Chapter 10

which is a pun as unexpected and imaginative as any that exists, not excepting even Lamb's renowned achievement, the immortal 'I say, Porter, is that your own Hare or a Wig?' But as a punster Hood is merely unsurpassable. The simplest and the most complex, the wildest and the most obvious, the straightest and the most perverse, all puns came alike to him. The form was his natural method of expression. His prose extravaganzas--even to the delightful _Friend in Need_--are pretty well forgotten; his one novel is very hard to read; there is far less in _Up the Rhine_ than in _Humphry Clinker_ after all; we have been spoiled for _Lycus the Centaur_ and _The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies_ by the rich and passionate verse of the Laureate, the distinction, and the measure of Arnold, the sumptuous diction and the varied and enchanting music of _Atalanta_ and _Hesperia_ and _Erechtheus_. We care little for the old- fashioned whimsicality of the _Odes_, and little for such an inimitable farrago of vulgarisms, such a _reductio ad absurdum_ of sentiment and style, as _The Lost Child_. But the best of Hood's puns are amusing after forty years. They are the classics of verbal extravagance, and they are a thousand times better known than _The Last Man_, though that is a work of genius, and almost as popular as the _Song of the Shirt_, the _Bridge of Sighs_, the _Dream of Eugene Aram_ themselves. By an odd chance, too, the rhymes in which they are set have all a tragic theme. 'Tout ce qui touche a la mort,' says Champfleury, 'est d'une gaiete folle.' Hood found out that much for himself before Champfleury had begun to write. His most riotous ballads are ballads of death and the grave. Tim Turpin does murder and is hanged

'On Horsham drop, and none can say He took a drop too much';

Ben Battle entwines a rope about his melancholy neck, and for the second time in life _enlists him in the line_; Young Ben expires of grief for the falsehood of Sally Brown: Lieutenant Luff drinks himself into his grave; John Day the amorous coachman,

'With back too broad to be conceived By any narrow mind,'

pines to nothingness, and is found heels uppermost in his cruel mistress's water-butt. To Hood, with his grim imagination and his strange fantastic humour, death was meat and drink. It is as though he saw so much of the 'execrable Shape' that at last the pair grew friends, and grinned whenever they foregathered even in thought.

His Immortal Part.

Was Thackeray right, then, in resenting the waste of Hood's genius upon mere comicalities? I think he was; but only to a certain point. Hood was a true poet: but it was not until after years of proof and endeavour that he discovered the use to which his powers could best be put and the material on which they could best be employed. He worked hard and with but partial success at poetry all his life long. He passed his life in punning and making comic assaults on the Queen's English; but he was author all the while of _The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies_, the _Ode to Melancholy_, _Hero and Leander_, _Lycus the Centaur_, and a score and more of lovable and moving ballads; and he had won himself a name with two such capital examples of melodrama as _The Last Man_ (1826) and _The Dream of Eugene Aram_ (1829). But as a poet he profited little. The public preferred him as a buffoon; and not until his last years (and then anonymously) was he able to utter his highest word. All was made ready against his coming--the age, the subject, the public mind, the public capacity of emotion; and in _The Song of the Shirt_ he approved himself a great singer. In the days of _Lycus the Centaur_ and the _Midsummer Fairies_ he could no more have written it than the public could have heeded had he written. But times were changed--Dickens had come, and the humanitarian epoch--and the great song went like fire. So, a year or two after, did _The Bridge of Sighs_. That, says Thackeray, 'was his Corunna, his Heights of Abraham--sickly, weak, wounded, he fell in the full blaze and fame of that great victory.' Could he have repeated it had he lived? Who knows? In both these irresistible appeals to the heart of man the material is of equal value and importance with the form; and in poetry such material is rare. A brace of such songs is possible to a poet; ten couples are not. It is Hood's immortality that he sang these two. Almost in the uttering they went the round of the world; and it is not too much to say of them that they will only pass with the language.

LEVER

How He Lived.

