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 Questions at issue. 
 
 3 1924 013 350 818 
 
The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013350818 
 
QUESTIONS AT ISSUE 
 
Other Works by Mr. EDMUND GOSSB 
 
 IN VERSE 
 
 On Viol and Flute. New edition. i8go 
 
 Firdausi in Exile, and otlier Poems. Second edition. iSSf 
 
 IN PROSE 
 
 Northern Studies, iSig. Popular edition. z8go 
 Life of Gray. iSSs. Revised edition. i88g 
 Seventeenth Centur y Studies. 1883. Second edition. l88j 
 Life ofCongreve. 1888 
 A History of Eighteenth Century Literature, z88g. Second 
 
 edition, l8gi 
 Life of Philip Henry Gosse, F.R.S. i8go 
 Gossip in a Library. i8gi. Second edition. i8g2 
 The Secret of Narcisse. A Romance. i8g2 
 
Questions at Issue 
 
 BY 
 
 EDMUND GOSSE 
 
 LONDPN 
 
 WILLIAM HEINEMANN 
 1893 
 [All rights reservedl 
 
 s 
 

 
TO 
 
 JOSEPH HENRT SHORTHOUSE 
 
 Ubfg Volume is SieMcatet) 
 
 BY 
 HIS AFFECTIONATE FRIEND 
 
 THE AUTHOR 
 
Preface 
 
 1 O the essays which are here collected I have given a 
 name which at once, I hope, describes them accurately 
 and distinguishes them from criticism of a more positive 
 order. When a writer speaks to us of the works of the 
 dead masters, of the literary life of the past, we demand 
 from him the authoritative attitude. That Homer is a 
 great poet, and that the verse of Milton is exquisite, 
 are not Questions at Issue. In dealing with such sub- 
 jects the critic must persuade himself that he is capable 
 of forming an opinion, and must then give us his opinion 
 definitely. But in the continent of literary criticism, 
 where all else is imperial, there is a province which 
 is still republican, and that is the analysis of contem- 
 porary literature, the frank examination of the literary 
 life of to-day. 
 
 In speaking of what is proceeding around us no 
 one can be trusted to be authoritative. The wisest, 
 clearest, and most experienced of critics have noto- 
 riously been wrong about the phenomena of their 
 own day. Ben Jonson selected the moment when 
 Hamlet and Othello had just been performed to talk 
 of raising "the despised head of poetry again, and 
 
X 
 
 Preface 
 
 stripping her of those rotten and base rags wherewilh 
 the times have adulterated her form." Neither Hazlitt 
 nor Sainte Beuve could be trusted to give as valuable 
 a judgment on the work of a man younger than them- 
 selves as they could of any past production, be it what 
 it might. To map the ground around his feet is a task 
 that the most skilful geographer is not certain to carry 
 out with success. 
 
 The insecurity of contemporary criticism is no reason, 
 however, why it should not be seriously and sincerely 
 attempted. On the contrary, the critic who has been 
 accustomed to follow paths where the laws and criteria 
 of literature are paramount, may be glad to slip away 
 sometimes to a freer country, where the art he tries 
 to practise is more instinctive, more emotional, and 
 more controversial. In the schools of antiquity, when 
 the set discourse was over, the lecturer mingled with 
 his audience under the portico of the Museum, and then, 
 I suppose, it was not any longer of the ancients that 
 they talked, but of the, poet of last night, and of the 
 rhetorician of to-morrow. 
 
 The critic may enjoy the sense of having abandoned 
 the lecturing desk or the tribune, and of mingling in 
 easy conversation with men who are not bound to 
 preserve any decorum in listening to his opinions. 
 In the criticism of the floating literature of the day 
 an opportunity is offered for sensibility, for the personal 
 note, even for a certain indulgence in levity or irony. 
 The questions of our own age are not yet settled by 
 
Preface xi 
 
 tradition, nor hedged about with logical deductions ; they 
 are still open to discussion ; they are still Questions at 
 Jssue. Such are all the aspects of the literary life 
 which I endeavour to discuss in this volume of essays. 
 
 There can, nevertheless, be no reason why, although 
 the dress and attitude be- different, the critic should 
 not be as true to his radical conceptions of right and 
 wrong in literature, when- he discusses the s hifts and 
 moveinents_about_him, as when- he " bears in memory 
 what has tamed great nations." The attention of a 
 literary man of character may be diverted to a hundred 
 dissimilar branches of his subject, but in dealing with 
 them all he should be the servant of the same ideas, 
 the defender of the same principles, the protector of 
 the same interests. The battle rages hither and 
 thither, but none of the issues of it are immaterial to 
 him, and his attitude towards what he regards as the 
 enemies of his cause should never radically alter. 
 His functions should rather become more active and 
 more militant when he feels that his temporary posi- 
 tion deprives him of accidental authority; and even 
 when he admits that the questions he discusses are 
 matters of open controversy, he should, in bringing 
 his ideas to bear upon them, be peculiarly careful to 
 obey the orders of fundamental principles. All this 
 is quite compatible, I hope, with the sauntering s tep, 
 the coii versational tone , the absen ce of ^ll^ pedagogic 
 assertion, which seem to me indispensable in the treat- 
 ment of contemporary themes. 
 
xii Preface 
 
 Of the essays here reprinted, nearly half are prac- 
 tically new to English readers, having been written for 
 an American review, and having been quoted only in 
 fragments on this side of the Atlantic. At the close 
 of the volume I have added a Lucianic sketch, which, 
 when it appeared anonymously in the Fortnightly Reuiew, 
 enjoyed the singular and embarrassing distinction of 
 being attributed, in succession, to four amusing writers, 
 each of whom is deservedly a greater favourite of the 
 public than I am. I have seen this little extravaganza 
 ticketed with such eminent names that I almost 
 hesitate to have to claim it at last as my own. I hope 
 there was none but very innocent fooling in it, and 
 that not a word in it can give anybody pain. I think 
 it was not an unfair representation of what literature 
 in England, from a social point of view, consisted two 
 years ago. Already death has been busy with my 
 ideal Academy, and no dreamer of 1893 could summon 
 together quite so admirable a company as was still 
 citable in 1891. 
 
 London, April iSgs- 
 
Contents 
 
 The Tyranny of the Novel i 
 
 The Influence of Democracy on Literature . . 33 
 
 Has America Produced a Poet? 69 
 
 What is a Great Poet ? gi 
 
 Making a Name in Literature 113 
 
 The Limits of Realism in Fiction . . . . 13S 
 
 Is Verse in Danger? 155 
 
 Tennyson — and Aftek . 175 
 
 Shelley in 1892 199 
 
 Symbolism and M St^phane Mallarm^ . . 217 
 
 Two Pastels : — 
 
 I. Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson as a Poet . 237 
 
 II. Mr. Rudyard Kipling's Short Stories . 255 
 
 An Election at the English Academy . . .295 
 
 Appendices 323 
 
TU following Essays originally afpeand in 'The 
 Contemporary Review,' • The Fortnightly Review,' ' The 
 National Review,' ' The New Review,' • The Forum,' 
 'The Century Magazine,' 'Longman's Magazine,' and 
 'The Academy.' 
 
THE TYRANNY OF THE NOVEL 
 
The Tyranny of the Novel 
 
 A PARISIAN Hebraist has been attracting a 
 moment's attention to his paradoxical and learned 
 self by announcing that strong-hearted and strong- 
 brained nations do not produce novels. This 
 gentleman's soul goes back, no doubt in longing 
 and despair, to the heart of Babylon and the brain 
 of Gath. But if he looks for a modern nation that 
 does not cultivate the novel, he must, I am afraid, 
 go far afield. Finland and Roumania are certainly 
 tainted ; Bohemia lies in the bond of naturalism. 
 Probably Montenegro is the one European nation 
 which this criterion would leave strong in heart and 
 brain. The amusing absurdity of this whim of 
 a pedant may serve to remind us how universal is 
 now the reign of prose fiction. In Scandinavia 
 the drama may demand an equal prominence, but no 
 more. In all other countries the novel takes the 
 largest place, claims and obtains the widest popular 
 
Questions at Issue 
 
 attention, is the admitted tyrant of the whole family 
 of literature. 
 
 This is so universally acknowledged now-a-days 
 that we scarcely stop to ask ourselves whether it 
 is a heaven-appointed condition of things, existing 
 from the earliest times, or whether it is an innova- 
 tion. As a matter of fact, the predominance of the 
 novel is a~veryrecent affair. MosTother classes of 
 literature are as old as the art of verbal expres- 
 sion.: lyrical and narrative poetry, drama, history, 
 philosophy — all these have flourished since the sun- 
 rise of the world's intelligence. But the novel is a 
 creation of the late afternoon of civilisation. In 
 the true sense, though not in the pedantic one, 
 the novel began in France with La Princesse de 
 Cleves, and in England with Pamela — that is to 
 say, in 1677 and in 1740 respectively. Com- 
 pared with the dates of the beginning of philo- 
 sophy and of poetry, these are as yesterday and 
 the day before yesterday. Once started, however, 
 the sapling of prose fiction grew and spread 
 mightily. It took but a few generations to over- 
 shadow all the ancient oaks and cedars around it, 
 and with its monstrous foliage to dominate the 
 forest. 
 
 It would not be uninteresting, if we had space to 
 
The Tyranny of the Novel 5 
 
 do so here, to mark in detail the progress of this 
 astonishing growth. It would be found that, in 
 England at least, it has not been by any means 
 regularly sustained. The original magnificent out- 
 burst of the English novel lasted for exactly a 
 quarter of a century, and closed with the publica- 
 tion of Humphrey Clinker. During this period of 
 excessive fertility in a field hitherto unworked, the 
 novel produced one masterpiece after another, posi- 
 tively pushing itself to the front and securing the 
 best attention of the public at a moment when 
 such men as Gray, Butler, Hume, and War- 
 burton were putting forth contributions to the 
 old and long-established sections of literature. 
 Nay : such was the force of the new kind of 
 writing that the gravity of Johnson and the grace 
 of Goldsmith were seduced into participating in 
 its facile triumphs. 
 
 But, at the very moment when the novel seemed 
 about to sweep everything before it, the wave sub- 
 sided and almost disappeared. For nearly forty 
 years, only one novel of the very highest class was 
 produced in England ; and it might well seem as 
 though prose fiction, after its brief victory, had 
 exhausted its resources, and had sunken for ever 
 into obscurity. During the close of the eighteenth 
 
Questions at Issue 
 
 century and the first decade of the nineteenth, no 
 novel, except Evelina, could pretend to disturb the 
 laurels of Burke, of Gibbon, of Cowper, of Crabbe. 
 The publication of Caleb Williams is a poor event 
 to set against that of the Lyrical Ballads; even 
 Tkalaba the Destroyer seemed a more impressive 
 phenomenon than the Monk. But the second great 
 burgeoning of the novel was at hand. Like the 
 tender ash, it delayed to clothe itself when all the 
 woods of romanticism were green. But in 1811 
 came Sense and Sensibility, in 18 14 Waverley ; and 
 the novel was once more at the head of the literary 
 movement of the time. 
 
 It cannot be said to have stayed there very long. 
 Miss Austen's brief and brilliant career closed in 
 18 1 7. Sir Walter Scott continued to be not far 
 below his best until about ten years later. But a 
 period of two decades included not only the work 
 of these two great novelists, but the best books 
 also of Gait, of Mary Ferrier, of Maturin, of 
 Lockhart, of Banim. It saw the publication 
 of Hajji Baba, of Frankenstein, of Anastatius. 
 Then, for the second time, prose fiction ceased 
 for a while to hold a position of high pre- 
 dominance. But Bulwer Lytton was already at 
 hand; and five or six years of comparative. 
 
The Tyranny of the Novel 7 
 
 obscurity prepared the way for Dickens, Lever, 
 and Lover. Since the memorable year 1837 
 the novel has reigned in English literature ; 
 and its tyranny was never more irresistible 
 than it is to-day. The Victorian has been pecu- 
 liariy the age of the triumph of fiction. 
 
 In the history of France something of the same 
 fluctuation might be perceived, although the pro- 
 duction of novels of a certain literary pretension 
 has been a feature of French much longer and more 
 steadily than of English life. As Mr. Saintsbury 
 has pointed out, " it is particularly noteworthy that 
 every one of the eight names which have been set 
 at the head " of the nineteenth-century literature of 
 France " is the name of a novelist." Since the 
 days of Flaubert — for the last thirty years, that is 
 to say — the novel has assumed a still higher literary 
 function than it held even in the hands of George 
 Sand and Balzac. It has cast aside the pretence 
 of merely amusing, and has affected the airs of 
 guide, philosopher, and friend. M. Zola, justified 
 to some extent by the amazing vogue of his own 
 writings, and the vast area covered by their prestige, 
 has said that the various classes of literary produc- 
 tion are being merged in the novel, and are ulti- 
 mately to disappear within it : 
 
Questions at Issue 
 
 Apollo, Tan, and Love, 
 And even Olympian Jove 
 <^row faint, for killing Truth hath glared on them; 
 Our hills, and seas, and streams. 
 Dispeopled of their dreams, 
 
 become the mere primary material for an endless 
 series of naturalistic stories. And even to-day, 
 when the young David of symbolism rises to smite 
 the Goliath Zola, the smooth stones he takes out of 
 his scrip are works of fiction by Maurice Barrfes and 
 Edouard Rod. The schools pass and nicknames 
 alter; but the novel rules in France as it does 
 elsewhere. 
 
 We have but to look around us at this very 
 moment to see how complete the tyranny of the 
 novel is. If one hundred educated and grown 
 men — not, of course, themselves the authors of 
 other books — were to be asked which are the 
 three most notable works published in London 
 during the season of 1892, would not ninety-and- 
 nine be constrained to answer, with a parrot uni- 
 formity, Tess of the DUrbervilles, David Grieve, The 
 Little Minister ? These are the books which have 
 been most widely discussed, most largely bought, 
 most vehemently praised, most venomously at- 
 tacked. These are the books in which the 
 
The Tyranny of the Novel 9 
 
 " trade " has taken most interest, the vitality of 
 which is most obvious and indubitable. It may 
 be said that the conditions of the winter of 1892 
 were exceptional — that no books of the first class 
 in other branches were produced. This may be 
 true; and yet Mr. Jebb issued a volume of his 
 Sophocles, Mr. William Morris a collection of the 
 lyric poems of years, Mr. Froude his Divorce of 
 Catherine of Aragon, and Mr. Tyndall his New 
 Fragments. If the poets in chorus had blown 
 their silver trumpets and the philosophers their 
 bold bassoons, the result would have been the 
 same : they would have won some respect and a 
 little notice for their performances ; but the novel- 
 ists would have carried away the money and the 
 real human curiosity. Who shall say that Mr. 
 Freeman was not a better historian than Robertson 
 was ? yet did he make ;^4,Soo by his History of 
 Sicily? I wish I could believe it. To-day Mr. 
 Swinburne may publish a new epic, Mr. Gardiner 
 discover to us the head of Charles I. on the scaf- 
 fold, Mr. Herbert Spencer explore a fresh province 
 of sociology, or Mr. Pater analyse devils in the 
 accents of an angel — none of these important 
 occurrences will successfully compete, for more 
 than a few moments, among educated people, with 
 
I o Questions at Issue 
 
 the publication of what is called, in publishers' 
 advertisements, " the new popular and original 
 novel of the hour." We are accustomed to this 
 state of things, and we bow to it. But we may, 
 perhaps, remind ourselves that it is a compara- 
 tively recent condition. It was not so in 1730, 
 nor in 1800, nor even in 1835. 
 
 Momentary aberrations of fashion must not 
 deceive us as to the general tendency of taste. Mr. 
 Hall Caine would have us believe that the public 
 has suddenly gone crazy for stage-plays. " Novels 
 of great strength and originality," says the author 
 of The Scapegoat, " occasionally appear without 
 creating more than a flutter of interest, and, 
 meanwhile, plays of one-tenth their power and 
 novelty are making something like a profound 
 impression." What plays are these? Not the 
 Ollendorfian attitudinisings of M. Maeterlinck, 
 surely ! The fact is that two years ago it would 
 have been impossible for any one to pen that sen- 
 tence of Mr. Caine's, and it is now possible merely 
 because a passion for the literary drama has been 
 flogged into existence by certain able critics. With 
 a limited class, the same class which appreciates 
 poetry, the literary drama may find a welcome ; 
 but to suppose that it competes, or can, in this 
 
The Tyranny of the Novel 1 1 
 
 country, even pretend to compete, with the novel is 
 a delusion, and Mr. Caine may safely abandon his 
 locusts and wild honey. 
 
 That we see around us a great interest in the 
 drama is, of course, a commonplace. But how 
 much of that is literary ? When the delights of the 
 eye are removed from the sum of pleasure, what is 
 left ? Our public is interested in the actors and 
 their art, in the scenery and the furniture, in the 
 notion of large sums of money expended, lost, or 
 won. When all these incidental interests are 
 extracted from the curiosity excited by a play, not 
 very much is left for the purely Uterary portion of 
 it — not nearly so much, at all events, as is awakened 
 by a great novel. After all that has been said 
 about the publication of plays, I expect that the 
 sale of dramatic contemporary literature remains 
 small and uncertain. Mr. Pinero is read ; but one 
 swallow does not make a summer. Where are the 
 dramatic works of Mr. Sydney Grundy, which 
 ought — if Mr. Caine be correct — to be seen on every 
 book-shelf beside the stories of Mr. Hawley 
 Smart ? 
 
 If, however, I venture to emphasise the fact of 
 the tyranny of the novel in our current literature, 
 it is without a murmur that I do so. Like the harm- 
 
12 Questions at Issue 
 
 less bard in Lady Geraldine^s Courtship, I " write 
 no satire," and, what is more, I mean none. It 
 appears to me natural and rational that this par- 
 ticular form of writing should attract more readers 
 than any other. It is so broad and flexible, includes 
 so vast a variety of appeals to the emotions,, makes 
 so few painful demands upon an overstrained atten- 
 tion, that it obviously lays itself out to please the 
 greatest number. For the appreciation of a fine 
 poem, of a learned critical treatise, of a contribu- 
 tion to exact knowledge, peculiar aptitudes are 
 required : the novel is within everybody's range. 
 Experience, moreover, proves that the gentle stimu- 
 lus of reading about the cares, passions, and adven- 
 tures of imaginary personages, and their relations 
 to one another — a mild and irrespansible mirroring 
 of real life on a surface undisturbed by responsibility, 
 or memory, or personal feeling of any kind — is the 
 most restful, the most refreshing, of all excitements 
 which literature produces. 
 
 It is commonly said, in all countries, that women 
 are the chief readers of novels. It may well be 
 that they are the most numerous, and that they 
 read more exhaustively than men, and with less 
 selection. They have, as a rule, more time. The 
 general notion seems to be that girls of from six- 
 
The Tyranny of the Novel 13 
 
 teen to twenty form the main audience of the 
 noveUst. But I am inclined to think that the real 
 audience consists of young married women, sitting 
 at home in the first year of their marriage. They 
 find themselves without any constraint upon their 
 reading: they choose what they will, and they 
 read incessantly. The advent of the first-born 
 baby is awaited in silent drawing-rooms, where 
 through long hours the novelists supply the sole 
 distraction. These young matrons form a much 
 better audience than those timorous circles of 
 flaxen-haired girls, watched by an Argus-eyed 
 mamma, which the English novelist seems to con- 
 sider himself doomed to cater for. I cannot believe 
 that it is anything but a fallacy that young girls do 
 read. They are far too busy with parties and 
 shopping, chatting and walking, the eternal music 
 and the eternal tennis. Middle-aged people in the 
 country, who are cut off from much society, and 
 elderly ladies, whose activities are past, and who 
 like to resume the illusions of youth, are far more 
 assiduous novel-readers than girls. 
 
 But, if we take these and all other married and 
 unmarried women into consideration, there is still 
 apparently an exaggeration in saying that it is they 
 who make the novelist's reputation. Men read 
 
14 Questions at Issue 
 
 novels a great deal more than is supposed, and it is 
 probaby from men that the first-class novel receives 
 its imprimatur. Men have made Mr. Thomas 
 Hardy, who owes nothing to the fair sex; if 
 women read him now, it is because the men have 
 told them that they must. Occasionally we see a 
 very original writer who decidedly owes his fame to 
 the plaudits of the ladies. M. Paul Bourget is the 
 most illustrious example that occurs to the memory. 
 But such instances are rare, and it is usually 
 to the approval of male readers that eminent 
 novelists owe that prestige which ultimately makes 
 them the favourites of the women. Not all men 
 are pressed by the excessive agitations of business 
 I life which are habitually attributed to their sex. 
 Even those who are most busy find time to read, 
 and we were lately informed that among the most 
 constant and assiduous students of new novels 
 were Lord Tennyson and Mr. Gladstone. Every 
 story-teller, I think, ought to write as though 
 he believed himself addressing such conspicuous 
 veterans. 
 
 As I say, I do not revolt against the supremacy 
 of the novel. I acknowledge too heavy a debt of 
 gratitude to my great contemporaries to assume 
 any but a thankful attitude towards them. In my 
 
The Tyranny of the Novel 15 
 
 dull and weary hours each has come like the angel 
 Israfel, and has invited me to listen to the beating of 
 his heart, be it lyre or guitar, a solemn instrument 
 or a gay one. I should be instantly bankrupt if 
 I sought to repay to Mr. Meredith or Mr. Besant, 
 Mr. Hardy or Mr. Norris, Mr. Stevenson or Mr. 
 Kipling— to name no others — one-tenth part of the 
 pleasure which, in varied quantity and quality, the 
 stories of each have given me. I admit (for which 
 I shall be torn in pieces) that the ladies please me 
 less, with some exceptions ; but that is because, 
 since the days of the divine Mrs. Gaskell, they have 
 been so apt to be either too serious or not serious 
 enough. I suppose that the composition of The 
 Daisy Chain and of Donovan serves some excellent 
 purpose ; doubtless these books are useful to great 
 growing girls. But it is not to such stories as 
 these that I owe any gratitude, and it is not to 
 their authors that I address the presumptuous 
 remarks which follow. 
 
 A question which constantly recurs to my mind 
 is this : Having secured the practical monopoly of 
 literature, having concentrated public attention on 
 their wares, what do the novelists propose to do 
 next ? To what use will they put the unprece- 
 dented opportunity thrown in their way? It is 
 
1 6 Questions at Issue 
 
 quite plain that to a certain extent the material out 
 of which the English novel has been constructed is 
 in danger of becoming exhausted. Why do the 
 American novelists inveigh against plots ? Not, 
 we may be sure, through any inherent tenderness 
 of conscience, as they would have us believe ; but 
 because their eminently sane and somewhat timid 
 natures revolt against the eifort of inventing what 
 is extravagant. But all the obvious plots, all the 
 stories which are not in some degree extravagant, 
 seem to have been told already, and for a writer 
 with the temperament of Mr. Howells there is 
 nothing left but the careful portraiture of a small 
 portion of the limitless field of ordinary humdrum 
 existence. So long as this is fresh, this also may 
 amuse and please ; to the practitioners of this kind 
 of work it seems as though the infinite prairie of 
 life might be surveyed thus for centuries, acre by 
 acre. But that is not possible. A very little while 
 suffices to show that in this direction also the 
 material is promptly exhausted. Novelty, fresh- 
 ness, and excitement are to be sought for at all 
 hazards, and where can they be found ? 
 
 The novelists hope many things from that happy 
 system of nature which supplies them, year by year, 
 with fresh generations of the ingenuous young. 
 
The Tyranny of the Novel 17 
 
 The procession of adolescence moves on and on, 
 and the front rank of it, for a month or a year, is 
 duped by the novelist's report of that astonishing 
 phenomenon, the passion of love. In a certain 
 sense, we might expect to be tired of love-stories 
 as soon as, and not before, we grow tired of the 
 ever-recurring March mystery of primroses and 
 daffodils. Each generation takes its tale of love 
 under the hawthorn-tree as something quite new, 
 peculiar to itself, not to be comprehended by its 
 elders ; and the novelist pipes as he will to this 
 idyllic audience, sure of pleasing, if he adapt 
 himself never so little to their habits and the idio- 
 syncrasies of their time. 
 
 That theory would work well enough if the 
 novelist held the chair of Erotics at the University 
 of Life, and might blamelessly repeat the same 
 (or very slightly modified) lectures to none but 
 the students of each successive yean But, un- 
 fortunately, we who long ago took our degree, 
 who took it, perhaps, when the Professor was 
 himself in pinafores, also continue to attend his 
 classes. We are hardly to be put off with the 
 old, old commonplaces about hearts and darts. 
 Yet our adult acquiescence is necessary for the 
 support of the Professor. How is he to freshen 
 
i8 Questions at Issue 
 
 up his oft-repeated course of lectures to suit our 
 jaded appetites ? 
 
 It would be curious to calculate how many tales 
 of love must have been told since the vogue of the 
 modern story began. Three hundred novels a year 
 is, I believe, the average product of the English 
 press. In each of these there has been at least 
 one pair of lovers, and generally there have been 
 several pairs. It would be a good question to set 
 in a mathematical examination : What is the 
 probable number of young persons who have con- 
 ducted one another to the altar in English fiction 
 during the last hundred years ? It is almost 
 terrible to think of this multitude of fictitious 
 love-makings : 
 
 For the lovers of years meet and gather ; 
 
 The sound of them all grotos like thunder : 
 
 O into what bosom, I wonder. 
 Is poured the whole passion of years ! 
 
 One would be very sorry to have the three 
 hundred of one year poured into one's own mature 
 bosom. But how curious is the absolute unani- 
 mity of it all ! Thousands and thousands of 
 books, every one of them, without exception, 
 turning upon the attraction of Edwin to Angelina, 
 
The Tyranny of the Novel 19 
 
 exactly as though no other subject on earth 
 interested a single human being ! The novels in 
 which love has not formed a central feature are 
 so few that I suspect that they could be counted 
 on the fingers of one hand. At this moment, I 
 •can but recall a single famous novel in which love 
 has no place. This is, of course, VAbbe Tigrane, 
 ■that delightful story in which all the interest 
 revolves around the intrigues of two priestly 
 factions in a provincial cathedral. But, although 
 M. Ferdinand Fabre achieved so great a success 
 in this book, and produced an acknowledged 
 masterpiece, he never ventured to repeat the 
 ■experiment. Eros revels in the pages of all his 
 ■other stories. 
 
 This would be the opportunity to fight the 
 battle of the novelists against Mrs. Grundy. But 
 I am not incUned to waste ink on that conceded 
 cause. After the reception of books Kke Tess of 
 the UUrbervilles and even David Grieve, it is 
 plain that the English novelist, who cares and dares, 
 may say almost anjrthing he or she likes without 
 calling flame out of heaven upon his head. There 
 has been a great reform in this respect since the 
 days when our family friend Mr. Punch hazarded 
 bis very existence by referring, in grimmest irony, 
 
26 Questions at Issue 
 
 to the sufferings of "the gay." We do not 
 want to claim the right, which the French have 
 so recklessly abused, of describing at will, and 
 secure against all censure, the brutal, the abnormal 
 and the horrible. No doubt a silly prudishness 
 yet exists. There are still clergymen's wives 
 who write up indignantly from The Vicarage, 
 Little Pedlington. I have just received an epistle 
 from such an one, telling me that certain poor 
 productions I am editing "make young hearts 
 acquainted with vice, and put hell-fire in their 
 hearts." " Woe unto you in your evil work," 
 says this lady, doubtless a most sincere and 
 conscientious creature, but a little behind the 
 times. Of her and her race individually, I wish 
 to say nothing but what is kind ; but I confess 
 I am glad to know that the unreflecting spirit 
 they represent is passing away. It is passing 
 away so rapidly that there is really no need to 
 hearten the novelists against it. I am weary to 
 death of the gentleman who is always telling 
 us what a splendid novel he would write, if the 
 publishers would only allow him to be naughty. 
 Let him be bold and naughty, and we will see. 
 If he is so poor-spirited as to be afraid to say 
 what he feels he ought to say because of this 
 
The Tyranny of the Novel 21 
 
 kind of criticism, his exposition of the verities 
 is not likely to be of very high value. 
 
 But I should like to ask our friends the leading 
 novelists whether they do not see their way to 
 enlarging a little the sphere of their labours. 
 What is the use of this tyranny which they 
 wield, if it does not enable them to treat life 
 broadly and to treat it whole ? The varieties of 
 amatory intrigue form a fascinating subject, which 
 is not even yet exhausted. But, surely, all life 
 is not love-making. Even the youngest have to 
 deal with other interests, although this may be 
 the dominant one ; while, as we advance in years, 
 Venus ceases to be even the ruling divinity. 
 Why should there not be novels written for 
 middle-aged persons ? Has the struggle for 
 existence a charm only in its reproductive 
 aspects ? If every one of us regards his or 
 her life seriously, with an absolute and unflinch- 
 ing frankness, it will be admitted that love, 
 extended so as to include all its forms— its 
 sympathetic, its imaginative, its repressed, as 
 well as its fulfilled and acknowledged, forms — 
 takes a place far more restricted than the formulae 
 of the novelist would lead the inhabitant of some 
 other planet to conjecture. 
 
22 Questions at Issue 
 
 Unless the novelists do contrive to enlarge 
 their borders, and take in more of life, that mis- 
 fortune awaits them which befell their ancestors 
 just before the death of Scott. About the year 
 1830 there was a sudden crash of the novel. 
 The public found itself abandoned to Lady Bles- 
 sington and Mr. Plumer Ward, and it abruptly 
 closed its account with the novelists. The large 
 prices which had been, for twenty years past, 
 paid for novels were no longer offered. The 
 book-clubs throughout the kingdom collapsed, 
 or else excluded novels. When fiction re-ap- 
 peared, after this singular epoch of eclipse, it 
 had learned its lesson, and the new writers 
 were men who put into their work their best 
 observation and ripest experience. 
 
 It does not appear that in the thirties any 
 one understood what was happening. The stuff 
 produced by the novelists was so ridiculous and 
 ignoble that " the nonsinse of that divil of a 
 Bullwig" seemed absolutely unrivalled in its com- 
 parative sublimity, although these were the days 
 of Ernest Maltravers. It never occurred to the 
 authors when the public suddenly declined to read 
 their books (it read " BuUwig's," in the lack of 
 anything else) that the fault was theirs. The 
 
The Tyranny of the Novel 23 
 
 same excuses were made that are made now, — 
 " necessary to write down to a wide audience ; " 
 " obliged to supply the kind of article demanded ; " 
 " women the only readers to be catered for ; " 
 " mammas so solicitous for the purity of what is 
 laid before their daughters." And the crash came. 
 The crash will come again, if the novelists do 
 not take care. The same silly piping of the 
 loves of the drawing-room, the same obsequious 
 attitude towards a supposititious public clamour- 
 ing for the commonplace, inspire the majority of 
 the novel-writers of to-day. Happily, we have, 
 what our fathers in 1835 had not, half a dozen 
 careful and vigorous men of letters who write, 
 not what the foolish publishers ask for, but what 
 they themselves choose to give. The future 
 rests with these few recognised masters of fiction, 
 and with their successors, the vigorous younger 
 men who are preparing to take their place. What 
 are these novehsts going to do ? They were set 
 down to farm the one hundred acres of an estate 
 called Life, and because one corner of it — the 
 two or three acres hedged about, and called the 
 kitchen-garden of Love — offered peculiar attrac- 
 tions, and was very easy to cultivate, they have 
 neglected the other ninety-seven acres. The 
 
24 Questions at Issue 
 
 result is that by over-pressing their garden, and 
 forcing crop after crop out of it, it is well-nigh 
 exhausted, and will soon refuse to respond to 
 the incessant hoe and spade ; while, all the time, 
 the rest of the estate, rich and almost virgin 
 soil, is left to cover itself with the weeds of 
 newspaper police-reports. 
 
 It is supposed that to describe one of the posi- 
 tive employments of life, — a business or a pro- 
 fession, for example, — would alienate the tender 
 reader, and check that circulation about which 
 novelists talk as nervously as if they were deli- 
 cate invalids. But what evidence is there to 
 show that an attention to real things does frighten 
 away the novel reader? The experiments which 
 have been made in this country to widen the field 
 of fiction in one direction, that of religious and 
 moral speculation, have not proved unfortunate. 
 What was the source of the great popular suc- 
 cess of John Inglesant and then of Robert Elsmere, 
 if not the intense delight of readers in being 
 admitted, in a story, to a wider analysis of the 
 interior workings of the mind than is compatible 
 with the mere record of the billing and cooing of 
 the callow young ? We are afraid of words and 
 titles. We are afraid of the word " psychology," 
 
The Tyranny of the Novel 25 
 
 and, indeed, we have seen follies committed in 
 its name. But the success of the books I have 
 just mentioned was due to their psychology, to 
 their analysis of the effect of associations and 
 sentiments on a growing mind. To make such 
 studies of the soul even partially interesting, a 
 great deal of knowledge, intuition, and workman- 
 like care must be expended. The novelist must 
 himself be acquainted with something of the 
 general life of man. 
 
 But the interior life of the soul is, after all, a 
 very much less interesting study to an ordinarily 
 healthy person than the exterior. It is surprising 
 how little our recent novelists have taken this 
 into consideration. One reason, I cannot doubt, 
 is that they write too early and they write too 
 fast. Fielding began with Joseph Andrews, when 
 he was thirty-five ; seven years later he pub- 
 hshed Tom Jones; during the remainder of his 
 life, which closed when he was forty-seven, he 
 composed one more novel. The consequence is 
 that into these three books he was able to pour 
 the ripe knowledge of an all-accomplished student 
 of human nature. But our successful novelist of 
 to-day begins when he is two- or three-and- 
 twenty. He "catches on," as they say, and he 
 
26 Questions at Issue 
 
 becomes a laborious professional writer. He toils 
 at his novels as if he were the manager of a 
 bank or the captain of an ocean steamer. In 
 one narrow groove he slides up and down, up 
 and down, growing infinitely skilful at his task 
 of making bricks out of straw. He finishes the 
 last page of " The Writhing Victim " in the 
 morning, lunches at his club, has a nap ; and, 
 after dinner, writes the first page of " The 
 Swart Sombrero." He cannot describe a trade 
 or a profession, for he knows none but his own. 
 He has no time to look at life, and he goes on 
 weaving fancies out of the ever-dwindling stores 
 of his childish and boyish memories. As these 
 grow exhausted, his works get more and more 
 shadowy, till at last even the long-suffering public 
 that once loved his merits, and then grew 
 tolerant of his tricks, can endure him no longer. 
 
 The one living novelist who has striven to give 
 a large, competent, and profound view of the move- 
 ment of life is M. Zola. When we have said the 
 worst of the Rougon-Macquart series, when we have 
 admitted the obvious faults of these books — their 
 romantic fallacies on the one hand, their cold 
 brutalities on the other — it must be admitted that 
 they present the results of a most laudable attempt 
 
The Tyranny of the Novel 27 
 
 to cultivate the estate outside the kitchen-garden. 
 Hardly one of the main interests of the modern 
 man has been neglected by M. Zola, and there is 
 no doubt at all that to the future student of nine- 
 teenth-century manners his books will have an 
 interest outweighing that of all other contemporary 
 novels. An astonishing series of panoramas he 
 has unrolled before us. Here is Le Ventre de 
 Paris, describing the whole system by which a vast 
 modern city is daily supplied with food ; here is 
 Au Bonheur des Dames, the romance of a shop, 
 which is pushed upwards and outwards by the 
 energy of a single ambitious tradesman, until it 
 swamps all its neighbours, and governs the trade 
 of a district; here is U Argent, in which, with 
 infinite pains and on a colossal scale, the passions 
 which move in la haute finance are analysed, and a 
 great battle of the money-world chronicled ; here, 
 above all, is Germinal, that unapproachable picture 
 of the agony and stress of life in a great mining 
 community, with a description of the processes so 
 minute and so technical that this novel is quoted 
 by experts as the best existing record of conditions 
 which are already obsolete. 
 
 In these books of M. Zola's, as everyone knows, 
 successive members of a certain family stand out 
 
28 Questions at Issue 
 
 against a background of human masses in incessant 
 movement. The peculiar characteristic of this 
 novelist is that he enables us to see why these 
 masses are moved, and in what direction. Other 
 writers vaguely tell us that the hero "proceeded 
 to his daily occupation," if, indeed, they deign to 
 allow that he had an occupation, M. Zola tells us 
 what that occupation was, and describes the 
 nature of it carefully and minutely. More than 
 this : he shows us how it affected the hero's, 
 character, how it brought him into contact with 
 others, in what way it represented his share of the 
 universal struggle for existence. So far from the 
 employment being a thing to be slurred over or 
 dimly alluded to, M. Zola loves to make that the 
 very hero of his piece, a blind and vast commercial 
 monster, a huge all-embracing machine, in whose 
 progress the human persons are hurried helplessly 
 along, in whose iron wheels their passions and 
 their hopes are crushed. He is enabled to do 
 this by the exceptional character of his genius, 
 which is realistic to excess in its power of retaining 
 and repeating details, and romantic, also to an 
 , extreme, in its power of massing these details on 
 a huge scale, in vast and harmoniously-balanced 
 compositions. 
 
The Tyranny of the Novel 29 
 
 I would not be misunderstood, even by the most 
 hasty reader, to recommend an imitation of M. Zola. 
 What suits his peculiarly-constituted genius might 
 ill accord with the characteristics of another. Nor 
 do I mean to say that we are entirely without some- 
 thing analogous in the writings of the more in- 
 telligent of our later novelists. The study of the 
 Dorsetshire dairy-farms in Mr. Hardy's superb 
 Tess of the UUrbervilles is of the highest value, 
 and more thorough and intelligible than what we 
 enjoyed in The Woodlanders, the details of the 
 ^pie-culture in the same county. To turn to a 
 totally diflFerent school : Mr. Hall Caine's Scapegoat 
 is a very interesting experiment in fresh fields of 
 thought and experience, more happily conceived, if 
 I may be permitted to say so, than fortunately 
 executed, though even in execution far above the 
 ruck of popular novels. A new Cornish stoiy, 
 caUed Inconsequent Lives, by that very promising 
 young story-teller, Mr. Pearce, seemed, when it 
 opened, to be about to give us just the vivid 
 information we want about the Newlyn pilchard- 
 fishery ; but the novelist grew timid, and forebore 
 to fill in his sketch. The experiments of Mr. 
 George Gissing and of Mr. George Moore deserve 
 sympathetic acknowledgment. These are instances 
 
30 Questions at Issue 
 
 in which, occasionally, or fantastically, or imperfectly, 
 the real facts of life have been dwelt upon in 
 recent fiction. But when we have mentioned or 
 thought of a few exceptions, to what inanities do 
 we not presently descend ! 
 
 If we could suddenly arrive from another planet, 
 and read a cluster of novels from Mudie's, without 
 any previous knowledge of the class, we should be 
 astonished at the conventionality, the narrowness, 
 the monotony. All I ask for is a larger study of 
 life. Have the stress and turmoil of a successful 
 political career no charm ? Why, if novels of the 
 shop and the counting-house be considered sordid, 
 can our novelists not describe the life of a sailor, 
 of a gamekeeper, of a railway-porter, of a civil 
 engineer? What capital central figures for a story 
 would be the whip of a leading hunt, the foreman 
 of a colliery, the master of a fishing smack, or a 
 speculator on the Stock Exchange ! It will be 
 suggested that persons engaged in one or other of 
 these professions are commonly introduced into 
 current fiction, and that I am proposing as a 
 novelty what is amply done already. My reply is 
 that our novelists may indeed present to us a 
 personage who is called a stoker or a groom, a 
 secretary of state or a pin-maker, but that, 
 
The Tyranny of the Novel 31 
 
 practically, they merely write these denominations 
 clearly on the breasts of lay-figures. For all the 
 enlightenment we get into the habits of action and 
 habits of thought entailed by the occupation of 
 each, the fisherman might be the groom and the 
 pin-maker the stock-broker. It is more than this 
 that I ask for. I want to see the man in his life. 
 I am tired of the novelist's portrait of a gentleman, 
 with gloves and hat, leaning against a pillar, upon 
 a vague landscape background. I want the gentle- 
 man as he appears in a snap-shot photograph, 
 with his every-day expression on his face, and the 
 localities in which he spends his days accurately 
 visible around him. I cannot think that the 
 commercial and professional aspects of life are 
 unworthy of the careful attention of the novelist, or 
 that he would fail to be rewarded by a larger and 
 more interested audience for his courage in dealing 
 closely with them. At all events, if it is too late 
 to ask our accepted tyrants of the novel to enlarge 
 their borders, may we not, at all events, entreat 
 their heirs-apparent to do so ? 
 
 JS92 
 
THE INFLUENCE OF DEMOCRACY 
 ON LITERATURE 
 
The Influence of Democracy on 
 Literature 
 
 It is not desirable to bring the element of party 
 politics into the world of books. But it is difficult 
 to discuss the influence of democracy on literature 
 without borrowing from'the Radicals one of the 
 wisest and truest of their watchwords. It is of no 
 use, as they remind us, to be afraid of the people. 
 We have this huge mass of individuals around us, 
 each item in the coagulation struggling to retain and 
 to exercise its liberty; and, while we are perfectly 
 free to like or dislike the condition of things which 
 has produced this phenomenon, to be alarmed, to 
 utter shrieks of fright at it, is to resign all pretension 
 to be listened to. We may believe that the whole 
 concern is going to the dogs, or we may be amusing 
 ourselves by printing Cook's tickets for a monster 
 excursion to Boothia Felix or other provinces of 
 
36 Questions at Issue 
 
 Utopia ; to be frightened at it, or to think that we 
 can do any good by scolding it or binding it with 
 chains of tow, is simply silly. It moves, and it 
 carries the Superior Person with it and in it, like a 
 mote of dust. 
 
 In considering, therefore, the influence of de- 
 mocracy on literature, it seems worse than useless 
 to exhort or persuade. All that can in any degree 
 be interesting must be to study, without prejudice, 
 the signs of the times, to compare notes about the 
 weather, and cheerfully tap the intellectual baro- 
 meter. This form of inquiry is rarely attempted in 
 a perfectly open spirit, partly, no doubt, because it 
 is unquestionably one which it is difficult to carry 
 through. It is wonderfully easy to proclaim the 
 advent of a literary Ragnarok, to say that poetry is 
 dead, the novel sunken into its dotage, all good 
 writing obsolete, and the reign of darkness begun. 
 There are writers who do this, and who round off 
 their periods by attributing the whole condition to 
 the democratic spirit, like the sailor in that delightful 
 old piece played at the Strand Theatre, who used 
 to sum up the misfortunes of a lifetime with the 
 recurrent refrain, " It's all on account of Eliza." 
 
 The " uncreating words " of these pessimists are 
 dispiriting for the moment, but they mean nothing. 
 
The Influence of Democracy 37 
 
 Those of the optimist do not mean much either. A 
 little more effort is required to produce his rose- 
 coloured picture, but we are not really persuaded 
 that because the brown marries the blonde all is for 
 the best in the best of all possible worlds. Nor is 
 much gained by prophecy. We have been listening 
 to a gentleman, himself a biographer and an historian, 
 who predicts, with babe-like naivete, that all literary 
 persons will presently be sent by the democracy to 
 split wood and draw water, except, perhaps, " the 
 historian or biographer." In this universal splitting 
 of wood, some heads, which now think themselves 
 mighty clever, may come to be rather disastrously 
 cracked. It was not Camille Desmoulins whom 
 Fate selected to enter into his own Promised Land 
 of emancipated literature. 
 
 We gain little by a comparison of our modern 
 situation with that of the ancient commonwealths. 
 The parallel between the state of literature in our 
 world and that in Athens or Florence is purely 
 academic. Whatever the form of government, 
 literature has always been aristocratic, or at least 
 oligarchic. It has been encouraged or else tolerated ; 
 even when it has been independent, its self-con- 
 gratulations on its independence have shown how 
 temporary that liberty was, and how imminent the 
 
38 Questions at Issue 
 
 relapse into bondage. The peculiar protection given 
 to the arts by enlightened commonwealths sur- 
 rounded by barbaric tyrannies was often of a most 
 valuable character, but it resembled nothing which 
 can recur in the modern world. The stimulus it 
 gave to the creative temperament was due in great 
 measure to its exclusiveness, to the fact that the 
 world was shut out, and the appeal for sympathy 
 made within a restricted circle. The Republic was 
 a family of highly trained intelligences, barred and 
 bolted against the vast and stupid world outside. 
 Never can this condition be re-established. The 
 essence of democracy is that it knows no narrower 
 bonds than those of the globe, and its success is 
 marked by the destruction of those very ramparts 
 which protected and inspirited the old intellectual 
 free States. 
 
