Chapter 11

that is to say, Queen Anne is dead. Thus, too, in _The Persian_, _the Sun_, _and the Cloud_:

'The gale arose; the vapour tost (The sport of winds) in air was lost; The glorious orb the day refines. Thus envy breaks, thus merit shines';

in _The Goat without a Beard_:

'Coxcombs distinguished from the rest To all but coxcombs are a jest';

in _The Shepherd's Dog and the Wolf_:

'An open foe may prove a curse, But a pretended friend is worse';

and so to the end of the chapter. The theme is not absorbing, and the variations are proper to the theme.

After All.

How long is it that the wise and good have ceased to say (striking their pensive bosoms), '_Here_ lies Gay'? It is--how long? But for all that Gay is yet a figure in English letters. As a song-writer he has still a claim on us, and is still able to touch the heart and charm the ear. The lyrics in _Acis and Galatea_ are not unworthy their association with Handel's immortal melodies, the songs in _The Beggars' Opera_ have a part in the life and fame of the sweet old tunes from which they can never be divided. I like to believe that in the operas and the _Trivia_ and _The Shepherd's Week_ is buried the material of a pleasant little book.

ESSAYS AND ESSAYISTS

The Good of Them.

It is our misfortune that of good essayists there should be but few. Men there have been who have done the essayist's part so well as to have earned an immortality in the doing; but we have had not many of them, and they make but a poor figure on our shelves. It is a pity that things should be thus with us, for a good essayist is the pleasantest companion imaginable. There are folk in plenty who have never read Montaigne at all; but there are few indeed who have read but a page of him, and that page but once. And the same may be said of Addison and Fielding, of Lamb and Hazlitt, of Sterne and Bacon and Ben Jonson, and all the members of their goodly fellowship. To sit down with any one of them is to sit down in the company of one of the 'mighty wits, our elders and our betters,' who have done much to make literature a good thing, having written books that are eternally readable. If of all them that have tried to write essays and succeeded after a fashion a twentieth part so much could be said the world would have a conversational literature of inexhaustible interest. But indeed there is nothing of the sort. Beside the 'rare and radiant' masters of the art there are the apprentices, and these are many and dull.

Generalities.

Essayists, like poets, are born and not made, and for one worth remembering the world is confronted with a hundred not worth reading. Your true essayist is in a literary sense the friend of everybody. As one of the brotherhood has phrased it, it is his function 'to speak with ease and opportunity to all men.' He must be personal, or his hearers can feel no manner of interest in him. He must be candid and sincere, or his readers presently see through him. He must have learned to think for himself and to consider his surroundings with an eye that is both kindly and observant, or they straightway find his company unprofitable. He should have fancy, or his starveling propositions will perish for lack of metaphor and the tropes and figures needed to vitalise a truism. He does well to have humour, for humour makes men brothers, and is perhaps more influential in an essay than in most places else. He will find a little wit both serviceable to himself and comfortable to his readers. For wisdom, it is not absolutely necessary that he have it, but in its way it is as good a property as any: used with judgment, indeed, it does more to keep an essay sweet and fresh than almost any other quality. And in default of wisdom--which, to be sure, it is not given to every man, much less to every essayist, to entertain--he need have no scruples about using whatever common sense is his; for common sense is a highly respectable commodity, and never fails of a wide and eager circle of buyers. A knowledge of men and of books is also to be desired; for it is a writer's best reason of being, and without it he does well to hold his tongue. Blessed with these attributes he is an essayist to some purpose. Give him leisure and occasion, and his discourse may well become as popular as Montaigne's own.

In Particular.