The story of Lever's life and adventures only wants telling to be as irresistibly attractive as Lorrequer's or O'Malley's own. Born in Dublin, of an English father and an Irish mother, he lived to be essentially cosmopolitan and a _viveur_ of the first magnitude. At eight he was master of his schoolmaster--a gentleman given to flogging but not learned in Greek, and therefore a proper subject for a certain sort of blackmailing. He was not an industrious boy; but he was apt and ready with his tongue, he was an expert in fencing and the dance, he was good at improvising and telling stories, it is on record that he pleaded and won the cause of himself and certain of his schoolmates accused before a magistrate of riot and outrage. At college he found work for his high spirits in wild fun and the perpetration of practical jokes. He and his chum Ottiwell, the original of Frank Webber, behaved to their governors, teachers, and companions very much as Charles O'Malley and the redoubtable Frank behave to theirs. Lever was excellent at a street-ballad, and made and sang them in the rags of Rhoudlim, just as Frank Webber does; and he personated Cusack the surgeon to Cusack's class, just as Frank Webber personates the dean to _his_ class. On the whole, indeed, he must have been as gamesome and volatile a nuisance as even Dublin has endured. On leaving college he took charge of an emigrant ship bound for Quebec. Arrived in Canada, he plunged into the backwoods, was affiliated to a tribe of Indians, and had to escape like Bagenal Daly at the risk of his life. Then he went to Germany, became a student at Gottingen under Blumenbach, was heart and soul a Bursch, and had the honour of seeing Goethe at Weimar. His diploma gained, he went to Clare to do battle with the cholera and gather materials for _Harry Lorrequer_. After this he was for some time dispensary doctor at Portstewart, where he met Prebendary Maxwell, the wild parson who wrote _Captain Blake_: so that here and now it is natural to find him leaping turf-carts and running away from his creditors. At Brussels, where he physicked the British Embassy and the British tourist, he knew all sorts of people--among them Commissioner Meade, the original of Major Monsoon, and Cardinal Pecci, the original of Leo XIII.--and saw all sorts of life, and ran into all sorts of extravagance: until of a sudden, he is back again in the capital, editing the _Dublin University Magazine_. Of course he was the maddest editor ever seen. For him cards, horses, and high living were not luxuries but necessaries of life; yet all the while he believed devoutly in medicine, and with his family indulged with freedom in the use of calomel and such agents. Presently he abandoned Ireland for the Continent. He took his horses with him, and astonished Europe with a four-in-hand of his own. Carlsruhe knew him well, as Belgium and the Rhine had known him. He only left the Reider Schloss at Bregenz to conquer Italy; and at Florence, Spezzia, and finally Trieste, he shone like himself.

What He Was.

He was a born _poseur_. His vanity made him one of the worst--the most excessive--of talkers; go where he would and do what he might, he was unhappy if the first place were another's. In all he did he was greedy to excel, and to excel incontestably. Like his own Bagenal Daly he would have taken the big jump with the reins in his mouth and his hands tied, 'just to show the English Lord-Lieutenant how an Irish gentleman rides.' He was all his life long confounding an English Lord-Lieutenant of some sort; for without display he would have pined away and died. At Templeogue he lived at the rate of 3,000 pounds a year on an income of 1,200 pounds; at Brussels he kept open house on little or nothing for all the wandering grandees of Europe; at Florence they used to liken the cavalcade from his house to a procession from Franconi's; he found living in a castle and spending 10 pounds a day on his horses the finest fun in the world. He existed but to bewilder and dazzle, and had he not been a brilliant and distinguished novelist he would have been a brilliant and distinguished something else. As he kept open house everywhere, as he was fond of every sort of luxury, as he loved not less to lend money to his intimates than to lose it to them at cards, and as he got but poor prices for his novels and was not well paid for his consular services, it is not easy to see how he managed to make ends meet.

How He Wrote.