 The purest and most elevated form of literature, 
 the rarest and, at its best, the most valuable, is 
 poetry. If it could be shown that the influence of 
 the popular advance in power has been favourable 
 to the growth of great verse, then all the rest might 
 be taken for granted. Unfortunately, there are 
 many circumstances which interfere with our vision, 
 and make it exceedingly difficult to give an opinion 
 on this point. Victor Hugo never questioned that 
 
The Influence of Democracy 39 
 
 the poetical element was needed, but he had occa- 
 sional qualms about its being properly demanded. 
 
 Teuples ! ecoutez le poete. 
 
 Scout ez le riveur sacre ; 
 Dans voire nuit, sans lui complete, 
 Lui seul a le front eclaire I 
 
 he shouted, but the very energy of the exclamation 
 suggests a doubt in his own mind as to its com- 
 plete acceptability. In this country, the democracy 
 has certainly crowded around one poet. It has 
 always appeared to me to be one of the most 
 singular, as it is one of the most encouraging 
 features of our recent literary history, that Tennyson 
 should have held the extraordinary place in the 
 affections of our people which has now been his 
 for nearly half a century. That it should be so 
 delicate and so iEolian a music, so little affected by 
 contemporary passion, so disdainful of adventitious 
 aids to popularity, which above all others has 
 attracted the universal ear, and held it without 
 producing weariness or satiety; this, I confess, 
 appears to me very marvellous. Some of the 
 Laureate's best-loved lyrics have been before the 
 public for more than sixty years. Cowley is one 
 of the few English poets who have been, during 
 
40 Questions at Issue 
 
 their lifetime, praised as much as Tennyson has 
 been, yet where in 1720 was the fame of Cowley ? 
 Where in the France of to-day are the Meditations 
 and Harmonies of Lamartine ? 
 
 If, then, we might take Tennyson as an example 
 of the result of the action of democracy upon litera- 
 ture, we might indeed congratulate ourselves. But 
 a moment's reflection shows that to do so is to put 
 the cart before the horse. The wide appreciation 
 of such delicate and penetrating poetry is, indeed, 
 an example of the influence of hterature on demo- 
 cracy, but hardly of democracy on literature. We 
 may examine the series of Tennyson's volumes with 
 care, and scarcely discover a copy of verses in which 
 he can be detected as directly urged to expression 
 by the popular taste. This prime favourite of the 
 educated masses never courted the public, nor strove 
 to serve it. He wrote to please himself, to win the 
 applause of the " little clan," and each round of 
 salvos from the world outside seemed to startle him 
 in his obstinate retirement. If it grew easier and 
 easier for him to consent to please the masses, it 
 was because he familiarised them more and more 
 with his peculiar accent. He led literary taste, he 
 did not dream of following it. 
 
 What is true of Tennyson is true of most of our 
 
The Influence of Democracy 41 
 
 recent poets. There is one exception, however, and 
 that a very curious one. The single EngUsh poet 
 of high rank whose works seem to me to be dis- 
 tinctly affected by the democratic spirit, nay, to be 
 the direct outcome of the influence of democracy, is 
 Robert Browning. It has scarcely been sufficiently 
 noted by those who criticise the style of that great 
 writer that the entire tone of his writings introduces 
 something hitherto unobserved in British poetry. 
 That something is the repudiation of the recognised 
 oligarchic attitude of the poet in his address to the 
 public. It is not that he writes or does not write 
 of the poor. It is a curious mistake to expect the 
 democratic spirit to be always on its knees adoring 
 the proletariat. To the true democracy all are 
 veritably of equal interest, and even a belted 
 earl may be a man and a brother. In his poems 
 Robert Browning spoke as though he felt himself to 
 be walking through a world of equals, all interest- 
 ing to him, all worthy of study. This is the secret 
 of his abrupt familiar appeal, his " Dare I trust the 
 same to you ? " " Look out, see the gipsy ! " 
 " You would fain be kinglier, say, than I am ? " the 
 incessant confidential aside to a cloud of unnamed 
 witnesses, the conversational tone, things all of 
 which were before his time unknown in serious 
 
42 Questions at Issue 
 
 verse. Browning is hail-fellow-well-met with all 
 the world, from queen to peasant, and half of what 
 is called his dramatic faculty is merely the result of 
 his genius for making friends with every species of 
 mankind. 
 
 With this exception, however, the principal 
 poetical writers of our time seem to be unaffected 
 by the pressure of the masses around them. They 
 select their themes, remain true to the principles of 
 composition which they prefer, concern themselves 
 with the execution of their verses, and regard the 
 opinion of the millions as little or even less than 
 their great forerunners did that of emperor or 
 prince-bishop. Being born with quick intelligences 
 into an age burdened by social difficulties, these 
 latter occasionally interest them very acutely, and 
 they write about them, not, I think, pressed into 
 that service by the democratic spirit, but yielding to 
 the attraction of what is moving and picturesque. 
 A wit has lately said of the most popular, the most 
 democratic of living French poets, M. Francois 
 Coppde, that his blazon is " des rimes riches sur 
 la blouse proldtaire." But the central fact to a 
 critic about M. Copp^e's verse is, not the accident 
 that he writes about poor people, but the essential 
 point that his rhymes are richer and his verse more 
 
The Influence of Democracy 43 
 
 faultless than those of any of his contemporaries. 
 We may depend upon it that democracy has had 
 no effect on his prosody, and the rest is a mere 
 matter of selection. 
 
 The fact seems to be that the more closely we 
 examine the highest examples of the noblest class 
 of literature the more we become persuaded that 
 democracy has scarcely had any effect upon them 
 at all. It has not interfered with the poets, least 
 of all has it dictated to them. It has listened to 
 them with respect ; it has even contemplated their 
 eccentricities with admiration ; it had tried, with its 
 millions of untrained feet, to walk in step with them. 
 And when we turn from poetry to the best science, 
 the best history, the best fiction, we find the same 
 phenomenon. Democracy has been stirred to its 
 depths by the writings of Darwin ; but who can 
 trace in those writings the smallest concession to 
 the judgment or desire of the masses ? Darwin 
 became convinced of certain theories. To the vast 
 mass of the public these theories were incredible, 
 unpalatable, impious. With immense patience, 
 without emphasis of any kind, he proceeded to sub- 
 stantiate his views, to enlarge his exposition ; and 
 gradually the cold body of democratic opposition 
 melted around that fervent atom of heat, and, in 
 
44 Questions at Issue 
 
 response to its unbroken radiation, became warm 
 itself. All that can be said is that the new demo- 
 cratic condition is a better conductor than the old 
 oligarchical one was. Darwin produces his effect more 
 steadily and rapidly than Galileo or Spinoza, but not 
 more surely, with exactly as little aid from without. 
 As far, then, as the summits of literature are 
 concerned — the great masters of style, the great 
 discoverers, the great intellectual illuminators — it 
 may be said that the influence of democracy upon 
 them is almost nil. It affords them a wider hearing, 
 and therefore a prompter recognition. It gives 
 them more readers, and therefore a more direct 
 arrival at that degree of material comfort necessary 
 for the proper conduct of their investigations, or 
 the full polish of their periods. It may spoil them 
 with its flatteries, or diminish their merit by 
 seducing them to over-production ; but this is a 
 question between themselves and their own souls. 
 A syndicate of newspapers, or the editor of a 
 magazine may tempt a writer of to-day, as Villon 
 was tempted with the wine-shop, or Coleridge with 
 laudanum ; but that is not the fault of the demo- 
 cracy. Nor, if a writer of real power is neglected, 
 are people more or less to blame in 1892 than they 
 were for letting Otway stai-ve two hundred years 
 
The Influence of Democracy 45 
 
 ago. Some people, beloved of the gods, cannot 
 be explained to mankind by king or caucus. 
 
 So far, therefore, as our present experience 
 goes, we may relinquish the common fear that the 
 summits of literature will be submerged by demo- 
 cracy. When the new spirit first began to be 
 studied, many whose judgment on other points was 
 sound enough were confident that the instinctive 
 programme of the democratic spirit was to prevent 
 intellectual capacity of every kind from developing, 
 for fear of the ascendency which it would exercise. 
 This is communism, and means democracy pushed 
 to an impossible extremity, to a point from which 
 it must rebound. No doubt, there is always a 
 chance that a disturbance of the masses may for a 
 moment wash over and destroy some phase of real 
 intellectual distinction, just as it may sweep away, 
 also for a moment, other personal conditions. But 
 it looks as though the individuality would always 
 reassert itself. The crowd that smashed the 
 porcelain in the White House to celebrate the 
 election of President Andrew Jackson had to buy 
 more to take its place. The White House did not 
 continue, even under Jackson, to subsist without 
 porcelain. In the same way, edicts may be passed 
 by communal councils forbidding citizens to worship 
 
46 Questions at Issue 
 
 the idols which the booksellers set up, and even that 
 consummation may be reached, to which a prophet 
 of our own day looks forward, when we shall all be 
 forced by the police to walk hand in hand with 
 " the craziest sot in the village " as our friend and 
 equal ; none the less will human nature, at the 
 earliest opportunity, throw off the bondage, and 
 openly prefer Darwin and Tennyson to that 
 engaging rustic. Indeed, all the signs of the 
 times go to suggest that the completer the demo- 
 cracy becomes, the vaster the gap will be in 
 popular honour between the great men of letters 
 and " the craziest sot in the village." It is quite 
 possible that the tyranny of extreme intellectual 
 popularity may prove as tiresome as other and 
 older tyrannies were. But that's another story, as 
 the new catchword tells us. 
 
 Literature, however, as a profession or a calling, 
 is not confined to the writings of the five or six men 
 who, in each generation, represent what is most 
 brilliant and most independent. From the leaders, 
 in their indisputable greatness, the intellectual 
 hierarchy descends to the lowest and broadest 
 class of workers who in any measure hang on to 
 the skirts of literature, and eke out a living by 
 writing. It is in the middle ranks of this vast 
 
The Influence of Democracy 47 
 
 pyramid that we should look to see most distinctly 
 the signs of the influence of democracy,. We 
 shall not find them in the broad and featureless 
 residuum any more than in the strongly indivi- 
 dualised summits. But we ought to discover them 
 in the writers who have talent enough to keep them 
 aloft, yet not enough to make them indifferent to 
 outer support. Here, where all is lost or gained 
 by a successful appeal to the crowd as it hastens 
 by, we might expect to see very distinctly the 
 effects of democracy, and here, perhaps, if we look 
 closely, we may see them. 
 
 It appears to me that even here it is not so easy 
 as one would imagine that it would be to pin 
 distinct charges to the sleeve of the much-abused 
 democracy. Let us take the bad points first. The 
 enlargement of the possible circle of an author's 
 readers may awaken in the breast of a man who 
 has gained a little success, the desire to arrive at a 
 greater one in another field, for which he is really 
 not so well equipped. An author may have a 
 positive talent for church history, and turning from 
 it, through cupidity, to fiction, may, by addressing 
 a vastly extended public, make a little more money 
 by his bad stories than he was able to make by 
 his good hagiology, and so act to the detriment 
 
48 Questions at Issue 
 
 of literature. Again, an author who has made a 
 hit with a certain theme, or a certain treatment of 
 that theme, may be held nailed down to it by the 
 public long after he has exhausted it and it has 
 exhausted him. Again, the complaisance of the 
 public, and the loyal eagerness with which it cries 
 " Give, give," to a writer that has pleased it, may 
 induce that writer to go on talking long after he 
 has anything to say, and so conduce to the water- 
 ing of the milk of wit. Or — and this is more 
 subtle and by no means so easy to observe — the 
 pressure of commonplace opinion, constantly check- 
 ing a writer when he shelves away towards either 
 edge of the trodden path of mediocrity, may keep 
 him from ever adding to the splendid originalities 
 of literature. This shows itself in the disease 
 which we may call Mudieitis, the inflammation 
 produced by the fear that what you are inspired 
 to say, and know you ought to say, will be un- 
 palatable to the circulating libraries, that "the wife 
 of a country incumbent," that terror before which 
 Messrs. Smith fall prone upon their faces, may 
 write up to headquarters and expostulate. In all 
 these cases, without doubt, we have instances of 
 the direct influence of democracy upon literature, 
 and that of a deleterious kind. Not one of them, 
 
The Influence of Democracy 49 
 
 however, can produce a bad effect upon any but 
 persons of weak or faulty character, and these 
 would probably err in some other direction, even 
 at the court of a grand duke. 
 
 On the other hand, the benefits of democratic 
 surroundings are felt in these middle walks of 
 literature. The appeal to a very wide audience has 
 the effect of giving a writer whose work is sound 
 but not of universal interest, an opportunity of col- 
 lecting, piecemeal, individual readers enough to 
 support him. The average sanity of a democracy, 
 and the habit it encourages of immediate, full, and 
 candid discussion, preserves the writer whose snare 
 is eccentricity from going too far in his folly. The 
 celebrated eccentrics of past literature, the Lyco- 
 phrons and the Gongoras, the Donnes and the 
 Gombrevilles, were the spokesmen of small and 
 pedantic circles, disdainful of the human herd, 
 " sets " whose members rejoiced in the conceits 
 and extravagance of their respective favourites, 
 and encouraged these talented personages to make 
 mountebanks of themselves. These leaders were 
 in most cases excessively clever, and we find their 
 work, or a little of it, very entertaining as we cross 
 the history of belles-lettres. But it is impossible 
 not to see that, for instance, each of the mysterious 
 
 D 
 
50 Questions at Issue 
 
 writers I have mentioned would, in a democratic 
 age, and healthily confronted with public criticism, 
 have been able to make a much wholesomer and 
 broader use of his cleverness. The democratic 
 spirit, moreover, may be supposed to encourage 
 directness of utterance, simplicity, vividness, and 
 lucidity. I say it may be supposed to do so, 
 because I cannot perceive that with all our liberty 
 the nineteenth century has proceeded any . farther 
 in this direction than the hide-bound eighteenth 
 century was able to do. On the whole, indeed, I 
 find it very difficult to discover that democracy^ as 
 such, is affecting the quality of such good literature 
 as we .possess in any very general or obvious way. 
 It may be that we are still under the oligarchic 
 tradition, and that a social revolution, introducing a 
 sudden breach in our habits, and perhaps paralysing 
 the profession of letters for a few years, would be 
 followed by a new literature of a decidedly demo- 
 cratic class. We are speaking of what we actually 
 see, and not of vague visions which may seem to 
 flit across the spectral mirror of the future. 
 
 But when we pass from the quality of the best 
 literature to the quantity of it, then it is impossible 
 to preserve so indifferent or so optimistic an atti- 
 tude. The democratic habit does not, if I am cor^ 
 
The Influence of Democracy 51 
 
 rect, make much difference in the way in which 
 good authors write, but it very much affects the 
 amount of circulation which their writings obtain. 
 The literature of which I have hitherto spoken is 
 that of which analysis can take cognisance, the 
 writing which possesses a measure, at least, of dis- 
 tinction, of accomplishment, that which, in every 
 class, belongs to the tradition of good work. It is 
 very easy to draw a rough line, not too high, above 
 "which all may fairly be treated as literature in posse 
 if not in esse. In former ages, almost all that was 
 published, certainly all that attracted public atten- 
 tion and secured readers, was of this sort. The 
 baldest and most grotesque Elizabethan drama, the 
 sickliest romance that lay with Bibles and with 
 billets-doux on Belinda's toilet-table, the most effete 
 didactic poem of the Hayley and Seward age, had 
 this quality of belonging to the literary camp. It 
 was a miserable object, no doubt, and wholly without 
 value, but it wore the king's uniform. If it could 
 have been better written, it would have been well 
 written. But, as a result of democracy, what is 
 still looked upon as the field of literature has been 
 invaded by camp-followers of every kind, so active 
 and so numerousj that they threaten to oust the 
 soldiery themselves ; persons in every variety of 
 
52 Questions at Issue 
 
 costume, from court-clothes to rags, but agreeing 
 only in this, that they are not dressed as soldiers of 
 literature. 
 
 These amateurs and specialists, these writers of 
 books that are not books, and essays that are not 
 essays, are peculiarly the product of a democratic 
 age. A love for the distinguished parts of litera- 
 ture, and even a conception that such parts exist, is 
 not common among men, and it is not obvious that 
 democracy has led to its encouragement. Hitherto 
 the tradition of style has commonly been respected ; 
 no very open voice having been as yet raised against 
 it. But with the vast majority of persons it remains 
 nothing but a mystery, and one which they secretly 
 regard with suspicion. The enlargement of the 
 circle of readers merely means an increase of per- 
 sons who, without an ear, are admitted to the concert 
 of literature. At present they listen to the tra- 
 ditional sonatas and mazurkas with bored respect, 
 but they are really longing for music-hall ditties on 
 the concertina. To this ever-increasing congrega- 
 tion of the unmusical comes the technical amateur, 
 with his dry facts and exact knowledge ; the flip- 
 pant amateur, with his comic " bits " and laughable 
 miscellanies ; the didactic and religious amateur, 
 anxious to mend our manners and save our souls. 
 
The Influence of Democracy 53 
 
 These people, whose power must not be slighted, 
 and whose value, perhaps, can only relatively be 
 denied, have something definite, something service- 
 able to give in the form of a paper or a magazine 
 or a book. What wonder that they should form 
 dangerous rivals to the writer who is assiduous 
 about the way in which a thing is said, and care- 
 ful to produce a solid and harmonious effect by 
 characteristic language ? 
 
 It was mainly during the close of the seven- 
 teenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century 
 that this body of technical, professional, and non- 
 literary writing began to develop. We owe it, 
 without doubt, to the spread of exact knowledge 
 arid the emancipation of speculative thought. It 
 was from the law first, then from divinity, then 
 from science, and last from philosophy that the 
 studied graces were excluded — a sacrifice on the 
 altar of positive expression. If a writer on precise 
 themes were to adopt to-day the balanced elegance 
 of Evelyn or Shaftesbury's stately and harmonious 
 periods, he would either be read for his style and 
 his sentiment or not at all. People would go for 
 their information elsewhere. No doubt, in a 
 certain sense, this change is due to the democracy ; 
 it is due to the quickening and rarefying of public 
 
54 Questions at Issue 
 
 life, to the creation of rapid needs, to a breaking 
 down of barriers. But so long as the books and 
 papers which deal with professional matters do not 
 utterly absorb the field, so long as they leave time 
 and space for pure literature, there is no reason 
 why they should positively injure the latter, though 
 they must form a constant danger to it. At times 
 of public ferment, when great constitutional or 
 social problems occupy' universal attention, there 
 can be no doubt that the danger ripens into real 
 injury. When newspapers are full of current 
 events in political and social life, the graver kind 
 of books are slackly bought, and " the higher 
 criticism " disappears from the Reviews. 
 
 We can imagine a state of things in which such, 
 a crowding out should become chronic, when the 
 nervous system of the public should crave such, 
 incessant shocks of actuality, that no time should 
 be left for thought or sentiment. We might arrive, 
 at the condition in which Wordsworth pictured, 
 the France of ninety years ago : 
 
 "Perpetual emptiness ! unceasing change ! 
 No single volume.paramount, no code, 
 No master spirit, no determined road ; 
 But equally a want of books and men I 
 
 When we feel inclined to forebode such a shock-. 
 
The Influence of Democracy ^5 
 
 ing lapse into barbarism, it may help us if we 
 reflect how soon France, in spite of, or by the aid 
 of, democracy, threw oif the burden of emptiness. 
 A recollection of the intellectual destitution of that 
 country at the beginning of the century and of 
 the passionate avidity with which, on the return of 
 political tranquillity, France threw herself back on 
 literary and artistic avocations, should strengthen 
 the nerves of those pessimists who, at the slightest 
 approach to a similar condition in modern England, 
 declare that our intellectual prestige is sunken, 
 never to revive; There is a great elasticity in the 
 tastes of the average man, and when they have 
 been pushed violently in one direction they do not 
 remain fixed there, but swing with equal force to 
 the opposite side. The aesthetic part of mankind 
 may be obscured, it cannot be obliterated. 
 
 The present moment appears to me to be a 
 particularly unhappy one for indulging in gloomy 
 diatribes against the democracy. Books, although 
 they constitute the most durable part of literature, 
 are not, in this day, by any means its sole channel. 
 Periodical literature has certainly been becoming 
 more and more democratic; and if the editors of 
 our newspapers gauge in any degree the taste of 
 their readers, that taste must be becoming more 
 
56 Questions at Issue 
 
 and more inclined to the formal and distinctive 
 parts of writing. A few years ago, the London 
 newspapers were singularly indifferent to the claims 
 of books and of the men who wrote them. An 
 occasional stately column of the Times represented 
 almost all the notice which a daily paper would 
 take of a volume. The provincial press was still 
 worse provided ; it afforded no light at all for such 
 of its clients as were groping their way in the 
 darkness of the book-market. 
 
 All this is now changed. One or two of the 
 evening newspapers of London deserve great 
 commendation for having dared to treat literary 
 subjects, in distinction from mere reviews of 
 books, as of immediate public interest. Their 
 example has at length quickened some of the 
 morning papers, and has spread into the pro- 
 vinces to such a signal degree that several of the 
 great newspapers of the North of England are 
 now served with literary matter of a quality and 
 a fulness not to be matched in a single London 
 daily twenty years ago. When an eminent man 
 of letters dies, the comments which the London 
 and country press make upon his career and the 
 nature of his work are often quite astonishing in 
 their fulness; space being dedicated to these 
 
The Influence of Democracy ^y 
 
 notices such as, but a few years ago, would have 
 been grudged to a politician or to a prize-fighter. 
 The newspapers are the most democratic of all 
 vehicles of thought, and the prominence of literary- 
 discussion in their columns does not look as 
 though the democracy was anxious to be thought 
 indifferent or hostile to literature. 
 
 In all this bustle and reverberation, however, it 
 may be said that there is not much place for those 
 who desire, like Jean Chapelain, to live in 
 innocence, with Apollo and with their books. 
 There can be no question, that the tendency of 
 modem life is not favourable to sequestered literary 
 scholarship. At the same time, it is a singular fact 
 that, even in the present day, when a Thomas Love 
 Peacock or an Edward FitzGerald hides himself in 
 a careful seclusion, like some rare aquatic bird in a 
 backwater, his work slowly becomes manifest, and 
 receives due recognition and honour. Such authors 
 do not enjoy great sales, even when they become 
 famous, but, in spite of their opposition to the 
 temper of their time, in spite of all obstacles 
 imposed by their own peculiarities of temperament, 
 they receive, in the long run, a fair measure of 
 success. They have their hour, sooner or later. 
 More than that no author of their type could have 
 
58 Questions at Issue 
 
 under any form of political government, or at any- 
 period of history. They should not, and, in 
 fairness it must be said they rarely do, complain. 
 They know that " Dieu paie," as Alphonse Kan- 
 said, " mais il ne paie pas tous les samedis." 
 
 It is the writers who want to be paid every 
 Saturday upon whom democracy produces the 
 worst effect. It is not the neglect of the public, 
 it is the facility with which the money can be 
 wheedled out of the pockets of the public on 
 trifling occasions that constitutes a danger to 
 literature. There is an enormous quantity of 
 almost unmitigated shoddy now produced and 
 sold, and the peril is that authors who are 
 capable of doing better things will be seduced 
 into adding to this wretched product for the sake 
 of the money. We are highly solicitous nowa- 
 days, and it is most proper that we should be, 
 about adequate payment for the literary worker. 
 But as long as that payment is in no sort of, 
 degree proportioned to the merit of the article 
 he prodijces, the question of its scale of pay-; 
 ment must remain one rather for his solicitor 
 than for the critics. The importance of our own 
 Society of Authors, for instance, lies, it appears 
 to me, in its constituting a soi't of firm of 
 
The Influence of Democracy 59 
 
 solicitors acting solely for literary clients. But 
 the moment we go further than this, we get into 
 difficulties. The money standard tends to become 
 the standard of merit. At a recent public meet- 
 ing, while one of the most distinguished of 
 living technical writers was speaking for the 
 literary profession, one of those purveyors of 
 tenth-rate fiction, who supply stories, as they 
 might supply vegetables, to a regular market, 
 was heard to say with scorn, " Call him an 
 author ? " " Why, yes ! " her neighbour replied, 
 "don't you know he has written so and so, 
 and so and so?" "Well," said the other, "I 
 should like to know what his sales are before I 
 allowed he was an author," 
 
 It would be highly inopportune to call for a 
 return of the bond fide sales of those of our 
 leading authors who are not novelists. It is to 
 be hoped that no such indulgence to the idlest 
 curiosity will ever be conceded. But if such a 
 thing were done, it would probably reveal some 
 startling statistics. It would be found that many 
 of those whose names are only next to the 
 highest in public esteem do not receive more 
 than the barest pittance from their writings, 
 even from those which are most commonly in 
 
6o Questions at Issue 
 
 the mouths of their contemporaries. To mention 
 only two writers, but these of singular eminence 
 and prominence, it was not until the later years 
 of their lives that either Robert Browning or 
 Matthew Arnold began to be sure of even a very 
 moderate pecuniai-y return on their books. The 
 curious point was that both of them achieved 
 fame of a wide and brilliant nature long before 
 their books began to " move," as publishers call 
 it. It is not easy to think of an example of 
 this curious fact more surprising than this, that 
 Friendship's Garland during many years did not 
 pass out of one moderate edition. This book, 
 published when Arnold was filling the mouths 
 of men with his paradoxical utterances, lighted 
 up all through with such wit and charm of style 
 as can hardly, of its kind, be paralleled in recent 
 prose; a masterpiece, not dealing with remote or 
 abstruse questions, but with burning matters of 
 the day — this entertaining and admirably modern 
 volume enjoyed a sale which would mean deplor- 
 able failure in the case of a female novelist of 
 a perfectly subterranean order. This case could 
 be paralleled, no doubt, by a dozen others, 
 equally striking. I have just taken up a volume 
 of humour, the production of a " funny man " of 
 
The Influence of Democracy 6 1 
 
 the moment, and I see on its title-page the 
 statement that it is in its one hundred and nine- 
 teenth edition. Of this book, 119,000 copies 
 have been bought during a space of time equal 
 to that in which Matthew Arnold sold probably 
 about 119 copies of Friendship's Garland. In 
 the face of these facts it is not possible to say 
 that, though it may buy well, the democracy 
 buys wisely. 
 
 It is this which makes me fear that, as I 
 Jiave said, the democratic spirit is influencing 
 disadvantageously the quantity rather than the 
 quality of good literature. It seems to be 
 starving its best men, and helping its coarsest 
 Jeshuruns to wax fat. The good authors write 
 as they would have written under any circum- 
 stances, valuing their work for its own sake, 
 and enjoying that state of happiness of which 
 Mr. William Morris has been speaking, "the 
 happiness only possible to artists and thieves." 
 But while they produce in this happy mood, 
 the democracy, which honours their names and 
 displays an inexplicable curiosity about their 
 persons, is gradually exterminating them by 
 borrowing their books instead of buying them, 
 and so reducing them to a level just below 
 
62 Questions at Issue 
 
 the possibility of living by pure literature. The 
 result is, as any list .of the most illustrious 
 living authors (not novelists) will- suggest, that 
 Scarcely a single man or v^oman of them has lived 
 by the production of books. An amiable poet of 
 the older school, whose name is everywhere 
 mentioned with honour, used to say that he 
 published books instead of keeping a carriage, 
 as his fortune would not permit him to afford 
 both of those luxuries. When we think of the 
 prizes which literature occasionally oifered to 
 serious work in the eighteenth century, it seems 
 as though there had been a very distinct retro- 
 gression in this respect. 
 
 The novel, in short, tends more and more to 
 become the only professional branch of literature ; 
 and this is unfortunate, because the novel is the 
 branch which shelters the worst work. In other 
 sections of pure letters, if work is not in any 
 way good, it is cast forth and no more heard 
 of. But a novel may be utterly silly, be con- 
 demned by every canon of taste, be ignored by 
 the press, and yet may enjoy a mysterious 
 success, pass through tens of editions, and start 
 its author on a career which may lead to opu- 
 lence. It would be interesting to know what it 
 
The Influence of Democracy 63 
 
 is that attracts the masses to books of this kind. 
 How do they hear of them in the first instance ? 
 Why does one vapid and lady-like novel speed 
 on its way, while eleven others, apparently just 
 like unto it, sink and disappear? How is the 
 public appetite for this insipidity to be recon- 
 ciled with the partiality of the same readers for 
 stories by writers of real excellence ? Why do 
 those who have once pleased the public continue 
 to please it, whatever lapses into carelessness 
 and levity they permit themselves ? I have put 
 these questions over and over again to those 
 whose business it is to observe and take advan- 
 tage of the fluctuations of. the book-market, but 
 they give no intelligible reply. If the Sphinx 
 had asked CEdipus to explain the position of 
 " Edna Lyall," he would have had to throw him- 
 self from the rock. 
 
 If the novelists, bad or good, showed in their 
 work the influence of democracy, they would reward 
 study. But it is difficult to perceive that they do. 
 The good ones, from Mr. George Meredith down- 
 wards, write to please themselves, in their own 
 manner, just as do the poets, the critics, and the 
 historians, leaving it to the crowd to take their 
 books or let them lie. The commonplace ones write 
 
64 Questions at Issue 
 
 blindly, following the dictates of their ignorance 
 and their inexperience, waiting for the chance that 
 the capricious public may select a favourite from 
 their ranks. Almost the only direct influence which 
 the democracy, as at present constituted in England, 
 seems to bring to bear on novels, is the narrowing 
 of the sphere of incident and emotion within which 
 they may disport themselves. It would be too 
 complicated and dangerous a question to ask here, 
 at the end of an essay, whether that restriction is 
 a good thing or a bad. The undeniable fact is that 
 whenever an English novelist has risen to protest 
 against it, the weight of the democracy has been 
 exercised to crush him. He has been voted " not 
 quite nice," a phrase of hideous import, as fatal to 
 a modern writer as the inverted thumb of a Roman 
 matron was to a gladiator. But all we want now is 
 a very young man strong enough, sincere enough, 
 and popular enough to insist on being listened to 
 when he speaks of real things — and perhaps we 
 have found him. 
 
 One great novelist our race has however produced, 
 who seems not only to write under the influence of 
 democracy, but to be absolutely inspired by the 
 democratic spirit. This is Mr. W. D. Howells, and 
 it is only by admitting this isolation of his, I think. 
 
The Influence of Democracy 65 
 
 that we can arrive at any just comprehension of his 
 place in contemporary literature. It is the secret 
 of his extreme popularity in America, except in a 
 certain Europeanised clique ; it is the secret of the 
 instinctive disHke of him, amounting to a blind 
 hereditary prejudice, which is so widely felt in this 
 country. Mr. Howells is the most exotic, perhaps 
 the only truly exotic writer of great distinction 
 whom America has produced. Emerson, and the 
 school of Emerson in its widest sense, being too 
 self-consciously in revolt against the English oli- 
 garchy, out of which they sprang, to be truly dis- 
 tinguished from it. But England, with its aristo- 
 cratic traditions and codes, does not seem to weigh 
 with Mr. Howells. His books suggest no rebellion 
 against, nor subjection to, what simply does not 
 exist for him or for his readers. He is superficially 
 irritated at European pretensions, but essentially, 
 and when he becomes absorbed in his work as a 
 creative artist, he ignores everything but that vast 
 level of middle-class of American society out of 
 which he sprang, which he faithfully represents, 
 and which adores him. To English readers, the 
 novels of Mr. Howells must always be something 
 of a puzzle, even if they partly like them, and as a 
 rule they hate them. But to the average educated 
 
 E 
 
66 Questions at Issue 
 
 American who has not been to Europe, these novels 
 appear the most deeply experienced and ripely 
 sympathetic product of modern literature. 
 
 When we review the whole field of which some 
 slight outline has here been attempted, we see much 
 that may cheer and encourage us, and something, 
 too, that may cause grave apprehension. The 
 alertness and receptivity of the enormous crowd 
 which a writer may now hope to address is a 
 pleasant feature. The hammering away at an idea 
 without inducing it to enter anybody's ears is now 
 a thing of the past. What was whispered in London 
 yesterday afternoon was known in New York this 
 morning, and we have the comments of America 
 upon it with our five o'clock tea to-day. But this is 
 not an unmixed benefit, for if an impression is now 
 quickly made, it is as quickly lost, and there is 
 httle profit in seeing people receive an idea which 
 they will immediately forget. Moreover, for those 
 who write what the millions read, there is some- 
 thing disturbing and unwholesome in this pubhc 
 roar that is ever rising in their ears. They ensconce 
 themselves in their study, they draw the curtains, 
 light the lamp, and plunge into their books, but 
 from the darkness outside comes that distracting 
 and agitating cry of the public that demands their 
 
The Influence of Democracy 67 
 
 presence. This is a new temptation, and indicates 
 a serious danger. But the popular writers will get 
 used to it, and when they realise how little it really 
 means it may cease to disturb them. In the mean- 
 time, let no man needlessly dishearten his brethren 
 in this world of disillusions, by losing faith in the 
 ultimate survival and continuance of literature. 
 
HAS AMERICA PRODUCED A POET? 
 
Has America Produced a Poet? 
 
 rOR the audacious query which stands at the 
 head of this essay, it is not I, but an American 
 editor, who must bear the blame, if blame there be. 
 It would never have occurred to me to tie such a 
 firebrand to the tail of any of my little foxes. He 
 gave it to me, just as Mr. Pepys gave Gaze not on 
 Swans to ingenious Mr. Birkenshaw, to make the 
 best I could of a bad argument. On the face of it 
 the question is absurd. There lies on my table a 
 manual of American poetry by Mr. Stedman, in 
 which the meed of immortality is awarded to about 
 one hundred of Columbia's sons and daughters. 
 No one who has a right to express an opinion is 
 likely to deny that the learning, fidelity, and 
 catholic taste which are displayed in this book are 
 probably at this time of day shared, in the same 
 degree, with its author, by no other living Anglo- 
 Saxon writer. Why, then, should not Mr. Stedman's 
 
72 Questions at Issue 
 
 admirable volume be taken as a complete and satis- 
 factory answer to our editor's query ? Simply 
 because everything is relative, and because it 
 may be amusing to apply to the subject of Mr. 
 Stedman's criticism a standard more cosmopolitan 
 and much less indulgent than his. Mr. Stedman 
 has mapped out the heavens with a telescope; 
 what can an observer detect with the naked 
 eye? 
 
 There is an obvious, and yet a very stringent, 
 sense in which no good critic could for a moment 
 question that America has produced poets. A 
 poet is a maker, a man or woman who expresses 
 some mood of vital passion in a new manner and 
 with adequate art. Turning to the accepted ranks 
 of English literature, Tickell is a poet on the score 
 of his one great elegy on Addison, and Wolfe, a 
 century later, by his Burial of Sir John Moore. 
 Those poems were wholly new and impassioned, 
 and time has no effect upon the fame of their 
 writers. So long as English poetry continues to 
 be studied a little closely, Tickell and Wolfe will 
 be visible as diminutive fixed stars in our poetical 
 firmament. But in a rapid and superficial glance, 
 Wolfe and Tickell disappear. Let the glance be 
 more and more rapid, and only a few planets 
 
Has America Produced a Poet ? 73 
 
 of the first magnitude are seen. In the age 
 before Elizabeth, Chaucer alone remains ; of the 
 Elizabethan galaxy, so glittering and rich, we see 
 at length only Spenser and Shakespeare ; then 
 come successive splendours of Milton, Dryden, Pope, 
 Gray, Burns ; then a cluster again of Wordsworth, 
 Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats. Last of all, still 
 too low on the horizon to be definitely measured, 
 Tennyson and Browning. Fifteen names in all, a 
 sum which might be reduced to ten, perhaps, but 
 never to fewer than ten, nor expanded, on the 
 same scale, beyond eighteen or twenty at the out- 
 side. These fifteen are the great English poets, 
 the selected glory and pride of five centuries, the 
 consummation of the noblest dynasty of verse 
 which the world has ever seen. What I take 
 to be the problem is. Has America hitherto pro- 
 duced a poet equal to the least of these, raised 
 as high above any possible vacillation of the tide 
 of fashion ? What an invidious question ! 
 
 In the first place, I will have nothing to do with 
 the living. They do not enter into our discussion. 
 There was never a time, in my opinion, when 
 America possessed among her citizens so various 
 and so accomplished singers, gifted in so many 
 provinces of song, as in 1888. But the time has 
 
74 Questions at Issue 
 
 not arrived, and long may it delay, when we shall 
 be called upon to discuss the ultimate sfaftts of the 
 now living poets of America. From the most aged 
 of them we have not yet, we hope, received " sad 
 autumn's last chrysanthemum." Those who have 
 departed will alone be glanced at in these few 
 words. Death is the great solution of critical 
 continuity, and the bard whom we knew so well, 
 and who died last night, is nearer already to 
 Chaucer than to us. I shall endeavour to state 
 quite candidly what my own poor opinion is with 
 regard to the claim of any dead American to be 
 classed with those fourteen or fifteen English 
 inheritors of unassailed renown. 
 
 One word more in starting. If we admit into 
 our criticism any patriotic or political prejudice, we 
 may as well cease to wrangle on the threshold of 
 our discussion. I cannot think that American 
 current criticism is quite free from this taint of 
 prejudice. In this, if I am right, Americans sin no 
 more nor less than the rest of us English, and 
 French ; but in America, I confess, the error seems 
 to me to be occasionally more serious than in 
 Europe. In England we are not guiltless of per- 
 mitting the most puerile disputes to embitter our 
 literary arena, and because a certain historian is a 
 
Has America Produced a Poet ? 75 
 
 home-ruler or a certain novelist a Tory, each is 
 anathema to the literary tribunal on the other side. 
 Such judgments are as pitiable as they are 
 ludicrous ; but when I have watched a polite 
 American smile to encounter such vagaries of taste 
 in our clubs or drawing-rooms, I have sometimes 
 wondered how the error which prefers the non- 
 political books of a Gladstonian to those of a 
 Unionist, on political grounds alone, differs from 
 that which thinks an American writer must have 
 the advantage, or some advantage, over an English 
 writer. Each prejudice is natural and amiable, 
 but neither the one nor the other is exempt from 
 the charge of puerility. Patriotism is a meaning- 
 less term in literary criticism. To prefer what has 
 been written in our own city, or state, or country, 
 for that reason alone, is simply to drop the balance 
 and to relinquish all claims to form a judgment. 
 The true and reasonable lover of literature refuses 
 to be constrained by any meaner or homelier bond 
 than that of good writing. His brain and his 
 taste persist in being independent of his heart, like 
 those of the German soldier who fought through 
 the campaign before Paris, and who was shot at 
 last with an Alfred de Musset, thumbed and scored, 
 in his pocket. 
 
76 Questions at Issue 
 
 One instance of the patriotic fallacy has so often 
 annoyed me that I will take this opportunity of 
 denouncing it. A commonplace of American 
 criticism is to compare Keats with a certain 
 Joseph Rodman Drake. They both died at 
 twenty-five and they both wrote verse. The 
 parallel ends there. Keats was one of the great 
 writers of the world. Drake was a gentle imitative 
 bard of the fourth or fifth order, whose gifts 
 culminated in a piece of pretty fancy called The 
 Culprit Fay. Every principle of proportion is 
 outraged in a conjunction of the names of Drake 
 and Keats. To compare them is like comparing 
 a graceful shrub in your garden with the tallest 
 pine that fronts the tempest on the forehead of 
 Rhodopd 
 
 When the element of prejudice is entirely with- 
 drawn, we have next to bear in mind the 
 fluctuations of taste in respect to popular favourites, 
 and the uncertainty that what has pleased us may 
 ever contrive to please the world again. I have 
 been reminded of the insecurity of contemporary 
 judgments, and of the process of natural selection 
 which goes on imperceptibly in criticism, by 
 referring to a compendium of literature published 
 thirty years ago, and remarkable in its own time 
 
Has America Produced a Poet ? "jj 
 
 for knowledge, acumen, and candour. In these 
 volumes the late Robert Carruthers, an excellent 
 scholar in his day and generation, gives a certain 
 space to the department of American poetry. It is 
 amusing to think how differently a man of 
 Carruthers's stamp would cover the same ground 
 to-day. He gives great prominence to Halleck and 
 Bryant, he treats Longfellow and Poe not inade- 
 quately, he spares brief commendation to Willis 
 and Holmes, and a bare mention to Dana and 
 Emerson (as a poet). He alludes to no one else ; 
 and apart from his omissions, which are significant 
 enough, nothing can be more curious than his 
 giving equal status respectively to Halleck and 
 Bryant, to Willis and Holmes, to Dana and 
 Emerson. Thirty years have passed, and each of 
 these pairs contains one who has been taken and 
 one who has been left. Bryant, Holmes, and 
 Emerson exist, and were never more prominent 
 than to-day ; but where are Halleck, Willis, and 
 Dana ? Under the microscope of Mr. Stedman, 
 these latter three together occupy but half of one 
 page out of four hundred, nor is there the slightest 
 chance that these writers will ever recover the 
 prominence which they held, and seemed to hold so 
 securely, little more than a generation ago. The 
 
7 8 Questions at Issue 
 
 moral is too obvious to need appending to this 
 suggestive little story. 
 
 It is not in America only that a figure which is 
 not really a great one gets accidentally raised on a 
 pedestal from which it presently has to be ignor 
 miniously withdrawn. But in America, where the 
 interest in intellectual problems is so keen, and 
 where the dull wholesome bondage of tradition is 
 unknown, these sudden exaltations are particularly 
 frequent. When I was in Baltimore (and I have 
 no happier memories of travel than my recollections 
 of Baltimore) the only crumple in my rose-leaf was 
 the difficulty of preserving a correct attitude toward 
 the local deity. When you enter the gates of Johns 
 Hopkins, the question that is asked is, " What 
 think you of Lanier " ? The writer of the Marshes 
 of Glynn had passed away before I visited Balti- 
 more, but I heard so much about him that I feel as 
 though I had seen him. The delicately-moulded 
 ivory features, the profuse and silken beard, the 
 wonderful eyes waxing and waning during the 
 feverish action of lecturing, surely I have witnessed 
 the fascination which these exercised ? Baltimore 
 would not have been Baltimore, would have been 
 untrue to its graceful, generous, and hospitable 
 instincts, if it had not welcomed with enthusiasm 
 
Has America Produced a Poet ? 79 
 
 this beautiful, pathetic Southern stranger. But I 
 am amazed to find that this pardonable idolatry is 
 still on the increase, although I think it must surely 
 have found its climax in a little book which my 
 friend, President Oilman, has been kind enough 
 to send me this year. In this volume I read 
 that Shelley and Keats, " before disconsolate," now 
 possess a mate ; that " God's touch set the starry 
 splendour of genius upon Lanier's soul " ; and that 
 all sorts of persons, in all sorts of language, exalt 
 him as one of the greatest poets that ever lived. 
 I notice, however, with a certain sly pleasure, that 
 on the occasion of this burst of Lanierolatry a 
 letter was received from Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, 
 " of too private a character to read." No wonder, 
 for Dr. Holmes is the dupe of no local enthusiasm, 
 and very well indeed distinguishes between good 
 verse and bad. 
 
 From Baltimore drunk with loyalty and pity I 
 appeal to Baltimore sober. What are really the 
 characteristics of this amazing and unparalleled 
 poetry of Lanier ? Reading it again, and with 
 every possible inclination to be pleased, I find a 
 painful effort, a strain and rage, the most prominent 
 qualities in everything he wrote. Never simple, 
 never easy, never in one single lyric natural and 
 
8o Questions at Issue 
 
 spontaneous for more than one stanza, always 
 forcing the note, always concealing his barrenness 
 and tameness by grotesque violence of image and 
 preposterous storm of sound, Lanier appears to me 
 to be as conclusively not a poet of genius as any 
 ambitious man who ever lived, laboured, and failed. 
 I will judge him by nothing less than those poems 
 which his wannest admirers point to as his master- 
 pieces; I take Corn, Sunrise, and The Marshes of 
 Glynn. I persist in thinking that these are elabo- 
 rate and learned experiments by an exceedingly 
 clever man, and one who had read so much and felt 
 so much that he could simulate poetical expression 
 with extraordinary skill. But of the real thing, of 
 the genuine traditional article, not a trace. 
 
 I hear faint bridal-sighs of brown and green 
 
 Dying to silent hints of kisses keen 
 
 As far lights fringe into a pleasant sheen. 
 