For the British essayists, they are more talked about than known. It is to be suspected that from the first their reputation has greatly exceeded their popularity; and of late years, in spite of the declamation of Macaulay and the very literary enthusiasm of the artist of _Esmond_ and _The Virginians_, they have fallen further into the background, and are less than ever studied with regard. In theory the age of Anne is still the Augustan age to us; but in theory only, and only to a certain extent. What attracts us is its outside. We are in love with its houses and its china and its costumes. We are not enamoured of it as it was but as it seems to Mr. Caldecott and Mr. Dobson and Miss Kate Greenaway. We care little for its comedy and nothing at all for its tragedy. Its verse is all that our own is not, and the same may be said of its prose and ours--of the prose of Mr. Swinburne and Mr. George Meredith and the prose of Addison and Swift. Mr. Gladstone is not a bit like Bolingbroke, and between _The Times_ and _The Tatler_, between _The Spectator_ (Mr. Addison's), and _The Fortnightly Review_, there is a difference of close upon two centuries and of a dozen revolutions--political, social, scientific, and aesthetic. We may babble as we please about the 'sweetness' of Steele and the 'humour' of Sir Roger de Coverley, but in our hearts we care for them a great deal less than we ought, and in fact Mr. Mudie's subscribers do not hesitate to prefer the 'sweetness' of Mr. Black and the 'humour' of Mr. James Payn. Our love is not for the essentials of the time but only its accidents and oddities; and we express it in pictures and poems and fantasies in architecture, and the canonisation (in figures) of Chippendale and Sheraton. But it is questionable if we might not with advantage increase our interest, and carry imitation a little deeper. The Essayists, for instance, are often dull, but they write like scholars and gentlemen. They refrain from personalities; they let scandal alone, nor ever condescend to eavesdropping; they never go out of their way in search of affectation or prurience or melancholy, but are content to be merely wise and cheerful and humane. Above all, they do their work as well as they can. They seem to write not for bread nor for a place in society but for the pleasure of writing, and of writing well. In these hysterical times life is so full, so much is asked and so much has to be given, that tranquil writing and careful workmanship are impossible. A certain poet has bewailed the change in a charming rondeau:--

'More swiftly now the hours take flight! What's read at morn is dead at night; Scant space have we for art's delays, Whose breathless thought so briefly stays, We may not work--ah! would we might, With slower pen!'

It must be owned that his melancholy is anything but groundless. The trick of amenity and good breeding is lost; the graces of an excellence that is unobtrusive are graces no more. We write as men paint for the exhibitions: with the consciousness that we must pass without notice if we do not exceed in colour and subject and tone. The need exists, and the world bows to it. Mr. Austin Dobson's little sheaf of _Eighteenth Century Essays_ might be regarded as a protest against the necessity and the submission. It proves that 'tis possible to be eloquent without adjectives and elegant without affectation; that to be brilliant you need not necessarily be extravagant and conceited; that without being maudlin and sentimental it is not beyond mortal capacity to be pathetic; and that once upon a time a writer could prove himself a humourist without feeling it incumbent upon him to be also a jack-pudding.

BOSWELL

His Destiny.

It has been Boswell's fate to be universally read and almost as universally despised. What he suffered at the hands of Croker and Macaulay is typical of his fortune. In character, in politics, in attainments, in capacity, the two were poles apart; but they were agreed in this: that Boswell must be castigated and contemned, and that they were the men to do it. Croker's achievement, consider it how you will, remains the most preposterous in literary history. He could see nothing in the _Life_ but a highly entertaining compilation greatly in need of annotation and correction. Accordingly he took up Boswell's text and interlarded it with scraps of his own and other people's; he pegged into it a sophisticated version of the _Tour_; and he overwhelmed his amazing compound with notes and commentaries in which he took occasion to snub, scold, 'improve,' and insult his author at every turn. What came of it one knows. Macaulay, in the combined interests of Whiggism and good literature, made Boswell's quarrel his own, and the expiation was as bitter as the offence was wanton and scandalous.

His Critic.