Nor is it easy to see how he contrived to produce his novels. He was too passionately addicted to society and the enjoyment of life to spare an instant from them if he could help it; and the wonder is not that he should have written so well but that he should have written at all. Fortunately or the other thing, his books cost him no effort. He wrote or dictated at a gallop and, his copy once produced, had finished his work. He abhorred revision, and while keenly sensitive to blame and greedy of praise he ceased to care for his books as soon as they had left his desk. That he was not in scarce any sense an artist is but too clear. He never worked on a definite plan nor was at any pains to contrive a plot; he depended on the morning's impressions for the evening's task, and wrote _Con Cregan_ under the immediate influence of a travelled Austrian, who used to talk to him every night ere he sat down to his story. But he was a wonderful improvisatore. He had imagination--(even romantic imagination: as the episode of Menelaus Crick in _Con Cregan_ will show)--a keen, sure eye for character, incomparable facility in composition, an inexhaustible fund of shrewdness, whimsicality, high spirits, an admirable knack of dialogue; and as consul at Spezzia and at Trieste, as a fashionable practitioner at Brussels, as dispensary doctor on the wild Ulster coast, he was excellently placed for the kind of literature it was in him to produce. Writing at random and always under the spur of necessity, he managed to inform his work with extraordinary vitality and charm. His books were only made to sell, but it is like enough that they will also live, for they are yet well nigh as readable as at first, and Nina and Kate O'Donoghue--(for instance)--seem destined to go down to posterity as typical and representative. Had their author taken art seriously, and devoted all his energy to its practice, he could scarce have done more than this. Perhaps, indeed, he would not have done so much. It could never have been Lorrequer's to 'build the lofty rhyme.' It was an honest as well as a brilliant creature; and I believe we should all have suffered if some avenging chance had borne it in upon him that to be really lofty your rhyme must of necessity be not blown upwards like a bubble but built in air like a cathedral. He would, I take it, have experimentalised in repentance to the extent of elaborating his creations and chastising his style; and, it may be, he would have contrived but to beggar his work of interest and correct himself of charm. A respectable ambition, no doubt; but how much better to be the rough-and-ready artist of Darby the Beast and Micky Free, the humane and charming rattlepate to whom we owe Paul Goslett and the excellent and pleasing Potts!

JEFFERIES

His Virtue.

I love to think of Jefferies as a kind of literary Leatherstocking. His style, his mental qualities, the field he worked in, the chase he followed, were peculiar to himself, and as he was without a rival, so was he without a second. Reduced to its simplest expression, his was a mind compact of observation and of memory. He writes as one who watches always, who sees everything, who forgets nothing. As his lot was cast in country places, among wood and pasturage and corn, by coverts teeming with game and quick with insect life, and as withal he had the hunter's patience and quick-sightedness, his faculty of looking and listening and of noting and remembering, his readiness of deduction and insistence of pursuit--there entered gradually into his mind a greater quantity of natural England, her leaves and flowers, her winds and skies, her wild things and tame, her beauties and humours and discomforts, than was ever, perhaps, the possession of writing Briton. This property he conveyed to his countrymen in a series of books of singular freshness and interest. The style is too formal and sober, the English seldom other than homely and sufficient; there is overmuch of the reporter and nothing like enough of the artist, the note of imagination, the right creative faculty. But they are remarkable books. It is not safe to try and be beforehand with posterity, but in the case of such works as the _Gamekeeper_ and _Wild Life_ and with such a precedent as that established by the _Natural History of Selborne_ such anticipation seems more tempting and less hazardous than usual. One has only to think of some mediaeval Jefferies attached to the staff of Robin Hood, and writing about Needwood and Charnwood as his descendant wrote about the South Downs, to imagine an historical document of priceless value and inexhaustible interest. And in years to be, when the whole island is one vast congeries of streets, and the fox has gone down to the bustard and the dodo, and outside museums of comparative anatomy the weasel is not and the badger has ceased from the face of the earth, it is not doubtful that the _Gamekeeper_ and _Wild Life_ and the _Poacher_--epitomising, as they will, the rural England of certain centuries before--will be serving as material and authority for historical descriptions, historical novels, historical epics, historical pictures, and will be honoured as the most useful stuff of their kind in being.