 This exemplifies the sort of English, the sort of 
 imagination, the sort of style which are' to make 
 Keats and Shelley — who have found Bryant and 
 Landor, Rossetti and Emerson, unworthy of their 
 company — comfortable with a mate at last. If 
 these vapid and eccentric lines were exceptional, if 
 they were even supported by a minority of sane and 
 
Has America Produced a Poet ? 8 1 
 
 original verse, if Lanier were ever simple or genuine, 
 I would seize on those exceptions and gladly forget 
 the rest ; but I find him on all occasions substi- 
 tuting vague, cloudy rhetoric for passion, and tor- 
 tured fancy for imagination, always striving, against 
 the grain, to say something prophetic and un- 
 paralleled, always grinding away with infinite labour 
 and the sweat of his brow to get that expressed 
 which a real poet murmurs, almost unconsciously, 
 between a sigh and a whisper. 
 
 Wheresoever I turn my view. 
 All is strange, yet nothing new ; 
 Sndless labour all along, 
 Bndless labour to be wrong. 
 
 Lanier must have been a charming man, and one 
 who exercised a great fascination over those who 
 knew him. But no reasonable critic can turn from 
 what has been written about Lanier to what Lanier 
 actually wrote, and still assert that he Avas the 
 Great American Poet. 
 
 It is not likely to be seriously contended that 
 there were in 1888 more than four of the deceased 
 poets of America who need to have their claims dis- 
 cussed in connection with the highest honours in the 
 art. These are Longfellow, Bryant, Emerson, Poe. 
 
82 Questions at Issue 
 
 There is one other name which, it may seem to 
 some of my readers, ought to be added to this list. 
 But originah'ty was so entirely lacking in the com- 
 position of that versatile and mellifluous talent to 
 which I allude, that I will not even mention here 
 the fifth name. I ask permission rapidly to inquire 
 whether Longfellow, Bryant, Emerson and Poe are 
 worthy of a rank beside the greatest English twelve. 
 In the first place, what are we to say of Long- 
 fellow ? I am very far from being one of those who 
 reject the accomplished and delicate work of this 
 highly-trained artist. If I may say so, no chapter of 
 Mr. Stedman's book seems to me to surpass in skill 
 that in which he deals with the works of Longfellow, 
 and steers with infinite tact through the difficulties 
 of the subject. In the face of those impatient 
 youngsters who dare to speak of Longfellow and 
 of Tupper in a breath, I assert that the former 
 was, within his limitations, as true a poet as ever 
 breathed. His skill in narrative was second only- 
 to that of Prior and of Lafontaine. His sonnets, 
 the best of them, are among the most pleasing 
 objective sonnets in the language. Although his 
 early, and comparatively poor, work was exagge- 
 ratedly praised, his head was not turned, but, like a 
 conscientious artist, he rose to better and better 
 
Has America Produced a Poet ? 83 
 
 things, even at the risk of sacrificing his popularity. 
 It is a pleasure to say this at the present day, 
 when Longfellow's fame has unduly declined ; 
 but it is needless, of course, to dwell on the 
 reverse of the medal, and disprove what nobody 
 now advances, that he was a great or original poet. 
 Originality and greatness were just the qualities he 
 lacked. I have pointed out elsewhere that Long- 
 fellow was singularly under Swedish influences, and 
 that his real place is in Swedish literature, chrono- 
 logically between Tegndr and Runeberg. Doubt- 
 less he seemed at first to his own people more 
 original than he was, through his habit of repro- 
 ducing an exotic tone very exactly. 
 
 Bryant appears to me to be a poet of a less 
 attractive but somewhat higher class than Long- 
 fellow. His versification is mannered, and his 
 expressions are directly formed on European models, 
 but his sense of style was so consistent that his 
 careful work came to be recognisable. His poetry 
 is a hybrid of two English stocks, closely related ; 
 he belongs partly to the Wordsworth of Tintern 
 Abbey, partly to the Coleridge of Mont Blanc. 
 The imaginative formula is Wordsworth's, the verse 
 is the verse of Coleridge, and having in very early 
 youth produced this dignified and novel flower. 
 
84 Questions at Issue 
 
 Bryant did not try to blossom into anything differ- 
 ent, but went on cultivating the Coleridge- Words- 
 worth hybrid down to the days of Rossetti and of 
 villanelles. But Wordsworth and Coleridge had 
 not stayed at the Mont Blanc and Tintem Abbey 
 point. They went on advancing, developing, alter- 
 ing, and declining to the end of their days. The 
 consequence is that the specimens of the Bryant 
 variety do not strike us as remarkably like the 
 general work of Wordsworth or of Coleridge. As 
 I have said, although he borrowed definitely and 
 almost boldly, in the first instance, the very per- 
 sistence of Bryant's style, the fact that he was 
 influenced once by a very exquisite and noble kind 
 of poetry, and then never any more, through a long 
 life, by any other verse, combined with his splen- 
 did command of those restricted harmonies the 
 secret of which he had conquered, made Bryant a 
 very interesting and valuable poet. But in discuss- 
 ing his comparative position, it appears to me to 
 be impossible to avoid seeing that his want of posi- 
 tive novelty — the derived character of his sentiment, 
 his verse, and his description — is absolutely fatal 
 to his claim to a place in the foremost rank. He 
 is exquisitely polished, full of noble suavity and 
 music, but his irreparable fault is to be secondary. 
 
Has America Produced a Poet ? 85 
 
 to remind us always of his masters first, and only 
 on reflection of himself. In this he contrasts to a 
 disadvantage with one who is somewhat akin to 
 him in temperament, Walter Savage Landor. We 
 may admit that Byrant is more refined, more uni- 
 formly exquisite than Landor, but the latter has a 
 flavour of his own, something quite original and 
 Landorian, which makes him continue to live, while 
 Byrant's reputation slowly fades away, like the 
 stately crystal gables of an iceberg in summer. 
 The " Water-Fowl " pursues its steady flight through 
 the anthologies, but Bryant is not with the great 
 masters of poetry. 
 
 We ascend, I think, into a sphere where neither 
 Bryant nor Longfellow, with all their art, have 
 power to wing their way, when we read such 
 verses as 
 
 [Musketaquit, a goblin strong, 
 
 Of shard and flint makes jewels gay ; 
 
 They lose their grief who hear his song. 
 And where he winds is the day of day. 
 
 So forth and brighter fares my stream ; 
 
 Who drinhj it shall not thirst again ; 
 No darkless stains its equal gleam, 
 
 And ages drop in it like rain. 
 
86 Questions at Issue 
 
 If Emerson had been frequently sustained at the 
 heights he was capable of reaching, he would 
 unquestionably have been one of the sovereign 
 poets of the world. At its very best his phrase is 
 so new and so magical, includes in its easy felicity 
 such a wealth of fresh suggestion and flashes with 
 such a multitude of side-lights, that we cannot 
 suppose that it will ever be superseded or will lose 
 its charm. He seems to me like a very daring 
 but purblind diver, who flings himself headlong into 
 the ocean, and comes up bearing, as a rule, nothing 
 but sand and common shells, yet who every now 
 and then rises grasping some wonderful and unique 
 treasure. In his prose, of course, Emerson was 
 far more a master of the medium than in poetry. 
 He never became an easy versifier ; there seems to 
 have been always a difficulty to him, although an 
 irresistible attraction, in the conduct of a piece of 
 work confined within rhyme and rhythm. He 
 starts with a burst of inspiration ; the wind drops 
 and his sails flap the mast before he is out of port ; 
 a fresh puff of breeze carries him round the corner ; 
 for another page, the lyrical afflatus wholly gone, 
 he labours with the oar of logic ; when sud- 
 denly the wind springs up again, and he dances 
 into a harbour. We are so pleased to find the 
 
Has America Produced a Poet ? 87 
 
 voyage successfully accomplished that we do not 
 trouble to inquire whether or no this particular 
 port was the goal he had before him at starting. 
 I think there is hardly one of Emerson's octo- 
 syllabic poems of which this will not be found to 
 be more or less an accurate allegorical description. 
 This is not quite the manner of Milton or Shelley, 
 although it may possess its incidental advantages. 
 
 It cannot be in candour denied that we obtain a 
 very strange impression by turning from what has 
 been written about Emerson to his own poetry. 
 All his biographers and critics unite, and it is very 
 sagacious of them to do so, in giving us little 
 anthologies of his best lines and stanzas, just as 
 writers on Hudibras extract miscellanies of the 
 fragmentary wit of Butler. Judged by a chain of 
 these selected jewels, Emerson gives us the 
 impression of high imagination and great poetical 
 splendour. But the volume of his verse, left to 
 produce its own effect, does not fail to weaken 
 this effect. I have before me at this moment 
 his first collected Poems, published, as he said, 
 at "the solstice of the stars of his intellectual 
 firmament." It holds the brilliant fragments that 
 we know so well, but it holds them as a mass of 
 dull quartz may sparkle with gold dust. It has 
 
■ 88 Questions at Issue 
 
 odes about Contocook and Agischook and the 
 Over-God, long nebulous addresses to no one 
 knows whom, about no one knows what ; for 
 pages upon pages it wanders away into mere caco- 
 phonous eccentricity. It is Emerson's misfortune 
 as a poet that his technical shortcomings are for 
 ever being more severely reproved by his own 
 taste and censorship than we should dare . to 
 reprove them. To the author of TIte World- 
 Soul, in shocking verses, we silently commend his 
 own postulate in exquisite prose, that " Poetry 
 requires that splendour of expression which carries 
 with it the proof of great thoughts." Emerson, as 
 a verse-writer, is so fragmentary and uncertain 
 that we cannot place him among the great poets ; 
 and yet his best lines and stanzas seem as good as 
 theirs. Perhaps we ought to consider him, in 
 relation to Wordsworth and Shelley, as an asteroid 
 among the planets. 
 
 It is understood that Edgar Allen Poe is still 
 unforgiven in New England. "Those singularly 
 valueless verses of Poe," was the now celebrated 
 dictum of a Boston prophet. It is true that, if 
 " that most beguiling of all little divinities, Miss 
 Walters of the Transcript," is to be implicitly 
 believed,- Edgar Poe was very rude and naughty at 
 
Has America Produced a Poet ? 89 
 
 the Boston Lyceum in the spring of 1845. ^"^ 
 surely bygones should be bygones, and Massa- 
 chusetts might now pardon the Al Aaraaf incident. 
 It is not difficult to understand that there were 
 many sides on which Poe was likely to be long 
 distasteful to Boston, Cambridge, and Concord. 
 The intellectual weight of the man, though unduly 
 minimised in New England, was inconsiderable by 
 the side of that of Emerson. But in poetry, as 
 one has to be always insisting, the battle is not 
 to the strong ; and apart from all faults, weak- 
 nesses, and shortcomings of Poe, we feel more and 
 more clearly, or we ought to feel, the perennial 
 charm of his verses. The posy of his still fresh 
 and fragrant poems is larger than that of any other 
 deceased American writer, although Emerson may 
 have one or two single blossoms to show which 
 are more brilliant than any of his. If the range 
 of the Baltimore poet had been wider, if Poe had 
 not harped so persistently on his one theme of 
 remorseful passion for the irrecoverable dead, if 
 he had employed his extraordinary, his unparalleled 
 gifts of melodious invention, with equal skill, in 
 illustrating a variety of human themes, he must 
 have been with the greatest poets. For in Poe, 
 in pieces like The Haunted Palace, The Conqueror 
 
90 Questions at Issue 
 
 Worm, The City in the Sea, and For Annie, we find 
 two qualities which are as rare as they are in- 
 valuable, a new and haunting music, which con- 
 strains the hearer to follow and imitate, and a 
 command of evolution in lyrical work so absolute 
 that the poet is able to do what hardly any other 
 lyrist has dared to attempt, namely, as in Tq One 
 in Paradise, to take a normal stanzaic form, and 
 play with it as a great pianist plays v/ith an air. 
 
 So far as the first of these attributes is concerned, 
 Poe has proved himself to be the Piper of Hamelin 
 to all later English poets. From Tennyson to 
 Austin Dobson there is hardly one whose verse- 
 music does not show traces of Poe's influence. 
 To impress the stamp of one's personality on a 
 succeeding generation of . artists, to be an almost 
 (although not wholly) flawless technical artist one's 
 self, to charm within a narrow circle to a degree 
 that shows no sign, after forty years, of lessening, 
 is this to prove a claim to rank with the Great 
 Poets ? Noj perhaps not quite ; but at all events 
 it is surely to have deserved great honour from 
 the country of one's birthright. 
 
WHAT IS A GREAT POET? 
 
What is a Great Poet? 
 
 1 HE answer to the question, " Has America 
 produced a Poet ? " which was published in the 
 Forum, called forth a surprising amount of 
 attention from the press in England as well as in 
 America. It was quite impossible, and I did 
 not expect, that such an expression of personal 
 opinion would pass without being challenged. 
 In America, particularly, it could not but disturb 
 some traditions and wound some prejudices. 
 But in the present instance, as always before, 
 it has been my particular fortune to find that 
 where criticism — by which I mean, not censure, 
 but analysis — is candid and sincere, it meets in 
 America with sincere and candid readers. In 
 parenthesis, I may add, that when literary criti- 
 cism of this kind is ill received in America, the 
 fault usually lies with that unhappy system of 
 newspaper reverberation by which " scraps " or 
 
94 Questions at Issue 
 
 "items/' removed from their context and slightly 
 altered at each fresh removal, go the round of 
 the press, and are presently commented upon by 
 journalists who have never seen what the critic 
 originally wrote. In reading some of the prin- 
 cipal articles which my essay called forth, I 
 find one point dwelt upon, in various ways, in 
 almost all of them. I find a fresh query started 
 as to the standard which we are to take as a 
 measurement for imaginative writers ; and it 
 seems to me that it may be interesting to carry 
 our original inquiry a step further back, and to 
 ask. What is a great poet ? 
 
 If we are to limit the number of the most 
 illustrious and commanding names, as I attempted 
 to do, it is plain that we must also confine the 
 historical range of our inquiry. Some of my 
 reviewers objected to my selection being made 
 among English poets only, and several of them 
 attempted lists which included the poets of 
 Europe or of the world. Yet, without excep- 
 tion, those critics displayed their national bias 
 by the large proportion of Anglo-Saxon worthies 
 whom they could not bring themselves to exclude 
 from their dozen. Shakespeare must be there, 
 and Milton, Chaucer, Wordsworth, and Shelley; 
 
What is a Great Poet ? 95 
 
 already a third of the majestic company is 
 English. One reviewer, who had been lately 
 studying the Anthology, could not persuade him- 
 self to omit several of those dying dolphins of 
 Byzantine song that drew the shallop of Agathias, 
 up into the Golden Horn ; and this when the 
 whole tale of bards was not to exceed fifteen 
 at most. One reviewer went to Iceland for a 
 name, and another to Persia — charming excursions 
 both of them, but calculated to exhaust our 
 resources prematurely. The least reflection will 
 remind us that the complexity and excessive ful- 
 ness of modern interests have invaded literature 
 also, and the history of literature ; to select from 
 all time a dozen greatest names is a task of 
 doubtful propriety, and certainly not to be lightly 
 undertaken. It was all very well, in the morn- 
 ing of time, for the ancient critics to regulate 
 their body-guards of Apollo by the numbers of 
 the Muses or the Graces. Nothing could be 
 pleasanter than that tale of the great lyrical 
 poets of the world which we find so often 
 repeated in slightly varying form : 
 
 " The mighty voice of Pindar has thundered 
 out of Thebes. The lyre of Simonides modulates 
 a song of delicate melody. What brilliancy in 
 
96 Questions at Issue 
 
 Ibycus and Stesichorus ! What sweetness in 
 Alcman ! From the mouth of Bacchylides there 
 breathe delicious accents. Persuasion exhales 
 from the lips of Anacreon. In the iEolian voice 
 of Alcaeus we hear once more the Lesbian 
 swan ; and as for Sappho, that ninth great lyric 
 poet, is not her place, rather, tenth among the 
 Muses ? " 
 
 If we are contributing lists of a dozen great poets, 
 here are three-fourths of the company already 
 summoned ; yet splendid as are these names, 
 and doubtless of irreproachable genius, the roll 
 is, for modern purposes, awkwardly overweighted. 
 Even if for those whose works Time has over- 
 whelmed, we substitute the ^schylus, Sophocles, 
 Euripides, Theocritus, whom he has spared, the 
 list is still impracticable and one-sided. Yet who 
 shall say that these were not great poets in 
 every possible sense of the word ? From each 
 of several modern European nations, from Italy 
 and from France at least, a magnificent list of 
 twelve could be selected, not one of whom their 
 compatriots could afford to lose. Nay, even 
 Sweden or Holland would present us with a list 
 of twelve which should seem indisputably great 
 to a Dutchman or a Swede. It is not possible 
 
What is a Great Poet ? 97 
 
 to spread the net so wide as to catch whales 
 from all the ancient and all the modern languages 
 at once. Let us restrain our ambition and see 
 what criterion we have for measuring those of 
 our own tongue and race. 
 
 Passing in review, then, the whole five centuries 
 which divide us from the youth of Chaucer, we 
 would seek to discover what qualities have raised a 
 limited number of the poetical writers of those 
 successive ages of English thought to a station 
 permanently and splendidly exalted. Among the 
 almost innumerable genuine poets of those five 
 hundred years, are there ten or twelve who are 
 manifestly greater than the rest, and if so, in what 
 does their greatness consist ? 
 
 We are not here occupied with the old thread- 
 bare question, " What is a poet " ? but we may 
 reply to it so far as to insist that when we are 
 speaking and thinking in English the term ex- 
 cludes all writers, however pathetic and fanciful, 
 who do not employ the metrical form. In many 
 modern languages the word poet, dichter, includes 
 novelists and all other authors of prose fiction, 
 I once learned this to my cost, for having pub- 
 lished a short summary of the writings of the 
 living " poets " of a certain continental country, 
 
 o 
 
98 Questions at Issue 
 
 one of the leading (if not the leading) novelist 
 of that country, exclusively a writer in prose, 
 indignantly upbraided me for the obviously per- 
 sonal slight I had shown him in leaving him 
 entirely unmentioned. In English we possess 
 and should carefully maintain the advantage 
 which accrues from having a word so distinct 
 in its meaning ; and we may recollect that there 
 Is no trick in literary criticism more lax and 
 silly than that of talking about " prose poetry " 
 (a contradiction in terms), or about such men as 
 Carlyle, Mr. Ruskin, or Jefferies as " poets." The 
 greatness we are discussing torday is a quality 
 wholly confined to those who have made it their 
 chief duty to speak to us in verse. 
 
 On these lines, perhaps, the main elements of 
 poetical greatness will be found to be originality in 
 the treatment of themes, perennial charm, exquisite 
 finish in execution, and distinction of individual 
 inanner. The great poet, in other words, will be 
 seen, through the perspectives of history, to have 
 been fresher, stronger, more skilful, and more 
 personal than his unsuccessful or less successful 
 rival. When the latter begins to recede into 
 obscurity it will be because prejudices that bhnded 
 criticism are being removed, and because the 
 
What is a Great Poet ? 99 
 
 candidate for immortality is being found to be 
 
 lacking in one or all of these peculiar qualities. 
 
 And here, of course, comes in the disputed question 
 
 of the existence of genius. I confess that that 
 
 'Controversy seems to me to rest on a mere 
 
 metaphysical quibble. Robert McTavish is a 
 
 plough-boy, and ends at the plough's tail. Robert 
 
 Burns is a plough-boy, and ends by being set up, 
 
 like Berenice's hair, as a glory and a portent in the 
 
 intellectual zenith of all time. Are they the same 
 
 to start with ? Is it merely a question of taking 
 
 pains, of a happy accident — of luck, in short ? A 
 
 fiddlestick's end for such a theory ! Just as well 
 
 might we say that a young vine that is to produce, 
 
 in its season, a bottle of corton, is the same as a 
 
 similar stick that will issue in a wretched draught 
 
 of vin bleu. That which, from its very cotyledons, 
 
 has distinguished the corton plant from its base 
 
 brother, that is genius. 
 
 But even thus the discussion is vain and 
 empty. What we have to deal with is the work 
 and not the man. So long as we all feel that 
 there is some quality of charm, vigour, and bright- 
 ness which exists in Pope and is absent in Eusden, 
 is discoverable in a tragedy of Shakespeare and 
 is wanting in a transpontine melodrama, so long, 
 
loo Questions at Issue 
 
 whether we call this quality by the good old 
 name of genius, or explain it away in the jargon 
 of some new-fangled sociography, we shall have 
 basis enough for the conduct of our particular 
 inquiry. 
 
 Perhaps I may now be permitted to recapitulate 
 the list of a dozen English poets whom I ventured 
 to quote as the manifest immortals of our British 
 Parnassus. They are Chaucer, Spenser, Shaken 
 speare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Gray, Burns, Words- 
 worth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats. It will 
 be noticed that there are thirteen names here, and 
 my reviewers have not failed to remind me that it 
 is notoriously difficult to count the stars. The 
 fact is that Gray, the real thirteenth, was an after- 
 thought ; and I will admit that, although Gray is 
 the author of what is perhaps the most imposing 
 single short poem in the language, and although he 
 has charm, skill, and distinction to a marvellous 
 degree, his originality, his force of production, were 
 so rigidly limited that he may scarcely be admitted 
 to the first rank. Whea he published his collected 
 poems Gray confessed himself " but a shrimp of an 
 author," and conjectured that the book would be 
 mistaken for " the works of a flea or a pismire." 
 No doubt the explosive force which eggs a very 
 
What is a Great Poet ? loi 
 
 great writer on to constant expression was lacking 
 in the case of Gray, and I yield him — a tender 
 babe, and the only one of my interesting family 
 which I will consent to throw to the wolves. The 
 rest are inviolable, and I will defend them to the 
 last ; but I can only put a lance in rest here for two 
 of them. 
 
 The absence of a truly catholic taste, and the 
 survival of an exclusive devotion to the romantic 
 ideals of the early part of the present century, 
 must, I suppose, be the cause of a tendency, on the 
 part of some of those who have rephed to me, to 
 question the right of Dryden and Pope to appear on 
 my list of great poets. It appears that Dryden is 
 very poorly thought of at Crawfordsville, Indiana, 
 and even at busier centres of American taste he is 
 reported as being not much of a power. " Dryden 
 is not read in America," says one of my critics, 
 with jaunty confidence. They say that we in 
 England are sometimes harsh in our estimates of 
 America ; but I confess I do not know the English- 
 man bold enough to have charged America with the 
 ■shocking want of taste which these children of her 
 own have so lightly volunteered to attribute to her. 
 Dryden not read in America ! It makes one wonder 
 what is read. Probably Miss Amelie Rives ? 
 
102 Questions at Issue 
 
 But to be serious, I can conceive nothing more 
 sinister for the future of English literature than that 
 to any great extent, or among any influential circle 
 of reading and writing men, the majesty and sinewy 
 force of the most masculine of all the English poets 
 should be despised and rejected. Something of a 
 temper less hurried than that of the man who runs 
 and reads is no doubt required for the appreciation 
 of that somewhat heavy-footed and sombre giant 
 of tragic and of narrative song, John Dryden, war- 
 ring with dunces, marching with sunken head — 
 " a down look," as Pope described it — through 
 the unappreciative flat places of our second Charles 
 and James. Prosaic at times he is, slow, fatigued, 
 unstimulating ; but, at his best, how full of the 
 true sublime, how uplifted by the wind of tragic 
 passion, how stirred to the depths by the noblest 
 intellectual and moral enthusiasm ! For my own 
 part, there are moments and moods in which nothing 
 satisfies my ear and my brain as do the great accents 
 of Dryden, while he marches down the page, with 
 his elephants and his standards and his kettle- 
 drums, " in the full vintage of his flowing honours." 
 There must be something effeminate and feeble 
 in the nervous system of a generation which cannot 
 bear this grandiose music, this virjle tramp of 
 
What is a Great Poet ? 103 
 
 Dryden's soldiers and camp-followers ; something 
 singularly dull and timid in a spirit that rejects this 
 robust intellectual companion. And, with all his 
 russet suit of homespun, Dryden is imbued to the 
 core with the truest and richest blood of poetry. 
 His vehemence is positively Homeric ; we would 
 not give Mac Flecknoe in exchange even for the lost 
 MargiteS. He possesses in a high degree all the 
 qualities which we have marked as needed for the 
 attribution of greatness. He is original to that 
 extent that mainly by his efforts the entire stream 
 of English poetry was diverted for a century and a 
 half into an unfamiliar channel ; he has an execu- 
 tive skill eminently his own, and is able to amaze 
 us to-day after so many subsequent triumphs of 
 verse-power ; he has distinction such as an emperor 
 might envy ; and after all the poets of the 
 eighteenth century have, as Mr. Lowell says, had 
 their hands in his pockets, his best lines are as 
 fresh and as magical as ever. 
 
 Pope I will not defend so warmly, and yet Pope 
 also was a great poet. Two of my American 
 critics, bent on refuting me, have severally availed 
 themselves of a somewhat unexpected weapon. 
 Each of them reminds me that Mr. Lang, in some 
 recent number of a magazine, has said that Pope is 
 
104 Questions at Issue 
 
 not a poet at all. Research might prove that this 
 heresy is not entirely unparalleled, yet I am uncon- 
 vinced. I yield to no one in respect and affection 
 for Mr. Lang, but in criticising that with which he 
 feels no personal sympathy, he is merely a " young 
 light-hearted master of the oar " of temperament. 
 When Mr. Lang blesses, the object is blest ; when 
 he curses, he may bless to-morrow. Some day he 
 will find himself alone in a country-house with a 
 Horace ; old chords will be touched, the mystery of 
 Pope will reveal itself to him, and we shall have a 
 panegyric that will make Lady Mary writhe in her 
 grave. Let no transatlantic, or cisatlantic, infidel 
 of letters be profane at the expense of a classic by 
 way of pleasing Mr. Lang ; his next emotion is 
 likely to be "«« sentiment obscur (Tavoir embrasse 
 la Chimere." 
 
 To justify one's confidence in the great poetic 
 importance of Pope is somewhat difficult. It needs 
 a fuller commentary and a longer series of refer- 
 ences than can be given here. But let us recollect 
 that the nature-worship and nature-study of to- 
 day may grow to seem a complete fallacy, a sheer 
 persistence in affectation, and that then, to readers 
 of new tastes and passions, Wordsworth and 
 Shelley will be as Pope is now, that is to say, 
 
What is a Great Poet ? 105 
 
 supported entirely by their individual merits. At 
 this moment, to the crowd, he is doubtless less 
 attractive than they are ; he is on the shady side, 
 they on the sunny side of fashion. But the author 
 of the end of the second book of The Rape of the 
 Lock, of the close of The New Dunciad, of the 
 Sporus portrait, and of the Third Moral Essay, 
 has qualities of imagination, applied to human char- 
 acter, and of distinction, applied to a formal and 
 delicately-elaborated style, which are unsurpassed, 
 even perhaps by Horace himself. Satirist after 
 satirist has chirped like a wren from the head of 
 Pope ; where are they now ? Where is the great, 
 the terrific, the cloud-compelling Churchill ? Mean- 
 while, in the midst of , a generation persistently 
 turned away from all his ideas and all his models, 
 the clear voice of Pope, still rings from the arena of 
 Queen Anne. 
 
 After all, this is mere assertion, and what am I 
 that I should pretend to lay down the law ? If 
 we seek, on the authority of whomsoever, to raise 
 an infallible standard of taste, and to arrange the 
 poets in classes, like schoolboys, then our inquiry 
 is futile indeed, and worse than futile. But the 
 interest which this controversy has undoubtedly 
 called forth seems to prove that there is a side on 
 
io6 Questions at Issue 
 
 which such questions as have been started are not 
 unwelcome nor unworthy of careful study. It is 
 not useless, I fancy, to remind ourselves now and 
 then of the very high standard which literature has 
 a right to demand from its more earnest votaries. 
 In the hurry of life, in the glare of passing in- 
 terests, we are apt to lose breadth of sympathy, 
 and to make our own personal and temporary 
 enjoyment of a book the criterion of its value. I 
 may take up Selden's Titles of Honour, turn over 
 a page or two, and lay it down in favour of the 
 new number of Punch, I must not for this 
 reason pledge myself to placing the comic paper of 
 to-day in a niche above the best work of a great 
 Elizabethan prose writer. But when a modern 
 American says that he finds better poetry in 
 Longfellow than in Chaucer, he is doing, to a less 
 exaggerated degree, precisely this very thing. He 
 feels his contemporary sympathies and limited 
 experience soothed and entertained by the facile 
 numbers of Evangeline, and he does not extract 
 an equal amount of amuoement and pleasure from 
 The Knight's Tale. 
 
 From one point of view it is very natural that 
 this should be so, and a critic would be priggish 
 indeed who should gravely reprove such a pre- 
 
What is a Great Poet ? 107 
 
 ference. The result would be, not to force the 
 reader to Chaucer, but to drive him away from 
 poetry altogether. The ordinary man reads what 
 he finds gives him the pure and wholesome stimulus 
 he needs. But if such a reader, in the pride of his 
 heart, should take upon himself to dogmatise, and 
 to tell us that Longfellow's poetry is better than 
 'Chaucer's, we should be obliged to remind him 
 that there are several factors to be taken into 
 account before he can carry us away with him on 
 the neck of such a theory. He has to consider 
 how long the charm of Chaucer has endured, and 
 how short a time the world has had to make up its 
 mind about Longfellow ; he has to appreciate the 
 relation of Chaucer to his own contemporaries, the 
 boldness of his invasion into realms until his day 
 unconquered, the inevitable influence of time in 
 fretting, wasting, and blanching the surface of the 
 masterpieces of the past. To be just, he has to 
 consider the whirligig of literature, and to ask him- 
 self whether, in the year 2289, after successive 
 revolutions of taste and repetitions of performance, 
 the works of Longfellow are reasonably likely to 
 possess the positive value which scholars, at all 
 events, still find in those of Chaucer. Not until 
 all these, and still more, irregularities of relative 
 
io8 Questions at Issue 
 
 position are taken into account, can the value of the 
 elder and the later poet be lightly laid in opposite 
 balances. 
 
 There has been no great disposition to produce 
 English candidates for the places of any of my 
 original dozen. The Saturday Review thinks that 
 I ought to have included Walter Scott, and the 
 St. Jame^s Gazette suggests Marlowe. There is 
 much to be said for the claims of each of these 
 poets, and I am surprised that no one has put in 
 a plea for Herrick or Elizabeth Barrett Browning. 
 Of Marlowe, indeed, we can to this day write 
 nothing better than Michael Drayton wrote : 
 
 Marlowe, bathed in the Thespian springs. 
 Had in him those brave translunary things 
 That our first poets had s his raptures were 
 All air and fire, which made his verses clear; 
 For that fine madness still he did retain. 
 Which rightly should possess a poet's brain. 
 
 He had the freshness and splendour of Heo- 
 sphoros, the bearer of light, the kindler of morning ; 
 as the dawn-star of our drama, he ascended the 
 heavens, in the auroral flush of youth, to announce 
 the approaching majesty of Shakespeare. But his 
 early death, and the unexampled character of the 
 
What is a Great Poet ? 109 
 
 genius who superseded him, have for centuries 
 obscured the name of Marlowe, which scintillated 
 half-extinguished in the blaze of Hamlet and Othello. 
 His reputation has, however, increased during the 
 last generation with greater rapidity than that of 
 any other of our elder poets, and a time may yet 
 come when we shall have popularly isolated him 
 from Shakespeare to such a degree as to enforce a 
 recognition of his individual greatness. At the 
 present moment to give him a place among the 
 twelve might savour of affectation. 
 
 In the case of Scott, I must still be firm in posi- 
 tively excluding him, although his name is one 
 of the most beloved in Uterature. The Waverley 
 Novels form Scott's great claim to our reverence, 
 and, save for the songs scattered through them, 
 have nothing to say to us here. Scott's long nar- 
 rative poems are really Waverley Novels told in 
 easy, ambling verse, and to a great measure, I must 
 confess, spoiled, I think, by such telling. For old 
 memory's sake we enjoy them still. 
 
 Full sore amaz'd at the wondrous change, 
 And frightened as a child might be 
 
 At the wild yell and visage strange, 
 And the dark words of gramarye ; 
 
 but the stuff is rather threadbare, surely. The best 
 
no Questions at Issue 
 
 passages are those in which, with skill not less than 
 that of Milton, Scott marshals heroic lists of High- 
 land proper names. Scott was a very genuine poet 
 "within his own limitations," as has been said of 
 another favourite, whose name I will not here repeat. 
 His lyrics, of very unequal merit, are occasionally 
 of wondrous beauty. I think it will be found, upon 
 very careful study of his writings, that he "published 
 eight absolutely perfect lyrical pieces, and about as 
 many more that were very good indeed. This is 
 much, and to how few can so high a tribute be paid ! 
 Yet this is not quite sufficient claim to a place on 
 the summits of English song. Scott was essen- 
 tially a great prose-writer, with a singular facility in 
 verse. 
 
 If this amiable controversy, started in the first 
 instance at the request of the Editor of the Forum, 
 has led us to examine a little more closely the basis 
 of our literary convictions, and, above all, if it has 
 led any of us to turn again to the fountain-heads of 
 English literature, it has not been without its im- 
 portance. One danger which I have long foreseen 
 from the spread of the democratic sentiment, is that 
 of the traditions of literary taste, the canons of lite- 
 rature, being reversed with success by a popular 
 vote. Up tp the present time, in all parts of the 
 
What is a Great Poet ? in 
 
 world, the masses of uneducated or semi-educated 
 persons, who form the vast majority of readers, 
 though they cannot and do not appreciate the 
 classics of their race, have been content to acknow- 
 ledge their traditional supremacy. Of late there 
 have seemed to me to be certain signs, especially 
 in America, of a revolt of the mob against our lite- 
 rary masters. In the less distinguished American 
 newspapers which reach me, I am sometimes startled 
 by the boldness with which a great name, like Words- 
 worth's or Dryden's, will be treated with indignity. 
 If literature is to be judged by a pUbiscite and if 
 the plebs recognises its power, it will certainly by 
 degrees cease to support reputations which give it 
 no pleasure and which it cannot comprehend. The 
 revolution against taste, once begun, will land us 
 in irreparable chaos. It is, therefore, high time 
 that those who recognise that there is no help for 
 us in literature outside the ancient laws and pre- 
 cepts of our profession, should vigorously support 
 the fame of those fountains of inspiration, the im- 
 peccable masters of English. 
 
 i88g. 
 
MAKING A NAME IN LITERATURE 
 
Making a Name in Literature 
 
 An American editor has asked nie to say how 
 a literary reputation is formed. It is like 
 asking one how wood is turned into gold, or how 
 real diamonds can be manufactured. If I knew 
 the answer, it is not in the pages of a review 
 that I should print it. I should bury myself in 
 a cottage in the woods, exercise my secret arts, 
 and wait for Fame to turn her trumpet into a 
 hunting-horn, and wake the forest-echoes with 
 my praises. In one of Mr. Stockton's stories a 
 princess sets all the wise men of her dominions 
 searching for the lost secret of what root-beer 
 should be made of. The philosophers fail to 
 discover it, and the magicians exhaust their arts 
 in vain. Not the slightest light is thrown on 
 the abstruse problem, until at last an old woman 
 is persuaded to reveal that it ought to be made 
 of roots. In the same way, the only quite ob- 
 
1 1 6 Questions at Issue 
 
 vious answer to the query, How should a literary 
 reputation be formed? is to reply, By thinking 
 nothing at all about reputation, but by writing 
 earnestly and carefully on the subjects and in 
 the style most congenial to your habits of mind. 
 But this is too obvious, and leads to no further 
 result. Besides, I see that the question is not, 
 how should be, but how is, a literary reputation 
 formed. I will endeavour, then, to give expres- 
 sion to such observations as I may have formed 
 on this latter subject. 
 
 A literary reputation, as here intended, is ob- 
 viously not the eternal fame of a Shakespeare, 
 which appears likely to last for ever, nor even 
 that of a Dickens, which must endure till there 
 comes a complete revolution of taste, but the 
 inferior form of repute which is enjoyed by some 
 dozens of literary people in each generation, and 
 makes a centre for the admiration or envy^of 
 the more enthusiastic or idler portion of their 
 contemporaries. There is as much cant in deny- 
 ing the attractiveness of such temporary glory as 
 there is in exaggerating its weight and importance. 
 To stimulate the minds of those who surround 
 him, to captivate their attention and excite their 
 curiosity, is pleasing to the natural man. We 
 
Making a Name in Literature 1 1 7 
 
 look with suspicion on the author who protests 
 too loudly that he does not care whether he is 
 admired or not. We shrewdly' surmise that in- 
 wardly he cares very much indeed. This instinc- 
 tive wish for reputation is one of the great 
 incentives to literary exertion. 
 
 Fame and money — these are the two chief spurs 
 which drive the author on. The statement may 
 sound ignoble, and the writers of every generation 
 persist in avowing that they write only to amuse 
 themsdves and to do good in their generation. 
 The noble lady in Lothair wished that she might 
 never eat, or if at all, only a little fruit by moon- 
 light on a bank. She, nevertheless, was always 
 punctual at her dinner ; and the author who pro- 
 tests his utter indifference to money and repu- 
 tation is commonly excessively sensitive when an 
 attack is made on his claims in either direction. 
 Literary reputation is relative, of course. There 
 may be a village fame which does not burn very 
 brightly in the country town, and provincial stars 
 that look very pale in a great city. The circum- 
 stances, however, under which all the various 
 degrees of fame are reached, are, I think, closely 
 analogous, and what is true of the local celebrity 
 is true, relatively, of a Victor Hugo or of a 
 
1 1 8 Questions at Issue 
 
 Tennyson. The importance of the reputation is 
 shown by the expanse of the area it covers, not 
 by the curve of its advance. The circle of a 
 great man's fame is extremely wide, but it only 
 repeats on a vast scale the phenomena attending 
 on the fame of a small man. 
 
 The three principal ways in which a literary 
 reputation is formed appear to be these : reviews, 
 private conversation among the leaders of opinion, 
 and the instinctive attraction which leads the 
 general public to discover for itself what is calcu- 
 lated to give it pleasure. I will briefly indicate 
 the manner in which these three seem to act at 
 the present moment on the formation of notoriety 
 and its attendant success, in the case of English 
 authors. First of all, it is not unworthy of note 
 that reputation, or fame, and monetary success, 
 are not identical, although the latter is frequently 
 the satellite of the former. One extraordinary 
 example of their occasional remoteness, which 
 may be mentioned without impertinence on the 
 authority of the author himself, is the position 
 of Mr. Herbert Spencer. In any list of living 
 Englishmen eminently distinguished for the 
 originality and importance of their books, Mr. 
 Spencer cannot fail to be ranked high. Yet, as 
 
Making a Name in Literature 1 1 9 
 
 every student of his later work knows, he stated 
 in the preface of one of those bald and inexpen- 
 sive volumes in which he enshrines his thought, 
 that up to a comparatively recent date the sale 
 of his books did not cover the cost of their publi- 
 cation. This was the case of a man famous, 
 it is not too much to say, in every civilised 
 country in the globe. 
 
 In pure literature there is probably no second 
 existing instance so flagrant as this. But, 10 
 take only a few of the most illustrious Englishmen 
 of letters, it is matter ,of common notoriety that 
 the sale of the books of, say, Mr. Swinburne 
 and Mr. Leslie Stephen, the Bishop of Oxford 
 (Dr. Stubbs) and Mr. Lecky, considerable as it 
 may now have become, for a long time by no 
 means responded to the lofty rank which each 
 of these authors has taken in the esteem of 
 educated people throughout the Anglo-Saxon 
 world. The reverse is still more curious and 
 unaccountable. Why is it that there are writers 
 of no merit at all, who sell their books in 
 thousands where people of genius sell theirs in 
 scores, yet without ever making a reputation ? 
 At the time when Tupper was far more popular 
 than Tennyson, and Eliza Cook enjoyed ten times 
 
I20 Questions at Issue 
 
 the commercial success of Browning, even the 
 votaries of these poetasters did not claim a higher 
 place for them, or even a high place at all. They 
 bought their books because they liked them, but 
 the buyers evidently did not imagine that pur- 
 chase gave their temporary favourites any rank 
 in the hierarchy of fame. These things are a 
 mystery, but the distinction between commercial 
 success and fame is one which must be drawn. 
 We are speaking here of reputation, whether at^ 
 tended by vast sales or only by barren honour. 
 
 Reviews have no longer the power which they 
 enjoyed seventy years ago, of making or even of 
 marring the fortunes of a book. When ther€ existed 
 hundreds of private book clubs throughout the 
 country, each one of which proceeded to buy a 
 copy of whatever the Edinburgh recommended, then 
 the reviewer was a great personage in the land. 
 We may see in Lockhart's Life of Scott that Sir 
 Walter, even at the height of his success, and 
 when, as Ellis said, he was " the greatest elephant 
 in the world " except himself, was seriously 
 agitated by Jeffrey's cold review of Marmion, 
 not through irritable peevishness, which was 
 wholly foreign to Scott s magnanimous nature, 
 bui because a slighting review was enough to 
 
Making a Name in Literature 121 
 
 cripple a book, and a slashing review to destroy it. 
 There is nothing of this kind now. No newspaper 
 -exists in Great Britain which is able to sell an 
 edition of a book by praising it. I doubt if any 
 review, under the most favourable circumstances 
 and coming from the most influential quarter, 
 causes two hundred copies of a book to be bought. 
 A signed article by Mr. Gladstone is, of course, 
 an exception ; yet some have doubted of late 
 whether a book may not be found so inept and 
 so heavy as not to stir even at the summons of 
 that voice. 
 
 The reviews in the professional literary papers 
 are still understood to be useful in the case of 
 unknown writers. A young author without a 
 friend, if he has merit, and above all if he has 
 striking originality, is almost sure to attract the 
 notice of some beneficent reviewer, and be praised 
 in the columns of one or other of the leading 
 weeklies. These are the circumstances under 
 which the native kindliness of the irritable race is 
 displayed most freely. The envy which sees merit 
 in a new man and determines to crush it with 
 silence or malignant attack, is inhuman, and 
 practically, I fancy, scarcely exists. The entirely 
 unheard-of writer wounds no susceptibilities. 
 
122 Questions at Issue 
 
 awakens no suspicions, and even excites a pleasur- 
 able warmth of patronage. It is a little later on, 
 when the new man is quite new no longer, but 
 is becoming a formidable rival, that evil passions 
 are aroused, or sometimes seem to have been 
 aroused, in pure literary bosoms. The most 
 sincere reviews are often those which treat the 
 works of unknown writers, and this is perhaps 
 the reason why the shrewd public still permits 
 itself to be moved by these when they are 
 strongly favourable. At any rate, every new- 
 comer must be introduced to our crowded public 
 to be observed at all, and to new-comers the 
 review is still the indispensable master of the 
 ceremonies. 
 
 But the power of reviews to create this form of 
 literary reputation has of late been greatly circum- 
 scribed. The public grows less and less the dupe 
 of an anonymous judgment, expressed in the 
 columns of one of the too-numerous organs of 
 public opinion. A more naiive generation than ours 
 was overawed by the nameless authority which 
 moved behind a review. Ours, on the contrary, 
 is apt to go too far, and pay no notice, because it 
 does not know the name of a writer. The author 
 who writhed under the humiliation of attack in a 
 
Making a Name in Literature 123 
 
 famous paper, little suspected that his critic was 
 one Snooks, an inglorious creature whose acquaint- 
 ance with the matter under discussion was mainly 
 taken from the book he was reviewing. But, on 
 the other hand, there is that story of the writer 
 of some compendium of Greek history severely 
 handled anonymously by the Athenceum, whose 
 scorn of the nameless critic gave way to horror 
 and shame when he discovered him to have been 
 no other than Mr. Grote. On the whole, when we 
 consider the careful, learned, and judicial reviews 
 which are still to be found, like grains of salt, in 
 the vast body of insipid criticism in the news- 
 papers, it may be held that the public pays less 
 attention to the reviews than it should. The fact 
 seems to remain that, except in the case of entirely 
 unknown writers, periodical criticism possesses an 
 ever-dwindling power of recommendation. 
 