But Macaulay, if he did Jeddart justice on Croker, took care not to forget that Johnson was a Tory hero, and that Boswell was Johnson's biographer. He was too fond of good reading not to esteem the _Life_ for one of the best of books. But he was also a master of the art of brilliant and picturesque misrepresentation; and he did not neglect to prove that the _Life_ is only admirable because Boswell was contemptible. It was, he argued, only by virtue of being at once daft and drunken, selfish and silly, an eavesdropper and a talebearer, a kind of inspired Faddle, a combination of butt and lackey and snob, that Boswell contrived to achieve his wretched immortality. And in the same way Boswell's hero was after all but a sort of Grub Street Cyclops, respectable enough by his intelligence--(but even so ridiculous in comparison to gifted Whigs)--yet more or less despicable in his manners, his English, and his politics. Now, Macaulay was the genius of special pleading. Admirable man of letters as he was, he was politician first and man of letters afterwards: his judgments are no more final than his antitheses are dull, and his method for all its brilliance is the reverse of sound. When you begin to inquire how much he really knew about Boswell, and how far you may accept his own estimate of his own pretentions, he becomes amusing in spite of himself: much as, according to him, Boswell was an artist. In his review of Croker he is keen enough about dates and facts and solecisms; on questions of this sort he bestows his fiercest energies; for such lapses he visits his Tory opposite with his most savage and splendid insolence, his heartiest contempt, his most scathing rhetoric. But on the great question of all--the corruption of Boswell's text--he is not nearly so implacable, and concerning the foisting on the _Life_ of the whole bulk of the _Tour_ he is not more than lukewarm. 'We greatly doubt,' he says, 'whether _even_ the _Tour to the Hebrides_ should have been inserted in the midst of the _Life_. There is one marked distinction between the two works. Most of the _Tour_ was seen by Johnson in manuscript. It does not appear that he ever saw any part of the _Life_.' This is to say that Croker's action is reprehensible not because it is an offence against art but because Johnson on private and personal grounds might not have been disposed to accept the _Life_ as representative and just, and might have refused to sanction its appearance on an equal footing with the _Tour_, which on private and personal grounds he _had_ accepted. In the face of such an argument who can help suspecting Macaulay's artistic faculty? 'The _Life of Johnson_,' he says, 'is assuredly a great, a very great, book. Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets, Shakespeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers . . . Eclipse is first, and the rest nowhere.' That is hearty and exact enough. But, as I have hinted, Macaulay, furious with Croker's carelessness, is almost tolerant of Croker's impudence. For Croker as a scholar and an historian he is merely pitiless; to Croker ruining the _Life_ by the insertion of the _Tour_--a feat which would scarce be surpassed by the interpolation of the Falstaff scenes of the _Merry Wives_ in one or other of the parts of _Henry IV._--he is lenient enough, and lenient on grounds which are not artistic but purely moral. Did he recognise to the full the fact of Boswell's pre-eminence as an artist? Was he really conscious that the _Life_ is an admirable work of art as well as the most readable and companionable of books? As, not content with committing himself thus far, he goes on to prove that Boswell was great because he was little, that he wrote a great book because he was an ass, and that if he had not been an ass his book would probably have been at least a small one, incredulity on these points becomes respectable.

Himself.

Boswell knew better. A true Scotsman and a true artist, he could play the fool on occasion, and he could profit by his folly. In his dedication to the first and greatest President the Royal Academy has had he anticipates a good many of Macaulay's objections to his character and deportment, and proves conclusively that if he chose to seem ridiculous he did so not unwittingly but with a complete apprehension of the effect he designed and the means he adopted. In the _Tour_, says he, from his 'eagerness to display the wonderful fertility and readiness of Johnson's wit,' he 'freely showed to the world its dexterity, even when I was myself the object of it.' He was under the impression that he would be 'liberally understood,' as 'knowing very well what I was about.' But, he adds, 'it seems I judged too well of the world'; and he points his moral with a story of 'the great Dr. Clarke,' who, 'unbending himself with a few friends in the most playful and frolicsome manner,' saw Beau Nash in the distance, and was instantly sobered. 'My boys,' quoth he, 'let us be grave--here comes a fool.' Macaulay was not exactly Beau Nash, nor was Boswell 'the great Dr. Clarke'; but, as Macaulay, working on Wolcot's lines, was presently to show, Boswell did right to describe the world as 'a great fool,' and to regret in respect of his own silliness that in the _Tour_ he had been 'arrogant enough to suppose that the tenour of the rest of the book would sufficiently guard against such a strange imputation.' In the same way he showed himself fully alive to the enduring merits of his achievement. 'I will venture to say,' he writes, 'that he (Johnson) will be seen in this work more completely than any man who has ever lived.' He had his own idea of biography; he had demonstrated its value triumphantly in the _Tour_ which, though organically complete, is plainly not a record of travel but a biographical essay. In the _Tour_, that is, he had approved himself an original master of selection, composition, and design; of the art of working a large number of essential details into a uniform and living whole; and of that most difficult and telling of accomplishments, the reproduction of talk. In the _Life_ he repeated the proof on a larger scale and with a finer mastery of construction and effect; and in what his best editor describes as 'the task of correcting, amending, and adding to his darling work' he spent his few remaining years. That he drifted into greatness, produced his two masterpieces unconsciously, and developed a genius for biography as one develops a disease, is 'a ridiculous conception,' as Mr. Napier rightly says. In proof of it we have Boswell's own words, and we have the books themselves. Such testimony is not to be overborne by any number of paradoxes, however ingenious, nor by any superflux of rhetoric, however plausible and persuasive. That Boswell was a gossip, a busybody, and something of a sot, and that many did and still do call him fool, is certain; but that is no reason why he should not have been an artist, and none why he should be credited with the fame of having devoted the best part of his life to the production of a couple of masterpieces--as M. Jourdain talked prose--without knowing what he was doing. Turner chose to go a-masquerading as 'Puggy Booth'; but as yet nobody has put forward the assertion that Turner was unconscious of the romance and splendour of his _Ulysses and Polyphemus_, or that he painted his _Rain_, _Speed_, _and Steam_ in absolute ignorance of the impression it would produce and the idea it should convey. Goldsmith reminded Miss Reynolds of 'a low mechanic, particularly . . . a journey-man tailor'; but that he was unconsciously the most elegant and natural writer of his age is a position which has not yet been advanced. And surely it is high time that Boswell should take that place in art which is his by right of conquest, and that Macaulay's paradox--which is only the opinion brilliantly put of an ignorant and unthinking world--('Il avait mieux que personne l'esprit de tout le monde')--should go the way of all its kind.