His Limitation.

In those first books of his Jefferies compels attention by sheer freshness of matter; he is brimful of new facts and original and pertinent observation, and that every one is vaguely familiar with and interested in the objects he is handling and explaining serves but to heighten his attractiveness. There are so many who but know of hares disguised as soup, of ants as a people on whose houses it is not good to sit down, of partridges as a motive of bread sauce! And Jefferies, retailing in plain, useful English the thousand and one curious facts that make up life for these creatures and their kind--Jefferies walking the wood, or tracking the brook, or mapping out the big tree--is some one to be heeded with gratitude. He is the Scandalous Chronicler of the warren and the rookery, the newsmonger and intelligencer of creeping things, and things that fly, and things that run; and his confidences, unique in quality and type, have the novelty and force of personal revelations. In dealing with men and women, he surrendered most of his advantage and lost the best part of his charm. The theme is old, the matter well worn, the subject common to us all; and most of us care nothing for a few facts more or less unless they be romantically conveyed. Reality is but the beginning, the raw material, of art; and it is by the artist's aid and countenance that we are used to make acquaintance with our fellows, be they generals in cocked hats or mechanics in fustian. Now Jefferies was not an artist, and so beside his stoats and hares, his pike, his rabbits, and his moles, his men and women are of little moment. You seem to have heard of them and to far better purpose from others; you have had their author's facts presented elsewhere, and that in picturesque conjunction with the great eternal interests of passion and emotion. To be aware of such a difference is to resent it; and accordingly to read is to know that Jefferies would have done well to leave Hodge and Hodge's masters alone and keep to his beasts and birds and fishes.

The General.

Is it not plain as the nose on your face that his admirers admire him injudiciously? It is true, for instance, that he is in a sense, 'too full' (the phrase is Mr. Besant's) for the generality of readers. But it is also true that he is not nearly full enough: that they look for conclusions while he is bent upon giving them only details: that they clamour for a breath of inspiration while he is bent upon emptying his note-book in decent English; that they persist in demanding a motive, a leading idea, a justification, while he with knowledge crammed is fixed in his resolve to tell them no more than that there are milestones on the Dover Road, or that there are so many nails of so many shapes and so many colours in the pig-sty at the back of Coate Farm. They prefer 'their geraniums in the conservatory.' They refuse, in any case, to call a 'picture' that which is only a long-drawn sequence of statements. They are naturally inartistic, but they have the tradition of a long and speaking series of artistic results, and instinctively they decline to recognise as art the work of one who was plainly the reverse of an artist. The artist is he who knows how to select and to inspire the results of his selection. Jefferies could do neither. He was a reporter of genius; and he never got beyond reporting. To the average reader he is wanting in the great essentials of excitement: he is prodigal of facts, and he contrives to set none down so as to make one believe in it for longer than the instant of perusal. From his work the passionate human quality is not less absent than the capacity of selection and the gift of inspiration, and all the enthusiasm of all the enthusiasts of an enthusiastic age will not make him and his work acceptable to the aforesaid average reader. In letters he is as the ideal British water- colourist in paint: the care of both is not art but facts, and again facts, and facts ever. You consider their work; you cannot see the wood for the trees; and you are fain to conclude that themselves were so much interested in the trees they did not even know the wood was there.

Last Words.