 It is in conversation that the fame of the best 
 books is made. There are certain men and women 
 in London who are on the outlook for new merit, 
 who are supposed to be hard to please, and whose 
 praise is like rubies. It is those people who, in 
 the smoking-room of the club, or across the dinner- 
 table, create the fame of writers and the success of 
 new books. "Seen Polyanthus?" says one of 
 
124 Questions at Issue 
 
 these peripatetic oracles. " No," you answer ; 
 " I am afraid I don't know what Polyanthus is." 
 " Well, it's not half bad ; it's this new realistic 
 romance." " Indeed ! By whom is it written ? " 
 "Oh! a fellow called — called Binks, I think — 
 Binks or Bunks ; qiiite a new man. You ought to 
 see it, don't you know." Some one far down the 
 table ventures to say, " Oh ! I think it was the 
 Palladium said on Saturday that it wasn't a good 
 book at all, awfully abnormal, or something of that 
 kind." " Well, you look at it ; I think you'll agree 
 with me that it's not half bad." Such a conversa- 
 tion as this, if held in a fructifying spot among the 
 best people, does Polyanthus more good than a 
 favourable review. It excites curiosity, and echoes 
 of the praise (" not half bad " is at the present 
 moment the most fulsome of existing expressions 
 of London enthusiasm) reverberate and reverberate 
 until the fortune of the book is made. At the 
 same time, be it for ever remembered, there must 
 be in Polyanthus the genuine force and merit which 
 appeal to an impartial judge and convert reader 
 after reader, or else vainly does the friendly oracle 
 try to raise the wind. He betrays himself, most 
 likely, by using the expression, " a very fine book," 
 or "beautifully written." These phrases have a 
 
Making a Name in Literature 125 
 
 falsetto air, and lack the persuasive sincerity of the 
 true modern eulogium, " not half bad." 
 
 But there are reputations formed in other places 
 than in London dining-rooms and the libraries of 
 clubs. There are certain books which are not 
 welcomed by the reviews, and which fail to please 
 or even to meet the eye of experts in literature, 
 which nevertheless, by some strange and unaccount- 
 able attraction, become known to the outer public, 
 and are eagerly accepted by a very wide circle of 
 readers. I am not aware that the late Mr. Roe 
 was ever a favourite with the writing or speaking 
 critics of America, He achieved his extraordinary 
 success not by the aid, but in spite of the neglect 
 and disapproval of the lettered classes, I have no 
 close acquaintance with Mr. Roe's novels, but I 
 know them well enough to despair of discovering 
 why they were found to be so eminently welcome 
 to thousands of readers. So far as I have examined 
 them, they have appeared to me to be — if I may 
 speak frankly — neither good enough nor bad enough 
 to account for their popularity. It is not that I 
 am such a prig as to disdain Mr. Roe's honourable 
 industry; far from it. But his books are luke- 
 warm ; they have neither the heat of a rich insight 
 into character, nor the deathly coldness of false or 
 
126 Questions at Issue 
 
 insincere fiction. They are not ill-constructed, 
 although they certainly are not well-constructed. 
 It is their lack of salient character that makes me 
 wonder what enabled them to float where scores 
 and scores of works not appreciably worse or better 
 than they have sunk. 
 
 Most countries possess at any given moment an 
 author of this class. In England we have the lady 
 who signs her eminently reputable novels by the 
 pseudonym of " Edna Lyall." I do not propose 
 to say what the lettered person thinks of the author 
 of Donovan; I would only point out that the 
 organs of literary opinion do not recognise her 
 existence. I cannot recollect ever noticing a 
 prominent review of one of her books in any lead- 
 ing paper. I never heard them so much as 
 mentioned by any critical reader. To find out 
 something about " Edna Lyall " I have just con- 
 sulted the latest edition of Men of the Time, but 
 she is unknown to that not excessively austere 
 compendium. And now for the reverse of the 
 medal. I lately requested the mistress of a girls' 
 school, a friend of mine, to ask her elder classes to 
 writedown the name of the greatest English author. 
 The universal answer was " Shakespeare." What 
 could be more respectable ? But the second 
 
Making a Name in Literature 127 
 
 question was, "Who is your favourite English 
 author ? " And this time, by a large majority, 
 Edna Lyall bore oiF the bell. 
 
 I think this amiable lady may be consoled for 
 the slight which Men of the Time puts upon her. 
 It seems plain that she is a very great personage 
 indeed to all the girls of the time. But if you ask 
 me how such a subterranean reputation as this is 
 formed, what starts it, how it is supported, I can 
 only say I have failed, after some not unindus- 
 trious search, to discover. I may but conjecture 
 that, as I have suggested, the public instinctively 
 feels the attraction of the article that satisfies its 
 passing requirement. These illiterate successes — if 
 I may use the word " illiterate " in its plain mean- 
 ing and without offence — are exceedingly ephemera], 
 and sink into the ground as silently and rapidly as 
 they rose from it. What has become of Mrs. Gore 
 and Mrs. March ? Who wrote Emilia Wytidham, 
 and to what elegant pen did the girls who are now 
 grandmothers owe Ellen Middleton ? Alas ! it has 
 taken only forty years to strew the poppy of 
 oblivion over these once thrilling titles. 
 
 For we have to face the fact that reputations 
 are lost as well as won. What destroys the fame 
 of an accepted author ? This, surely, is a question 
 
128 Questions at Issue 
 
 not less interesting than that with which w^e 
 started, and a necessary corollary to it. Not un- 
 favourable reviews, certainly. An unjust review 
 may annoy and depress the author, it may cheer a 
 certain number of his enemies and cool the ardour 
 of a few of his friends, but in the long run it is 
 sure to be innocuous in proportion to its injustice. I 
 have in my mind the mode in which Mr. Browning's 
 poems were treated in certain quarters twenty 
 years ago. I remember more than one instance in 
 which critics were permitted, in newspapers which 
 ought to have known better, to exemplify that 
 charge of needless obscurity which it was then 
 the fashion to bring against the poet, by the quo- 
 tation of mutilated fragments, and even by the 
 introduction of absurd mistakes into the tran- 
 scription of the text. Now, in this case, a few 
 persons were possibly deterred from the further 
 perusal of a writer who appeared, by these ex- 
 cerpts, to be a lunatic ; but I think far more were • 
 roused into vehement sympathy for Mr. Browning 
 by comparing the quotations with the originals, and 
 so finding out that the reviewers had lied. 
 
 It rests with the author, not the critic, to destroy 
 his own reputation. No one, as Bentley said, was 
 ever written down except by himself, and the public 
 
Making a Name in Literature 129 
 
 is quite, shrewd enough to do a rough sort of justice 
 to the critic who accuses as well as to the author 
 who is arraigned. As Dangle observes, "it cer- 
 tainly does hurt an author of delicate feelings to 
 see the liberties the reviews take " with his writ- 
 ings ; but if he is worth his salt at all, he will 
 comfort himself by thinking, with Sir Fretful, 
 that " their abuse is, after all, the best panegyric." 
 To an author who is smarting under a more than 
 common infliction of this kind of peppering, one 
 consolatory consideration may be hinted — namely, 
 that not to be spoken about at all is even worse 
 than being maligned. 
 
 One of the most insidious perils that waylay 
 the modern literary life is an exaggerated success 
 at the outset of a career. A very remarkable 
 instance of this has been seen in our time. Thir- 
 teen years ago a satire was published, which, 
 although essentially destructive, and therefore not 
 truly promising, was set forth with so much 
 novelty of execution, brightness of wit, and variety 
 of knowledge that the world was taken by storm. 
 The author of that work was received with plaudits 
 of the most exaggerated kind, and his second book 
 was looked forward to with unbounded anticipa- 
 tion. It came, and though fresh and witty, it had 
 
 I 
 
1 3° Questions at Issue 
 
 less distinction, less vitality than the first. Book 
 after book has marked ever a further step in steady 
 decline, and now that once flattered and belaureled 
 writer's name is one no more to conjure with. 
 This, surely, is a pathetic fate. I can imagine no 
 form of failure so desperately depressing as that 
 which comes disguised in excessive juvenile success. 
 In literature, at least as much as in other profes- 
 sions, the race is not to the swift, although the 
 battle must eventually be to the strong. There is 
 a blossoming, like that of forced annuals, which 
 pays for its fulness and richness by a plague of 
 early sterility. 
 
 What the young writer of wholesome ambition 
 should pray for is, not to flash like a meteor 
 on the astonished world of fashion, but by solid 
 and admirable writing slowly to win a place 
 which has a firm and wide basis. There is 
 such a fate as to suffer through life from the 
 top-heaviness of an initial success. Such a 
 struggle as Thackeray's may be painful at the 
 time, and may call for the exercise of a great deal 
 of patience and good temper. It is, nevertheless, 
 a better thing in the long run to serve a novitiate 
 in Grub Street, than, like Samuel Warren, to be 
 famous at thirty, and die almost forgotten at 
 
Making a Name in Literature 131 
 
 seventy. There is a deadly tendency in the mind 
 which too easily has found others captivated by his 
 effusions, to fancy that anything is good enough 
 for the public. A precocious favourite conceives 
 that he has only to whistle and the world will at 
 any moment come back to him. The soldier who 
 meets with no resistance throws aside his armour 
 and relaxes his ambition. He forgets that, as 
 Andrew Marvell says : 
 
 The same art that did gain 
 ^ power, must it maintain. 
 
 Some danger to a partially established reputation 
 is to be met with from the fickleness of public taste 
 and the easy satiety of readers. If an imaginative 
 writer has won the attention of the public by a 
 vigorous and original picture of some unhackneyed 
 scene of life which is thoroughly familiar to himself, 
 he is apt to find himself on the horns of a dilemma, 
 If he turiis to a new class of subjects, the public 
 which has already " placed " him as an authority 
 on a particular subject, will be disappointed ; on the 
 other hand, if he sticks to his last, he runs the 
 chance of fatiguing his readers and of exhausting 
 his own impressions. For such an author, ultimate 
 success probably lies on the side of courage. He 
 
132 Questions at Issue 
 
 must reject the temptation to indulge the public 
 with what he knows it wants, and must boldly 
 force it to like another and still unrecognised phase 
 of his talent. He ought, however, to make very sure 
 that he is right, and not his readers, before he 
 insists upon a change. It is not every one who 
 possesses the versatility of the first Lord Lytton, 
 and can conquer new worlds under a pseudonym at 
 the age of fifty. There are plenty of instances of 
 men of letters who, weary of being praised for what 
 they did well, have tried to force down the throats 
 of the public what everybody but themselves could 
 see was ill-done. I remember Hans Christian 
 Andersen, in the last year of his life, telling me that 
 the books he should really be remembered by were 
 his dramas and his novels, not the fairy-stories that 
 everybody persisted in making so much fuss about. 
 He had gone through life without gaining the least 
 skill in gauging his own strength or weakness. 
 Andersen, however, was exceptionally uncritical ; 
 and the author who is not blinded by vanity can 
 generally tell, before he reaches middle life, in what 
 his real power consists. 
 
 Yet, when we sum up the whole question, we 
 have to confess that we know very little about the 
 causes which lead to the distribution of public praise. 
 
Making a Name in Literature 133 
 
 The wind of fame bloweth where it listeth, and we 
 hear the sound of it without knowing whence it 
 Cometh. This, however, appears to be certain, that, 
 except in the case of those rare authors of excep- 
 tionally subUme genius who conquer attention by 
 their force of originality, a great deal more than 
 mere cleverness in writing is needful to make a 
 reputation. Sagacity in selection, tact in dealing 
 with other people, suppleness of character, rapidity 
 in appreciation, and adroitness in action — all these 
 are qualities which go to the formation of a broad 
 literary reputation. In these days an author must 
 be wide awake, and he must take a vast deal of 
 trouble. The age is gone by when he could sit 
 against the wall and let the gooseberries fall into 
 his mouth. The increased pressure of competition 
 tells upon the literary career as much as upon any 
 other branch of professional life, and the author 
 who wishes to continue to succeed must keep his 
 loins girded. 
 
 i88g. 
 
THE LIMITS OF REALISM IN FICTION 
 
The Limits of Realism in Fiction 
 
 In the last new Parisian farce, by M, Sarcey's 
 clever young son-in-law, there is a conscientious 
 painter of the realistic school who is preparing for 
 the Salon a very serious and abstruse production. 
 The young lady of his heart says, at length : 
 " It's rather a melancholy subject ; I wonder you 
 don't paint a sportsman, crossing a rustic bridge, 
 and meeting a pretty girl." This is the climax, 
 and the artist breaks off his relations with Young 
 Lady No. i. Toward the end of the play, while 
 he is still at work on his picture. Young Lady 
 No. 2 says : " If I were you, I should take another 
 subject. Now, for instance, why don't you paint a 
 pretty girl, crossing a rustic bridge, and met by a 
 sportsman ? " 
 
 This is really an allegory, whether M. Gandillot 
 intends it or not. Thus have those charming, 
 fresh, ingenuous, ignorant, and rather stupid 
 
138 Questions at Issue 
 
 young ladies, the English and American publics, 
 received the attempts which novelists have made 
 to introduce among them what is called, outside 
 the Anglo-Saxon world, the experimental novgj. 
 The present writer is no defender of that class of 
 fiction ; least of all is he an exclusive defender of 
 it; but he is tired to death of the criticism on both 
 sides of the Atlantic, which refuses to see what the 
 realists are, whither they are tending, and what 
 position they are beginning to hold in the general 
 evolution of imaginative literature. He is no great 
 lover of what they produce, apd most certainly does 
 not delight in their excesses ; but when they are 
 advised to give up their studies and paint pretty 
 girls on rustic bridges, he is almost stung into 
 partisanship. The present essay will have no 
 interest whatever for persons who approve of no 
 more stringent investigation into conduct than 
 Miss Yonge's, and enjoy no action nearer home 
 than Zambeziland ; but to those who have perceived 
 that in almost every country in the world the novel 
 of manners has been passing through a curious 
 phase, it may possibly not be uninteresting to be 
 called upon to inquire what the nature of that 
 phase has been, and still more what is to be the 
 outcome of it. 
 
Limits of Realism in Fiction 139 
 
 So far as the Anglo-Saxon world is concerned, 
 the experimental or realistic novel is mainly to be 
 studied in America, Russia, and France. It exists 
 now in all the countries of the European Continent, 
 but we know less about its manifestations there. 
 It has had no direct development in England, 
 except in the clever but imperfect stories of Mr. 
 George Moore. Ten years ago the realistic novel, 
 or at all events the naturalist school, out of which 
 it proceeded, was just beginning to be talked about, 
 and there was still a good deal of perplexity, out- 
 side Paris, as to its scope and as to the meaning of 
 its name. Russia, still unexplored by the Vicomte 
 de VogQd and his disciples, was represented to 
 western readers solely by TurgenefF, who was a 
 great deal too romantic to be a pure naturalist. In 
 America, where now almost every new writer of 
 merit seems to be a realist, there was but one, 
 Mr. Henry James, who, in 1877, had inaugurated 
 the experimental novel in the English language, 
 with his American. Mr. Howells, tending more 
 and more in that direction, was to write on for 
 several years before he should produce a thoroughly 
 realistic novel. 
 
 Ten years ago, then, the very few people who 
 take an interest in literary questions were looking 
 
140 Questions at Issue 
 
 with hope or apprehension, as the case might be, 
 to Paris, and chiefly to the study of M. Zola. It 
 was from the little villa at M^dan that revelation on 
 the subject of the coming novel was to be awaited ; 
 and in the autumn of 1880 the long-expected 
 message came, in the shape of the grotesque, 
 violent, arid narrow, but extremely able volume of 
 destructive and constructive criticism called Le 
 Roman Experimental. People had complained that 
 they did not know what M. Zola was driving at ; 
 that they could not recognise a " naturalistic " or 
 " realistic " book when they saw it ; that the 
 "scientific method" in fiction, the "return to 
 nature," " experimental observation " as the basis 
 of a story, were mere phrases to them, vague and 
 incomprehensible. The Sage of Medan determined 
 to remove the objection ■ and explain everything. 
 He put his speaking-trumpet to his lips, and, dis- 
 daining to address the crassness of his countrymen, 
 he shouted his system of rules and formulas to the 
 Russian public, that all the world might hear. 
 
 In 1880 he had himself proceeded far. He had 
 published the Rougon-Macquart series of his novels, 
 as far as Une Page d! Amour. He has added 
 since then six or seven novels to the bulk of his 
 works, and he has published many forcible and 
 
Limits of Realism in Fiction 141 
 
 fascinating and many repulsive pages. But since 
 1880 he has not altered his method or pushed 
 on to any further development. He had already 
 displayed his main qualities — his extraordinary 
 mixture of versatility and monotony, his enduring 
 force, his plentiful lack of taste, his cynical disdain 
 for the weaknesses of men, his admirable construc- 
 tive power, his inability to select the salient points 
 in a vast mass of observations. He had already 
 shown himself what I must take the liberty of say- 
 ing that he appears to me to be — one of the leading 
 men of genius in the second half of the nineteenth 
 century, one of the strongest novelists of the world ; 
 and that in spite of faults so serious and so eradi- 
 cable that they would have hopelessly wrecked a 
 writer a little less overwhelming in strength and 
 resource. 
 
 Zola seems to me to be the Vulcan among 
 our later gods, afflicted with moral lameness from 
 his birth, and coming to us sooty and brutal 
 from the forge, yet as indisputably divine as any 
 Mercury-Hawthorne or Apollo-Thackeray of the 
 best of them. It is to Zola, and to Zola only, 
 that the concentration of the scattered tendencies 
 of naturalism is due. It is owing to him that the 
 threads of Flaubert and Daudet, Dostoiefsky and 
 
142 Questions at Issue 
 
 Tolstoi, Howells and Henry James can be drawn 
 into anything like a single system. It is Zola who 
 discovered a common measure for all these talents, 
 and a formula wide enough and yet close enough 
 to distinguish them from the outside world and 
 bind them to one another. It is his doing that for 
 ten years the experimental novel has flowed in a 
 definite channel, and has not spread itself abroad 
 in a thousand whimsical directions. 
 
 To a serious critic, then, who is not a partisan, 
 but who sees how large a body of carefully composed 
 fiction the naturalistic school has produced, it is of 
 great importance to know what is the formula of 
 M. Zola: He has defined it, one would think, 
 clearly enough, but to see it intelligently repeated 
 is rare indeed. It starts from the negation of 
 fancy — not of imagination, as that word is used by 
 the best Anglo-Saxon critics, but of fancy — the 
 romantic and rhetorical elements that novelists have 
 so largely used to embroider the home-spun fabric 
 of experience with. It starts with the exclusion of 
 all that is called " ideal," all that is not firmly based 
 on the actual life pf human beings, all, in short, 
 that is grotesque, unreal, nebulous, or didactic. I 
 do not understand Zola to condemn the romantic 
 writers of the past ; I do not think he has spoken 
 
Limits of Realism in Fiction 143 
 
 of Dumas pire or of George Sand as Mr, Howells 
 has allowed himself to speak of Dickens. He has 
 a phrase of contempt-7-richly deserved, it appears 
 to me — for the childish evolution of Victor Hugo's 
 plots, and in particular of that of Notr& Dame de 
 Paris; but, on the whole, his aim is rather to 
 determine the outlines of a new school than to 
 attack the recognised masters of the past. If it 
 be not so, it should be so ; there is room in the 
 Temple of Fame for all good writers, and it does 
 not blast the laurels of Walter Scott that we are 
 deeply moved by Dostoiefsky. 
 
 With Zola's theory of what the naturalistic 
 novel should be, it seems impossible at first sight 
 to quarrel. It is to be contemporary ; it is to be 
 founded on and limited by actual experience ; it 
 is to reject all empirical modes of awakening sym- 
 pathy and interest ; its aim is to place before its 
 readers living beings, acting the come dy of li fe as 
 naturally as possible. It is to trust to principles 
 of action and to reject formulas of character ; to 
 cultivate the personal expression ; to be analytical 
 rather than lyrical ; to paint men as they are, not 
 as you think they should be. There is no harm 
 in all this. There is not a word here that does 
 not apply to the chiefs of one of the two great 
 
144 Questions at Issue 
 
 parallel schools of English fiction. It is hard to 
 conceive of a novelist whose work is more expe- 
 rimental than Richardson. Fielding is personal 
 and analytical above all things. If France counts 
 George Sand among its romanticists, we can point 
 to a realist who is greater than she, in Jane 
 Austen. There is not a word to be found in 
 M. Zola's definitions of the experimental novel 
 that is not fulfilled in the pages of Emma; which 
 is equivalent to saying that the most advanced 
 realism may be practised by the most innocent as 
 well as the most captivating of novelists. Miss, 
 Austen did not observe over a wide area, but 
 within the circle of her experience she disguised 
 nothing, neglected nothing, glossed over nothing. 
 She is the perfection of the realistic ideal, and 
 there ought to be a statue of her in the vesti- 
 bule of the forthcoming Academic des Goncourts. 
 Unfortunately, the lives of her later brethren have 
 not been so sequestered as hers, and they, too, 
 have thought it their duty to neglect nothing and 
 to disguise nothing. 
 
 It is not necessary to repeat here the rougher 
 charges which have been brought against the natu- 
 ralist school in France — charges which in mitigated 
 form have assailed their brethren in Russia and 
 
Limits of Realism in Fiction 145 
 
 America. On a carefully reasoned page in the 
 copy of M. Zola's essay Du Roman which lies 
 before me, one of those idiots who write in 
 public books has scribbled the remark, " They 
 see nothing in life but filth and crime," This 
 ignoble wielder of the pencil but repeats what 
 more ambitious critics have been saying in solemn 
 terms for the last fifteen years. Even as regards 
 Zola himself, as the author of the delicate comedy 
 of La Conquete de Plassans, and the moving 
 tragedy of Une Page d'Amour, this charge is 
 utterly false, and, in respect of the other leaders 
 it is simply preposterous. None the less, there 
 are sides upon which the naturalistic novelists 
 are open to serious criticism in practice. It is 
 with no intention of underrating their eminent 
 qualities that I suggest certain points at which, 
 as it appears to me, their armour is conspicuously 
 weak. There are limits to realism, and they 
 seem to have been readily discovered by the 
 realists themselves. These weak points are to 
 be seen in the jointed harness of the strongest 
 book that the school has yet produced in any 
 country, Le Crime et le Chdtiment. 
 
 When the ideas of Zola were first warmly 
 taken up, about ten years ago, by the most 
 
 K 
 
146 Questions at Issue 
 
 earnest and sympathetic writers who then were 
 young, the ■ theory of the experimental novel 
 seemed unassailable, and the range within which 
 it could be worked to advantage practically bound- 
 less. But the fallacies of practice remained to 
 be experienced, and looking back upon what has 
 been written by the leaders themselves, the places 
 where the theory has broken down are patent. 
 It may not be uninteresting to take up the lead- 
 ing dogmas of the naturalistic school, and to see 
 what elements of failure, or, rather, what limit- 
 ations to success, they contained. The outlook is 
 very different in 1890 from what it was in 1880; 
 and a vast number of exceedingly clever writers 
 have laboured to no avail, if we are not able 
 at the latter date to gain a wider perspective than 
 could be obtained at the earlier one. 
 
 Ten years ago, most ardent and generous young 
 authors, outside the frontiers of indifferent Albion, 
 were fired with enthusiasm at the results to be 
 achieved by naturalism in fiction. It was to be 
 the Revealer and the Avenger. It was to display 
 society as it is, and to wipe out all the hypocrisies 
 of convention. It was to proceed from strength 
 to strength. It was to place all imagination upon 
 a scientific basis, and to open boundless vistas 
 
Limits of Realism in Fiction 147 
 
 Ito sincere and courageous young novelists. We 
 have seen with what ardent hope and confidence 
 its principles were accepted by Mr. Howells, We 
 have seen all the Latin races, in their coarser 
 way, embrace and magnify the system. We have 
 seen Zola, like a heavy father in high comedy, 
 bless a budding generation of novel-writers, 
 and prophesy that they will all proceed further 
 than he along the road of truth and experiment. 
 Yet the naturalistic school is really less advanced, 
 less thorough, than it was ten years ago. Why 
 is this ? 
 
 It is doubtless because the strain and stress 
 of production have brought to light those weak 
 places in the formula which were not dreamed of. 
 The first principle of the school was the exact 
 reproduction of life. But life is wide, and it is 
 elusive. All that the finest observer can do is 
 to make a portrait of one corner of it. By the 
 confession of the master-spirit himself, this portrait 
 is not to be a photograph. It must be inspired 
 by imagination, but sustained and confined by 
 the experience of reality. It does not appear at 
 first sight as though it should be difficult to 
 attain this, but in point of fact it is found almost 
 impossible to approach this species of perfection. 
 
148 Questions at Issue 
 
 The result of building up a long work on this 
 principle is, I hardly know why, to produce the 
 effect of a reflection in a convex mirror. TJie 
 more accurately experimental some parts of the 
 picture are, the more will the want of balance 
 and proportion in other parts be felt. I will take 
 at random two examples. No better work in the 
 naturalistic direction has been done than is to 
 be found in the beginning of M. Zola's La Joie 
 de Vivre, or in the early part of the middle of 
 Mr. James's Bostonians. The life in the melan- 
 choly Norman house upon the cliff, the life 
 among the uncouth fanatic philanthropists in the 
 American city, these are given with a reality, a 
 brightness, a personal note which have an elec- 
 trical effect upon the reader. But the remainder 
 of each of these remarkable books, built up as 
 they are with infinite toil by two of the most 
 accomplished architects of fiction now living, 
 leaves on the mind a sense of a strained reflec- 
 tion, of images blurred or malformed by a con- 
 vexity of the mirror. As I have said, it is 
 difficijlt to account for this, which is a feature of 
 blight on almost efvery specimen of the experi- 
 mental novel ; but perhaps it can in a measure 
 be accounted for by the, inherent disproportipji 
 
Limits of Realism in Fiction 149 
 
 which exists between the small flat surface of a 
 book and the vast arch of life which it under- 
 takes to mirror, those studies being least liable 
 to distortion which reflect the smallest section of' 
 life, and those in which ambitious masters en- 
 deavour to make us feel the mighty movements 
 of populous cities and vast bodies of men being 
 the most inevitably misshapen. 
 
 Another leading principle of the naturalists is the 
 disin terested attitud e of the narrator. He who tells 
 the story must not act the part of Chorus, must not 
 praise or blame, must have no favourites ; in short, 
 must not be ajagrglist bjuLSiP-an^tomist. This excel- 
 lent and theoretical law has been a snare in practice. 
 The nations of continental Europe are not bound 
 down by conventional laws to the same extent as we 
 English are. The Anglo-Saxon race is now the only 
 one that has not been touched by that pessimism of 
 which the writings of Schopenhauer are the most 
 prominent and popular exponent. This fact is too 
 often overlooked when we scornfully ask why the 
 foreign nations allow themselves so great a latitude 
 in the discussion of moral subjects. It is partly, 
 no doubt, because of our beautiful Protestant insti- 
 tutions ; because we go to Sunday-schools and take 
 .a lively interest in the souls of other people; because. 
 
J50 Questions at Issue 
 
 in short, we are all so virtuous and godly, that our 
 novels are so prim and decent. But it is also partly 
 because our hereditary dulness in perceiving deli- 
 cate ethical distinctions has given the Anglo-Saxon 
 race a tendency to slur over the dissonances between 
 man and nature. This tendency does not exist 
 among the Latin races, who run to the opposite ex- 
 treme and exaggerate these discords. The conse- 
 quence has been that they have, . almost without 
 exception, being betrayed by the disinterested 
 attitude into a contemplation of crime and frailty 
 (notoriously more interesting than innocence and 
 virtue) which has given bystanders excuse for 
 saying that these novelists are lovers of that which 
 is evil. In the same way they have been tempted 
 by the Rembrandtesque shadows of pain, dirt, and 
 obloquy to overdash their canvases with the subfusc 
 hues of sentiment. In a wqrd,_in- trying to draw 
 life evenly and draw it whole, they have introduced 
 such a brutal want of tone as to render the portrait 
 a caricature. The American realists, who were 
 guarded by fashion from the Scylla of brutality, 
 have not wholly escaped, on their side and for the 
 same reason, the Charybdis of insipidity. 
 
 It would take us too far, and would require a 
 constant reference to individual books, to trace the 
 weaknesses of the realistic school of our own day. 
 
Limits of Realism in Fiction 151 
 
 Human sentiment has revenged itself upon them for 
 their rigid regulations and scientific formulas, by 
 betraying them into faults the possibility of which 
 they had not anticipated. But above all other 
 causes of their limited and temporary influence, the 
 most powerful has been the material character which 
 their rules forced upon them, and their excess of 
 positivism and precision. In eliminating the gro- 
 tesque and the rhetorical they drove out more than 
 they wished to lose ; they pushed away with their 
 scientific pitchfork the fantastic and intellectual ele- 
 ments. How utterly fatal this was may be seen, 
 not in the leaders, who have preserved something 
 of the reflected colour of the old romance, but in 
 those earnest disciples who have pushed the theory 
 to its extremity. In their sombre, grimy, and 
 fdreary studies in pathology, clinical bulletins of a 
 soul dying of atrophy, we may see what the limits 
 of realism are, and how impossible it is that human 
 readers should much longer go on enjoying this sort 
 of literary aliment. 
 
 If I have dwelt upon these limitations, however, 
 it has not been to cast a stone at the naturalistic 
 school. It has been rather with the object of clearing 
 away some critical misconceptions about the future 
 development of it. Anglo-Saxon criticism of the 
 perambulating species might, perhaps, be persuaded 
 
152 Questions at Issue 
 
 to consider the realists with calmer judgment, if it 
 looked upon them, not as a monstrous canker that 
 was slowly spreading its mortal influence over the 
 whole of literature, which it would presently over- 
 whelm and destroy, but as a natural and timely 
 growth, taking its due place in the succession of 
 products, and bound, like other growths, to bud and 
 blossom and decline. I venture to put forth the 
 view that the novel of experiment has had its day > 
 that it has been made the vehicle of some of the 
 loftiest minds of our age ; that it has produced a 
 huge body of fiction, none of it perfect, perhaps^ 
 much of it bad, but much of it, also, exceedingly 
 intelligent, vivid, sincere, and durable ; and that it 
 is now declining, to leave behind it a great memory, 
 the prestige of persecution, and a library of books 
 which every highly educated man in the future will 
 be obliged to be familiar with. 
 
 It would be difficult, I think, for any one but a 
 realistic novelist to overrate the good that realism 
 in fiction has done. It has cleared the air of a 
 thousand follies, has pricked a whole fleet of 
 oratorical bubbles. Whatever comes next, we 
 cannot return, in serious novels, to the inanities 
 and impossibilities of the old " well-made " plot, to 
 the children changed at nurse, to the madonna 
 
Limits of Realism in Fiction 153 
 
 heroine and the god-like hero, to the impossible 
 virtues and melodramatic vices. In future, even 
 those who sneer at realism and misrepresent it 
 most wilfully, will be obliged to put in their effects 
 in ways more in accord with veritable experience. 
 The public has eaten of the apple of knowledgej 
 and will not be satisfied with mere marionettes. 
 There will still be novel-writers who address the 
 gallery, and who will keep up the gaudy old con- 
 vention and the clumsy Family Herald evolution j 
 but they will no longer be distinguished people of 
 genius. They will no longer sign themselves 
 George Sand and Charles Dickens. 
 
 In the meantime, wherever I look I see the 
 novel ripe for another reaction. The old leaders 
 will not change. It is not to be expected that 
 they will write otherwise than in thd mode which 
 has grown mature with them. But in France, 
 among the younger men, every one is escaping 
 from the realistic formula. The two young athletes 
 for whom M, Zola predicted ten years ago an 
 "experimental" career more profoundly scientific 
 than his own, are realists no longer. M. Guy de 
 Maupassant has become a psychologist, and M. 
 Huysmans a mystic. M. Bourget, who set all the 
 ladies dancing after his ingenious, musky books, 
 
154 Questions at Issue 
 
 never has been a realist ; nor has Pierre Loti, in 
 whom, with a fascinating freshness, the old exiled 
 romanticism comes back with a laugh and a song. 
 All points to a reaction in France ; and in Russia, 
 too, if what we hear is true, the ngxt^tep will be 
 one toward the mystical and the introspective. In 
 America it would be rash for a foreigner to say 
 what signs of change are evident. The time has 
 hardly come when we look to America for the 
 symptoms of literary initiative. But it is my 
 conviction that the limits of realism have been 
 reached ; that no great writer who has not already 
 adapted the experimental system will do so ; and 
 that we ought now to be on the outlook to welcome 
 (and, of course, to. persecute) a school of novelists 
 with a totally new aim, part of whose formula must 
 unquestionably be a concession to the human 
 instinct for mystery and beauty. 
 
 iSgo. 
 
IS VERSE IN DANGER? 
 
Is Verse in Danger ? 
 
 We are passing through a period obviously un- 
 favourable to the development of the art of poetry. 
 A little while ago there was an outburst of popular 
 appreciation of living verse, but this is now replaced, 
 for the moment, by an almost ostentatious indiffer^' 
 ence. These alternations of curiosity and disdain 
 deceive no one who looks at the history of literature 
 with an eye which is at all philosophical. It is 
 easy to say, as is commonly said, that they depend 
 on the merit of the poetry which is being produced. 
 But this is nqt always, or even often^ the case. 
 About twenty years ago a ferment of interest and 
 enthusiasm was called forth, all over the English- 
 speaking world, by the early writings of Mr. Swin- 
 burne and by those of the late Mr. Rossetti. 
 This was deserved by the merit of those produce 
 tions ; but the disdain which, twenty years earlier, 
 
1 5^ Questions at Issue 
 
 the verse of Mr. Robert Browning and Mr. Matthew 
 Arnold had met with, cannot be so accounted for. 
 It is wiser to admit that sons never look at life 
 with their fathers' eyes, and that taste is subject to 
 incessant and almost regular fluctuations. At the 
 present moment, though men should sing with the 
 voice of angels, the barbarian public would not 
 listen, and a new Milton would probably be less 
 warmly welcomed in 1890 than a Pomfret was two 
 centuries ago or a Bowles Was in 1790. Literary 
 history shows that a debiand for poetry does not 
 always lead to a supply, and that a supply does not 
 always command a ftiarket. He who doubts this 
 fact may compare the success of Herrick with that 
 of Erasmus Darwin, 
 
 The only reason for preluding a speculation on 
 the future of the art of poetry with these remarks, 
 is to clear the ground of any arguments based on 
 the merely momentary condition of things. The 
 eagerness or coldness of the public, the fertility or 
 exhaustion of the poets, at this particular juncture, 
 are elements of no real importance. If poetry is to 
 continue to be one of the living arts of humanity, 
 it does not matter an iota whether poetry is looked 
 upon with contempt by the members of a single 
 generation. If poetry is declining, and, as a matter 
 
Is Verse in Danger? 159 
 
 of fact, is now moribund, the immense vogue of 
 Tennyson at a slightly earlier period will take its 
 place among the insignificant phenomena of a 
 momentary reaction, The problem is a more serious 
 one. It is this : Is poetry, in its very essence, an 
 archaic and rudimentary form of expression, still 
 galvanised into motion, indeed, by antiquarianism, 
 but really obsolete and therefore to be cultivated 
 only at the risk of affectation and insincerity; 
 or is it an art capable of incessant renovation — a 
 living organism which grows, on the whole, with 
 the expansion of modern life ? In other words, is 
 the art of verse one which, like music or painting,: 
 delights and consoles us with a species of expression 
 which can never be superseded, because it is in 
 danger of no direct rivalry from a similar species ; 
 or was poetry merely the undeveloped, though in 
 itself the extremely beautiful, infancy of a type 
 which is now adult, and which has relinquished its 
 charming puerilities for a mode of expression 
 infinitely wider and of more practical utility ? 
 Sculptors, singers, painters must always exist ; 
 but need we have poets any longer, since the world 
 has discovered how to say all it wants to say in 
 prose ? Will any one who has anything of im- 
 portance to. communicate be likely in the future 
 
i6o Questions at Issue 
 
 to express it through the medium of metrical 
 language ? 
 
 These questions are not to be dismissed with a 
 smile. A large number of thoughtful persons at 
 the present time are, undoubtedly, disposed to 
 answer them in the affirmative, although a certain 
 decency forbids them openly to say so. Plenty of 
 clever people secretly regard the Muse as a dis- 
 tinguished old lady, of good family, who has been 
 a beauty and a wit in her day, but who really 
 rules only by sufferance in these years of her 
 decline. They whisper that she is sinking into 
 second childhood, that she repeats herself when 
 she converses, and that she has exchanged her 
 early liberal tastes for a love of what is puerile, 
 ingenious, and " finikin." A great Parisian critic 
 has just told us that each poet is read only by the 
 other poets, and he gives as the reason that the 
 art of verse has become so refined and so elaborate 
 that it passes over the heads of the multitude. But 
 may it not be that this refinement is only a 
 decrepitude — the amusement of an old age that has 
 sunk to the playing of more and more helplessly 
 ingenious games of patience ? That is what those 
 hint who, more insidious by far than the open 
 enemies of literature, suggest that poetry has had 
 
Is Verse in Danger? i6i 
 
 its reign, its fascinating and imperial tyranny, and 
 that it must now make way for the demoqracy of 
 prose. 
 
 Probably there would have been no need to 
 face this question, either in this generation or for 
 many generations to come, if it had not been for a 
 single circumstance. The great enemies of the 
 poets of the present are the poets of the past, and 
 the antiquarian spirit of the nineteeinth century has 
 made the cessation of the publication of fresh verse 
 a possibility. The intellectual condition of our 
 times differs from that of all preceding ages in no 
 other point so much as in its attitude toward the 
 writings of the dead. In those periods of reno- 
 vation which have refreshed the literatures of the 
 world, the tendency has always been to study 
 some one class of deceased writers with affection. 
 In English history, we have seen the romantic 
 poets of Italy, the dramatists of Spain, the Latin 
 satirists, and the German ballad-mongers, exercise, 
 at successive moments, a vivid influence on English 
 writers. But this study was mainly limited to 
 those writers themselves, and did not extend to 
 the circle of their readers ; while even with the 
 writers it never absorbed at a single moment the 
 whole range of poetry. We may take one instancej 
 
 L 
 
i62 Questions at Issue 
 
 Pope was the disciple of Horace and of the French 
 Jesuits, of Dryden and of the conceit-creating 
 school of Donne, But he was able to use Boileau 
 and Crashaw so freely because he addressed a 
 public that had never met with the first and had 
 forgotten the second ; and when he passed outside 
 this narrow circle he was practically without a 
 rival. To the class whom he addressed, Shake- 
 speare and Milton were phantoms, Chaucer and 
 Spenser not so much as names. The only 
 doubt was whether Alexander Pope was man 
 enough to arrest attention by the intrinsic merits 
 of his poetry. If his verse was admitted to be 
 good, his public were not distracted by a prefer- 
 ence for other verse which they had known for a 
 longer time. 
 
 This remained true until about a generation ago. 
 The great romantic poets of the beginning of this 
 century found the didactic and rhetorical verse- 
 writers of the eighteenth century in possession of 
 the field, but they found no one else there. Their 
 action was of the nature of a revolt — a revolution 
 ■so successful that it became constitutional. All 
 that Wordsworth and Keats had to do was to 
 prove their immediate predecessors to be unworthy 
 of public attention, and when once they had per- 
 
Is Verse in Danger? 163 
 
 suaded the reading world that what they had to 
 offer was more pleasing than what Young and 
 Churchill and Darwin had offered, the revolution 
 was complete. But, in order to draw attention to 
 the merits of the proposed change, the romantic 
 poets of the Georgian age pointed to the work of 
 the writers of the Elizabethan age, whom they 
 claimed as their natural predecessors— the old 
 stock cast out at &ie Restoration and now rein- 
 stated. The public had entirely forgotten the 
 works of these writers, except to some extent 
 those of the dramatists, and it became necessary 
 to reprint them. A whole galaxy of poetic stars 
 was revealed when the cloud of prejudice was 
 blown away, and a class of dangerous rivals to the 
 modem poet was introduced. 
 
 The activity of the dead is now paramount, and 
 threatens to paralyse original writing altogether. 
 The revival of the old poets who were in direct 
 sympathy with Keats and Wordsworth has extended 
 far beyond the limits which those who inaugurated 
 it desired to lay down. Every poetic writer of any 
 age precedent to our own has now a chance of 
 popularity, often a very much better chance than 
 he possessed during his own lifetime. Scarcely 
 a poet, from Chaucer downward, remains inedited. 
 
164 Questions at Issue 
 
 The imitative lyrist who, in a paroxysm of inspira- 
 tion, wrote one good sonnet under the sway of 
 James I., but was never recognised as a poet even 
 by his friends, rejoices now in a portly quarto, and 
 lives for the first time. The order of nature is 
 reversed, and those who were only ghosts in the 
 seventeenth century come back to us clothed in 
 literary vitality. 
 
 In this great throng of resuscitated souls, all of 
 whom have forfeited their copyright, how is the 
 modem poet to exist ? He has no longer to com- 
 pete — as " his great forefathers did, from Homer 
 down to Ben " — ^with the leading spirits of his own 
 generation, but with the picked genius of the world: 
 He writes an epic ; Mr. Besant and the Society of 
 Authors oblige him to "retain his rights," to "pub" 
 lish at a royalty," and to keep the rules of the 
 game. But Milton has no rights and demands no 
 royalty. The new poet composes lyrics and pub- 
 lishes them in a volume. They are sincere and 
 ingenious ; but why . should the reader buy that 
 volume, when he can get the best of Shelley and 
 Coleridge, of Gray and Marvell, in a cheaper form 
 in. The Golden Treasury ? At every turn the 
 thronging company of the ghosts impedes and 
 disheartens the modern writer, and it is no wonder 
 
Is Verse in Danger ? 165 
 
 if the new Orpheus throws down his lyre in 
 despair when the road to his desire is held by 
 such an invincible army of spectres. In the 
 golden age of the Renaissance an enthusiast is 
 said to have offered up a manuscript by Martial 
 every year, as a burnt sacrifice to Catullus, an 
 author whom he distinctly preferred. The modern 
 poet, if he were not afraid of popular censure, 
 might make a yearly holocaust of editions of the 
 British classics, in honour of the Genius of Poetry 
 There are many enemies of the art abroad, but 
 among them all the most powerful and insidious 
 are those of its own household. The poets of to- 
 day might contrive to fish the murex up, and to 
 eat turtle, if it were not for the intolerable rivalry 
 of " souls of poets dead and gone." 
 ■ On the whole, however, it is highly unlikely 
 that the antiquarian passion of our age will last. 
 Already it gives signs of wearing out, and it will 
 probably be succeeded by a spirit of unreason- 
 able intolerance of the past. Intellectual invention 
 will not allow itself to be pinioned for ever by 
 these soft and universal cords of tradition, each 
 as slight as gossamer in itself, but overwhelming 
 in the immense mass. As for the old poets, 
 young verse-writers may liote with glee that these 
 
1 66 Questions at Issue 
 
 rivals of theirs are being caught in the butterfly 
 net of education, whercj they will soon find the 
 attractive feathers rubbed off their wings. One 
 by one they pass into text-books and are lost. 
 Chaucer is done for, and so is Milton ; Goldsmith 
 is annotated, Scott is prepared for " local exami- 
 nations," and even Byron, the loose, the ungram- 
 piatical, is edited as a school book. The noble 
 army of extension lecturers will scarcely pause in 
 their onward march. We shall see Wordsworth 
 captured, Shelley boiled down for the use of babes,^ 
 and Keats elaborately annotated, with his blunders 
 in classical mythology exposed. The schoolmaster 
 is the only friend the poet of the future dares to 
 look to, for he alone has the power to destroy the 
 loveliness and mystery which are the charm of the 
 old poets. Even a second-rate verse-writer may 
 hope to live by the side of an Elizabethan poet 
 edited for the Clarendon Press. 
 
 This remedy may, however, be considered fan- 
 tastic, and it would scarcely be wise to trust to 
 it. There is, nevertheless, nothing ironical in the- 
 statement that an exaggerated attention paid to his- 
 torical work leaves no time and no appetite for 
 what contemporaries produce. The neglect of 
 poetry is so widespread that if the very small 
 
Is Verse in Danger ? 167 
 
 residuum of love of verse is expended lavishly 
 on the dead, the living are likely to come off badly 
 indeed. The other arts, which can better defend 
 themselves, are experiencing the same sense of 
 being starved by the old masters. The bulk of 
 the public neither buys books nor invests in pic- 
 tures, nor orders statuary according to its own 
 taste, but according to the fashion; and if the 
 craze is antiquarian, we may produce Raphaels in 
 dozens and Shelleys in shoals ; they will have to 
 subsist as the bears and the pelicans do. 
 
