rejoices my heart to realise what a power you are. I am lost in astonishment at the extraordinary collection of Lilliputian authors you have hatched by your incubating process. They are the prettiest little brood imaginable, and what is so charming about them is that they are all so tame and well-behaved that they will never fly. This is such a comfort. Just a little scurrying and flopping through the press-yard is all they are capable of, and quite enough too. Comfortable hencoop sanity in literature is the thing; we don't want any of Professor Lombroso's maniacs in the way of geniuses about. They are dangerous. They do strange things and break out in strange places, and often succeed in stopping all the world on its way to look at them. Nothing would alarm you so much, I assure you, my dear Andrew, as the involuntary hatching of a genius. In fact, I believe it would be all over with you. You could not survive.

But, thanks to a merciful Providence, you run no risk of this. The old hen Art is a savage bird and lays her eggs among wild thorns and bracken out in the open, where no man can find them to bring to you for the artificial bursting heat of a "boom." You only get the dwarf product of the domestic poultry of the press-yard. And these are easily incubated by your patent process--in fact, they almost hatch themselves, they are in such a hurry to chirp forth their claims to literary distinction. But being fragile of constitution they need constantly looking after, which I should imagine must be rather a bore. Relays of paragraph-men have to come and throw corn and savouries all the while lest your little chicks should die of inanition, they having no stamina in themselves. Some will die, some are dying, some are dead; yet weep not, gentle Incubator, for their fate. It better suits thy purpose that such should perish, so long as thou dost remain to hatch fresh fowl upon demand. The press-yard relies upon thee for its stock of guaranteed male birds--its gifted "virile" roosters, whose "cocksure" literary crowings may wake old Granny Journalism at stated hours from too-prolonged and loudly-snoring slumbers; but produce no hens, Andrew, for if thou dost, thou art a mistaken patent and workest by a wrong process! Continue in the path of wisdom, therefore, and faithfully incubate only masculine fledglings for the literary coops. More we do not expect of thee, save that thou continue to be the king of compilers and the enemy of blue stockings. For myself, personally speaking, admiring thee as I am fain to do, I naturally implore thee to go on in all the magazines and journals telling me the things I knew before--the old stories I read when I was a thoughtless child, the scraps of information familiar to me as copybook maxims, the ancient jokes at which my elders laughed, the snatches of French romance and fable I picked up casually at school. For being always a book-lover it is but natural I should have learned the things wherewith thou instructest the ignorant world; but thou shalt tell me of them again and yet again, good Andrew, and yet I will not murmur nor ask of thee one thought original. Aware of all thou canst say, I still entreat thee, say it! Say it (to quote the jovial old _Saturday_ once more) in "little," that I may have it "lang."

And now, ever famous and beloved Andrew, I must for the moment take my leave of thee. The glory of thy reputation is as a band of light around the foggy isles of Britain, and that benighted Europe knows thee not at all is but a trifle to us, though a loss to Europe. When Hall Caine recently found out that he was not celebrated in Germany he wondered thereat and said the Germans had no taste for English literature. No--not though they are the finest Shakesperian scholars in the world and the most ardent lovers of Byron's poesy. "Benighted Fatherland!" inwardly moaned the writer of "Sagas"--"Benighted country that knoweth not my works! Benighted people that have never heard--ye gods, imagine it!--have never heard the name of Kipling!" Oh, dull, beer-drinking, Wagner-ridden disciples of Goethe, Schiller, and Heine! To be ignorant of Kipling! To be only capable of a bovine questioning stare at Caine! To be impervious to the electric name of Lang! To know nothing about the new "Thucydides," R. L. Stevenson! Heaven forgive them, for I cannot. I abjure the Rhineland till it has been to school with Lang's text-books under its arm. Drop Heine, ye besotted slaves of "lager-bier," and read Kipling. _Try_ to read him, anyway. If you can't, my friend Andrew will show you how. Andrew will show you anything that can be shown in English journals and newspapers. But beyond these he cannot go. You must not expect him to expand farther. His incubating work belongs solely to the English Press Poultry-yard--his name, his power, his influence avail, alas! as Nothing, out in the wide, wide world!

XIX.

BYRON LOQUITUR.