To come to an end with the man:--his range was very limited, and within that range his activity was excessive; yet the consequences of his enormous effort were--and are--a trifle disappointing. He thought, poor fellow! that he had the world in his hand and the public at his feet; whereas, the truth to tell, he had only the empire of a kind of back garden and the lordship of (as Mr. Besant has told us) some forty thousand out of a hundred millions of readers. You know that he suffered greatly; you know too that to the last he worked and battled on as became an honest, much-enduring, self-admiring man: as you know that in death he snatched a kind of victory, and departed this life with dignity as one 'good at many things,' who had at last 'attained to be at rest.' You know, in a word, that he took his part in the general struggle for existence, and manfully did his best; and it is with something like a pang that you find his biographer insisting on the merits of the feat, and quoting approvingly the sentimentalists who gathered about his death- bed. To make eloquence about heroism is not the way to breed heroes; and it may be that Jefferies, had his last environment been less fluent and sonorous, would now seem something more heroic than he does.

GAY

The Fabulist.

Gay the fabulist is only interesting in a certain sense and to a small extent. The morality of the _Fables_ is commonplace; their workmanship is only facile and agreeable; as literature--as achievements in a certain order of art--they have a poor enough kind of existence. In comparison to the work of La Fontaine they are the merest journalism. The simplicity, the wit, the wisdom, the humanity, the dramatic imagination, the capacity of dramatic expression, the exquisite union of sense and manner, the faultless balance of matter and style, are qualities for which in the Englishman you look in vain. You read, and you read not only without enthusiasm but without interest. The verse is merely brisk and fluent; the invention is common; the wit is not very witty; the humour is artificial; the wisdom, the morality, the knowledge of life, the science of character--if they exist at all it is but as anatomical preparations or plants in a _hortus siccus_. Worse than anything, the _Fables_ are monotonous. The manner is consistently uniform; the invention has the level sameness of a Lincolnshire landscape; the narrative moves with the equal pace of boats on a Dutch canal. The effect is that of a host of flower-pots, the columns in a ledger, a tragedy by the Rev. Mr. Home; and it is heightened by the matchless triteness of the fabulist's reflections and the uncommon tameness of his drama. It is hard to believe that this is indeed the Gay of _Polly_ and _The Beggars' Opera_. True, the dialects of his Peachum and his Lockit are in some sort one; his gentlemen of the road and his ladies of the kennel rejoice in a common flippancy of expression; there is little to choose between the speech of Polly and the speech of Lucy. But in respect of the essentials of drama the dialogue of the _Beggars' Opera_ is on the whole sufficient. The personages are puppets; but they are individual, and they are fairly consistent in their individuality. Miss Lockit does not think and feel like Miss Diver; Macheath is distinguishable from Peachum; none is exactly alive, but of stage life ail have their share. The reverse of this is the case with the personages of the _Fables_. They think the thoughts and speak the speech of Mr. Gay. The elephant has the voice of the sparrow; the monkey is one with the organ on which he sits; there is but a difference of name between the eagle and the hog; the talk of Death has exactly the manner and weight and cadence of the Woodman's; a change of label would enable the lion to change places with the spaniel, would suffice to cage the wolf as a bird and set free the parrot as a beast of prey. All are equally pert, brisk, and dapper in expression; all are equally sententious and smart in aim; all are absolutely identical in function and effect. The whole gathering is stuffed with the same straw, prepared with the same dressing, ticketed in the same handwriting, and painted with the same colours. Any one who remembers the infinite variety of La Fontaine will feel that Gay the fabulist is a writer whose work the world has let die very willingly indeed.

The Moralist.

And Gay is not a whit less inefficient as a moralist. He is a kindly soul, and in his easygoing way he has learnt something of the tricks of the world and something of the hearts of men. He writes as an unsuccessful courtier; and in that capacity he has remarks to offer which are not always valueless, and in which there is sometimes a certain shrewdness. But the unsuccessful courtier is on the whole a creature of the past. Such interest as he has is rather historical than actual; and neither in the nursery nor in the schoolroom is he likely to create any excitement or be received with any enthusiasm. To the world he can only recommend himself as one anxious to make it known on the smallest provocation and on any occasion or none that Queen Anne is dead. Open him where you will, and you find him full of this important news and determined on imparting it. Thus, in _The Scold and the Parrot_:

'One slander must ten thousand get, The world with int'rest pays the debt';