 Let us abandon ourselves, however, to the vain 
 pleasure of prophesying. Let us suppose, for the 
 humour of it, that what very young gentlemen call 
 " the might of poesy " is sure to reassert itself, 
 that the votaries of modern verse will always form 
 a respectable minimum, and that some alteration in 
 fashion will reduce the tyranny of antiquarianism 
 to decent proportions. Admit that poetry, in 
 whatever lamentable condition it may be at the 
 present time, is eternal in its essence, and must 
 offer the means of expression to certain admirable 
 talents in each generation. What, then, is the 
 form which we may reasonably expect it to take 
 next? This is, surely, a harmless kind of specu- 
 lation, and the moral certainty of being fooled by 
 
1 68 Questions at Issue 
 
 the event need not restrain us from indulging in it. 
 We will prophesy, although fully conscious of the 
 wild predictions on the same subject current in 
 England in 1580, 1650, and 1780, and in France 
 in 177s and 1825. We may be quite sure of one 
 thing, that when the Marlowe or the Andrd 
 Chenier is coming, not a single critic will be 
 expecting him. But in the meantime why show 
 a front less courageous than that of the history-!- 
 defying Zadkiel ? 
 
 It is usually said, in hasty generalisation, that 
 the poetry of the present age is unique in the 
 extreme refinement of its exterior mechanism. 
 Those who say this are not aware that the great 
 poets whose virile simplicity and robust careless- 
 ness of detail they applaud-^thus building tombs to 
 prophets whom they have never worshipped — 
 have, almost without exception, been scrupulously 
 attentive to form. No modern writer has been so 
 learned in rhythm as Milton, so faultless in rhyme- 
 arrangement as Spenser. But what is true is that 
 a care for form, and a considerable skill in the 
 technical art of verse, have been acquired by 
 writers of a lower order, and that this sort of 
 perfection is no longer the hall-mark of a great 
 master. We may expect it, therefore, to attract less 
 
Is Verse in Danger? 169 
 
 attention in the future ; and although, assuredly, 
 the bastard jargon of Walt Whitman, and kindred 
 returns to sheer barbarism, will not be accepted, 
 technical perfection will more and more be t^ken 
 as a matter of course, as a portion of the poet's 
 training which shall be as indispensable, and as 
 little worthy of notice, as, that a musician should, 
 read his notes correctly. 
 
 Less effort, thereforcj is likely to be made, in the 
 immediate future, to give pleasure by the manner of 
 poetry, and more skill will be expended on the 
 subject-matter. By this I do not understand that 
 greater concession will be made than in the past to 
 what may be called the didactic fallacy, the obstinate 
 belief of some critics in the function of poetry as a 
 teacher. The fact is certain that nothing is more 
 obsolete than educational verse, the literary product 
 which deliberately supplies information. We may 
 see another Sappho ; it is even conceivable that we 
 might see another Homer; but a new Hesiod, never. 
 Knowledge has grown to be far too complex, exact, 
 and minute to be impressed upon the memory by the 
 artifice of rhyme ; and poetry had scarcely passed 
 its infancy before it discovered that to stimulate, to 
 impassion, to amuse, were the proper duties of an art 
 which appeals to the emotions, and to the emotions 
 
170 Questions at Issue 
 
 only. The curious attempts, then, which have 
 been made by poets of no mean talent to dedicate 
 their verse to botany, to the Darwinian hypothesis, 
 to the loves of the fossils, and to astronomical 
 science, are not likely to be repeated, and if they 
 should be repeated, they would scarcdy attract 
 much popular attention. Nor is the epic, on a 
 large scale — that noble and cumbersome edifice 
 with all its blank windows and corridors that 
 lead to nothing-^a species of poetic architecture 
 which the immediate future can be expected to 
 indulge in. 
 
 Leaving the negative for the positive, then, we 
 may fancy that one or two probabilities loom before 
 us. Poetry, if it exist at all, will deal, and probably 
 to a greater degree than ever before, with those 
 more frail and ephemeral shades of emotion which 
 prose scarcely ventures to describe. The existence 
 of a delicately organised human being is diversified 
 by divisions and revulsions of sensation, ill-defined 
 desires, gleams of intuition, and the whole gamut of 
 spiritual notes descending from exultation to despair, 
 none of which have ever been adequately treated 
 except in the hieratic language of poetry. The most 
 realistic novel, the closest psychological analysis in 
 prose, does no more than skim the surface of the 
 
Is Verse in Danger ? 171 
 
 soul ; verse has the pritilege of descending into its 
 depths. In the future, lyrical poetry will probably 
 grow less trivial and less conventional, at the risk 
 of being less popular. It will interpret what prose 
 dares not suggest. It will penetrate further into 
 the complexity of human sensation, and, untroubled 
 by the necessity of formulating a creed, a theory, 
 or a story, will describe with delicate accuracy, and 
 under a veil of artistic beauty, the amazing,; the un- 
 familiar, and even the portentous phenomena which 
 it encountersi 
 
 The social revolution or evolution which most 
 sensible people are now convinced is imminent, will 
 surely require a species of poetry to accompany its 
 course and to celebrate its triumphs. If we could 
 foresee what form this species will take, we should 
 know all things. But we must believe that it will 
 be democratic, and that to a degree at present 
 unimaginable. The. aristocratic tradition is still 
 paramount in all art. Kings, princesses, and the 
 symbols of chivalry are as essential to poetry, as 
 we now conceive it, as roses, stars, or nightingales. 
 The poet may be a pronounced socialist ; he may be 
 Mr. William Morris ; but the oligarchic imagery 
 pervades his work as completely as if he were a 
 troubadour of the thirteenth century. It is difficult 
 
172 Questions at Issue 
 
 to understand what will be left if this romantic 
 phraseology is destroyed, but it is still more diffi- 
 cult to believe that it can survive a complete social 
 revolution. 
 
 A kind of poetry now scarcely cultivated at all 
 may be expected to occupy the attention of the 
 poets, whether socialism hastens or delays. What 
 the Germans understand by epic verse — that is 
 to say, short and highly finished studies in 
 narrative — is a class of literature which offers 
 unlimited opportunities. What may be done in 
 this direction is indicated in France by the work 
 of M. Copp^e. In England and America we 
 have at present nothing at all like it, the idyllic 
 stories of Mr. Coventry Patmore presenting the 
 closest parallel. The great danger which attends 
 the writing of these narratives in English is the 
 tendency to lose distinction of style, to become 
 humorous in dealing with the grotesque and 
 tame in describing the simple. Blank verse will 
 be ,wholIy eschewed by those who in the future 
 sing the annals of the humble; they will feel 
 that the strictest art and the most exquisite orna- 
 ment of rhyme and metre will be required for 
 the treatment of such narratives. M. Coppee 
 himself, who records the adventures of seam- 
 
Is Verse in Danger ? 173 
 
 stresses and engine-drivers, of shipwrecked sailors 
 and retail grocers, with such simplicity and 
 moving pathos, has not his rival in all France 
 for purity of phrase and for exquisite propriety 
 of versification. 
 
 The modern interest in the drama, and the 
 ever-growing desire to see literature once more 
 wedded to tlje stage, will, it can hardly be 
 doubted, lead to a revival of dramatic poetry. 
 This will not, of course, have any relation to the 
 feeble lycean plays of the hour — spectacular 
 romances enshrined in ambling blank verse — but 
 will, in its form and substance alike, offer enter- 
 tainment to other organs than the eye. Probably 
 the puritanic limitations which have so long 
 cramped the English theatre will be removed, 
 and British plays, while remaining civilised and 
 decent, will once more deal with the realities of 
 life and not with its conventions. Neither the 
 funeral baked meats of the romantic English 
 novel, nor the spiced and potted dainties of the 
 French stage, will satisfy our playgoers when 
 once we have strong and sincere playwrights of 
 our own. 
 
 In religious verse something, and in philo- 
 sophical verse much, remains to be done. The 
 
174 Questions at Issue 
 
 wider hope has scarcely found a singer yet, and 
 the deeper speculation has been very imperfectly 
 and empirically celebrated by our poets. Whether 
 love, the very central fountain of poetic inspira- 
 tion in the past, can yield many fresh variations' 
 remains to be seen. That passion will, how- 
 ever, in all probability be treated in the future 
 less objectively and with a less obtrusive land- 
 scape background. The school which is now 
 expiring has carried description, the conscious- 
 ness of exterior forms and colours, the drapery 
 and upholstery of nature, to its extreme limit. 
 The next development of poetry is likely to be 
 very bare and direct, unembroidered, perhaps 
 even arid, in character. It will be experimental 
 rather than descriptive, human rather than animal. 
 So at least we vaguely conjecture. But what- 
 ever the issue may be, we may be confident that 
 the art will retain that poignant charm over un- 
 developed minds, and that exquisite fascination, 
 which for so many successive generations have 
 made poetry the wisest and the fairest friend of 
 youth. 
 
 jSgt. 
 
TENNYSON— AND AFTER 
 
Tennyson — and After 
 
 As we filed slowly out of the Abbey on the 
 afternoon of Wednesday, the 12th of October, 
 1892, there must have occurred to others, I 
 think, as to myself, a whimsical and half-terri- 
 fying sense of the symbolic contrast between 
 what we had left and what we emerged upon. 
 Inside, the grey and vitreous atmosphere, the 
 reverberations of music moaning somewhere out 
 of sight, the bones and monuments of the noble 
 dead, reverence, antiquity, beauty, rest. Outside, 
 in the raw air, a tribe of hawkers urging upon 
 the edges of a dense and inquisitive crowd a 
 large sheet of pictures of the pursuit of a flea by 
 a " lady," and more insidious salesmen doing a 
 brisk trade in what they falsely pretended to be 
 "Tennyson's last poem." 
 
 Next day we read in our newspapers affecting 
 accounts of the emotion displayed by the vast 
 
 M 
 
178 Questions at Issue 
 
 crowds outside the Abbey — horny hands dashing 
 away the tear, seamstresses holding the " the little 
 green volumes " to their faces to hide their agitation. 
 Happy for those who could see these things with 
 their fairy telescopes out of the garrets of Fleet 
 Street. I, alas ! — though I sought assiduously — 
 could mark nothing of the kind. Entering the 
 Abbey, conducted by courteous policemen through 
 unparalleled masses of the curious, we distinguished 
 patience, good behaviour, cheerful and untiring 
 inquisitiveness, a certain obvious gratitude for an 
 incomprehensible spectacle provided by the author- 
 ities, but nothing else. And leaving the Abbey, 
 as I say, the impression was one almost sinister 
 in its abrupt transition. Poetry, authority, the 
 grace and dignity of life, seemed to have been 
 left behind us for ever in that twilight where 
 Tennyson was sleeping with Chaucer and with 
 Dryden. 
 
 In recording this impression I desire nothing 
 so little as to appear censorious. Even the ex- 
 ternal part of the funeral at Westminster seemed, 
 as was said of the similar scene which was enacted 
 there nearly two hundred years ago, " a well- 
 conducted and uncommon public ceremony, where 
 the philosopher can find nothing to condemn, nor 
 
Tennyson — and After 179 
 
 the satirist to ridicule." But the contrast between 
 the outside and the inside of the Abbey, a contrast 
 which may possibly have been merely whimsical 
 in itself, served for a parable of the condition of 
 poetry in England as the burial of Tennyson has 
 left it. If it be only the outworn body of this 
 glorious man which we have relinquished to the 
 safeguard of the Minster, gathered to his peers 
 in the fulness of time, we have no serious ground 
 for apprehension, nor, after the first painful 
 moment, even for sorrow. His harvest is ripe, 
 and we hold it in our granaries. The noble phy- 
 sical presence which has been the revered com- 
 panion of three generations has, indeed, sunk at 
 length : 
 
 Tet would we not disturb him from his tomb. 
 Thus sleeping in his Abbey s friendly shade, 
 And the rough waves of life for ever laid. 
 
 But what if this vast and sounding funeral 
 should prove to have really been the entombment 
 of English poetry? What if it should be the 
 prestige of verse that we left behind us in the 
 Abbey? That is a question which has issues 
 far more serious than the death of any one man, 
 no matter how majestic that man may be. 
 
i8o Questions at Issue 
 
 Poetry is not a democratic art. We are con- 
 stantly being told by the flexible scribes who live 
 to flatter the multitude that the truest poetry is 
 that which speaks to the million, that moves the 
 great heart of the masses. In his private con- 
 sciousness no one knows better than the lettered 
 man who writes such sentences that they are not 
 true. Since the pastoral days in which poets 
 made great verses for a little clan, it has never 
 been true that poetry of the noblest kind was 
 really appreciated by the masses. If we take the 
 bulk of what are called educated people, but a 
 very small proportion are genuinely fond of read- 
 ing. Sift this minority, and but a minute residue 
 of it will be found to be sincerely devoted to 
 beautiful poetry. The genuine lovers of verse 
 are so few that if they could be made the subject 
 of a statistical report, we should probably be 
 astounded at the smallness of their number. From 
 the purely democratic point of view it is certain 
 that they form a negligible quantity. They would 
 produce no general effect at all if they were not 
 surrounded by a very much larger number of 
 persons who, without taste for poetry themselves, 
 are yet traditionally impressed with its value, and 
 treat it with conventional respect, buj'ing it a 
 
Tennyson — and After i8i 
 
 little, frequently conversing about it, pressing to 
 gaze at its famous professors, and competing for 
 places beside the tombs of its prophets. The 
 respect for poetry felt by these persons, although 
 in itself unmeaning, is extremely valuable in its 
 results. It supports the enthusiasm of the few 
 who know and feel for themselves, and it radiates 
 far and wide into the outer masses, whose dark- 
 ness would otherwise be unreached by the very 
 glimmer of these things. 
 
 There is no question, however, that the exist- 
 ence in prominent public honour of an art in its 
 essence so aristocratic as poetry — that is to say, 
 so dependent on the suffrages of a few thousand 
 persons who happen to possess, in greater or 
 lesser degree, certain peculiar qualities of mind 
 and ear — is, at the present day, anomalous, and 
 therefore perilous. All this beautiful pinnacled 
 structure of the glory of verse, this splendid 
 position oi, poetry at the summit of the civil orna- 
 ments of the Empire, is built of carven ice, and 
 needs nothing but that the hot popular breath 
 should be turned upon it to sink into so much 
 water. It is kept standing there, flashing and 
 sparkling before our eyes, by a succession of 
 happy accidents. To speak rudely, it is kept 
 
1 82 Questions at Issue 
 
 there by an effort of bluif on the part of a small 
 influential class. 
 
 In reflecting on these facts, I have found my- 
 self depressed and terrified at an ebullition of popu- 
 larity which seems to have struck almost everybody 
 else with extreme satisfaction. It has been very 
 natural that the stupendous honour apparently done 
 to Tennyson, not merely by the few who always 
 valued him, but by the many who might be sup- 
 posed to stand outside his influence, has been 
 welcomed with delight and enthusiasm. But what 
 is so sinister a circumstance is the excessive cha- 
 racter of this exhibition. I think of the funeral of 
 Wordsworth at Grasmere, only fort3'-two years 
 ago, with a score of persons gathering quietly 
 under the low wall that fenced them from the 
 brawling Rotha ; and I turn to the spectacle of 
 the 1 2th, the vast black crowd in the street, the 
 ten thousand persons refused admission to the 
 Abbey, the whole enormous popular maaifestation.* 
 What does it mean ? Is Tennyson, great as he 
 is, a thousand times greater than Wordsworth ? 
 Has poetry, in forty years, risen at this ratio in 
 the public estimation ? The democracy, I fear, 
 
 * See Mr. Hall Caine's interesting article in the Times for 
 October 17th, 1892. 
 
Tennyson — and After 183 
 
 doth protest too much, and there is danger in this 
 hollow reverence. 
 
 The danger takes this form. It may at any 
 moment come to be held that the poet, were he 
 the greatest that ever lived, was greater than 
 poetry ; the artist more interesting than his art. 
 This was a peril unknown in ancient times. The 
 plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries were 
 scarcely more closely identified with the men who 
 wrote them than Gothic cathedrals were with their 
 architects. Cowley was the first English poet 
 about whom much personal interest was felt out- 
 side the poetic class. Dry den is far more evident 
 to us than the Elizabethans were, yet phantasmal 
 by the side of Pope. Since the age of Anne an 
 interest in the poet, as distinguished from his 
 poetry, has steadily increased ; the fashion for 
 Byron, the posthumous curiosity in Shelley and 
 Keats, are examples of the rapid growth of this 
 individualisation in the present century. But since 
 the death of Wordsworth it has taken colossal 
 proportions, without, so far as can be observed, 
 any parallel quickening of the taste for poetry 
 itself. The result is that a very interesting or 
 picturesque figure, if identified with poetry, may 
 attract an amount of attention and admiration 
 
184 Questions at Issue 
 
 which is spurious as regards the poetry, and of 
 no real significance. Tennyson had grown to be 
 by far the most mysterious, august, and singular 
 figure in English society. He represented poetry, 
 and the world now expects its poets to be as pic- 
 turesque, as aged, and as individual as he was, or 
 else it will pay poetry no attention. I fear, to be 
 brief, that the personal, as distinguished from the 
 purely literary, distinction of Tennyson may strike, 
 for the time being, a serious blow at the vitality of 
 poetry in this country. 
 
 Circumstances have combined, in a very curious 
 way, to produce this result. If a supernatural 
 power could be conceived as planning a scenic 
 effect, it could hardly have arranged it in a manner 
 more telling, or more calculated to excite the 
 popular imagination, than has been the case in 
 the quick succession of the death of Matthew 
 Arnold, of Robert Browning, and of Tennyson. 
 
 Insatiate archer ! could not one suffice 1 
 
 Thy shaft Jlew thrice ; and thrice our peace was slain. 
 
 A great poet was followed by a greater, and he by 
 the greatest of the century, and all within five 
 years. So died, but not with this crescent effect^ 
 Shakespeare, Beaumont, and Raleigh ; so Vanbrugh, 
 
Tennyson — and After 185 
 
 Congreve, Gay, Steele, and Defoe ; so Byron, 
 Shelley, and Keats ; so Scott, Coleridge, and 
 Lamb. But in none of these cases was the field 
 left so exposed as it now is in popular estimation. 
 The deaths of Keats, Shelley, and Byron were 
 really momentous to an infinitely greater degree 
 than those of Arnold, Browning, and Tennyson, 
 because the former were still in the prime of life, 
 while the ' latter had done their work ; but the 
 general public was not aware of this, and, as is 
 well known, Shelley and Keats passed away with- 
 out exciting a ripple of popular curiosity. 
 
 The tone of criticism since the death of Tennyson 
 has been very much what might, under the circum- 
 stances, have been expected. Their efforts to over- 
 whelm his coffin with lilies and roses have seemed 
 paltry to the critics, unless they could succeed, at 
 the same time, in la3'ing waste all the smaller 
 gardens of his neighbours. There is no doubt 
 that the instinct for suttee lies firmly embedded 
 in human nature, and that the glory of a dead 
 rajah is dimly felt by us all to be imperfect unless 
 some one or other is immolated on his funeral pile. 
 But when we come to think calmly on this matter, 
 it will be seen that this offering up of the live poets 
 as a burnt sacrifice to the memory of their dead 
 
1 86 Questions at Issue 
 
 master is absurd and grotesque. We have boasted 
 all these years that we possessed the greatest of 
 the world's poets since Victor Hugo. We did 
 well to boast. But he is taken from us at a great 
 age, and we complain at once, with bitter cries — 
 because we have no poet left so venerable or so 
 perfect in ripeness of the long-drawn years of 
 craftsmanship — that poetry is dead amongst us, 
 and that all the other excellent artists in verse 
 are worthless scribblers. This is natural, perhaps, 
 but it is scarcely generous and not a little ridi- 
 culous. It is, moreover, exactly what the critics 
 said in 1850, when Arnold, Browning, and Tenny- 
 son had already published a great deal of their 
 most admirable work. 
 
 The ingratitude of the hour towards the surviving 
 poets of England pays but a poor compliment to 
 the memory of that great man whose fame it 
 professes to honour. I suppose that there has 
 scarcely been a writer of interesting verse who has 
 come into anything like prominence within the life- 
 time of Tennyson who has not received from him- 
 some letter of praise — some message of benevolent 
 indulgence. More than fifty years ago he wrote, 
 in glowing terms, to congratulate Mr. Bailey on his 
 Festus; it is only yesterday that we were hearing 
 
Tennyson — and After 187 
 
 of his letters to Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Mr. 
 William Watson. Tennyson did not affect to be a 
 critic — no man, indeed, can ever have lived who 
 less affected to be anything — but he loved good 
 verses, and he knew them when he saw them, and 
 welcomed them indulgently. No one can find 
 it more distasteful to him to have it asserted 
 that Tennyson was, and will be, " the last 
 of the English poets" than would Tennyson 
 himself. 
 
 It was not my good fortune to see him many 
 times, and only twice, at an interval of about twelve 
 years, did I have the privilege of hearing him talk 
 at length and ease. On each of those occasions, 
 however, it was noticeable with what warmth and 
 confidence he spoke of the future of English poetry, 
 with what interest he evidently followed its progress, 
 and how cordially he appreciated what various 
 younger men were doing. In particular, I hope it 
 is not indiscreet to refer to the tone in which he 
 spoke to me on each of these occasions of Mr. 
 Swinburne, whose critical conscience had, it must 
 not be forgotten, led him to refer with no slight 
 severity to several of the elder poet's writings. In 
 1877 Mr. Swinburne's strictures were still recent, 
 and might not unreasonably have been painfully 
 
1 88 Questions at Issue 
 
 recollected. Yet Tennyson spoke of him almost as 
 Dryden did two hundred years ago to Congreve : 
 
 And this I prophesy — thou shall he seen 
 ( Though with some short parenthesis between) 
 High on the throne of wit, and, seated there. 
 Not mine {that 's little), but thy laurel wear. 
 
 It would never have occurred to this great and 
 wise man that his own death could be supposed to 
 mark the final burning up and turning to ashes of 
 the prophetic bays. 
 
 These are considerations, however — to return to 
 my original parable — for the few within the Abbey. 
 They are of no force in guiding opinion among the 
 non-poetical masses outside. These, dangerously 
 moved for the nonce to observe the existence of 
 poetry, may make a great many painful and un- 
 desirable reflections before the subject quits their 
 memory. There is always a peril in a popular 
 movement that is not founded on genuine feeling, 
 and the excitement about Tennyson's death has 
 been far too universal to be sincere. It is even 
 now not too early for us to perceive, if we will face 
 it calmly, that elements of a much commoner and 
 emptier nature than reverence for a man of genius 
 have entered into the stir about the Laureate's 
 burial. The multitude so stirred into an excited 
 
Tennyson — and After 189 
 
 curiosity about a great poet will presently crave, of 
 course, a little more excitement still over another 
 poet, and this stimulant will not be forthcoming. 
 We have not, and shall not have for a generation 
 at least, such another sacrifice to offer to the 
 monster. It will be in the retreat of the wave, in 
 the sense of popular disappointment at the non- 
 recurrence of such intellectual shocks as the deaths 
 of Browning and Tennyson have supplied, that the 
 right of poetry to take precedence among the arts 
 of writing will for the first time come to be seriously 
 questioned. Our critics will then, too late, begin 
 to regret their suttee of the Muses ; but if they try 
 to redeem their position by praising this living poet 
 or that, the public will only too glibly remind them 
 of their own dictum that " poetry died with 
 Tennyson." 
 
 In old days the reading public swept the litera- 
 ture of its fathers into the dust-bin, and read 
 Horace while its immediate contemporaries were 
 preparing works in prose and verse to suit the 
 taste of the moment. But nowadays each great 
 writer who passes out of physical life preserves 
 his intellectual existence intact and becomes a last- 
 ing rival to his surviving successor. The young 
 novelist has no living competitor so dangerous to 
 
190 Questions at Issue 
 
 him as Dickens and Thackeray are, who are never- 
 theless divided from him by time almost as far as 
 Milton was from Pope. It is nearly seventy years 
 since the earliest of Macaulay's Essays appeared, 
 and the least reference to one of them would now 
 be recognised by " every schoolboy." Less than 
 seventy years after the death of Bacon his Essays 
 were so completely forgotten that when extracts 
 from them were discovered in the common-place 
 book of a deceased lady of quality, they were 
 supposed to be her own, were published and 
 praised by people as clever as Congreve, went 
 through several editions, and were not detected 
 until within the present century. When an age 
 made a palimpsest of its memory in this way it 
 was far easier to content it with contemporary 
 literary excellence than it is now, when every 
 aspirant is confronted with the quintessence of the 
 centuries. 
 
 It is not, however, from the captious taste of 
 the public that most is to be feared, but from its 
 indifference. Let it not be believed that, because 
 a mob of the votaries of Mr. Jerome and Mr. 
 Sims have been drawn to the precincts of the 
 Abbey to gaze upon a pompous ceremonial, these 
 admirable citizens have Suddenly taken to reading 
 
Tennyson — and After 191 
 
 Lucretius or The Two Voices. What their praise 
 is worth no one among us would venture to say in 
 words so unmeasured as those of the dead Master 
 himself, who, with a prescience of their mortuary 
 attentions, spoke of these irreverent admirers as 
 those 
 
 Who make it seem more sweet to be 
 The little life of bank and brier. 
 The bird who pipes his lone desire 
 
 And dies unheard within his tree. 
 
 Than he that warbles long and loud. 
 And drops at Glory's temple-gates, 
 For whom the carrion-vulture waits 
 
 To tear his heart before the crowd. 
 
 If this is more harsh reproof than a mere idle 
 desire to be excited by a spectacle or by an event 
 demands, it may nevertheless serve us as an 
 antidote to the vain illusion that these multitudes 
 are suddenly converted to a love of fine literature. 
 They are not so converted, and fine literature — 
 however scandalous it may sound in the ears of 
 this generation to say it — is for the few. 
 
 How long, then, will the many permit them- 
 selves to be brow-beaten by the few ? At the 
 present time the oligarchy of taste governs our 
 vast republic of readers. We tell them to praise 
 
192 Questions at Issue 
 
 the Bishop of Oxford for his history, and Mr. 
 Walter Pater for his essays, and Mr. Herbert 
 Spencer for his philosophy, and Mr. George Meredith 
 for his novels. They obey us, and these are great 
 and illustrious personages about whom newspaper 
 gossip is continually occupied, whom crowds, when 
 they have the chance, hurry to gaze at, but whose 
 books (or I am cruelly misinformed) have a rela- 
 tively small circulation. These reputations are like 
 beautiful churches, into which people turn to cross 
 themselves with holy water, bow to the altar, and 
 then hurry out again to spend the rest of the 
 morning in some snug tavern. 
 
 Among these churches of living fame, the noblest, 
 the most exquisite was that sublime cathedral of 
 song which we called Tennyson ; and there, it is 
 true, drawn by fashion and by a choral service of 
 extreme beauty, the public had formed the habit of 
 congregating. But at length, after a iinal ceremony 
 of incomparable dignity, this minster has been 
 closed. Where will the people who attended there 
 go now ? The other churches stand around, 
 honoured and empty. Will they now be better 
 filled ? Or will some secularist mayor, of strong 
 purpose and an enemy to sentiment, order them 
 to be deserted altogether ? We may, at any rate. 
 
Tennyson — and After 193 
 
 be quite sure that this remarkable phenomenon of 
 the popularity of Tennyson, however we regard it, 
 is but transitory and accidental, or at most personal 
 to himself. That it shows any change in the public 
 attitude of reserved or grumbling respect to the best 
 literature, and radical dislike to style, will not be 
 ,^5eriously advanced. 
 
 What I dread, what I long have dreaded, is 
 the eruption of a sort of Commune in literature. 
 At no period could the danger of such an outbreak 
 of rebellion against tradition be so great as during 
 the reaction which must follow the death of our 
 most illustrious writer. Then, if ever, I should 
 expect to see a determined resistance made to the 
 pretensions of whatever is rare, or delicate, or 
 abstruse. At no time, I think, ought those who 
 guide taste amongst us to be more on their guard 
 <o preserve a lofty and yet generous standard, to 
 insist on the merits of what is beautiful and yet 
 tmpopular, and to be unaffected by commercial 
 tests of distinction. We have lived for ten years 
 in a fool's paradise. Without suspecting the truth, 
 we have been passing through a period of poetic 
 glory hardly to be paralleled elsewhere in our 
 history. One by one great luminaries were re- 
 moved — Rossetli, Newman, Arnold, Browning sank, 
 
194 Questions at Issue 
 
 each star burning larger as it neared the horizonl 
 Still we felt no apprehension, sa3ang, as we turned 
 towards Farringford : 
 
 " (Mais U pert est la-bas, dans I'Ve." 
 
 Now he is gone also, and the shock of his 
 extinction strikes us for the moment with a sense 
 of positive and universal darkness. 
 
 But this very natural impression is a mistaken 
 one. As our eyes grow accustomed to the absehd^ 
 of this bright particular planet, we shall be more 
 and more conscious of the illuminating power of the 
 heavenly bodies that are left. We shall, at least, if 
 criticism directs us carefully and wholesomely. With 
 all the losses that our literature has sustained, we 
 are, still, more richly provided with living poets of 
 distinction than all but the blossoming periods of 
 our history have been. In this respect we are 
 easily deceived by a glance at some chart of the 
 course of English literature, where the lines of life 
 of aged writers overlap those of writers still in theif 
 early youth. The worst pessimist amongst us will 
 not declare that our poetry seems to be in the utterly 
 and deplorably indigent condition in which the death 
 of Burns appeared to leave it in 1796. Then the 
 beholder, glancing rounds would see nothing but 
 
Tennyson— and After 195 
 
 Crabbe, grown silent for eleven years, Cowper 
 insane, Blake undeveloped and unrecognised ; the 
 pompous, florid Erasmus Darwin left solitary master 
 of the field. But we, who look at the chart, see 
 Wordsworth and Coleridge on the point of evolution, 
 Campbell and Moore at school, Byron and Shelley 
 in the nursery, and Keats an infant. Who can tell 
 what inheritors of unfulfilled renown may not now 
 be staining their divine lips with the latest of this 
 season's blackberries ? 
 
 But we are not left to these conjectural consola-^ 
 tions. I believe that I take very safe ground when 
 I say that our living poets present a variety and 
 amplitude of taleAt, a fulness of tone, an accom- 
 plishment in art, such as few other generations in 
 England, and still fewer elsewhere, have been in a 
 position to exult in. It would be invidious, and it 
 might indeed be very difficult and tedious, to go 
 through the list of those who do signal honour to 
 our living literature in this respect. Without re- 
 peating the list so patiently drawn up and so humor- 
 ously commented upon by Mr. Traill, it would be 
 easy to select from it fifteen names, not one of which 
 would be below the fair meridian of original merit, 
 and many of which would rise far above it. Could 
 so much have been said in 1592, or in 1692, or in 
 
J 96 Questions at Issue 
 
 1792 ? Surely, no. I must not be led to multiply 
 names, the mere mention of which in so casual a 
 manner can hardly fail to seem impertinent ; yet I 
 venture to assert that a generation which can boast 
 of Mr, Swinburne and Miss Christina Rossetti, of 
 Mr. William Morris and Mr. Coventry Patmore, of 
 Mr. Austin Dobson and Mr. Robert Bridges, has no 
 reason to complain of lack of fire or elevation, grace 
 or versatility. 
 
 It was only in Paradise, so we learn from St. Basil, 
 that roses ever grew without thorns. We cannot 
 have the rose of such an exceptional life as Tenny- 
 son's without suffering for it. We suffer by the 
 void its cessation produces, the disturbance in our 
 literary hierarchy that it brings, the sense of uncer- 
 tainty and insufficiency that follows upon it. The 
 death of Victor Hugo led to precisely such a rocking 
 and swaying of the ship of literature in France, and 
 to this day it cannot be said that the balance there 
 is completely restored. I cannot think that we gain 
 much by ignoring this disturbance, which is inevi- 
 table, and still less by folding our hands and calling 
 out that it means that the vessel is sinking. It 
 means nothing of the kind. What it does mean is 
 that when a man of the very highest rank in the 
 profession lives to an exceptionally great age, and 
 
Tennyson — and After 197 
 
 retains his intellectual gifts to the end, combining 
 with these unusual advantages the still more fortui- 
 tous ones of being singular and picturesque in hid 
 personality and the object of much ungratified 
 curiosity, he becomes the victim, in the eyes of 
 his contemporaries, of a sort of vertical mirage. He 
 is seen up in the sky where no man could be. I 
 trust I shall not be accused of anything like dis- 
 respect to the genius of Tennyson — which I loved 
 and admired as nearly to the pitch of idolatry as 
 possible — when I say that his reputation at this 
 moment is largely mirage. His gifts were of the 
 very highest order ; but in the popular esteem, at 
 this moment, he holds a position which is, to carry 
 on the image, topographically impossible. No poet, 
 no man, ever reached that altitude above his fellows. 
 The result of seeing one mountain in vertical 
 mirage, and various surrounding acclivities (if that 
 were possible) at their proper heights, would be to 
 falsify the whole system of optical proportion. Yet 
 this is what is now happening, and for some little 
 time will continue to happen in crescendo, with 
 regard to Tennyson and his surviving contem- 
 poraries. There is no need, however, to cherish 
 " those gloomy thoughts led on by spleen " which 
 the melancholy events of the past month have 
 
198 Questions at Issue 
 
 awakened. The recuperative force of the arts has 
 never yet failed the human race, and will not fail 
 us now. All the Tit-Bits and Pearson's Weeklies 
 in the world will not be able to destroy a fragment 
 of pure and original literature, although the tastes 
 they foster may delay its recognition and curtail its 
 rewards. 
 
 The duty of all who have any influence on the 
 public is now clear. So far from resigning the 
 responsibility of praise and blame, so far from 
 opening the flood-gates to what is bad — on the 
 ground that the best is gone, and that it does not 
 matter — it behoves those who are our recognised 
 judges of literary merit to resist more strenuously 
 than ever the inroads of mere commercial success 
 into the Temple of Fame. The Scotch ministry 
 preserve that interesting practice of " fencing the 
 tables" of the Lord by a solemn searching of 
 would-be communicants. Let the tables of Apollo 
 be fenced, not to the exclusion or the discomfort of 
 those who have a right to his sacraments, but to 
 the chastening of those who have no other mark of 
 his service but their passbook. And poetry, which 
 survived the death of Chaucer, will recover even 
 from the death of Tennyson. 
 
 1892. 
 
SHELLEY in 1892 
 
Shelley in 1892 
 
 Centenary Address delivered at Horsham, August ii, tSgi 
 
 We meet to-day to celebrate the fact that, exactly 
 one hundred years ago, there was bom, in an old 
 house in this parish, one of the greatest of the 
 English poets, one of the most individual and 
 remarkable of the poets of the world. This beauti- 
 ful county of Sussex, with its blowing woodlands 
 and its Shining downs, was even then not un- 
 accustomed to poetic honours. One hundred and 
 thirty years before, it had given birth to Otway ; 
 seventy years before, to Collins. But charming as 
 these pathetic figures were and are, not Collins and 
 not Otway can compare for a moment with that ■ 
 writer who is the main intellectual glory of Sussex, 
 the ever-beloved and ethereally illustrious Percy 
 Bysshe Shelley. It has appeared to me that you 
 might, as a Sussex audience, gathered in a Sussex 
 town, like to be reminded, before we go any further, 
 of the exact connection of our poet with the county—' 
 
202 Questions at Issue 
 
 of the stake, as it is called, which his family held in 
 Sussex, and of the period of his own residence in 
 it. You will see that, although his native province 
 lost him early, she had a strong claim upon his 
 interests and associations. 
 
 When Shelley was born, on the 4th of August, 
 1792, his grandfather, afterwards a baronet, Sir 
 Bysshe Shelley, was ensconced at Goring Castle, 
 while his father, the heir to the title, Mr. Timothy 
 Shelley, inhabited that famous house. Field Place, 
 which lies here at your doors. Mr. Timothy Shelley 
 had married a lady from your nearest eastern 
 neighbour, the town of Cuckfield ; he was M.P. 
 for another Sussex borough, Shoreham ; in the 
 next Parliament he was to represent, if I am not 
 mistaken, Horsham itself. The names which meet 
 us in the earliest pages of the poet's biographies 
 are all Sussex names. It was at Warnham that 
 he was taught his earliest lessons, and it was in 
 .Warnham Pond that the great tortoise lurked which 
 was the earliest of his visions. St. Irvine's, in 
 whose woods he loved to wander by moonlight, has 
 disappeared, but Strode is close to you still, and if 
 St. Leonard's Forest has shrunken somewhat to the 
 eastward since Shelley walked and raved in its 
 allies, you still possess it in your neighbourhood. 
 
Shelley in 1892 203 
 
 Until Shelley was expelled from Oxford, Field 
 Place was his constant residence out of school and 
 college hours. Nor, although his father at first 
 forbade him to return, was his connection with 
 Sussex broken even then. The house of his uncle, 
 Captain Pilfold, was always open to him at Cuck- 
 field, and when the Duke of Norfolk made his kind 
 suggestion that the young man should enter Parlia- 
 ment, as a species of moral sedative, it was to a 
 Sussex borough that he proposed to nominate him. 
 Shelley's first abortive volume of poems was set up 
 by a Horsham printer, and it was from Hurstpier-r 
 point that Miss Kitchener, afterwards known as 
 the " Brown Demon," started on her disastrous 
 expedition into the lives of the Shelleys. It was 
 not until 18 14, on the eve of his departure for the 
 Continent, that Shelley came to Sussex for the last 
 time, paying that furtive visit to his mother and 
 sisters, on which, in order to conceal himself from 
 his father, he buttoned the scarlet jacket of a 
 guardsman round his attenuated form. 
 
 If I have endeavoured, by thus grouping together 
 all the Sussex names which are connected with 
 Shelley, to attract your personal and local sympathy 
 around the career of the poet, it is with no inten- 
 tion to claim for him a provincial significance. 
 
204 Questions at Issue 
 
 Shelley does not belong to any one county, how- 
 ever rich and illustrious that county may be ; he 
 belongs to Europe — to the world. The tendency 
 of his poetry and its peculiar accent were not so 
 much English as European. He might have been 
 a Frenchman, or an Italian, a Pole, or a Greek, in 
 a way in which Wordsworth, for instance, or even 
 Byron, could never have been anything but an 
 Englishman. He passes, as we watch the brief 
 and sparkling record of his life, from Sussex to the 
 world. One day he is a child, sailing paper boats 
 among the reeds in Warnham Pond ; next day we 
 look, and see, scarcely the son of worthy Mr. 
 Timothy Shelley of Field Place, but a spirit with- 
 out a country, "a planet- crested shape sweeping 
 by on lightning-braided pinions" to scatter the 
 liquid joy of life over humanity. 
 
 Into the particulars of this strange life I need 
 not pass. You knowl^ them well. No life so 
 brief as Sheljey's has occupied so much curiosity, 
 and for my part I think that even too minute 
 inquiry has been made concerning some of its 
 details. The " Harriet problem " leaves its trail 
 across one petal of this rose ; minuter insects, not 
 quite so slimy, lurk where there should be nothing 
 but colour and odour. We may well, I think, be 
 
Shelley in 1892 205 
 
 content to-day to take the large romance of 
 Shelley's life, and leave any sordid details to 
 oblivion. He died before he was quite thirty 
 years of age, and the busy piety of biographers 
 has peeped into the record of almost every day of 
 the last ten of those years. What seems to me 
 most wonderful is that a creature so nervous, so 
 passionate, so ill-disciplined as Shelley was, should 
 be able to come out of such an unprecedented 
 ordeal with his shining garments so little specked 
 with mire. Let us, at all events, to-day, think of 
 the man only as ' ' the peregrine falcon " that his 
 best and oldest friends describe him. 
 
 We may, at all events, while a grateful England 
 is cherishing Shelley's memory, and congratulating 
 herself on his majestic legacy of song to her, reflect 
 almost with amusement on the very different atti- 
 tude of public opinion seventy and even fifty years 
 ago. That he should have been pursued by 
 calumny and prejudice through his brief, misre- 
 presented life, and even beyond the tomb, can 
 surprise no thinking spirit. It was not the poet 
 who was attacked ; it was the revolutionist, the 
 enemy of kings and priests, the extravagant and 
 paradoxical humanitarian. It is not needful, in 
 order to defend Shelley's genius aright, to inveigh 
 
2o6 Questions at Issue 
 
 against those who, taught in the prim school of 
 eighteenth-century poetics, and repelled by political 
 and social peculiarities which they but dimly under- 
 stood, poured out their reprobation of his verses. 
 Even his reviewers, perhaps, were not all of them 
 " beaten hounds " and " carrion kites " ; some, per- 
 haps, were very respectable and rather narrow- 
 minded English gentlemen, devoted to the poetry 
 of Shenstone. The newer a thing is, in the true 
 sense, the slower people are to accept it, and the 
 abuse of the Quarterly Review, rightly taken, was 
 but a token of Shelley's opulent originality. 
 
 To this unintelligent aversion there succeeded 
 in the course of years an equally blind, although 
 more amiable, admiration. Among a certain class 
 of minds the reaction set in with absolute violence, 
 and once more the centre of attention was not the 
 poet and his poetry, but the faddist and his fads. 
 Shelley was idealised, etherealised, and canonised. 
 Expressions were used about his conduct and 
 his opinions which would have been extravagant 
 if employed to describe those of a virgin-martyr 
 or of the founder of a religion. Vegetarians 
 clustered around the eater of buns and raisins, 
 revolutionists around the enemy of kings, social 
 anarchists around the husband of Godwin's' 
 
Shelley in 1892 207 
 
 daughter. Worse than all, those to whom the 
 restraints of religion were hateful, marshalled 
 themselves under the banner of the youth who 
 had rashly styled himself an atheist, forgetful 
 of the fact that all his best writings attest that, 
 whatever name he might give himself, he, more 
 than any other poet of the age, saw God in every- 
 thing. This also was a phase, and passed away. 
 The career of Shelley is no longer a battlefield 
 for fanatics of one sort or the other; if they 
 still skirmish a little in its obscurer corners, the 
 main tract of it is not darkened with the smoke 
 from their artillery. It lies, a fair open countr}' 
 of pure poetry, a province which comes as near 
 to being fairyland as any that literature provides 
 for us. 
 
 We cannotj however, think of this poet as of 
 a writer of verses in the void. He is anything 
 but the " idle singer of an empty day." Shelley 
 was born amid extraordinary circumstances into 
 an extraordinary age. On the very day, one 
 hundred years ago, when the champagne was 
 being drunk in the hall of Field Place in honour 
 of the birth of a son and heir to Mr. Timothy 
 Shelley, the thunder-cloud of revolution was 
 breaking over Europe. Never before had_ there 
 
2o8 Questions at Issue 
 
 been felt within so short a space of time so 
 general a crash of the political order of things. 
 Here, in England, we were spectators of the wild 
 and sundering stress, in which the other kingdoms 
 of Europe were distracted actors. The faces 
 of Burke and of his friends wore " the expression 
 of men who are going to defend themselves from 
 murderers," and those murderers are called, during 
 the infancy of Shelley, by many names, Mame- 
 lukes and Suliots, Poles and Swedes, besides the 
 all-dreaded one of sansculottes. In the midst of 
 this turmoil Shelley was born, and the air of 
 revolution filled his veins with life. 
 
 In Shelley we see a certain type of revolu- 
 tionist, born out of due time, and directed to the 
 bloodless field of literature. The same week 
 that saw the downfall of La Fayette saw the 
 birth of Shelley, and we might believe the one 
 to be an incarnation of the hopes of the other. 
 Each was an aristocrat, born with a passionate 
 ambition to play a great part in the service of 
 humanity; in neither was there found that ad- 
 mixture of the earthly which is needful for sus- 
 tained success in practical life. Had Shelley 
 taken part in active affairs, his will and his enthu- 
 siasm must have broken, like waves, against the 
 
Shelley in 1892 209 
 
 coarser type of revolutionist, against the Dantons 
 and the Robespierres. Like La Fayette, Shelley 
 was intoxicated with virtue and glory ; he was 
 chivalrous, inflammable, and sentimental. Happily 
 for us, and for the world, he was not thrown 
 into a position where these beautiful qualities 
 could be displayed only to be shattered like a 
 dome of many-coloured glass. He was the not 
 unfamiliar figure of revolutionary times, the grand 
 seigneur enamoured of democracy. But he was 
 much more than this ; as Mr. Swinburne said 
 long ago, Shelley "was born a son and soldier 
 of light, an archangel winged and weaponed for 
 angel's work." Let us attempt to discover what 
 sort of prophecy it was that he blew through his 
 golden trumpet. 
 