If I did not believe, or pretend to believe, in Spiritualism, Theosophism, Buddhism, or some other fashionable "ism" which is totally opposed to Christianity, I should not be "in the swim" of things. And of course I would rather perish than not be in the swim of things. I cannot, if I wish to "go" with my time, admit to any belief in God; like Zola's Jean Bearnat, I say, "Rien, rien, rien! Quand on souffle sur le soleil ça sera fini," or, with the reckless Corelli, I propound to myself the startling question, "Suppose God were dead? We see that the works of men live ages after their death--why not the works of God?" The exclamation of "Rien, rien!" is _la mode_, and those who are loudest in its utterance generally take to a belief in bogies--Blavatsky bogies, Annie Besant bogies, Sinnett bogies, Florence Marryat bogies, many of which disembodied spirits, by the by, talk bad grammar and lose control over their H's. My jovial acquaintance, Captain Andrew Haggard (brother of Rider), and I, have rejoiced in the society of bogies very frequently. We have called "spirits from the vasty deep," and sometimes, if all the "influences" have been in working order, they have come. We know all about them. Haggard, perhaps, knows more than I do, for I believe he confesses to being enamoured of a rather pretty bogie--feminine, of course. She has no substance, so the little flirtation is quite harmless. I regret to say the "spirits" do not flirt with me. They don't seem to like me, especially since the Tomkins episode. The Tomkins episode occurred in this wise. At a certain _séance_ in which I took a somewhat too obtrusive part a "bogie" appeared who announced himself as Tomkins. Some one asked for his baptismal name, and he said "George." A devil of mischief prompted me to hazard the remark that I once knew a John Tomkins, but he was dead.

"That's me!" said the bogie, hurriedly. "I'm John."

"How did you come to be George?" I demanded.

"My second name was George," replied the prompt bogie.

"That's odd!" I said. "I never knew it."

"You can't expect to know everything," remarked the bogie, sententiously.

"No, I can't," I agreed. "And, what is more, I never knew a Tomkins at all, John or George, living or dead! You are a fraud, my friend!"

Confusion ensued, and I was promptly expelled as an "unbeliever" who disturbed the "influences." And since that affair the "spirits" are shy of me.

Whether the memory of the Tompkins episode haunted me, or whether it was the effect of an excellent dinner enjoyed with "Labby" just previously, I do not know, but certain it is that on one never-to-be-forgotten evening I saw a ghost--a _bonâ-fide_ ghost, who entered my sleeping apartment without permission, and addressed me without the assistance of a "medium." He was a ghost of average height and build, and I observed that he kept one foot very carefully concealed beneath his long, cloudy draperies, which were disposed about him in the fashion of the classic Greek. Upon his head, which was covered with clustering curls fit to adorn the brows of Apollo, he wore a wreath of laurels whose leaves were traced in light, and these cast a brilliant circle of supernatural radiance around him. In one hand he grasped a scroll, and as he turned his face upon me he beckoned with this scroll, slowly and majestically, after the style of Hamlet's father on the battlements of Elsinore. I trembled, but had no power to move. Again he beckoned, and his eyes flashed fire.

"My lord----!" I stammered, shrinking beneath his indignant gaze, and fervently hoping that I was not the object of his evident wrath.

"Lord me no lords!" said a deep voice that seemed to quiver with disdain. "Speak, puny mortal! Knowest thou me?"

Know him! I should think I did. There was no mistaking him. He was BYRON all over--Byron, more thoroughly Byronic of aspect than any portrait has ever made him. Involuntarily I thought of the present Lord Wentworth and his occasionally flabby allusions to his "Grandfather," and smiled at the comparison between ancestor and descendant. My ghostly visitant had a sense of humour, and, reading my thoughts, smiled too.

"I see thou hast wit," he was good enough to observe in more pacific accents. "Hear me, therefore, and mark my every word! There are such follies in this age--such literary rascals, such damned rogues of rhymesters--oh, don't be startled! every one swears in Hades--that I have writ some lines and remodelled others, to suit the exigencies of the modern school of Shams. Never did Art stand at a premium in England, but God knows it should not fall to zero as it is rapidly doing. Listen! and move not while I speak; my lines shall burn themselves upon thy brain till thou inscribe and print them for the world to read; then, and then only, having done my bidding, shalt thou again be free!"

I bowed my head submissively and begged the noble Ghost to proceed, whereupon he unfolded his scroll, and read, with infinite gusto, the following:--

"ENGLISH SCRIBES AND SMALL REVIEWERS.

"Still must I hear? Shall SWINBURNE mouth and scream His wordy couplets in a drunken dream, And I not sing, lest haply small reviews Should dub me 'dead' and forthwith damn my muse? No! My proud spirit shall not suffer wrong; 'Booms' are my theme--let satire be my song.

"Through Nature's new-found gift, Magnetic skill, My soul obeys an influential Will, And I from Hades rise to life again To wield once more mine own especial pen, Which none have rivalled in these sickly days Of tawdry epics and translated plays, When knavish cliques o'er honest Art prevail, And weigh out judgment by the 'Savile' scale. The petty vices of the time demand Another scourging from my fearless hand; Still are there flocks of geese for me to chase, Still false pretenders to the 'poet's' place. Who dare to pile detraction on my name, Let such beware, for scribblers are my game! Speed Pegasus! Ye modern pensters small, WATTS, BRYDGES, MORRIS, ARNOLD, have at you all! Remember well how once upon a time I poured along the town a flood of rhyme So strong and scathing that the little fry Of rhymesters like yourselves were doomed to die! Moved by that triumph past, I still pursue The self-same road, despite the _New Review_ And _Quarterly_, and other journals silly, That take dull articles by Mr. LILLY.