CONGREVE

His Biographers and Critics.

An American literary journal once assured its readers that Congreve has a 'niche in the Valhalla of Ben Jonson.' The remark is injudicious, of course, even for a literary American, and there is no apparent reason why it should ever have got itself uttered. It is probably the unluckiest thing that ever was said of Congreve, who--with some unimportant exceptions--has been singularly fortunate in his critics and biographers. Dryden wrote of him with enthusiasm, and in doing so he may be said to have set a fashion of admiration which is vigorous and captivating even yet. Swift, Voltaire, Lamb, Hunt, Hazlitt, Thackeray, Macaulay, to name but these, have dealt with him in their several ways; of late he has been praised by such masters of the art of writing as Mr. Swinburne and Mr. George Meredith; while Mr. Gosse, the last on the list, surpasses most of his predecessors in admiration and nearly all, I think, in knowledge.

The Real Congreve.

It is no fault of Mr. Gosse's that with all his diligence he should fail to give a complete and striking portrait of his man, or to make more of what he describes as his 'smiling, faultless rotundity.' As he puts it: 'There were no salient points about Congreve's character,' so that 'no vagaries, no escapades place him in a ludicrous or in a human light,' and 'he passes through the literary life of his time as if in felt slippers, noiseless, unupbraiding, without personal adventures.' That, I take it, is absolutely true. It is known that Congreve was cheerful, serviceable, and witty; that he was a man of many friends; that Pope dedicated his _Iliad_ to him; that Dryden loved and admired him; that Collier attacked his work, and that his rejoinder was equally spiritless and ill-bred; that he was attached to Mrs. Bracegirdle, and left all his money to the Duchess of Marlborough; that he was a creditable Government official; and that at thirty, having written a certain number of plays, he suddenly lost his interest in life and art, and wrote no more. But that is about all. Thackeray's picture of him may be, and probably is, as unveracious as his Fielding or his Dick Steele; but there is little or nothing to show how far we can depend upon it. The character of the man escapes us, and we have either to refrain from trying to see him or to content ourselves with mere hypothesis. So abnormal is the mystery in which he is enshrouded that what in the case of others would be notorious remains in his case dubious and obscure: so that we cannot tell whether he was Bracegirdle's lover or only her friend, and the secret of his relations with the Duchess of Marlborough has yet to be discovered. Mr. Gosse succeeded no better than they that went before in plucking out the heart of Congreve's mystery. He was, and he remains, impersonal. At his most substantial he is (as some one said of him) no more than 'vagueness personified': at his most luminous only an appearance like the _Scin-Laeca_, the shining shadow adapted in a moment of peculiar inspiration by the late Lord Lytton.

The Dramatist.