 It is in the period of youth that Shelley appeals 
 to us most directly, and exercises his most unques- 
 tioned authority over the imagination. In early 
 life, at the moment more especially when the 
 individuality begins to assert itself, a young 
 man or a young woman of feeling discovers in 
 this poet certain qualities which appear to be not 
 merely good, but the best, not only genuine, but 
 exclusively interesting. At that age we ask for 
 light, and do not care how it is distributed ; for 
 
 o 
 
2IO Questions at Issue 
 
 melody, and do not ask the purpose of the song ; 
 for colour, and find no hues too brilliant to 
 delight the unwearied eye. Shelley satisfies 
 these cravings of youth. His whole conception 
 of life is bounded only by its illusions. The 
 brilliancy of the morning dream, the extremities 
 of radiance and gloom, the most pellucid truth, 
 the most triumphant virtue, the most sinister 
 guilt and melodramatic infamy, alone contrive to 
 rivet the attention. All half-lights, all arrange- 
 ments in grey or russet, are cast aside with 
 impatience, as unworthy of the emancipated spirit. 
 Winged youth, in the bright act of sowing its 
 intellectual wild oats, demands a poet, and 
 Horsham, just one hundred years ago, produced 
 Shelley to satisfy that natural craving. 
 
 It is not for grey philosophers, or hermits wear- 
 ing out the evening of life, to pass a definitive 
 verdict on the poetry of Shelley. It is easy for 
 critics of this temper to point out weak places in 
 the radiant panoply, to say that this is incoherent, 
 and that hysterical, and the other an ethereal fallacy. 
 Sympathy is needful, a recognition of the point of 
 view, before we can begin to judge Shelley aright. 
 We must throw ourselves back to what we were at 
 twenty, and recollect how dazzling, how fresh, how 
 
Shelley in 1892 211 
 
 full of colour, and melody, and odour, this poetry 
 seemed to us — how like a May-day morning in a 
 rich Italian garden, with a fountain, and with night- 
 ingales in the blossoming boughs of the orange- 
 trees, with the vision of a frosty Apennine beyond 
 the belt of laurels, and clear auroral sky everywhere 
 above our heads. We took him for what he seemed, 
 " a pard-like spirit, beautiful and swift," and we 
 thought to criticise him as little as we thought to 
 judge the murmur of the forest or the reflections of 
 the moonlight on the lake. He was exquisite, 
 emancipated, young like ourselves, and yet as wise 
 as a divinity. We followed him unquestioning, 
 walking in step with his panthers, as the Bacchantes 
 followed Dionysus out of India, intoxicated with 
 enthusiasm. 
 
 If our sentiment is no longer so rhapsodical, 
 shall we blame the poet ? Hardly, I think. He 
 has not grown older, it is we who are passing 
 further and further from that happy eastern morning 
 where the light is fresh, and the shadows plain and 
 clearly defined. Over all our lives, over the lives 
 of those of us who may be seeking to be least 
 trammelled by the commonplace, there creeps ever 
 onward the stealthy tinge of conventionality, the 
 admixture of the earthly. We cannot honestly 
 
212 Questions at Issue 
 
 wish it to be otherwise. It is the natural develop- 
 ment, which turns kittens into cats, and blithe- 
 hearted lads into earnest members of Parliament. 
 If we try to resist this inevitable tendency, we 
 merely become eccentric, a mockery to others, and 
 a trouble to ourselves. Let us accept our respecta- 
 bility with becoming airs of gravity ; it is another 
 thing to deny that youth was sweet. When I see 
 an elderly professor proving that the genius of 
 Shelley has been overrated, I cannot restrain a 
 melancholy smile. What would he, what would I, 
 give for that exquisite ardour, by the light of which 
 all other poetry than Shelley's seemed dim ? You 
 recollect our poet's curious phrase, that to go to him 
 for common sense was like going to a gin-palace 
 for mutton chops. The speech was a rash one, 
 and has done him harm. But it is true enough 
 that those who are conscious of the grossness of 
 life, and are over-materialised, must go to him for 
 the elixir and ether which emancipate the senses. 
 
 If I am right in thinking that you will all be 
 with me in considering this beautiful passion of 
 youth, this recapturing of the illusions, as the most 
 notable of the gifts of Shelley's poetry to us, you 
 will also, I think, agree with me in placing only 
 second to it the witchery which enables this writer, 
 
Shelley in 1892 213 
 
 more than any other, to seize the most tumultuous 
 and agitating of the emotions, and present them to 
 us coloured by the analogy of natural beauty. 
 Whether it be the petulance of a solitary human 
 being, to whom the little downy owl is a friend, or 
 the sorrows and desires of Prometheus, on whom 
 the primal elements attend as slaves, Shelley is 
 able to mould his verse to the expression of feeling, 
 and to harmonise natural phenomena to the magni- 
 tude or the delicacy of his theme. No other poet 
 has so wide a grasp as he in this respect, no one 
 sweeps so broadly the full diapason of man in 
 nature. Laying hold of the general life of the 
 universe with a boldness that is unparalleled, he is 
 equal to the most sensitive of the naturalists in his 
 exact observation of tender and humble forms. 
 
 And to the ardour of fiery youth and the 
 imaginative sympathy of pantheism, he adds what 
 we might hardly expect from so rapt and tem- 
 pestuous a singer, the artist's self-restraint. Shelley 
 is none of those of whom we are sometimes told in 
 these days, whose mission is too serious to be 
 transmitted with the arts of language, who are too 
 much occupied with the substance to care about 
 the form. All that is best in his exquisite collec- 
 tion of verse cries out against this wretched heresy. 
 
214 Questions at Issue 
 
 With all his modernity, his revolutionary instinct, 
 his disdain of the unessential, his poetry is of the 
 highest and most classic technical perfection. No 
 one, among the moderns, has gone further than he 
 in the just attention to poetic form, and there is so 
 severe a precision in his most vibrating choruses 
 that we are taken by them into the company, not 
 of the Ossians and the Walt Whitmans, not of 
 those who feel, yet cannot control their feelings, 
 but of those impeccable masters of style, 
 
 who dwelt by the azure sea 
 Of serene and golden Italy, 
 Or Greece the mother of the free. 
 
 And now, most inadequately and tamely, yet, I 
 trust, with some sense of the greatness of my theme, 
 I have endeavoured to recall to your minds certain 
 of the cardinal qualities which animated the divine 
 poet whom we celebrate to-day. I have no taste 
 for those arrangements of our great writers which 
 assign to them rank like schoolboys in a class, and 
 I cannot venture to suggest that Shelley stands 
 above or below this or that brother immortal. But 
 of this I am quite sure, that when the slender roll 
 is called of those singers, who make the poetry of 
 England second only to that of Greece (if even of 
 
Shelley in 1892 215 
 
 Greece), however few are named, Shelley must be 
 among them. To-day, under the auspices of the 
 greatest poet our language has produced since 
 Shelley died, encouraged by universal public opinion 
 and by dignitaries of all the professions, yes, even 
 by prelates of our national church, we are gathered 
 here as a sign that the period of prejudice is over, 
 that England is in sympathy at last with her beau- 
 tiful wayward child, understands his great language, 
 and is reconciled to his harmonious ministry. A 
 century has gone by, and once more we acknow- 
 ledge the truth of his own words : 
 
 The splendours of the firmament of time 
 
 May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not ; 
 Like stars to their appointed height they climb. 
 
SYMBOLISM AND 
 M. STEPHANE MALLARME' 
 
Symbolism and 
 M. Stephane Mallarme 
 
 1 HE name which stands at the head of this essay 
 is that of a writer who is at the present time more 
 talked about, more ferociously attacked, more pas- 
 sionately beloved and defended, and at the same 
 time less understood, than perhaps any other 
 man of his intellectual rank in Europe. Even 
 in the ferocious world of Parisian letters his purity 
 of motive and dignity of attitude are respected. 
 Benevolent to those younger than himself, ex- 
 quisitely courteous and considerate in controversy, 
 a master of that suavity and reserve the value of 
 which literary persons so rarely appreciate, M. 
 Mallarme, to one who from a distance gazes with 
 curiosity into the Parisian hurly-burly, appeals first 
 by the beautiful amenity of his manners — a dreamy 
 Sir Launcelot riding through a forest of dragons to 
 
220 Questions at Issue 
 
 help the dolorous lady of Poesy from pain. In the 
 incessant pamphlet-wars of his party, others seem 
 to strike for themselves, M. Mallarm^ always for 
 the cause ; and when the battle is over, and the 
 rest meet to carouse round a camp-fire, he is always 
 found stealing back to the ivory tower of contem- 
 plation. Before we know the rights of the case, or 
 have read a line of his verses, we are predisposed 
 towards a figure so pure and so distinguished. 
 
 But though the personality of M. Mallarm^ is so 
 attractive, and though he marches at the head of a 
 very noisy rabble, exceedingly little seems to be 
 clearly known about him in this country. Until 
 now, he has published in such a rare and cryptic 
 manner, that not half a dozen of any one of his 
 books can have reached England. Two or three 
 abstruse essays in prose, published in the National 
 Observer, have lately amazed the Philistines. Not 
 thus did Mr. Lillyvick understand that the French 
 language was to be imparted to Morleena Kenwigs. 
 Charming stories float about concerning Scotch 
 mammas who subscribed to the National Observer 
 for the use of their girls, and discovered that the 
 articles were written in Moldo-Wallachian. M. 
 Mallarme's theories have been ridiculed and tra- 
 vestied, his style parodied, his practice gravely 
 
Symbolism 221 
 
 rebuked ; but what that practice and style and 
 theories are^ has scarcely been understood. M. 
 Mallarmd has been wrapped up in the general fog 
 which enfolds our British notions of symbolists and 
 impressionists. If the school has had a single 
 friend in England, it has been Mr. Arthur Symons, 
 one of the most brilliant of our younger poets ; 
 and even he has been interested, I think, more in 
 M. Verlaine than in the Symbolists and Decadents 
 proper. 
 
 It was in 1886 that the Decadents first began to 
 be talked about. Then it was that Arthur Rim- 
 baud's famous sonnet about the colours of the 
 vowels flashed into celebrity, and everybody was 
 telling everybody else that 
 
 A^s black; ^i whites I, blue; 0,red; V, yellow ; 
 'But purple see\s in vain a vowel-fellow. 
 
 Those were the days, already ancient now ! of Noel 
 Loumo and Marius Tapera, when the inexpressi- 
 ble Adore Floupette published Les Deliqtiescences. 
 Where are the deliquescents of yesteryear ? Where 
 is the once celebrated scene in the " boudoir oblong 
 aux cycloides bigarrures " which enlivened Le The 
 chez Miranda of M. Jean Mor^as ? These added 
 to the gaiety of nations, and have been forgotten ; 
 
222 Questions at Issue 
 
 brief life was here their portion. Fresh oddities 
 come forward, poets in shoals and schools, Evo- 
 lutivo-instrumentists, Cataclysmists, Trombonists — 
 even while we speak, have they not faded away ? 
 But amidst all this world of phantasmagoria, among 
 these fugitive apparitions and futile individualities, 
 dancing once across the stereopticon and seen no 
 more — one figure of a genuine man of letters 
 remains, that of M. Stdphane Mallarm^, the soli- 
 tary name among those of the so-called Decadents 
 which has hitherto proved its right to serious con- 
 sideration. 
 
 If the dictionaries are to be trusted, M, Mallarm6 
 was born in 1842. His career seems to have been 
 the most uneventful on record. He has always 
 been, and I think still is, professor of English at the 
 Lyc^e Fontanes in Paris. About twenty years ago 
 he paid a short visit to London, carrying with him, 
 as I well remember, the vast portfolio of his trans- 
 lation of Poe's Raven, with Manet's singular illus- 
 trations. His life has been spent in a Buddhistic 
 calm, in meditation. He has scarcely published 
 anything, disliking, so it is said, the " exhibition- 
 nisme " involved in bringing out a book, the banality 
 of types and proofs and revises. 
 
 His revolutionary ideas with regard to style 
 
Symbolism 223 
 
 were formulated about 1875, when the Pamasse 
 Contemporain, edited by the friends and co-evals 
 of M. Mallarme, rejected his first important poem, 
 L'Apres-Midi d'un Faune, which appeared at length 
 in 1876, as a quarto pamphlet, illustrated by 
 Manet. In the same year he gave his earliest 
 example of the new prose in the shape of an essay 
 prefixed to a beautiful reprint of Beckford's 
 Vathek, a volume bound in vellum, tied with black 
 and crimson silk, and produced in a very small 
 edition. Ridicule was the only welcome vouchsafed 
 to these two couriers of the D6cadance. Perhaps 
 M. Mallarme was somewhat discouraged, although 
 absolutely unsubdued. 
 
 He remained long submerged, but with the 
 growth of his school he was persuaded to reappear. 
 In 1887 one fascicule only of his complete poems 
 was brought out in an extraordinary form, photo- 
 lithographed from the original manuscript. In 
 1888 followed a translation of the poems of Edgar 
 Poe. But until 1893 the general reader has had 
 no opportunity, even in France, of forming an 
 opinion on the prose or verse of M. Mallarme. 
 Meanwhile, his name has become one of the most 
 notorious in contemporary literature. A thousand 
 eccentricities, a thousand acts of revolt against 
 
224 Questions at Issue 
 
 tradition, have been perpetrated under the banner 
 of his tacit encouragement. It is high time to try 
 and understand what M. Mallarm6's teaching really 
 is, and what his practice. 
 
 To ridicule the Decadents, or to insist upon 
 their extravagance, is so easy as to be unworthy of 
 a serious critic. It would be quite simple for some 
 crusty Christopher to show that the poems of master 
 and scholars alike are monstrous, unintelligible, 
 ludicrously inept, and preposterous. M. Mallarme 
 has had hard words, not merely from the old 
 classical critics such as M. Brunetiere, but from 
 men from whom the extremity of sympathy might 
 have been looked. Life-long friends like M. 
 Leconte de Lisle confess that they understood him 
 once, but, alas ! understand him no longer ; or, 
 like M. Fran9ois Coppee, avoid all discussion of his 
 verses, and obstinately confine themselves to " son 
 esprit eleve, sa vie si pure, si belle." When such 
 men as these profess themselves unable to com- 
 prehend a writer of their own age and language, it 
 seems presumptuous for a foreigner to attempt to 
 do so, nor do I pretend that in the formal and 
 minute sense I am able to comprehend the poems 
 of M. Mallarme. He remains, under the most 
 loving scrutiny, a most difficult writer. But, at all 
 
Symbolism 225 
 
 events, I think that sympathy and study may avail 
 to enable the critic to detect the spirit which 
 inspires this strange and cryptic figure. Study 
 and sympathy I have given, and I offer some results 
 of them, not without diffidence. 
 
 Translated into common language, then, the main 
 design of M. Mallarmd and his friends seems to be 
 to refresh the languid current of French style. 
 They hold — and in this view no English critic can 
 dare to join issue with them — that art is not a 
 stable nor a definite thing, and that success for the 
 future must lie along paths not exactly traversed in 
 the immediate past. They are tired of the official 
 versification of France, and they dream of new 
 effects which all the handbooks tell them are 
 impossible to French prosody. They make in- 
 finite experiments, they feel their way ; and I have 
 nothing to reproach them with except their undue 
 haste (but M. Mallarme has not been hasty) in 
 publishing their " tentatives." Their aims are 
 those of our own Areopagites of 1580, met "for 
 the general surceasing and silence of bold Rymers, 
 and also of the very best of them too " — " our new 
 famous enterprise for the exchange of barbarous 
 rymes for artificial verses." We must wish for 
 the odd productions of these modern Parisian 
 
226 Questions at Issue 
 
 euphuists a better fate than befell the trimeter 
 iambics of Master Drant and Master Preston. But 
 the cause of their existence is plain enough. It is 
 the exhaustion, the enervation of the language, 
 following upon the activities of Victor Hugo and his 
 contemporaries. It is, morever, a reaction towards 
 freedom, directly consequent upon the strict and 
 impersonal versification of the Parnassians. When 
 the ofScial verse has been burnished and chased to 
 the metallic perfection of M. de H^redia's sonnets, 
 nothing but to withdraw to the wilderness in 
 sheepskins is left to would-be poets of the next 
 generation. 
 
 To pass from Symbolism generally to M. 
 Mallarmg and his particular series of theories, he 
 presents himself to us above all as an individualist. 
 The poets of the last generation were a flock of 
 singing-birds, trained in a general aviary. They 
 met, as on the marble pavement of some new 
 Serapeum, to contend in public for the rewards of 
 polished verse. In contrast with these rivalries 
 and congregations M. Mallarme has always shown 
 himself sohtary and disengaged. As he has said : 
 "The poet is a man who isolates himself that he 
 may carve the sculptures of his own tomb." He 
 refuses to obey that hierarchical tradition of which 
 
Symbolism 227 
 
 Victor Hugo was the most formidable pontiff. He 
 finds the alexandrine, as employed in the intractable 
 prosody of modern France, a rigid and puerile 
 instrument, from which melodies can nowadays no 
 more be extracted. So far as I comprehend the 
 position, M. Mallarme does not propose, as do some 
 of his disciples, to reject this noble verse-form 
 altogether, and to slide into a sort of rhymed Walt 
 Whitmanism. I cannot trace in his published 
 poems a single instance of such a determination. 
 But it is plain that he takes the twelve syllables of 
 the line as forming, not six notes, but twelve, and 
 he demands permission to form with these twelve 
 as many combinations as he pleases. Melody, to 
 be gained at any sacrifice of the old Jesuit laws, is 
 what he desiderates : harmony of versification, 
 obtained in new ways, by extracting the latent 
 capabilities of the organ until now too convention- 
 ally employed. 
 
 So much, very briefly, for the prosodical inno- 
 vation. For the language he demands an equal 
 refreshment, by the rejection of the old worn 
 phrases in favour of odd, exotic, and archaic terms. 
 He takes up and adopts literally the idea of 
 Theophile Gautier that words are precious stones, 
 and should be so set as to flash and radiate from 
 
228 Questions at Issue 
 
 the page. More individually characteristic of M. 
 Mallarm6 I find a certain preference for enigma. 
 Language, to him, is given to conceal definite 
 thought, to draw the eye away from the object. 
 The Parnassians defined, described, analysed the 
 object until it stood before us as in a coloured 
 photograph. M. Mallarme avoids this as much as 
 possible. He aims at allusion only ; he wraps a 
 mystery around his simplest utterance ; the ab- 
 struse and the symbolic are his peculiar territory. 
 His aim, or I greatly misunderstand him, is to use 
 words in such harmonious combinations as tvill 
 suggest to the reader a mood or a condition which 
 is not mentioned in the text, but is nevertheless 
 paramount in the poet's mind at the moment of 
 composition. To the conscious aiming at this 
 particular effect are, it appears to me, due the more 
 curious characteristics of his style, and much of 
 the utter bewilderment which it produces on the 
 brain of an indolent reader debauched by the 
 facilities of realism. 
 
 The longest and the most celebrated of the poems 
 of M. Mallarmd is EApres-Midi d'un Faune. It 
 appears in the " florilfege " which he has just pub- 
 lished, and I have now read it again, as I have often 
 read it before. To say that I understand it bit by 
 
Symbolism 229 
 
 bit, phrase by phrase, would, be excessive. But if 
 I am asked whether this famous miracle of unin- 
 telligibility gives me pleasure, I answer, cordially, 
 Yes. I even fancy that I obtain from it as definite 
 and as solid an impression as M. Mallarm6 desires 
 to produce. This is what I read in it : A faun — a 
 simple, sensuous, passionate being — wakens in the 
 forest at daybreak and tries to recall his experience 
 of the previous afternoon. Was he the fortunate 
 recipient of an actual visit from nymphs, white and 
 golden goddesses, divinely tender and indulgent ? 
 Or is the memory he seems to retain nothing but 
 the shadow of a vision, no more substantial than 
 the " arid rain " of notes from his own flute ? He 
 cannot tell. Yet surely there was, surely there is, 
 an animal whiteness among the brown reeds of the 
 lake that shines out yonder ? Were they, are they, 
 swans ? No ! But Naiads plunging ? Perhaps ! 
 
 Vaguer and vaguer grows the impression of 
 this delicious experience. He would resign his 
 woodland godship to retain it. A garden of lilies, 
 golden-headed, white-stalked, behind the trellis 
 of red roses ? Ah ! the eifort is too great for 
 his poor brain. Perhaps if he selects one lily 
 from the garth of lilies, one benign and beneficent 
 yielder of her cup to thirsty lips, the memory, 
 
23° Questions at Issue 
 
 the ever-receding memory, may be forced back. 
 So, when he has glutted upon a bunch of grapes, 
 he is wont to toss the empty skins into the air and 
 blow them out in a visionary greediness. But no, 
 the delicious hour grows vaguer ; experience or 
 dream, he will now never know which it was. The 
 sun is warm, the grasses yielding; and he curls 
 himself up again, after worshipping the efficacious 
 star of wine, that he may pursue the dubious 
 ecstasy into the more hopeful boskages of sleep. 
 
 This, then, is what I read in the so excessively 
 obscure and uninteiligible L'Apres-MM (fun Faune,- 
 and, accompanied as it is with a perfect suavity of 
 language and melody of rhythm, I know not what 
 more a poem of eight pages could be expected to 
 give. It supplies a simple and direct impression of 
 physical beauty, of harmony, of colour; it is ex- 
 ceedingly mellifluous, when once the ear under- 
 stands that the poet, instead of being the slave of 
 the alexandrine, weaves his variations round it like 
 a musical composer. Unfortunately, L'Apres-Midi 
 was written fifteen years ago, and his theories have 
 grown upon M. Mallarme as his have on Mr. George 
 Meredith. In the new collection of Vers et Prose I 
 miss some pieces which I used to admire in par- 
 ticular, surely, Placet, and the delightful poem called 
 
Symbolism 231 
 
 Le Guignon. Perhaps these were too lucid for the 
 worshippers. In return, we have certain allegories 
 which are terribly abstruse, and some subfusc 
 sonnets. I have read the following, called Le 
 Tombeau d'Edgard Poe, over and over and over. I 
 am very stupid, but I cannot tell what it says. In 
 a certain vague and vitreous way I think I perceive 
 what it means; and we are aided now by its being 
 punctuated, which was not the case in the original 
 form in which I met with it. But, " O my Brothers, 
 ye the Workers," is it not still a little difficult ? 
 
 Tel qu'en Lui-m^me enfin I'eterniti le change, 
 
 Le "Poete suscite avec un glaive nu 
 
 Son Slide epouvante de r^ avoir fas connu 
 Que la mort triomphait dans cette voix etrange ! 
 6ux, comme un vil sursaut d^hydre oyant jadis Pange 
 
 Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu 
 
 "Proclamerent tres haut le sortiPege bu 
 Dans le Jlot sans honneur de quelque noir melange. 
 Du sol et de la nue hostiles, o grief I 
 Si notre idee avec ne sculpte un bas-relief 
 
 Dont la tombe de Toe eblouissante s'orne 
 Calme bloc ici-bas chu d'un desastre obscur 
 
 Que ce granit du moins montre a jamais sa borne 
 Aux noirs vols du 'Blasphlme ipars dans lefutur. 
 
 Of the prose of M. Mallarme, I can here speak 
 but briefly. He has not published very much of it ; 
 
232 Questions at Issue 
 
 and it is all polished and cadenced like his verse, 
 with strange transposed adjectives and exotic nouns 
 fantastically employed. It is even more distinctly 
 to be seen in his prose than in his verse that he 
 descends directly from Baudelaire, and in the former 
 that streak of Lamartine that marks his poems is 
 lacking. 
 
 The book called Pages can naturally be compared 
 with the Poemes en Prose of Baudelaire. Several 
 of the sketches so named are now reprinted in Vers 
 et Prose, and they strike me as the most distinguished 
 and satisfactory of the published writings of M. 
 Mallarm^. They are difficult, but far more intelli- 
 gible than the enigmas which he calls his sonnets. 
 La Pipe, in which the sight of an old meerschaum 
 brings up dreams of London and the solitary 
 lodgings there; Le Nenuphar Blanc, recording the 
 vision of a lovely lady, visible for one tantalising 
 moment to a rower in his boat ; Frisson cCHiver, 
 the wholly fantastic and nebulous reverie of archaic 
 elegances evoked by the ticking of a clock of 
 Dresden china ; each of these, and several more of 
 these exquisite Pages, give just that impression of 
 mystery and allusion which the author deems that 
 style should give. They are exquisite — so far as 
 they go — pure, distinguished, ingenious ; and the 
 
Symbolism 2^33; 
 
 fantastic oddity of their vocabulary seems in perfect 
 accord with their general character. 
 
 Here is a fragment of La Pinultieme, on which 
 the reader may try his skill in comprehending 
 the New French : 
 
 " Mais oil s'installe I'irrdcusable intervention du 
 surnaturel, et le commencement de I'angoisse sous 
 laquelle agonise mpn esprit nagufere seigneur, c'est 
 quand je vis, levant les yeux, dans la rue des anti- 
 quaires instinctivement suivie, que j'dtais devant la 
 boutique d'un luthier vendeur de vieux instruments 
 pendus au mur, et, a terre, des palmes jaunes ct 
 les ailes enfouies en I'ombre, d'oiseaux anciens. Je 
 m'enfuis, bizarre, personne condamnde h. porter 
 probablement le deuil de I'inexplicable P^nul- 
 tifeme." 
 
 As a translator, all the world must commend 
 M. Mallarme. He has put the poems of Poe into 
 French in a way which is subtle almost without 
 parallel. Each version is in simple prose, but so 
 full, so reserved, so suavely mellifluous, that the 
 metre and the rhymes continue to sing in an English 
 ear. None could enter more tenderly than he into 
 the strange charm of Ulalume, of The Sleeper, or of 
 The Raven. It is rarely indeed that a word sug- 
 gests that the melody of one, who was a symbolist 
 
234 Questions at Issue 
 
 and a weaver of enigmas like himself, has mo- 
 mentarily evaded the translator. 
 
 M. Mallarmd, who understands English so per- 
 fectly, has perhaps seen the poems of Sydney 
 Dobell. He knows, it is possible, that thirty or 
 forty years ago there was an English poet who 
 cultivated the symbol, who deUquesced the language, 
 as he himself does in French. Sydney Dobell 
 wrote lovely, unintelligible things, that broke, every 
 now and then, into rhapsodies of veritable beauty. 
 But his whole system was violent. He became an 
 eccentric cometary nebula, whirling away from our 
 poetic system at a tangent. He whirled away, for 
 all his sincere passion, into oblivion. This is what 
 one fears for the Symbolists : that being read with 
 so great an effort by their own generation, they 
 may, by the next, not be read at all, and what is 
 pure and genuine in their artistic impulses be lost. 
 Something of M. Mallarm^ will, however, always be 
 turned back to with respect and perhaps with 
 enthusiasm, for he is a true man of letters. 
 
 1893. 
 
TWO PASTELS 
 
Mr. R. L. Stevenson as a Poet 
 
 A. PRETTY little anthology might be made of 
 poems by distinguished writers who never for a 
 moment professed to be poets, and who only 
 " swept, with hurried hand, the strings " when 
 they thought nobody was listening. The elegant 
 technical people of the eighteenth century, who 
 never liked to be too abstruse to seem polite, 
 would contribute a great many of these flowers 
 that were born to bloom unseen. It is not every- 
 body who is aware that the majestic Sir William 
 Blackstone was " guilty," as people put it,' of a 
 set of one hundred octosyllabic verses which 
 would do credit to any laurelled master on 
 Parnassus. We might, indeed, open our little 
 volume with The Lawyer's Farewell to his Muse. 
 Then, of course, there would be Bishop Berkeley's 
 unique poem. Westward the Course of Empire 
 
238 Questions at Issue 
 
 takes its Way; and Oldys, the antiquary, would 
 spare us his Busy, curious, thirsty Fly. We 
 should appeal to Burton for the prefatory verses 
 in the Anatomy of Melancholy, and to Bacon for 
 The World's Bubble. If I had any finger 
 in that anthology, Smollett's Ode to Leven 
 Water should by no means be omitted. It 
 would be a false pride that would reject Holcroft's 
 Gaffer Gray, or Sydney Smith's Receipt for a 
 Salad, which latter Herrick might have been 
 glad to sign. Hume's solitary poem should be 
 printed by itself, or with some of Carlyle's lyrics, 
 and George Eliot's sonnets, in an appendix, as 
 an awful warning. 
 
 As we come down to recent times the task of 
 editing our anthology would grow difficult. In 
 our day, the prose writers have either been 
 coy or copious with their verses. If Professor 
 Tyndall has never essayed the Lydian measure 
 it is very surprising, but we have not yet 
 been admitted to hear his shell ; nor has Mr. 
 Walter Besant, to the best of my belief, published 
 an ode to anything. Let the shades of Berkeley 
 and Smollett administer reproof. Until quite 
 lately, however, "we should have been contented 
 to close our selection with " The bed was made, 
 
Mr. R. L. Stevenson as a Poet 239 
 
 the room was fit," from Travels with a Donkey. 
 But Mr. Stevenson is now ineligible — he has pub- 
 lished books of poems. 
 
 That this departure is not quite a new one 
 might be surmised by any one who has followed 
 closely the publications of the essayist and novelist 
 whom a better man than I am has called " the 
 most exquisite and original of our day." Though 
 Mr. Stevenson's prose volumes are more than 
 twelve in number, and though he had been thought 
 of essentially as a prose writer, the ivory shoulder 
 of the lyre has peeped out now and then. I do 
 not refer to his early collections of verse, to Not 
 I, and other Poems, to Moral Emblems, and to 
 The Graver and the Pen. (I mention these scarce 
 publications of the Davos press in the hope of 
 rousing wicked passions in the breasts of other 
 collectors, since my own set of them is complete.) 
 These volumes were decidedly occult. A man 
 might build upon them a reputation as a sage, 
 but hardly as a poet. Their stern morality came 
 well from one whose mother's milk has been the 
 Shorter Catechism; they are books which no one 
 can read and not be the better for ; but as mere 
 verse, they leave something to be desired. Non 
 ragionam di lor, ma guarda, if you happen to be 
 
240 Questions at Issue 
 
 lucky enough to possess them, e passu. Where 
 the careful reader has perceived that Mr. Stevenson 
 was likely to become openly a poet has been in 
 snatches of verse published here and there in 
 periodicals, and of a quality too good to be 
 neglected. Nevertheless, the publication of A 
 Child's Garden of Verses (Longmans, 1885) was 
 something of a surprise, and perhaps the new 
 book of grown-up poems. Underwoods (Chatto 
 and Windus, 1887) is more surprising still. 
 There is no doubt about it any longer. Mr. 
 Stevenson is a candidate for the bays. 
 
 The Child's Garden of Verses has now been 
 published long enough to enable us to make a 
 calm consideration of its merits. When it was 
 fresh, opinion was divided, as it always is about 
 a new strong thing, between those who, in Mr. 
 Longfellow's phrase about the little girl, think 
 it very, very good, and those who think it is 
 horrid. After reading the new book, the Under- 
 woods, we come back to A Child's Garden with 
 a clearer sense of the writer's intention, and a 
 wider experience of his poetical outlook upon life. 
 The later book helps us to comprehend the 
 former; there is the same sincerity, the same 
 buoyant simplicity, the same curiously candid and 
 
Mr. R, L. Stevenson as a Poet 241 
 
 confidential attitude of mind. If any one doubted 
 that Mr. Stevenson was putting his own childish 
 memories into verse in the first book, all doubt 
 must cease in reading the second book, where 
 the experiences, although those of an adult, have 
 exactly the same convincing air of candour. The 
 first thing which struck the reader of A Child's 
 Garden was the extraordinary clearness and pre- 
 cision with which the immature fancies of eager 
 childhood were reproduced in it. People whose 
 own childish memories had become very vague, and 
 whose recollections of their games and dreams were 
 hazy in the extreme, asked themselves how far this 
 poet's visions were inspired by real memory and 
 how far by invention. The new book sets that 
 question at rest ; the same hand that gave us — 
 
 My bed is like a little boat ; 
 
 Nurse helps me in when I embark ; 
 She girds me in my sailor's coat. 
 
 And starts me in the dark ; 
 
 and the even more delicious — 
 
 Now, with my little gun, I crawl 
 All in the dark along the wall. 
 And follow round the forest-track 
 Away behind the sofa-back, — ■ 
 
 now gives us pictures like the following : 
 
 Q 
 
242 Questions at Issue 
 
 My house, / say. But hark to the sunny doves. 
 That make my roof the arena of their loves. 
 That gyre about the gable all day long 
 And fill the chimneys with their murmurous song : 
 Our house, they say ; and mine, the cat declares. 
 And spreads his golden fleece upon the chairs ; 
 And mine the dog, and rises stiff with wrath 
 If any alien foot profane the path. 
 So, too, the buck that trimmed my terraces. 
 Our whilome gardener, called the garden his ; 
 Who now, deposed, surveys my plain abode 
 And his late kingdom, only from the road. 
 
 We now perceive that it is not invention, but 
 memory of an extraordinarily vivid kind, patiently 
 directed to little things, and charged with imagina- 
 tion ; and we turn back with increased interest to 
 A Child's Garden, assured that it gives us a unique 
 thing, a transcript of that child-mind which we 
 have all possessed and enjoyed, but of which no 
 one, except Mr. Stevenson, seems to have carried 
 away a photograph. Long ago, in one of the very 
 earliest, if I remember right, of those essays by 
 R. L. S. for which we used so eagerly to watch 
 the Cornhill Magazine in Mr. Leslie. Stephen's time, 
 in the paper called " Child Play," this retention of 
 what is wiped off from the memories of the rest of 
 us was clearly displayed. Out of this rarely sug- 
 
Mr. R. L. Stevenson as a Poet 243 
 
 gestive essay I will quote a few lines, which might 
 have been printed as an introduction to A ChilcPs 
 Garden : 
 
 " In the child's world of dim sensation, play is 
 all in all. ' Making believe ' is the gist of his 
 whole life, and he cannot so much as take a walk 
 except in character. I could not learn my alphabet 
 without some suitable mise-en-scdne, and had to act 
 a business-man in an office before I could sit down 
 
 to my book I remember, as though it were 
 
 yesterday, the expansion of spirit, the dignity and 
 self-reliance, that came with a pair of mustachios 
 in burnt cork, even when there was none to see. 
 Children are even content to forego what we call 
 the realities, and prefer the shadow to the sub- 
 stance. When they might be speaking intelligently 
 together, theiy chatter gibberish by the hour, and 
 are quite happy because they are making believe to 
 speak French." 
 
 Probably all will admit the truth of this state- 
 ment of infant fancy, when it is presented to them 
 in this way. But how many of us, in perfect 
 sincerity, not relying upon legends of the nursery, 
 not refreshed by the study of our own children's 
 " make-believe," can say that we clearly recollect 
 the method of it ? We shall find that our memories 
 
244 Questions at Issue 
 
 are like a breath upon the glass, like the shape of 
 a broken wave. Nothing is so hopelessly lost, 
 so utterly volatile, as the fancies of our child- 
 hood. But Mr. Stevenson, alone amongst us 
 all, appears to have kept daguerreotypes of the 
 whole series of his childish sensations. Except 
 the late Mrs. Ewing, he seems to be without 
 a rival in this branch of memory as applied to 
 literature. 
 
 The various attitudes of literary persons to the 
 child are very interesting. There are, for instance, 
 poets like Victor Hugo and Mr. Swinburne who 
 come to admire, who stay to adore, and who do 
 not disdain to throw their purple over any humble 
 article of nursery use. They are so magnificent 
 in their address to infancy, they say so many 
 brilliant and unexpected things, that the mother is 
 almost as much dazzled as she is gratified. We 
 stand round, with our hats off", and admire the 
 poet as much as he admires the child ; but we 
 experience no regret when he presently turns away 
 to a discussion of grown-up things. We have an 
 ill-defined notion that he reconnoitres infancy from 
 the outside, and has not taken the pains to reach 
 the secret mind of childhood. It is to be noted, 
 and this is a suspicious circumstance, that Mr. 
 
Mr. R. L. Stevenson as a Poet 245 
 
 Swinburne and Victor Hugo like the child better 
 the younger it is. 
 
 What likeness may define, and stray not 
 
 From truth's exactest way, 
 A baby's beauty 2 Love can say not. 
 What likeness may. 
 
 This is charming ; but the address is to the mother^ 
 is to the grown-up reflective person. To the real 
 student of child-life the baby contains possibilities, 
 but is at present an uninteresting chrysalis. It 
 cannot carry a gun through the forest, behind the 
 sofa-back ; it is hardly so useful as a cushion to 
 represent a passenger in a railway-train of inverted 
 chairs. 
 
 Still more remote than the dithyrambic poets 
 are those writers about children — and they 
 are legion — who have ever the eye fixed upon 
 morality, and carry the didactic tongue thrust in 
 the cheek of fable. The late Charles Kingsley, 
 who might have made so perfect a book of his 
 Water-Babies, sins notoriously in this respect. The 
 moment a wise child perceives the presence of 
 allegory, or moral instruction, all the charm of a 
 book is gone. Parable is the very antipodes of 
 childish " make-believe," into which the element of 
 
246 Questions at Issue 
 
 ulterior motive or secondary moral meaning never 
 enters for an instant. The secret of the charm of 
 Mrs. Gatty's Parables from Nature, which were the 
 fairest food given to very young minds in my day, 
 was that the fortunate child never discovered that 
 they were parables at all. I, for one, used to read 
 and re-read them as realistic statements of fact, the 
 necessity of pointing a moral merely having driven 
 the amiable author to the making of her story a 
 little more fantastic, and therefore more welcome, 
 than it would otherwise be. It was explained to 
 me one hapless day that the parables were of a 
 nature to instil nice principles into the mind ; and 
 from that moment Mrs. Gatty became a broken 
 idol. Lewis Carroll owed his great and deserved 
 success to his suppleness in bending his fancy to 
 the conditions of a mind that is dreaming. It has 
 never seemed to me that the Adventures in Wonder- 
 land were specially childish ; dreams are much the 
 same, whether a child or a man is passive under 
 them, and it is a fact that Lewis Carroll appeals 
 just as keenly to adults as to children. In Edward 
 Lear's rhymes and ballads the love of grotesque 
 nonsense in the grown-up child is mainly appealed 
 to ; and these are certainly appreciated more by 
 parents than by children. 
 
Mr. R. L. Stevenson as a Poet 247 
 
 It would be easy, by multiplying examples, to 
 drive home my contention that only two out of 
 the very numerous authors who haire written 
 successfully on or for children have shown a clear 
 recollection of the mind of healthy childhood 
 itself. Many authors have achieved brilliant suc- 
 cess in describing children, in verbally caressing 
 them, in amusing, in instructing them ; but only 
 two, Mrs. Ewing in prose, and Mr. Stevenson 
 in verse, have sat down with them without dis- 
 turbing their fancies, and have looked into the 
 world of "make-believe" with the children's own 
 eyes. If Victor Hugo should visit the nursery, 
 every head of hair ought to be brushed, every 
 pinafore be clean, and nurse must certainly be 
 present, as well as mamma. But Mrs. Ewing or 
 Mr. Stevenson might lead a long romp in the attic 
 when nurse was out shopping, and not a child in 
 the house should know that a grown-up person had 
 been there. There are at least a dozen pieces in 
 the Child's Garden which might be quoted to show 
 what is meant. " The Lamplighter " will serve our 
 purpose as well as any other : 
 
 IMy tea is nearly ready and the sun has left the sky ,• 
 It's time to take the window to see Learie going by ; 
 
248 Questions at Issue 
 
 For every night at tea-time, and before you take your seat. 
 With lantern and with ladder he comes posting up the 
 street. 
 
 Now Tom would be a driver and 3\taria go to sea, 
 e/Ind my papa's a banker and as rich as he can be ; 
 'But I, when I am stronger and can choose what Fm to do, 
 O Learie, Fll go round at night and light the lamps 
 with you / 
 
 For we are very lucky, with a lamp before the door, 
 vtnd Learie stops to light it as he lights so many more ; 
 tind O 1 before you hurry by with ladder and with light, 
 O Learie, see a little child, and nod to him to-night. 
 
 In publishing this autumn a second volume, this 
 time of grown-up verses, Mr. Stevenson has ven- 
 tured on a bolder experiment. His Underwoods, 
 with its title openly borrowed from Ben Jonson, is 
 an easy book to appreciate and enjoy, but not to 
 review. In many respects it is plainly the work 
 of the same fancy that described the Country of 
 Counterpane and the Land of Story-books, but it 
 has grown a little sadder, and a great deal older. 
 There is the same dehcate sincerity, the same 
 candour and simplicity, the same artless dependence 
 on the good faith of the public. The ordinary 
 themes of the poets are untouched ; there is not 
 one piece from cover to cover which deals with the 
 passion of love. The book is occupied with friend- 
 
Mr. R. L. Stevenson as a Poet 249 
 
 ship, with nature, with the honourable instincts of 
 man's moral machinery. Above all, it enters with 
 great minuteness, and in a very confidential spirit, 
 into the theories and moods of the writer himself. 
 It will be to many readers a revelation of the every- 
 day life of an author whose impersonal writings 
 have given them so much and so varied pleasure. 
 Not a dozen ordinary interviewers could have 
 extracted so much of the character of the man 
 himself as he gives us in these one hundred and 
 twenty pages. 
 
 The question of admitting the personal element 
 into literature is one which is not very clearly 
 understood. People try to make rules about it, 
 and say that an author may describe his study, but 
 not his dining-room, and his wife, but not her 
 cousin. The fact is that no rules can possibly be 
 laid down in a matter which is one of individual 
 sympathy. The discussion whether a writer may 
 speak of himself or no is utterly vain until we are 
 informed in what voice he has the habit of speak- 
 ing. It is all a question which depends on the 
 timbre of the literary voice. As in life there are 
 persons whose sweetness of utterance is such that 
 we love to have them warbling at our side, no 
 matter on what subject they speak, and others to 
 
250 Questions at Issue 
 
 whom we have scarcely patience to hsten if they 
 want to tell us that we have inherited a fortune, 
 so it is in literature. Except that httle class 
 of stoic critics who like to take their books in 
 vacuo, most of us prefer to know something about 
 the authors we read. But whether we like them 
 to tell it us themselves, or no, depends entirely on 
 the voice. Thackeray and Fielding are never 
 confidential enough to satisfy us ; Dickens and 
 Smollett set our teeth on edge directly they start 
 upon a career of confidential expansion ; and this 
 has nothing to do with any preference for Tom 
 Jones over Peregrine Pickle. There is no doubt 
 that Mr. Stevenson is one of those writers the 
 sound of whose personal voices is pleasing to the 
 public, and there must be hundreds of his admirers 
 who will not miss one word' of " To a Gardener " 
 or " The Mirror Speaks," and who will puzzle out 
 each of the intimate addresses to his private friends 
 with complete satisfaction. 
 
 The present writer is one of those who are most 
 under the spell. For me Mr. Stevenson may 
 speak for ever, and chronicle at full length all his 
 uncles and his cousins and his nurses. But I 
 think if it were my privilege to serve him in the 
 capacity of Molifere's old woman, or to be what a 
 
Mr. R. L. Stevenson as a Poet 251 
 
 friend of mine would call his " foolometer," I 
 should pluck up courage to represent to him that 
 this thing can be overdone. I openly avow myself 
 an enthusiast, yet even I shrink before the con- 
 fidential character of the prose inscription to 
 Underwoods. This volume is dedicated, if you 
 please, to eleven physicians, and it is strange that 
 one so all compact of humour as Mr. Stevenson 
 should not have noticed how funny it is to think of an 
 author seated affably in an armchair, simultaneously 
 summoning by name eleven physicians to take a 
 few words of praise each, and a copy of his little 
 book. 
 
 The objective side of Mr. Stevenson's mind is 
 very rich and full, and he has no need to retire 
 too obstinately upon the subjective. Yet I know 
 not that anything he has written in verse is more 
 worthily dignified than the following little personal 
 fragment, in which he refers, of course, to the 
 grandfather who died a few weeks before his birth, 
 and to the father whom he had just conducted to 
 the grave, both heroic builders of lighthouses : 
 
 Say not of me that weakly I declined 
 The labours of my sires, and fled the sea, 
 The towers we founded and the lamp we lit, 
 To play at home with paper li\e a child. 
 
252 Questions at Issue 
 
 "But rather say : In the afternoon of time 
 A strenuous family dusted from its hands 
 The sand of granite, and beholding far 
 e/llong the sounding coast its pyramids 
 And tall memorials catch the dying sun. 
 Smiled well content, and to this childish task 
 Around the fire addressed its evening hours. 
 
 This is a particularly happy specimen of Mr. 
 Stevenson's blank verse, in which 'metre, as a rule, 
 he does not show to advantage. It is not that his 
 verses are ever lame or faulty, for in the technical 
 portion of the art he seldom fails, but that his 
 rhymeless iambics remind the ear too much now of 
 Tennyson, now of Keats. He is, on the contrary, 
 exceedingly happy and very much himself in that 
 metre of eight or seven syllables, with couplet- 
 rhymes, which served so well the first poets who 
 broke away from heroic verse, such as Swift and 
 Lady Winchilsea, Green and Dyer. If he must be 
 affiliated to any school of poets it is to these, who 
 hold the first outworks between the old classical 
 camp and the invading army of romance, to whom 
 I should ally him. Martial is with those octo- 
 syllabists of Queen Anne, and to Martial might 
 well have been assigned, had they been in old 
 Latin, the delicately homely lines, "To a Gardener." 
 How felicitous is this quatrain about the onion — 
 
Mr. R. L. Stevenson as a Poet 253 
 
 Let first the onion flourish there. 
 Rose among roots, the maiden fair, 
 Wine-scented and poetic soul 
 Of the capacious salad-howl. 
 
 Or this, in more irregular measure, and enfolding a 
 loftier fancy — 
 
 Sing clearlier, iMuse, or evermore be still, 
 Sing truer, or no longer sing t 
 No more the voice of melancholy Jacques 
 To make a weeping echo in the hill; 
 'But as the boy, the pirate of the spring, 
 From the green elm a living linnet takes, 
 One natural verse recapture — then be still. 
 
 It would be arrogant in the extreme to decide 
 whether or no Mr. R. L. Stevenson's poems will 
 be read in the future. They are, however, so full 
 of character, so redolent of his own fascinating 
 temperament, that it is not too bold to suppose 
 that so long as his prose is appreciated those who 
 love that will turn to this. There have been prose 
 writers whose verse has not lacked accomplishment 
 or merit, but has been so far from interpreting 
 their prose that it rather disturbed its effect and 
 weakened its influence. Cowley is an example of 
 this, whose ingenious and dryly intellectual poetry 
 positively terrifies the reader away from his 
 
^54 Questions at Issue 
 
 eminently suave and human essays. Neither of 
 Mr. Stevenson's volumes of poetry will thus disturb 
 his prose. Opinions may be divided as to their 
 positive value, but no one will doubt that the same 
 characteristics are displayed in the poems, the same 
 suspicion of "the abhorred pedantic sanhedrim," 
 the same fulness of life and tenderness of hope, the 
 same bright felicity of epithet as in the essays and 
 romances. The belief, however, may be expressed 
 without fear of contradiction that Mr. Stevenson's 
 fame will rest mainly upon his verse and not upon 
 his prose, only in that dim future when Mr. 
 Matthew Arnold's prophecy shall be fulfilled and 
 Shelley's letters shall be preferred to his lyrical 
 poems. It is saying a great deal to acknowledge 
 that the author of Kidnapped is scarcely less read- 
 able in verse than he is in prose. 
 
 1887. 
 
II 
 
 Mr. Rudyard Kipling's 
 Short Stories 
 
 1 wo years ago there was suddenly revealed to 
 us, no one seems to remember how, a new star 
 out of the East. Not fewer distinguished men of 
 letters profess to have " discovered " Mr. Kipling 
 than there were cities of old in which Homer was 
 born. Yet, in fact, the discovery was not much 
 more creditable to them than it would be, on a 
 summer night, to contrive to notice a comet flaring 
 across the sky. Not only was this new talent 
 robust, brilliant, and self-asserting, but its recep- 
 tion was prepared for by a unique series of 
 circumstances. The fiction of the Anglo-Saxon 
 world, in its more intellectual provinces, had 
 become curiously feminised. Those novel-writers 
 who cared to produce subtle impressions upon 
 their readers, in England and America, had become 
 
256 Questions at Issue 
 
 extremely refined in taste and discreet in judgment. 
 People who were not content to pursue the soul of 
 their next-door neighbour through all the burrows 
 of self-consciousness had no choice but to take 
 ship with Mr. Rider Haggard for the Mountains 
 of the Moon. Between excess of psychological 
 analysis and excess of superhuman romance there 
 was a great void in the world of Anglo-Saxon 
 fiction. It is this void which Mr. Kipling, with 
 something less than one hundred short stories, one 
 novel, and a few poems, has filled by his exotic 
 realism and his vigorous rendering of unhackneyed 
 experience. His temperament is eminently mascu- 
 line, and yet his imagination is strictly bound by 
 existing laws. The Evarras of the novel had said : 
 
 Thus gods are made, 
 And whoso makes them otherwise shall die, 
 
 when, behold, a young man comes up out of India, 
 and makes them quite otherwise, and Hves. 
 
 The vulgar trick, however, of depreciating other 
 writers in order to exalt the favourite of a moment 
 was never less worthy of practice than it is in the 
 case of the author of Soldiers Three. His relation 
 to his contemporaries is curiously slight. One 
 living writer there is, indeed, with whom it is not 
 
Mr. Kipling's Short Stories 257 
 
 unnatural to compare him — Pierre Loti. Each 
 of these men has attracted the attention, and then 
 the almost exaggerated admiration, of a crowd of 
 readers drawn from every class. Each has become 
 popular without ceasing to be delightful to the 
 fastidious. Each is independent of traditional 
 literature, and affects a disdain for books. Each is 
 a wanderer, a lover of prolonged exile, more at 
 home among the ancient races of the East than 
 among his own people. Each describes what he 
 has seen in short sentences, with highly coloured 
 phrases and local words, little troubled to obey the 
 'laws of style if he can but render an exact 
 impression of what the movement of physical life 
 has been to himself. Each produces on the reader 
 a peculiar thrill, a voluptuous and agitating 
 sentiment of intellectual uneasiness, with the 
 spontaneous art of which he has the secret. 
 Totally unlike in detail, Rudyard Kipling and 
 Pierre Loti have these general qualities in common, 
 and if we want a hterary parallel to the former, 
 the latter is certainly the only one that we can find. 
 Nor is the attitude of the French novelist to his 
 sailor friends at all unlike that of the Anglo-Indian 
 civilian to his soldier chums. To distinguish we 
 must note very carefully the difference between 
 
258 Questions at Issue 
 
 Mulvaney and mon frere Yves; it is not altogether 
 to the advantage of the latter. 
 
 The old rhetorical manner of criticism was not 
 meant for the discussion of such writers as these. 
 The only way in which, as it seems to me, we can 
 possibly approach them, is by a frank confession of 
 their personal relation to the feelings of the critic. 
 I will therefore admit that I cannot pretend to be 
 indifferent to the charm of what Mr. Kipling writes. 
 From the first moment of my acquaintance with it 
 it has held me fast. It excites, disturbs, and 
 attracts me ; I cannot throw off its disquieting 
 influence. I admit all that is to be said in its 
 disfavour. I force myself to see that its occasional 
 cynicism is irritating and strikes a false note. I 
 acknowledge the broken and jagged style, the 
 noisy newspaper bustle of the little peremptory 
 sentences, the cheap irony of the satires on society. 
 Often — but this is chiefly in the earlier stories — I 
 am aware that there is a good deal too much of 
 the rattle of the piano at some cafe concert. But 
 when all this is said, what does it amount to ? 
 What but an acknowledgment of the crudity of a 
 strong and rapidly developing young nature ? You 
 cannot expect a creamy smoothness while the act 
 of vinous fermentation is proceeding. 
 
Mr. Kipling's Short Stories 259 
 
 Wit will shine 
 Through the harsh cadence of a rugged line ; 
 A noble error, and but seldom made, 
 When poets are by too much force betrafd ; 
 Thy generous fruits, though gather' d ere their prime. 
 Still show a quickness, and maturing time 
 'But mellows what we write to the dull sweets of rime. 
 
 In the following pages I shall try to explain 
 why the sense of these shortcomings is altogether 
 buried for me in delighted sympathy and breathless 
 curiosity. Mr. Kipling does not provoke a critical 
 suspension of judgment. He is vehement, and 
 sweeps us away with him ; he plays upon a 
 strange and seductive pipe, and we follow him like 
 children. As I write these sentences, I feel how 
 futile is this attempt to analyse his gifts, and how 
 greatly I should prefer to throw this paper to the 
 winds and listen to the magician himself I want 
 more and more, like Oliver Twist. I want all 
 those " other stories " ; I wish to wander down all 
 those bypaths that we have seen disappear in the 
 brushwood. If one lay very still and low by the 
 watch-fire, in the hollow of Ortheris's greatcoat, 
 one might learn more and more of the inex- 
 tinguishable sorrows of Mulvaney. One might be 
 told more of what happened, out of the moonlight, 
 
26o Questions at Issue 
 
 in the blackness of Amir Nath's Gully. I want to 
 know how the palanquin came into Dearsley's 
 possession, and what became of Kheni Singh, and 
 whether the seal-cutter did really die in the House 
 of Suddhoo. I want to know who it is who 
 dances the Hdlli Hukk, and how, and why, and 
 where. I want to know \yhat happened at 
 Jagadhri, when the Death Bull was painted. I 
 want to know all the things that Mr. Kipling does 
 not like to tell — to see the devils of the East 
 " rioting as the stallions riot in spring." It is the 
 strength of this new story-teller that he reawakens 
 in us the primitive emotions of curiosity, mystery, 
 and romance in action. He is the master of a new 
 kind of terrible and enchanting peepshow, and we 
 crowd around him begging for "just one more 
 look." When a writer excites and tantalises us in 
 this way, it seems a little idle to discuss his style. 
 Let pedants, then, if they will, say that Mr. 
 Kipling has no style ; yet, if so, how shall we 
 designate such passages as this, frequent enough 
 among his more exotic stories ? 
 
 "Come back with me to the north and be among 
 men once more. Come back when this matter is 
 accomplished and I call for thee. The bloom of 
 the peach-orchards is upon all the valley, and 
 
Mr. Kipling's Short Stories 261 
 
 here is only dust and a great stink. There is a 
 pleasant wind among the mulberry-trees, and the 
 streams are bright with snow-water, and the cara- 
 vans go up and the caravans go down, and a hun- 
 dred fires sparkle in the gut of the pass, and 
 tent-peg answers hammer-nose, and pony squeals 
 to pony across the drift-smoke of the evening. It 
 is good in the north now. Come ba,ck with me. 
 Let us return to our own people. Come !" 
 
 The private life of Mr. Rudyard Kipling is not a 
 matter of public interest, and I should be very 
 unwilling to exploit it, even if I had the means 
 of doing so. The youngest of living writers 
 should really be protected for a few years longer 
 against those who chirp and gabble about the 
 unessential. All that needs to be known, in order 
 to give him his due chronological place, is that 
 he was born in Bombay in Christmas week, 
 1865. The careful student of what he has pub- 
 lished will collect from it the impression that Mr. 
 Kipling was resident in India at an age when few 
 European children remain there ; that he returned 
 
262 Questions at Issue 
 
 to England for a brief period; that he began a 
 career on his own account in India at an unusually 
 early age ; that he has led a life of extraordinary 
 vicissitude, as a journalist, as a war correspondent, 
 as a civilian in the wake of the army ; that an 
 insatiable curiosity has led him to shrink from no 
 experience that might help to solve the strange 
 riddles of Oriental existence; and that he is dis- 
 tinguished from other active, adventurous, and in- 
 quisitive persons in that his capacious memory 
 retains every impression that it captures. 
 
 Beyond this, all that must here be said about the 
 man is that his stories began to be published — I 
 think about eight years ago — in local newspapers 
 of India, that his first book of verse. Departmental 
 Ditties, appeared in 1886, while his prose stories 
 were not collected from a Lahore journal, of which 
 he was the sub-editor, until 1888, when a volume 
 of Plain Tales from the Hills appeared in Calcutta. 
 In the same year six successive pamphlets or thin 
 books appeared in an Indian Railway Library, 
 published at Allahabad, under the titles of Soldiers 
 Three, The Gadsbys, In Black and White, Under 
 the Deodars, The Phantom ^Rickshaw, and Wee 
 Willie Winkie. These formed the literary baggage 
 of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, when, in 1889, he came 
 
Mr. Kipling's Short Stories 263 
 
 home to find himself suddenly famous at the age 
 of twenty-three. 
 
 Since his arrival in England Mr. Kipling has 
 not been idle. In 1890 he brought out a Christ- 
 mas annual C£illed The Record of Badalia Herods- 
 foot, and a short novel, The Light that Failed. 
 Already in 1891 he has published a fresh collec- 
 tion of tales called (in America) Mine Own People, 
 and a second miscellany of verses. This is by 
 no means a complete record of his activity, but 
 it includes the names of all his important writings. 
 At an age when few future novelists have yet 
 produced anything at all, Mr. Kipling is already 
 voluminous. It would be absurd not to acknow- 
 ledge that a danger lies in this precocious 
 fecundity. It would probably be an excellent 
 thing for every one concerned if this brilliant 
 youth could be deprived of pens and ink for a 
 few years and be buried again somewhere in the 
 far East. There should be a " close time " for 
 authors no less than for seals, and the extra- 
 ordinary fulness and richness of Mr. Kipling's 
 work does not completely reassure us. 
 
 The publications which I have named above 
 have not, as a rule, any structural cohesion. 
 With the exception of Badalia Herodsfoot and 
 
264 Questions at Issue 
 
 The Light that Failed, which deal with phases 
 of London life, their contents might be thrown 
 together without much loss of relation. The 
 general mass so formed could then be redivided 
 into several coherent sections. It may be 
 remarked that Mr. Kipling's short stories, of 
 which, as I have said, we hold nearly a hundred, 
 mainly deal with three or four distinct classes 
 of Indian life. We may roughly distinguish 
 these as the British soldier in India, the Anglo- 
 Indian, the Native, and the British child in India. 
 In the following pages, I shall endeavour to 
 characterise his treatment of these four classes. 
 I^_retaiji— the— persOHar"Impression that it is pre- 
 emineiUly_as_a_post^haJt-we -shall--ev£ntu,|(ll^^ 
 to regard him,^ For the present his short stories 
 fill the popular mind in connection with his name. 
 
 II 
 
 There can be no question that the side upon 
 which Mr. Kipling's talent has most delicately 
 tickled British curiosity, and British patriotism too, 
 is his revelation of the soldier in India. A great 
 body of our countrymen are constantly being drafted 
 out to the East on Indian service. They serve 
 
Mr. Kipling's Short Stories 265 
 
 their time, are recalled, and merge in the mass of 
 our population ; their strange temporary isolation 
 between the civilian and the native, and their prac- 
 tical inability to find public expression for their 
 feelings, make these men — to whom, though we 
 so often forget it, we owe the maintenance of our 
 Empire in the East — an absolutely silent section 
 of the community. Of their officers we may 
 know something, although A Conference of the 
 Powers may perhaps have awakened us to the 
 fact that we know very little. Still, people like 
 Tick Boileau and Captain Mafflin of the Duke of 
 , Denys Pink Hussars are of ourselves ; we meet 
 them before they go out and when they come back ; 
 they marry our sisters and our daughters ; and 
 they lay down the law about India after dinner. 
 Of the private soldier, on the other hand, of his 
 loves and hates, sorrows and pleasures, of the way 
 in which the vast, hot, wearisome country and its 
 mysterious inhabitants strike him, of his attitude 
 towards India, and of the way in which India 
 treats him, we know, or knew until Mr. Kipling 
 enlightened us, absolutely nothing. It is not sur- 
 prising, then, if the novelty of this portion of his 
 writings has struck ordinary English readers more 
 than that of any other. 
 
266 Questions at Issue 
 
 This section of Mr. Kipling's work occupies the 
 seven tales called Soldiers Three, and a variety of 
 stories scattered through his other books. In 
 order to make his point of view that of the men 
 themselves, not spoiled by the presence of superior 
 officers, or by social restraint of any sort, the author 
 takes upon himself the character of an almost silent 
 young civilian who has gained the warm friendship 
 of three soldiers, whose intimate companion and 
 chum he becomes. Most of the military stories, 
 though not all, are told by one of these three, or 
 else recount their adventures or caprices. 
 
 Before opening the book called Soldiers Three, 
 however, the reader will do well to make himself 
 familiar with the opening pages of a comparatively 
 late story, The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney, in 
 which the characteristics of the famous three are 
 more clearly defined than elsewhere. Mulvaney, 
 the Irish giant, who has been the " grizzled, tender, 
 and very wise Ulysses " to successive generations of 
 young and foolish recruits, is a great creation. He 
 is the father of the craft of arms to his associates ; 
 he has served with various regiments from Bermuda 
 to Halifax ; he is " old in war, scarred, reckless, 
 resourceful, and in his pious hours an unequalled 
 soldier." Learoyd, the second of these friends, is 
 
Mr, Kipling's Short Stories 267 
 
 " six and a half feet of slow-moving, heavy-footed 
 Yorkshireman, born on the wolds, bred in the dales, 
 and educated chiefly among the carriers' carts at 
 the back of York railway-station." The third is 
 Ortheris, a little man as sharp as a needle, " a fox- 
 terrier of a cockney," an inveterate poacher and 
 dog-stealer. 
 
 Of these three strongly contrasted types the first 
 and the third live in Mr. Kipling's pages with 
 absolute reality. I must confess that Learoyd is to 
 me a little shadowy, and even in a late story. On 
 Greenhow Hill, which has apparently been written 
 in order to emphasise the outline of the Yorkshire- 
 man, I find myself chiefly interested in the inci- 
 dental part, the sharp-shooting of Ortheris, It 
 seems as though Mr. Kipling required, for the 
 artistic balance of his cycle of stories, a third 
 figure, and had evolved Learoyd while he observed 
 and created Mulvaney and Ortheris, nor am I sure 
 that places could not be pointed out where Learoyd, 
 save for the dialect, melts undistinguishably into an 
 incarnation of Mulvaney. The others are studied 
 from the life, and by an observer who goes deep 
 below the surface of conduct. How penetrating 
 the study is, and how clear the diagnosis, may be 
 seen in one or two stories which lie somewhat 
 
268 Questions at Issue 
 
 outside the popular group. It is no superficial 
 idler among men who has taken down the strange 
 notes on military hyste'ria which inspire The Mad- 
 ness of Ortheris and In the Matter of a Private, 
 while the skill with which the battered giant Mul- 
 vaney, who has been a corporal and then has been 
 reduced for misconduct, who to the ordinary view 
 and in the eyes of all but the wisest of his officers 
 is a dissipated blackguard, is made to display the 
 rapidity, wit, resource, and high moral feeling which 
 he really possesses, is extraordinary. 
 
 We have hitherto had in English literature no 
 portraits of private soldiers like these, and yet the 
 soldier is an object of interest and of very real, if 
 vague and inefficient, admiration to his fellow- 
 citizens. Mr. Thomas Hardy has painted a few 
 excellent soldiers, but in a more romantic light and 
 a far more pastoral setting. Other studies of this 
 kind in fiction have either been slight and un- 
 substantial, or else they have been, as in the baby- 
 writings of a certain novelist who has enjoyed 
 popularity for a moment, odious in their sentimental 
 unreality. There seems to be something essentially 
 volatile about the soldier's memory. His life is 
 so monotonous, so hedged in by routine, that he 
 forgets the details of it as soon as the restraint is 
 
Mr. Kipling's Short Stories 269 
 
 removed, or else he looks back upon it to see it 
 bathed in a fictitious haze of sentiment. The 
 absence of sentimentality in Mr. Kipling's version 
 of the soldier's life in India is one of its great 
 merits. What romance it assumes under his treat- 
 ment is due to the curious contrasts it encourages. 
 We see the ignorant and raw English youth trans- 
 planted, at the very moment when his instincts 
 begin to develop, into a country where he is divided 
 from everything which can remind him of his home, 
 where by noon and night, in the bazar, in barracks, 
 in the glowing scrub jungle, in the ferny defiles of 
 the hills, everything he sees and hears and smells 
 and feels produces on him an unfamiliar and an 
 unwelcome impression. How he behaves himself 
 under these new circumstances, what code of laws 
 still binds his conscience, what are his relaxations 
 and what his observations, these are the questions 
 which we ask and which Mr. Kipling essays for the 
 first time to answer. 
 
 Among the short stories which Mr. Kipling has 
 dedicated to the British soldier in India there are a 
 few which excel all the rest as works of art. I do 
 not think that any one will deny that of this inner 
 selection none exceeds in skill or originality The 
 Taking of Lungtungpen. Those who have not read 
 
270 Questions at IssUe 
 
 this little masterpiece have yet before them the 
 pleasure of becoming acquainted with one of the 
 best short stories, not merely in English, but in any 
 language. I do not know how to praise adequately 
 the technical merit of this little narrative. It 
 possesses to the full that masculine buoyancy, that 
 power of sustaining an extremely spirited narrative 
 in a tone appropriate to the action, which is one of 
 Mr. Kipling's rare gifts. Its concentration, which 
 never descends into obscurity, its absolute novelty, 
 its direct and irresistible appeal to what is young 
 and daring and absurdly splendid, are unsurpassed. 
 To read it, at all events to admire and enjoy it, is 
 to recover for a moment a little of that dare-devil 
 quality that lurks somewhere in the softest and the 
 baldest of us. Only a very young man could have 
 written it, perhaps, but still more certainly only a 
 young man of genius. 
 
 A little less interesting, in a totally different way, 
 is The Daughter of the Regiment, with its extra- 
 ordinarily vivid account of the breaking-out of 
 cholera in a troop-train. Of The Madness of Or- 
 theris I have already spoken ; as a work of art 
 this again seems to me somewhat less remarkable, 
 because carried out with less completeness. But 
 it would be hard to find a parallel, of its own class, 
 
Mr. Kipling's Short Stories 271 
 
 to The Rout of the White Hussars, with its study of 
 the effects of what is believed to be supernatural 
 on a gathering of young fellows who are absolutely 
 without fear of any phenomenon of which they 
 comprehend the nature. In a very late story, The 
 Courting of Dinah Shadd, Mr. Kipling has shown 
 that he is able to deal with the humours and matri- 
 monial amours of Indian barrack-life just as rapidly, 
 fully, and spiritedly as with the more serious epi- 
 sodes of a soldier's career. The scene between 
 Judy Sheehy and Dinah, as told by Mulvaney in 
 that story, is pure comedy, without a touch of farce. 
 On the whole, however, the impression left by 
 Mr. Kipling's military stories is one of melancholy. 
 Tommy Atkins, whom the author knows so well 
 and S3mipathises, with so truly is a solitary being in 
 India. In all these tales I am conscious of the 
 barracks as of an island in a desolate ocean of sand. 
 All around is the infinite waste of India, obscure, 
 monotonous, immense, inhabited by black men and 
 pariah dogs, Pathans and green parrots, kites and 
 crocodiles, and long solitudes of high grass. The 
 island in this sea is a little collection of young men, 
 sent out from the remoteness of England to serve 
 " the Widder," and to help to preserve for her the 
 rich and barbarous empire of the East. This 
 
272 Questions at Issue 
 
 microcosm of the barracks has its own laws, its 
 own morals, its own range of emotional sentiment. 
 What these are the new writer has not told us (for 
 that would be a long story), but shown us that he 
 himself has divined. He has held the door open 
 for a moment, and has revealed to us a set of very 
 human creations. One thing, at least, the bio- 
 grapher of Mulvaney and Ortheris has no difficulty 
 in persuading us — namely, that " God in his wisdom 
 has made the heart of the British soldier, who is 
 very often an unlicked ruffian, as soft as the heart 
 of a little child, in order that he may believe in and 
 follow his officers into tight and nasty places." 
 
 Ill 
 
 The Anglo-Indians with whom Mr. Kipling deals 
 are of two kinds. I must confess that there is no 
 section of his work which appears to me so insigni- 
 ficant as that which deals with Indian "society." 
 The eight tales which are bound together as 
 The Story of the Gadsbys are doubtless very early 
 productions. I have been told, but I know not 
 whether on good authority, that they were published 
 in serial form before the author was twenty-one. 
 
Mr. Kipling's Short Stories 273 
 
 Judged as the observation of Anglo-Indian life by 
 so young a boy, they are, it is needless to say, 
 astonishingly clever. Some pages in them can 
 never, I suppose, come to seem unworthy of his 
 later fame. The conversation in The Tents of 
 Kedar, where Captain Gadsby breaks to Mrs. 
 Herriott that he is engaged to be married, and 
 absolutely darkens her world to her during " a Naini 
 Tal dinner for thirty-five," is of consummate adroit- 
 ness. What a " Naini Tal dinner " is I have not 
 the slightest conception, but it is evidently some- 
 thing very sumptuous and public, and if any practised 
 hand of the old social school could have contrived 
 the thrust and parry under the fire of seventy critical 
 eyes better than young Mr. Kipling has done, I 
 know not who that writer is. In quite another 
 way the pathos of the little bride's delirium in 
 The Valley of the Shadow is of a very high, almost 
 of the highest, order. 
 
 But, as a rule, Mr. Kipling's " society " Anglo- 
 Indians are not drawn better than those which 
 other Indian novelists have created for our 
 diversion. There is a sameness in the type of 
 devouring female, and though Mr. Kipling devises 
 several names for it, and would fain persuade us 
 that Mrs. Herriott, and Mrs. Reiver, and Mrs. 
 
 s 
 
274 Questions at Issue 
 
 Hauksbee possess subtle differences which distin- 
 guish them, yet I confess I am not persuaded. 
 They all — and the Venus Annodomini as well — 
 appear to me to be the same high-coloured, rather 
 ill-bred, not wholly spoiled professional coquette. 
 Mr. Kipling seems to be too impatient of what he 
 calls " the shiny toy-scum stuff people call civilisa- 
 tion " to paint these ladies very carefully. The 
 Phantom 'Rickshaw, in which a hideously selfish 
 man is made to tell the story of his own cruelty 
 and of his mechanical remorse, is indeed highly 
 original, but here it is the man, not the woman, 
 in whom we are interested. The proposal of 
 marriage in the dust-storm in Fake Dawn, a 
 theatrical, lurid scene, though scarcely natural, is 
 highly effective. The archery contest in Cupid's 
 Arrows needs only to be compared with a similar 
 scene in Daniel Deronda to show how much more 
 closely Mr. Kipling keeps his eye on detail than 
 George Eliot did. But these things are rare in 
 this class of his stories, and too often the Anglo- 
 Indian social episodes are choppy, unconvincing, 
 and not very refined. 
 
 All is changed when the central figure is a man. 
 Mr. Kipling's officials and civilians are admirably 
 vivid and of an amazing variety. If any one 
 
Mr. Kipling's Short Stories 275 
 
 wishes to know why this new author has been 
 received with joy and thankfulness by the Anglo- 
 Saxon world, it is really not necessary for him to 
 go further for a reason than to the moral tale of 
 The Conversion of Aurelian McGoggin. Let the 
 author of that tract speak for himself : 
 
 " Every man is entitled to his own religious 
 opinions ; but no man — least of all a junior — has a 
 right to thrust these down other men's throats. 
 The Government sends out weird civilians now and 
 again ; but McGoggin was the queerest exported 
 for a long time. He was clever — brilliantly clever 
 — but his cleverness worked the wrong way. 
 Instead of keeping to the study of the vernaculars, 
 he had read some books written by a man called 
 Comte, I think, and a man called Spencer, and a 
 Professor Clifford. [You will find these books in 
 the Library.] They deal with people's insides 
 from the point of view of men who have no 
 stomachs. There was no order against his read- 
 ing them, but his mamma should have smacked 
 
 him I do not say a word against this 
 
 creed. It was made up in town, where there is 
 Tiothing but machinery and asphalte and building — 
 
 all shut in by the fog But in this country 
 
 [India], where you really see humanity — raw. 
 
276 Questions at Issue 
 
 brown, naked humanity — with nothing between it 
 and the blazing sky, and only the used-up, over- 
 handled earth underfoot, the notion somehow dies 
 away, and most folk come back to simpler 
 theories." 
 
 Those who will not come back to simpler 
 theories are prigs, for whom the machine-made 
 notion is higher than experience. Now Mr. 
 Kipling, in his warm way, hates many things, but 
 he hates the prig for preference. Aurelian 
 McGoggin, better known as the Blastoderm, is a 
 prig of the over-educated type, and upon him falls 
 the awful calamity of sudden and complete nerve- 
 collapse. Lieutenant Golightly, in the story which 
 bears his name, is a prig who values himself for 
 spotless attire and clockwork precision of manner ; 
 he therefore is mauled and muddied up to his eyes, 
 and then arrested under painfully derogatory con- 
 ditions. In Lispefh we get the missionary prig, 
 who thinks that the Indian instincts can be effaced 
 by a veneer of Christianity. Mr. Kipling hates 
 " the sheltered life." The men he likes are those 
 who have been thrown out of their depth at an 
 early age, and taught to swim off a boat. The 
 very remarkable story of Thrown Away shows the 
 effect of preparing for India by a life " unspotted 
 
Mr. Kipling's Short Stories 277 
 
 from the world " in England ; it is as hopelessly 
 tragic as any in Mr. Kipling's somewhat grim 
 repertory. 
 
 Against the regime of the prig Mr. Kipling sets 
 the regime of Strickland. Over and over again he 
 introduces this mysterious figure, always with a 
 phrase of extreme approval. Strickland is in the 
 police, and his power consists in his determination 
 to know the East as the natives know it. He can 
 pass through the whole of Upper India, dressed as 
 a fakir, without attracting the least attention. 
 Sometimes, as in Beyond the Pale, he may know 
 too much. But this is an exception, and personal 
 to himself. Mr. Kipling's conviction is that this is 
 the sort of man to pervade India for us, and that 
 one Strickland is worth a thousand self-conceited 
 civilians. But even below the Indian prig, because 
 he has at least known India, is the final object of 
 Mr. Kipling's loathing, "Pagett, M.P.," the radical 
 English politician who comes out for four months 
 to set everybody right. His chastisement is 
 always severe and often comic. But in one very 
 valuable paper, which Mr. Kipling must not be 
 permitted to leave unreprinted, The Enlighten- 
 ment of Pagett, M.P., he has dealt elaborately 
 and quite seriously with this noxious creature. 
 
278 Questions at Issue 
 
 Whether Mr. Kipling is right or wrong, far be it 
 from me in my ignorance to pretend to know. 
 But his way of putting these things is persuasive. 
 
 Since Mr. Kipling has come back from India 
 he has written about society " of sorts " in Eng- 
 land. Is there not perhaps in him something of 
 Pagett, M.P., turned inside out ? As a delineator 
 of English life, at all events, he is not yet 
 thoroughly master of his craft. Everything he 
 writes has vigour and picturesqueness. But The 
 Lamentable Comedy of Willow Wood is the sort of 
 thing that any extremely brilliant Burman, whose 
 English, if slightly odd, was nevertheless unim- 
 peachable, might write of English ladies and 
 gentlemen, having never been in England. The 
 Record of Badalia Herodsfoot was in every way 
 better, more truly observed, more credible, more 
 artistic, but yet a little too cynical and brutal to 
 come straight from life. And last of all there is 
 the novel of The Light that Failed, with its much- 
 discussed two endings, its oases of admirable detail 
 in a desert of the undesirable, with its extremely 
 disagreeable woman, and its far more brutal and 
 detestable man, presented to us, the precious pair 
 of them, as typical specimens of English society. 
 I confess thati it is The Light that Failed that has 
 
Mr. Kipling's Short Stories 279 
 
 wakened me to the fact that there are limits to this 
 dazzling new talent, the iclat of which had almost 
 lifted us off our critical feet. 
 
 IV 
 
 The conception of Strickland would be very 
 tantalising and incomplete- if we were not permitted 
 to profit from his wisdom and experience. But, 
 happily, Mr. Kipling is perfectly willing to take us 
 below the surface, and to show us glimpses of the 
 secret life of India. In so doing he puts forth his 
 powers to their fullest extent, and I think it cannot 
 be doubted that the tales which deal with native 
 manners are not merely the most curious arid 
 interesting which Mr. Kipling has written, but are 
 also the most fortunately constructed. Every one 
 who has thought over this writer's mode of execution 
 will have been struck with the skill with which his 
 best work is restrained within certain limits. When 
 inspiration flags with him, indeed, his stories may 
 grow too long, or fail, as if from languor, before 
 they reach their culmination. But his best short 
 stories — and among his best we include the majority 
 of his native Indian tales — are cast at once, as if 
 
28o Questions at Issue 
 
 in a mould ; nothing can be detached from them 
 without injury. In this consists his great technical 
 advantage over almost all his English rivals ; we 
 must look to France or to America for stories 
 fashioned in this way. In several of his tales of 
 Indian manners this skill reaches its highest because 
 most complicated expression. It may be compara- 
 tively easy to hold within artistic bonds a gentle 
 episode of European amorosity. To deal, in the 
 same form, but with infinitely greater audacity, 
 with the muffled passions and mysterious instincts 
 of India, to slur over nothing, to emphasise nothing, 
 to give in some twenty pages the very spicy odour 
 of the East, this is marvellous. 
 
 Not less than this Mr. Kipling has done in a 
 little group of stories which I cannot but hold to be 
 the culminating point of his genius so far. If the 
 remainder of his writings were swept away, posterity 
 would be able to reconstruct its Rudyard Kipling 
 from Without Benefit of Clergy, The Man who Would 
 be King, The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes, 
 and Beyond the Pale. More than that, if all other 
 record of Indian habits had been destroyed, much 
 might be conjectured from these of the pathos, the 
 splendour, the cruelty, and the mystery of India. 
 From The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows more is to 
 
Mr. Kipling's Short Stories 281 
 
 be gleaned of the real action of opium-smoking, and 
 the causes of that indulgence, than from many 
 sapient debates in the British House of Commons. 
 We come very close to the confines of the moon- 
 light-coloured world of magic in The Bisara of 
 Pooree. For pure horror and for the hopeless 
 impenetrability of the native conscience there is 
 The Recrudescence of Imray. In a revel of colour 
 and shadow, at the close of the audacious and 
 Lucianic story of The Incarnation of Krishna 
 Mulvaney, we peep for a moment into the mystery 
 of " a big queen's praying at Benares." 
 
 Admirable, too, are the stories which deal with 
 the results of attempts made to melt the Asiatic 
 and the European into one. The red-headed Irish- 
 Thibetan who makes the king's life a burden to 
 him in the fantastic story of Namgay Doola repre- 
 sents one extremity of this chain of grotesque 
 Eurasians ; Michele D'Cruze, the wretched little 
 black police inspector, with a drop of white blood 
 in his body, who wakes up to energetic action at 
 one supreme moment of his life, is at the other. 
 The relapse of the converted Indian is a favourite 
 theme with this cynical observer of human nature. 
 It is depicted in The Judgment of Dungara, with a 
 rattling humour worthy of Lever, where the whole 
 
282 Questions at Issue 
 
 mission, clad in white garments woven of the 
 scorpion nettle, go mad with fire and plunge into 
 the river, while the trumpet of the god bellows 
 triumphantly from the hills. In Lispeth we have a 
 study — much less skilfully worked out, however — 
 of the Indian woman carefully Christianised from 
 childhood reverting at once to heathenism when 
 her passions reach maturity. 
 
 The lover of good literature, however, is likely 
 to come back to the four stories which we named 
 first in this section. They are the very flower of 
 Mr. Kipling's work up to the present moment, and 
 on these we base our highest expectations for his 
 future. Without Benefit of Clergy is a study of the 
 Indian woman as wife and mother, uncdvenanted 
 wife of the English civilian and mother of his son. 
 The tremulous passion of Ameera, her hopes, her 
 fears, and her agonies of disappointment, combine 
 to form by far the most tender page which Mr. 
 Kiphng has written. For pure beauty the scene 
 where Holden, Ameera, and the baby count the 
 stars on the housetop for Tola's horoscope is so 
 characteristic that, although it is too long to quote 
 in full, its opening paragraph must here be given as a 
 specimen of Mr. Kipling's style in this class of work: 
 
 " Ameera climbed the narrow staircase that led to 
 
Mr. Kipling's Short Stories 283 
 
 the flat roof. The child, placid and unwinking, 
 lay in the hollow of her right arm, gorgeous in 
 silver-fringed muslin, with a small skull-cap on his 
 head. Ameera wore all that she valued most. 
 The diamond nose-stud that takes the place of the 
 Western patch in drawing attention to the curve 
 of the nostril, the gold ornament in the centre of 
 the forehead studded with tallow-drop emeralds and 
 flawed rubies, the heavy circlet of beaten gold that 
 was fastened round her neck by the softness of the 
 pure metal, and the clinking curb-patterned silver 
 anklets hanging low over the rosy ankle-bone. 
 She was dressed in jade-green muslin, as befitted a 
 daughter of the Faith, and from shoulder to elbow 
 and elbow to wrist ran bracelets of silver tied with 
 floss silk ; frail glass bangles slipped over the 
 wrist in proof of the slenderness of the hand, and 
 certain heavy gold bracelets that had no part in her 
 country's ornaments, but, since they were Holden's 
 gift, and fastened with a cunning European snap, 
 delighted her immensely. 
 
 " They sat down by the low white parapet of the 
 roof, overlooking the city and its lights." 
 
 What tragedy was in store for the gentle 
 astrologer, or in what darkness of waters the story 
 ends, it is needless to repeat here. 
 
284 Questions at Issue 
 
 In The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes a civil 
 engineer stumbles by chance on a ghastly city of 
 the dead who do not die, trapped into it, down 
 walls of shifting sand, on the same principle as the 
 ant-Hon secures its prey, the parallel being so close 
 that one half suspects Mr. Kipling of having 
 invented a human analogy to the myrmeleon. The 
 abominable settlement of living dead men is so 
 vividly described, and the wonders of it are so 
 calmly, and, as it were, so temperately discussed, 
 that no one who possesses the happy gift of 
 beheving can fail to be persuaded of the truth 
 of the tale. The character of Gunga Dass, a 
 Deccanee Brahmin whom Jukes finds in this 
 reeking village, and who, reduced to the bare 
 elements of life, preserves a little, though exceed- 
 ingly little, of his old traditional obsequiousness, is 
 an admirable study. But all such considerations 
 are lost, as we read the story first, in the over- 
 whelming and Poe-like horror of the situation and 
 the extreme novelty of the conception. 
 
 A still higher place, however, I am inclined to 
 claim for the daring invention of The Man who 
 would be King. This is a longer story than is 
 usual with Mr. Kipling, and it depends for its 
 effect, not upon any epigrammatic surprise or 
 
Mr. Kipling's Short Stories 285 
 
 extravagant denouement of the intrigue, but on 
 an imaginative effort brilliantly sustained through a 
 detailed succession of events. Two ignorant and 
 disreputable Englishmen, exiles from social life, 
 determine to have done with the sordid struggle, 
 and to close with a try for nothing less than 
 empire. They are seen by the journalist who 
 narrates the story to disappear northward from the 
 Kumharsan Serai disguised as a mad priest and 
 his servant starting to sell whirligigs to the Ameer 
 of Kabul. Two years later there stumbles into the 
 newspaper ofSce a human creature bent into a 
 circle, and moving his feet one over the other like 
 a bear. This is the surviving adventurer, who, 
 half dead and half dazed, is roused by doses of 
 raw whisky into a condition which permits him to 
 unravel the squalid and splendid chronicle of 
 adventures beyond the utmost rim of mountains, 
 adventures on the veritable throne of Kafiristan. 
 The tale is recounted with great skill as from the 
 lips of a dying king. At first, to give the needful 
 impression of his faint, bewildered state, he mixes 
 up his narrative, whimpers, forgets, and repeats 
 his phrases ; but by the time the curiosity of the 
 reader is fully arrested, the tale has become limpid 
 and straightforward enough. When it has to be 
 
286 Questions at Issue 
 
 drawn to a close, the symptoms of aphasia and 
 and brain-lesion are repeated. This story is 
 conceived and conducted in the finest spirit of an 
 artist. It is strange to the verge of being 
 incredible, but it never outrages possibility, and 
 the severe moderation of the author preserves our 
 credence throughout. 
 
 It is in these Indian stories that Mr. Kipling 
 displays more than anywhere else the accuracy 
 of his eye and the retentiveness of his memory. 
 No detail escapes him, and, without seeming to 
 emphasise the fact, he is always giving an exact 
 feature where those who are in possession of 
 fewers facts or who see less vividly are satisfied 
 with a shrewd generality. 
 
 In Mr. Kipling's first volume there was one 
 story which struck quite a diflFerent note from all 
 the others, aud gave promise of a new delineator 
 of children. Tods' Amendment, which is a 
 curiously constructed piece of work, is in itseli 
 a political allegory. It is to be noticed that 
 when he warms to his theme the author puts 
 
Mr. Kipling's Short Stories 287 
 
 aside the trifling fact that Tods is an infant of 
 six summers, and makes him give a clear 
 statement of collated native opinion worthy 
 of a barrister in ample practice. What led to 
 the story, one sees without difficulty, was the 
 wish to emphasise the fact that unless the Indian 
 Government humbles itself, and becomes like 
 Tods, it can never legislate with efficiency, 
 because it never can tell what all the jhampanis 
 and saises in the bazar really wish for. If this 
 were all, Mr. Kipling in creating Tods would have 
 shown no more real acquaintance with children 
 than other political allegorists have shown with 
 sylphs or Chinese philosophers. But Mr. Kipling 
 is always an artist, and in order to make a setting 
 for his child-professor of jurisprudence, he in- 
 vented a really convincing and delightful world 
 of conquering infancy. Tods, who lives up at 
 Simla with Tods' mamma, and knows everybody, 
 is " an utterly fearless young pagan," who pursues 
 his favourite kid even into the sacred presence 
 of the Supreme Legislative Council, and is on 
 terms of equally well-bred familiarity with the 
 Viceroy and with Futteh Khan, the villainous 
 loafer khit from Mussoorie. 
 
 To prove that Tods' Amendment was not an 
 
288 Questions at Issue 
 
 accident, and also, perhaps, to show that he 
 could write about children purely and simply, 
 without any after-thought of allegory, he brought 
 out, as the sixth instalment of the Indian Railway 
 Library, a little volume entirely devoted to child- 
 life. Of the four stories contained in this book 
 one is among the finest productions of its author, 
 while two others are very good indeed. There 
 are also, of course, the children in The Light that 
 Failed, although they are too closely copied from 
 the author's previous creations in Baa, Baa, Black 
 Sheep ; and in other writings of his, children take 
 a position sufficiently prominent to justify us in 
 considering this as one of the main divisions of 
 his work. 
 
 In his preface to Wee Willie Winkie, Mr. 
 Kipling has sketched for us the attitude which 
 he adopts towards babies. " Only women," he 
 says, but we may doubt if he means it, " under- 
 stand children thoroughly ; but if a mere man 
 keeps very quiet, and humbles himself properly, 
 and refrains from talking down to his superiors, 
 the children will sometimes be good to him, and 
 let him see what they think about the world," 
 This is a curious form of expression, and suggests 
 the naturalist more than the lover of children. 
 
Mr, Kipling's Short Stories 289 
 
 So might we conceive a successful zoologist 
 affirming that the way to note the habits of wild 
 animals and birds is by keeping very quiet, and 
 lying low in the grass, and refraining from making 
 sudden noises. This is, indeed, the note by 
 which we may distinguish Mr. Kipling from such 
 true lovers of childhood as Mrs. Ewing. He 
 has no very strong emotion in the matter, but 
 he patiently and carefully collects data, partly out 
 of his own faithful and capacious personal memory, 
 partly out of what he still observes. 
 
 The Tods type he would probably insist that 
 he has observed. A finer and more highly deve- 
 loped specimen of it is given in Wee Willie 
 Winkie, the hero of which is a noble infant of 
 overpowering vitality, who has to be put under 
 military discipline to keep him in any sort of 
 domestic order, and who, while suffering under 
 two days' confinement to barracks (the house and 
 verandah), saves the life of a headstrong girl. The 
 way in which Wee WiUie Winkie — who is of Mr. 
 Kipling's favourite age, dix — does this is at once 
 >yhoHy delightful and a terrible strain to credence. 
 The baby sees Miss Allardyce cross the river, 
 which he has always been forbidden to do, because 
 the river is the frontier, and beyond it are bad 
 
 T 
 
290 Questions at Issue 
 
 men, goblins, Afghans, and the like. He feels 
 that she is in danger, he breaks mutinously out 
 of barracks on his pony and follows her, and 
 when she has an accident, and is surrounded by 
 twenty hill-men, he saves her by his spirit and by 
 his complicated display of resource. To criticise 
 this story, which is told with infinite zest and 
 picturesqueness, seems merely priggish. Yet it 
 is contrary to Mr. Kipling's whole intellectual 
 attitude to suppose him capable of writing what 
 he knows to be supernatural romance. We have 
 therefore to suppose that in India infants "of 
 the dominant race" are so highly developed at 
 six, physically and intellectually, as to be able 
 to ride hard, alone, across a difficult river, and 
 up pathless hilly country, to contrive a plan for 
 succouring a hapless lady, and to hold a little 
 regiment of savages at bay by mere force of eye. 
 If Wee Willie Winkie had been twelve instead 
 of six, the feat would have been just possible; 
 But then the romantic contrast between the baby 
 and his virile deeds would not have been nearly 
 so piquant. In all this Mr. Kipling, led away 
 by sentiment and a false ideal, is not quite the 
 honest craftsman that he should be. 
 
 But when, instead of romancing and creating, he 
 
Mr. Kipling's Short Stories 291 
 
 is content to observe children, he is excellent in 
 this as in other branches of careful natural history. 
 But the children he obsei"ves, are, or we much mis- 
 judge him, himself. Baa, Baa, Black Sheep is a 
 strange compound of work at first and at second 
 hand. Aunty Rosa (delightfully known, without a 
 suspicion of supposed relationship, as "Antirosa"), 
 the Mrs. Squeers of the Rocklington lodgings, is a 
 sub-Dickensian creature, tricked out with a few 
 touches of reality, but mainly a survival of early 
 literary hatreds. The boy Harry and the soft little 
 sister of Punch are rather shadowy. But Punch 
 lives with an intense vitality, and here, without any 
 indiscretion, we may be sure that Mr. Kipling has 
 looked inside his own heart and drawn from 
 memory. Nothing in the autobiographies of their 
 childhood by Tolstoi and Pierre Loti, nothing in 
 Mr. R. L. Stevenson's Child's Garden of Verses, is 
 more valuable as a record of the development of 
 childhood than the account of how Punch learned 
 to read, moved by curiosity to know what the 
 "falchion" was with which the German man split 
 the GrifHn open. Very nice, also, is the reference 
 to the mysterious rune, called " Sonny, my Soul," 
 with which mamma used to sing Punch to sleep. 
 By far the most powerful and ingenious story, 
 
292 Questions at Issue 
 
 however, which Mr. Kipling has yet dedicated to a 
 study of childhood is The Drums of the Fore and 
 Afi. " The Fore and Aft " is a nickname given in 
 derision to a crack regiment, whose real title is 
 "The Fore and Fit," in memory of a sudden 
 calamity which befell them on a certain day in an 
 Afghan' pass, when, if it had not been for two little 
 blackguard drummer-boys, they would have been 
 wofullyand contemptibly , cut to pieces, as they 
 were routed by a dashing troop of Ghazis. The 
 two little heroes, who only conquer to die, are 
 called Jakin and Lew, stunted children of fourteen, 
 " gutter-birds " who drink and smoke and "do 
 everything but lie," and are the disgrace of the 
 regiment. In their little souls, however, there'burns 
 what Mr. Pater would call a " hard, gem-like flame " 
 of patriotism, and they are willing to undergo 
 any privation, if only they may wipe away the 
 stigma of being " bloomin' non-combatants." 
 
 In the intervals of showing us how that stain 
 was completely removed, Mr. Kipling gives us not 
 merely one of the most thrilling and effective battles 
 in fiction, but a singularly delicate- portrait of two 
 grubby little souls 'turned white and splendid by an 
 element of native greatness. It would be difficult 
 to point to a page of modern English more poignant 
 
Mr. Kipling's Short Stories 293 
 
 than that which describes how " the only acting- 
 drummers who were took along," and— left behind, 
 moved forward across the pass alone to the enemy's 
 ffont, and sounded on drum and fife the return of 
 the regiment to duty. But perhaps the most re- 
 markable feature of the whole story is that a record 
 of shocking British retreat and failure is so treated 
 as to flatter in its tenderest susceptibilities the pride 
 of British patriotism. 
 
 i8gi. 
 
AN ELECTION AT THE ENGLISH 
 ACADEMY 
 
An Election at the English 
 Academy 
 
 Athen^um CttJB, Pall Mall, S.W. 
 
 To Robert Louis Stevenson, R.E,A., Samoa 
 
 Dear Mr. Stevenson, — Last night I think that 
 even you must have regretted being a beach •> 
 comber. Even the society of your friend Ori-a- 
 Ori and the delights of kava and bread-fruit can 
 hardly make up to you for what you lost in 
 Piccadilly. It was the first occasion, as you are 
 aware, upon which we have been called upon to 
 fill up a vacancy in the Forty. You know, long 
 before this letter reaches you, that we have 
 already lost one of our original members. Poor 
 Kinglake ! I thought at the time that it was a 
 barren honour, but it was one which his fame 
 imperatively demanded. I can't say I knew him : 
 a single introduction, a few gracious words in a low 
 
298 Questions at Issue 
 
 voice, a grave and sad presence — that is all I re- 
 tain of him personally. I shall know more when our 
 new Academician has to deliver the eulogium on his 
 predecessor. What an intellectual treat it will be! 
 We had a splendid gathering. Do you recollect 
 that when the papers discussed us, before our 
 foundation, one thing they said was that there 
 never would be a decent attendance ? I must 
 confess our business meetings have been rather 
 sparsely filled up. Besant is invariably there, 
 Lecky generally, a few others. There has always 
 been a quorum — not much more. But between you 
 and me and those other palms — the feathery palms 
 of your cabin — there has not been much business 
 to transact ; not much more than might have been 
 left to assiduous Mr. Robinson, our paid secretary. 
 But last night the clan was all but complete. 
 There were thirty-seven of us, nobody missing but 
 Mr. Ruskin and yourself. Ruskin, by the way, 
 wrote a letter to be read at the meeting, and then 
 sent on to the Pall Mall Gazette — so diverting ! I 
 must cut it out and enclose it. But his style, if 
 this is to be taken as an example, is not quite what 
 
 * My dear Sir,— What in the Devil's name should I do at 
 your assemblage of notorieties ? I neither care nor wish to care 
 
Election at the English Academy 299 
 
 Well^ I am still so excited that I hardly know 
 where to begin. To me, a real country bumpkin, 
 the whole thing was such an occasion ! Such a 
 social occasion ! I must begin from the beginning. 
 I came all the way up from Luxilian, my green 
 uniform, with the golden palm-shoots embroidered 
 on it, safely packed in my portmanteau under my 
 dress-clothes. To my great annoyance the chil- 
 dren had been wearing it in Christmas charades. 
 My dear wife, ay me, has so little firmness of 
 character. By-the-by, I hope you wear yours on 
 official occasions in Samoa ? The whole costume, 
 I should fancy, must be quite in a Polynesian taste. 
 
 whom you elect. The only Gardiner I ever heard of was Henry s 
 Bloody Bishop. If " Kiss me Hardy" came before us, it would 
 be worth while for the only true Tory left in England to vote for 
 him; but he has been with God this good half century. My 
 £■100 a year as Academician —recoverable, they tell me, in case of 
 lapsed payment, from Her Majesty herself — I spend in perfect- 
 ing my collection of the palates of molluscs, who keep their 
 inward economy as clean as the deck of a ship of the line with 
 stratagems beautiful and manifold exceedingly. Few of your 
 Academicians show an apparatus half so handsome when they 
 open their mouths. How unlike am I, by the way, in my 
 retirement, from Bismarck across the waters, who squeaks like a 
 puppy-dog on his road to the final parliamentary sausage-making 
 machine of these poor times. Would it not be well for your 
 English Academy, instead of these election follies, to bestir itself 
 with a copy of The Crown of Wild Olive for his heart's betterment ? 
 But keep your Lydian modes; I hold my Dorian. — Ever faith- 
 fully yours, John Ruskin. 
 
300 Questions at Issue 
 
 I was more " up " in the candidates and their 
 characteristics than you would expect. Ah ! I 
 know you think me rather a Philistine— ^but can an 
 Academician be a Philistine ? That is a question 
 that might be started when next the big gooseberry 
 season begins. I was " up " in the candidates 
 because, as good luck would have it, Sala had 
 been spending a week with me in the country. De- 
 lightful companion, but scarcely fitted for rural 
 pleasures. He mentioned such a great number of 
 eminent literary persons whom I had never heard 
 of — mostly rather occasional writers, I gathered. 
 He has an extraordinarily wide circle, I find : it 
 makes me feel quite the Country Mouse. He did 
 not seem to know much about Gardiner, it is truei 
 but then he could tell me all that Hardy had 
 written— or pretty nearly all ; and, of course, as 
 you know, Gardiner is my own hobby. 
 
 The moment I got to Paddington I foolishly 
 began looking hither and thither for fellow- 
 " immortals." Rather absurd, but not so absurd 
 as you might suppose, for there, daintily stepping 
 out of a first-class carriage, whom should I see but 
 Max Muller. I scarcely know him, and should not 
 have ventured to address him, but he called out : 
 "Ah! my dear friend, we come, I suspect, on the 
 
Election at the English Academy 301 
 
 same interesting, the same patriotic errand ! " I 
 had felt a few qualms of conscience about my own 
 excitement in the election; we are so quiet at 
 Luxilian that we can scarcely measure the relative 
 importance of events. But Max Miiller completely 
 reassured me. It was delightful to me to see .how 
 seriously he regarded the events " Europe," he 
 said, " is not inattentive to such a voice as the 
 unanimity of the English Academy may — may 
 wield." I could not help smiling at the last word, 
 and reflecting how carelessly the most careful of 
 us professional writers expresses himself in 
 conversation. But his enthusiasm was very 
 beautiful, and I found myself more elevated than 
 ever. "It is permitted to us," he went on, " t6 
 whisper among ourselves what the world must not 
 hear — the unthinking world — -that the social status 
 of English Academician adds not a little dignity t6 
 literature. One hopes that, whoever may be 
 
 added to our number to-night, the social eh ? " 
 
 I had formulated just the same fpeling myself. 
 '/ Only in so far," he went . on,- " as is strictly 
 consistent with the interests of literature and 
 scholarship — of course ? Good-bye !" and he left 
 me with an impression that he wanted to vote for 
 both candidates. 
 
302 Questions at Issue 
 
 There was a little shopping I had to do in 
 Regent Street, after I had left my costume at the 
 Academy, and I called in at Mudie's for a moment 
 on my way to the British Museum. To give you 
 an idea of the mental disturbance I was suffering 
 from, I asked the very polite young man at the 
 counter for my own Mayors of Woodshire — ^you 
 know, my seventeenth-century book — instead of 
 The Mayor of Casterbridge, which my wife wanted 
 to read. I did not realise my mistake till I saw 
 the imprint of the Clarendon Press. At last I 
 got to the manuscript room, made my references, 
 and found that our early dinner hour was ap- 
 proaching. I walked westward down Oxford 
 Street, enjoying the animation and colour of the 
 lovely evening, and then, suddenly, realising what 
 the hour was, turned and took a hansom to the 
 Athenaeum. 
 
 Who should meet me in the vestibule but 
 Seeley ? Less and less often do I find my way 
 to Cambridge, and I hesitated about addressing 
 him, although I used to know him so well. He 
 was buried in a reverie, and slowly moving to the 
 steps. I suppose I involuntarily slackened my 
 speed also, and he looked up. He was most 
 cordial, and almost immediately began to talk 
 
Election at the English Academy 303 
 
 to me about those notes on the commercial 
 relations of the Woodshire ports with Poland 
 which I printed in the English Historical two 
 (or perhaps three) years ago. I daresay you 
 never heard of them. I promised to send him 
 some transcripts I have since made of the har- 
 bour laws of Luxilian itself — most important. I 
 longed to ask Seeley whether we might be sure 
 of his support for Gardiner, but I hardly liked 
 to do so, he seemed so much more absorbed in 
 the past. I took for granted it was all right, 
 and when we parted, as he left the Club, he said, 
 " We meet later on this evening, I suppose ? " 
 and that was his only reference to the election, 
 
 I am hardly at home yet at the Athenaeum, 
 and I was therefore delighted to put myself under 
 Leckys wing. I soon saw that quite a muster 
 of Academicians was preparing to dine, for when 
 we entered the Coffee Room we found Mr. Walter 
 Besant already seated, and before we could 
 join him Mr. Black and Mr. Herbert Spencer 
 came in together and approached us. We had 
 two small tables placed together, and just as we 
 were sitting down, Lord Lytton, who was so 
 extremely kind to me in Paris last autumn when 
 I left my umbrella in the Eiffel Tower, made his 
 
3°4 Questions at Issue 
 
 appearance. We all seemed studiously to make 
 no reference, at first, to the great event of the 
 day, while Mr. Spencer diverted us with several 
 anecdotes which he had just brought from a 
 family in the country — not at all, of course, of a 
 puerile description, but throwing a singular light 
 upon the development of infant mind. After 
 this the conversation flagged a little. I suppose 
 we were all thinking of the same thing. I was 
 quite relieved when a remark of Lecky's introduced 
 the general topic. 
 
 Our discussion began by Lord Lytton's giving 
 us some very interesting ' particulars of the 
 election of Pierre. Loti (M. Viaud) into the French 
 Academy last week, and of the social impression 
 produced by these contests. I had no idea of 
 the pushing, the intriguing, the unworthy anxiety 
 which are shown by some people in Paris who, 
 wish to be of the Forty. Lord Lytton says that 
 there is a story by M. Daudet which, although 
 it is petulant and exaggerated, gives a very 
 graphic picture of the seamy side of the French 
 Academy. I must read this novel, for I feel 
 that we, as a new body destined to wield a vast 
 influence in this country, ought to be forewarned. 
 I ventured to say that I did not think that 
 
Election at the English. Academy 305 
 
 English people, with our honest and wholesome 
 traditions, and the blessings of a Protestant 
 religion, would be in any danger of falling into 
 these excesses. Nobody responded to this ; I 
 am afraid the London writers are dreadfully 
 cynical, and Black remarked that we six, at all 
 events, were poachers turned inside out. They 
 laughed at this, and I was quite glad when the 
 subject was changed. 
 
 Lord Lytton asked Mr. Besant whether he was, 
 still as eager as ever about his Club of Authors, 
 or whether he considered that the English. 
 Academy covered the ground. He replied that 
 he had wholly relinquished that project for the 
 present. His only wish had been to advocate 
 union among authors, on a basis of mutual esteem 
 and encouragement, and he thought that the 
 Academy would be quite enough to do that, if 
 it secured for itself the building which is now 
 being talked about, as a central point for con- 
 sultation on all matters connected with the literary 
 life and profession. But this notion did not 
 seem to command itself to Mr. Spencer, who said 
 that it seemed to him that the Forty were pre- 
 cisely those whom success or the indulgence of 
 the public had raised above the need or the desire 
 
3o6 Questions at Issue 
 
 of consultation. " I am very glad to have the 
 pleasure of playing a game of billiards with you, 
 Mr. Besant, but why should I consult you about 
 my writings ? I conceive that the duty of our 
 Academy is solely to insist on a public recog- 
 nition of the dignity of literature, and that if we 
 go a step beyond that aim, we prepare nothing 
 but snares for our feet." 
 
 " Whom, then, do you propose," continued Lecky 
 to Besant, " to summon to your consultations ? " 
 
 " Surely," was the reply, "any respectable 
 authors." 
 
 "Outsiders, then," said Mr. Spencer, "a few 
 possible and a multitude of impossible candidates?" 
 
 " Female writers as well as male ? " asked Black; 
 " are we to have the literary Daphne at our con- 
 versaziones — 
 
 With legs toss'd high on her sophee she sits, 
 Vouchsafing audience to contending wits ? 
 
 How do you like that prospect, Lecky ? " 
 
 " But poorly, I must confess. We have tiresome 
 institutions enough in London without adding to 
 them a sort of Ptolemaic Mouseion, for us to strut 
 about on the steps of, in our palm-costume, attended 
 by dialectical ladies and troops of intriguing pupils. 
 
Election at the English Academy 307 
 
 Though that, I am sure," he added courteously, 
 " is the last thing our friend JBesant desires, yet I 
 conceive if would tend to be the result of such 
 consultation." 
 
 " What then," said the novelist, " is to be the 
 practical service of the English Academy to life and 
 literature ? " 
 
 At this we all put on a grave and yet animated 
 expression, for certainly, to each of us, this was a 
 very important consideration. 
 
 " Putting on one side," began Mr. Spencer, " the 
 social advantage, the unquestionable dignity and 
 importance given to individual literary accomplish- 
 ment at a time when the purer parts of writing — 
 I mean no disrespect to you novelists — are greatly 
 neglected in the general hurly-burly ; putting on 
 one side this function of the English Academy, 
 there remains, of course " 
 
 But, at this precise moment, when I was literally 
 hanging on the lips of our eminent philosopher, the 
 door opened with a considerable noise of gaiety, 
 and Mr. Arthur Balfour entered, in company with a 
 gentleman, who was introduced to me presently as 
 Mr. Andrew Lang. 
 
 " Two more Academicians, and this time neither 
 novelists nor philosophers," said Black. 
 
3o8 Questions at Issue 
 
 They sat down close to us, so that the conversa- 
 tion was still general. 
 
 " We were discussing the Academy," said Lord 
 Lytton. " And we," replied Mr. Balfour, " were 
 comparing notes about rackets. Lang tells me he 
 has found a complete description of the game in 
 one of the Icelandic sagas." 
 
 " Played with a shuttlecock," said Mr. Lang, 
 throwing himself back with a gesture of intense 
 fatigue. " By the way, when we get to B in our 
 Academy dictionary, I will write the article battledore. 
 It is Provenpal, I believe ; but one must look up 
 Skeat." 
 
 " We shall be very old, I am afraid, before we 
 reach letter B," I remarked, "shall we not ? " 
 
 " Oh ! no," said Mr. Lang, " we shall fire away 
 like fun. All we have to do is to crib our definitions 
 out of Murray." 
 
 "I hardly think that," said Mr. Besant ; "we 
 seem to have precious little to occupy ourselves 
 with, but our dictionary at least you must leave 
 us." 
 
 We talked this over a little, and the general 
 opinion seemed to be that it would turn out to be 
 more an alphabetical series of monographs on the 
 history of our language than a dictionary in the 
 
Election at the English Academy 309 
 
 ordinary sense. And who was to have the courage 
 to start it, no one seemed able to guess. 
 
 A general conversation then began, which was of 
 not a little interest to me. The merits of our two 
 candidates were warmly, but temperately discussed. 
 Everybody seemed to feel that we ought to have 
 them both among us ; that our company would still 
 be incomplete if one was elected. Black suggested 
 that some public-spirited Academician should per- 
 form the Happy Despatch, so as to supply the 
 convenience of two vacancies. Lord Lytton re- 
 minded us that we were doing, on a small scale, 
 what the French Academy itself did for a few years, 
 — from the election of Guizot to that of Labiche — 
 namely, meeting in private to wrangle over the 
 merits of the candidates. We laughed, and set to 
 with greater zeal, I painting Gardiner in rosier 
 colours as Besant advanced the genius of Hardy. 
 
 While this was going on Sir Frederick Leighton 
 joined us, listening and leaning in one of his 
 Olympian attitudes. "I find," he said at last, 
 ^'that I am able to surprise you. You are not 
 aware that there is a third candidate." " A third 
 candidate ? " we all exclaimed. " Yes," he said ; 
 " before the hour was too far advanced yesterday, 
 our secretary received the due notice from his 
 
3i6 Questions at Issue 
 
 Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury." " Ah ! you 
 mean for your own Academy," some one said ; "as 
 chaplain in the room of the poor Archbishop of 
 York ? " " No," Sir Frederick answered, smiling, 
 **as a candidate for our Academy, the English 
 Academy." (And, indeed, I recollected that Leigh- 
 ton was one of our original members. I cannot 
 quite recall upon what literary grounds, but he is a 
 charming person, and a great social acquisition.) 
 
 There was a pause at this unexpected announce- 
 ment. " I am sorry," said Mr. Balfour at last, 
 " that the Archbishop, whom I greatly esteem and 
 admire, should have laid himself open to this rebuff. 
 We cannot admit him, and yet how extremely 
 painful to reject him. He has scarcely more claim 
 
 to belong to this Academy than I have, and " 
 
 At this we all, very sincerely, murmured our 
 expostulation, and Lord Lytton, leaning across; 
 said : " My dear Arthur, you are our Haussonville!" 
 " I am afraid I am more likely," he replied, " to be 
 your Audriffet-Pasquier. But here I am^ and it 
 was none of my seeking. I am, at least, determined 
 not to use what fortieth-power I have for the 
 election of any but the best purely literary candi- 
 dates." There was no direct reply to this, and 
 presently we all got up and separated to prepare for 
 
Election at the English Academy 311 
 
 the election, each of us manifestly disturbed by this 
 unexpected news. 
 
 As I was going out of the Club, I met Jebb, 
 whom I was very glad to greet. I used to know 
 him well, but I go so seldom to Cambridge in these 
 days that I can scarcely have seen him since he 
 took his doctor's degree in letters^ which must be 
 seven or eight years ago, when I came up to see 
 my own boy get his B.A. He was quite un- 
 changed, and as cordial as ever. The night was 
 so clear that we decided to walk, and, as we passed 
 into Pall Mall, the moonlight suddenly flooded the 
 street. 
 
 "How the nightingales must be singing at 
 Luxilian," I cried. 
 
 " And that nest of singing-birds with whom I 
 saw you dining," said Jebb, " how did they enter- 
 tain you ? " 
 
 " The best company in the world," I replied ; 
 
 " and yet ! Perhaps Academicians talk better 
 
 in twos and ones than en masse. I thought the 
 dinner might have been more brilliant, and it cer- 
 tainly might have been more instructive." 
 
 " They were afraid of one another, no doubt," 
 said the Professor; "they were afraid of you. 
 But how could it have been more instructive ? " 
 
312, Questions at Issue 
 
 " I was in hopes that I should hear from all 
 these accomplished men something definite about 
 the aims of the Academy, its functions in practical 
 life — what the use of it is to be, in fact." 
 
 " Had they no ideas to exchange on that subject ? 
 Did they not dwell on the social advantages it gives 
 to literature ? Why, my dear friend, between our- 
 selves, the election of a new member to an Academy 
 constituted as ours is, so restricted in numbers, so 
 carefully weeded of all questionable elements, is in 
 itself the highest distinction ever yet placed within 
 the reach of English literature. In fact, it is the 
 Garter." 
 
 "But," I pursued, "are we not in danger of 
 thinking too much of the social matter ? Are we 
 not framing a tradition which, if it had existed 
 for three hundred years, would have excluded 
 Defoe, Bunyan, Keats, and perhaps Shakespeare 
 himself? " 
 
 "Doubtless," Jebb answered, "but we are pro- 
 tected against such folly by the high standard of 
 our candidates. Hardy, Gardiner — who could be 
 more unexceptionable ? who could more eminently 
 combine the qualities we seek ? " 
 
 " You are not aware, then," I said, " that a third 
 candidate is before us ? " 
 
Election at the English Academy 313 
 
 " No ! Who ? " 
 
 " The Archbishop of Canterbury." 
 
 " Ah ! " he exclaimed, and we walked on together 
 in silence.' 
 
 At the door of the Academy Jebb left me, " for 
 a moment or two," he said, and proceeded up 
 Piccadilly. I ascended the steps of our new 
 building, and passed into the robing-room. Whom 
 should I meet there, putting on his green palm- 
 shoots, but Mr. Leslie Stephen. I was particularly 
 glad to have a moment's interview with him, for I 
 wanted to tell him of my great discovery, a fifth 
 Nicodemus, Abbot of Luxilian, in the twelfth cen- 
 tury. Extraordinary thing ! Of course, I imagined 
 that he would be delighted about it, although he 
 has not quite reached N yet, but I can't say that 
 he seemed exhilarated. " Five successive Nico- 
 demuses," I said, " what do you think of that ? " 
 He murmured, something about " all standing naked 
 in the open air." I fancy he is losing his interest 
 in the mediaeval biographies. However, before I 
 could impress upon him what a " find " it is, Mr. 
 Gladstone came in with the Bishop of Oxford, and 
 just then Sala called me out to repeat a story to me 
 which he had just heard at some club. I thought 
 it good at the time — something about " Manipur " 
 
314 Questions at Issue 
 
 and " many poor " — but I have forgotten how it 
 went. 
 
 Upstairs, in the great reception-room, the com- 
 pany was now rapidly gathering. You may imagine 
 how interesting I found it. Everywhere knots of 
 men were forming, less, 1 felt, to discuss the rela- 
 tive claims of Hardy and Gardiner than to deplore 
 the descent of the Archbishop into the lists. The 
 Duke of Argyll, who courteously recognised me, 
 deigned to refer to this topic of universal interest. 
 " I would have done much," he said, " to protect 
 him from the annoyance of this defeat. A prince 
 of the Anglican Church, whom we all respect 
 and admire ! I fear he will not have more than — 
 than — perhaps one vote. Alas ! alas ! " 
 
 Various little incidents caught my eye. Poor 
 Professor Freeman, bursting very hastily into the 
 room, bounced violently against Mr. Froude, who 
 happened to be standing near the door. I don't think 
 Mr. Freeman can have realised how roughly he 
 struck him, for he did not turn or stop, but rushed 
 across the room to the Bishop of Oxford, with whom 
 he was soon in deep consultation about Gardiner, 
 no doubt ; I did not disturb them. Lord Salisbury, 
 w^ith pendant arms, gently majestic, stood on the 
 hearthrrug talking to an elderly gentleman of pleas- 
 
Election at the English Academy 315 
 
 ing aspect, in spectacles. I heard some one say 
 something about " the other uncrowned king of 
 Brentford," but I did not understand the allusion. 
 I suppose the gentleman was some supporter of the 
 Ministry, but I did not catch his name. 
 
 Lecky was so kind as to present me to Professors 
 Huxley and Tyndall, neither of whom, I believe, 
 ought to have been out on so fresh a spring night ; 
 neither, I hope to hear this evening, is the worse 
 for such imprudence. A curious incident now 
 occurred, for as we were chatting, Huxley suddenly 
 said, in a low voice : " Gladstone has his eye upon 
 you, Tyndall." The professor flounced about at 
 this in a great agitation, and replied, so loudly that 
 I feared it would be generally heard — " He had 
 better not attempt to address me. I should utter 
 six withering syllables, and then turn iny back upon 
 
 him. Gladstone, indeed, the old ." But at 
 
 this moment, to my horror, Mr. Gladstone glided 
 across the floor with his most courtly and dignified 
 air, and held out his hand. "Ah! Professor 
 Tyndall, how long it seems since those beautiful 
 days on the Bel Alp." There was a little bridling 
 and hesitating, and then Tyndall took the proffered 
 hand. " I was wandering," said the Grand Old 
 Man, "^ without a guide, arid now I have foUnd one, 
 
3i6 Questions at Issue 
 
 the best possible. I am—; " " Oh ! " broke in 
 
 the professor, " I thought it would be so. I am 
 more delighted than " " Pardon me," inter- 
 rupted Mr. Gladstone with an exquisite deprecation, 
 " I am mainly interested at the moment in the 
 Sirens. I am lost, as I said, without a guide, and 
 I have found one. Your experiments with the 
 sirens on the North Forelands — 
 
 leiaai otra KoXkifiov, — " 
 
 and then, arm in arm, the amicable and animated 
 pair retired to a corner of the room. 
 
 Impossible to describe to you all the incidents 
 of this delightful gathering. In one corner the 
 veteran Dr. Martineau was seated, conversing 
 with Mr. Henry Irving. I was about to join them 
 when I was attracted by a sharp and elastic step 
 on the stairs, and saw that Lord Wolseley, enter- 
 ing the room, and glancing quickly round, walked 
 straight to a group at my left hand, which was 
 formed around Mr. George Meredith. 
 
 " For whom must I vote, Mr. Meredith ? " he' 
 said. " I place myself in your hands. Is it to 
 be the Archbishop of Canterbury ? " 
 
 " Nay," replied Mr. Meredith, smiling, " for the 
 prelate I shake you out a positive negative. The 
 
Election at the English Academy 317 
 
 customary guests at our academic feast — well ; poet, 
 historiai.->, essayist, say novelist or journalist, all 
 welcome on grounds of merit royally acknowledged 
 and distinguished. But this portent of a crozier, 
 nodding familiarly to us with its floriated tin summit, 
 a gilt commodity, definitely hostile to literature — 
 never in the world. How Europe will boom with 
 cachinnation when it learns that we have invented 
 the Academy of English Letters for the more excellent 
 glorification of mere material episcopacy, a radiant 
 excess of iridescence thrown by poetry upon prelacy, 
 heart's blood of books shed merely to stain more 
 rosily the infulce and vittce of a mitre. I shall be 
 tempted into some colloquial extravagance if I dwell 
 on this theme, however ; I must chisel on Blackmore 
 yonder for floral wit, and so will, with permission, 
 float out of your orbit by a bowshot." 
 
 Dr. Jowett now made his appearance, in com- 
 pany with Mr. Swinburne ; and they were followed 
 by a gentleman in a rough coat and picturesque 
 blue shirt, who attracted my attention by this odd 
 costume, and by his very fine head, with flowing 
 beard and hair. I was told it was the poet 
 Morris ; not at all how I had pictured the author 
 of The Epic of Hades. And finally, to our infinite 
 delight, Lord Tennyson himself came in, leaning 
 
31 8 Questions at Issue 
 
 on Jebb's arm, and we felt that our company was 
 complete. 
 
 We clustered at last into our inner council-room, 
 at the door of which the usher makes us sign our 
 names. What a page last night's will be for the 
 enjoyment of posterity ! We gradually settled 
 into our places ; Lord Tennyson in his presidential 
 chair, Lecky in his post of permanent secretary ; our 
 excellent paid secretary hurrying about with papers, 
 and explaining to us the routine. It seemed 
 more like a club than ever at that moment, our 
 charming Academy, with the best of all possible 
 society. As I sat waiting for business to begin, my 
 thoughts ran more and more upon the unfortunate 
 candidature of the Archbishop. I reflected on 
 what the Duke of Argyll had said, the wretched- 
 ness of the one vote. He should, at least, have 
 two, I determined ; and I asked my neighbour, 
 Mr. Frederic Harrison, if he knew what Dr. 
 Benson had published. " I have an idea," he 
 replied, " that he is the author of a work entitled 
 The Cathedral: its Necessary Place in the Life and 
 Work of an Academy." 
 
 Our proceedings were interrupted for a moment 
 by the entrance of Cardinal Manning, who desired 
 to be permitted, before the election began, to add 
 
Election at the English Academy 3 1 9 
 
 to the names of the candidates that of Mr. W. T. 
 Stead. At this there was a general murmur, and 
 Mr. Lang muttered : " If it comes to that, I propose 
 Bridge " (of " Brydges " — I could not catch the 
 name). The Cardinal continued : "I know I have 
 a seconder for him in my eminent friend opposite." 
 We all looked across at Archdeacon Farrar, who 
 objected, with considerable embarrassment : " No, 
 no ; when I said that, I did not understand what 
 the final list of candidates was to be. I must 
 really decline." The Cardinal then turned to 
 Mr. John Morley, who shook his head. "The 
 Academy will have more need of Mr. Stead ten 
 years hence, perhaps, than it has now." And with 
 that the incident terminated. 
 
 The moment had at last arrived, and we ex- 
 pected a prolonged session. By a system of 
 successive ballotings, we have to work on until 
 one candidate has a positive majority ; this may 
 take a long time, and may even fail to be accom- 
 plished. The President rang his bell, and the 
 names were pronounced by the secretary : 
 
 Edward White Benson, Archbishop of 
 Canterbury, 
 
 Samuel Rawson Gardiner, and 
 
 Thomas Hardy. 
 
320 Questions at Issue 
 
 As soon as he had recorded his vote, our venerable 
 President left us ; the remainder of the company 
 awaited the result with eager curiosity. The general 
 opinion seemed to be that the votes for Gardiner 
 and Hardy would prove pretty equal, and I began 
 to feel a little qualm at having thrown mine away. 
 But when Mr. Gladstone, taking the President's 
 chair, rang his bell, and announced the result of 
 the voting, it is not too much to say that we were 
 stupefied. The votes were thus divided : 
 
 The Archbishop of Canterbury . 19 
 
 Gardiner ..... 8 
 
 Hardy ..... 7 
 
 Blank votes .... 3 
 
 There was, accordingly, no need for a second 
 ballot, since the Archbishop had secured a positive 
 majority of the votes. I felt a little uncomfortable 
 when I reflected that my vote, if loyally given to 
 Gardiner, would have necessitated a reopening of 
 the matter. Never mind. Better as it is. The 
 election is a very good one, from a social point of 
 view particularly. 
 
 The company dispersed rather hurriedly. On 
 the stairs, where Mr. Arthur Balfour was offering 
 his arm to Lord Selborne, I heard the latter say, 
 
Election at the English Academy 321 
 
 " We may congratulate ourselves on a most excel- 
 lent evening's work, may we not ? " Mr. Balfour 
 shook his head, but I did not catch his reply ; he 
 seemed to have lost something of his previous good 
 spirits. 
 
 This morning the daily papers are in raptures, 
 the Gladstonians as much as the Unionists. A 
 great honour, they all say, done to the profession 
 of literature. " Quite a social triumph," the 
 Morning Post remarks ; " a bloodless victory in 
 the campaign of letters " — rather happy, is it not ? 
 But one of those young men of the National 
 Observer, who was waiting for me outside the 
 Academy last night, and kindly volunteered to 
 see me home to the hotel — where he was even 
 good enough to partake of refreshment — was 
 
 rather severe. " Not a single writer in the d 'd 
 
 gang of you," he said. A little coarse, I thought ; 
 and not positively final, as criticism. 
 I am. 
 
 Yours very faithfully, 
 
 iSgi. 
 
APPENDICES 
 
TENNYSON— AND AFTER? 
 
 W HEN this essay first appeared in The New Review, 
 the scepticism it expressed with regard to the universal 
 appreciation of the poet was severely censured in one 
 or two newspapers. On the other hand, the accom- 
 plished author of Thyrza and New Grub Street obliged 
 me with a letter of very great interest, which fully con- 
 firmed my doubts. Mr. Gissing has kindly permitted 
 me to print his letter here. His wide experience among 
 the poor makes his opinion on this matter one which 
 cannot lightly be passed by : 
 
 " Nffv. 20, 1892. 
 
 " Sir, — Will you pardon me if I venture to say 
 with what satisfaction I have read your remarks about 
 Tennyson in The New Review, which has only just 
 come into my hands ? 
 
 "The popular mind is my study, and I know that 
 Tennyson's song no more reached it than it reached 
 the young-eyed cherubim. Nor does any song reach 
 
326 Appendices 
 
 the populace, rich and poor, unless, as you suggest, it 
 be such as appears in The Referee. 
 
 " After fifteen years' observation of the poorer classes 
 of English folk, chiefly in London and the south, I 
 am pretty well assured that, whatever civilising agencies 
 may be at work among the democracy, poetry is not 
 one of them. Reading, of one kind or another, is 
 universal ; study, serious and progressive, is no longer 
 confined to the ranks that enjoy a liberal education; 
 but the populace, the industrial and trading masses, not 
 merely remain without interest in poetry, but do not 
 so much as understand what the term poetry means. 
 In other intellectual points, the grades of unlettered 
 life are numerous; as regards appreciation of verse, 
 the People are one. From the work-girl, with her 
 penny novelette, to the artisan who has collected a 
 little library, the natural inclination of all who represent 
 their class is to neglect verse as something exotic, 
 something without appeal to their instincts. They 
 either do not read it at all — the common case — or 
 (with an exception to be noticed) they take it as a 
 quaint variety of prose, which custom has consecrated 
 to religion, to the affections, and to certain phases of 
 facetiousness. 
 
 " In London, through all orders of society below 
 the liberally educated, it is a most exceptional thing 
 to meet with a person who seeks for verse as verse; 
 who recognises the name of any greater poet not 
 hackneyed in the newspapers, or who even distantly 
 
Appendices 327 
 
 apprehends the nature of the poet's art. In the north 
 of England, where more native melody is found, self- 
 taught readers of poetry are, I believe, not so rare; 
 but they must still be greatly the exception. As to 
 the influence of board-schools, one cannot doubt that 
 the younger generation are even less inclined to a taste 
 for poetry than their fathers. Some elderly people, in 
 Sunday languor, take up a book of verse with which 
 they have been familiar since early days (Mrs. Hemans, 
 Eliza Cook, Montgomery, Longfellow) ; whereas their 
 children cannot endure printed matter cut into rhythmic 
 lengths, unless the oddity solicit them in the columns 
 of a paper specially addressed to their intelligence. 
 
 "At the instigation of those zealous persons who 
 impress upon shopkeepers, clerks and artisans, the 
 duty of ' self-culture in leisure hours,' there undoubtedly 
 goes on some systematic reading of verse — the excep- 
 tional case to which I alluded. It is undertaken in a 
 resolute spirit by pallid men, who study the poet just 
 as they study the historian, the economist, the master 
 of physical science, and their pathetic endeavour is 
 directed by that species of criticism which demands — 
 exclusively — from poetry its 'message for our time.' 
 Hence, no doubt, the conviction of many who go 
 down to the great democratic deep that multitudes are 
 hungering for the poet's word. Here, as in other 
 kindred matters, the hope of such enthusiasts arises 
 from imperfect understanding. Not in lecture-hall and 
 classroom can the mind of the people be discovered. 
 
328 Appendices 
 
 Optimism has made a fancy picture of the representa- 
 tive working-man, ludicrous beyond expression to those 
 who know him in his habitat; and the supremely 
 ludicrous touch is that which attributes to him a capacity 
 for enjoying pure literature. 
 
 " I have in mind a typical artisan family, occupying 
 a house to themselves, the younger members grown up 
 and,. in their own opinion, very far above those who 
 are called ' the poor.' They possess perhaps a dozen 
 volumes: a novel or two, some bound magazines, a 
 few musty works of popular instruction or amusement ; 
 all casually acquired and held in no value. Of these 
 people I am able confidently to assert (as the result 
 of i specific inquiry) that they have in their abode no 
 book of verse — that they never read verse when they 
 can avoid it — that among their intimates is no person 
 who reads or wishes to read verse — that they never 
 knew of any one buying a book of verse — and that 
 not one of them, from childhood upwards, ever heard 
 a piece of verse read aloud at the fireside. In this 
 respect, as in many others, the family beyond doubt 
 is typical. They stand between the brutal and the 
 intelligent of working-folk. There must be an over- 
 whelming number of such households through the land, 
 representing a vast populace absolutely irresponsive to 
 the word of any poet. 
 
 "The custodian of a Free Library in a southern 
 city informs me that 'hardly once in a month' does 
 a volume of verse pass over his counter ; that the ex- 
 
Appendices 329 
 
 ceptional applicant (seeking Byron or Longfellow) is 
 generally * the wife of a tradesman ' ; and that an offer 
 of verse to man or woman who comes simply for 
 ' a book ' is invariably rejected ; ' they won't even look 
 at it.' 
 
 "What else could one have anticipated? To love 
 poetry is a boon of nature, most sparingly bestowed ; 
 appreciation of the poet's art is an outcome of studious 
 leisure. Even an honest liking for verse, without dis- 
 cernment, depends upon complex conditions of birth, 
 breeding, education. No one seeks to disparage the 
 laborious masses on the ground of their incapacity 
 for delights necessarily the privilege of a few. It was 
 needless folly to pretend that, because one or two of 
 Tennyson's poems became largely known through 
 popular recitation, therefore Tennyson was dear to the 
 heart of the people, a subject of their pride whilst he 
 lived, of their mourning when he departed. My point 
 is that no poet holds this place in the esteem of the 
 English lower orders. 
 
 " Tennyson ? The mere price of his works is pro- 
 hibitive to people who think a shilling a very large 
 outlay for printed paper. Half a dozen of his poems 
 at most would obtain a hearing from the average 
 uneducated person. We know very well the kind of 
 home in which Tennyson is really beloved for the sake 
 of perhaps half his work — and that not the better 
 half. Between such households and the best discover- 
 able in the world of which I speak, lies a chasm of 
 
33° Appendices 
 
 utter severance. In default of other tests, Tennyson 
 might be used as a touch-stone to distinguish the last 
 of gentle-folk from the first of the unprivileged. 
 
 " On the day of his funeral, I spoke of the dead poet 
 to a live schoolmaster, a teacher of poor children, 
 and he avowed to me, quite simply, that he ' couldn't 
 stand poetry — except a few hymns ; ' that he had 
 thoroughly disliked it ever since the day, when as a 
 schoolboy, he had to learn by heart portions of The 
 Lady of the Lake. I doubt whether this person could 
 have named three pieces of Tennyson's writing. He 
 spoke with the consciousness of being supported by 
 general opinion in his own world. 
 
 " Some days before, I was sitting in a public room, 
 where two men, retired shopkeepers, exchanged an 
 occasional word as they read the morning's news. ' A 
 great deal here about Lord Tennyson,' said one. The 
 ' Lord ' was significant ; I listened anxiously for his 
 companion's reply. ' Ah — yes.' The man moved uneasily, 
 and added at once : ' What do you think about this long- 
 distance ride ? ' In that room (I frequented it on succes- 
 sive days with this object) not a syllable did I hear 
 regarding Tennyson save the sentence faithfully recorded. 
 This was in the south of England ; perhaps it could not 
 have happened in the north. 
 
 " As a boy, I at one time went daily to school by train. 
 It happened once that I was alone in the carriage with a 
 commercial traveller; my Horace was open before me, 
 and it elicited a remark from the man of samples, who 
 
Appendices 331 
 
 spoke with the accent of that northern county, and 
 certainly did not belong to the educated class. After 
 a word or two, he opened his bag, and took out an 
 ancient copy, battered, thumbed, pencilled, of — Horatius 
 Flaccus. Without this, he told me, he never travelled. 
 From a bare smattering obtained at school, he had 
 pursued the study of Latin ; Horace was dear to him ; 
 
 he indicated favourite odes 
 
 " Everywhere there are the many and the few. What 
 of the multitude, in higher spheres? Their leisure is 
 ample; literature lies thick about them. It would be 
 amusing to know how many give one hour a month to 
 the greater poets 
 
 " Believe me, Sir, yours faithfully, 
 
 "George Gissing. 
 
 " To Edmund Gosse, Esq." 
 
II 
 
 M. MALLARME AND SYMBOLISM 
 
 IT was with not a little hesitation that I undertook to 
 unravel a corner of the mystic web, woven of sunbeams 
 and electrical threads, in which the poet of UAprh-Midi 
 d'un Faune conceals himself from curious apprehen- 
 sion. There were a dozen chances of my interpretation 
 b eing wrong, and scarcely one of its being right. My 
 delight therefore may be conceived when I received 
 a most gracious letter from the mage himself; Apol- 
 lonius was not more surprised when, by a fortunate 
 chance, one of his prophecies came true. I quote from 
 this charming paper of credentials, which proceeds to add 
 some precious details : — 
 
 " Votre etude est un miracle de divination . . . Les 
 poetes seuls ont le droit de parler ; parce qu' avant coup, 
 ils savent. II y a, entre toutes, une phrase, oti vous 
 dcartez tous voiles et designez la chose avec une clair- 
 voyance de diamant, le voici : ' His aim ... is to use 
 words in such harmonious combination as will suggest to 
 the reader a mood or a condition which is not mentioned 
 
Appendices 333 
 
 in the text, but is nevertheless paramount in the poet's 
 mind at the moment of composition.' 
 
 " Tout est Ik. Je fais de la Musique, et appelle ainsi 
 non celle qu'on peut tirer du rapprochment euphonique 
 des mots, cette premiere condition va de soi ; mais I'aude- 
 Ik magiquement produit par certaines dispositions de 
 la parole, oii celle-ci ne reste qu'k I'Stat de moyen de 
 communication matdrielle avec le lecteur comme les 
 touches du piano. Vraiment entre les lignes et audessus 
 du regard cela se passe, en toute puret^, sans I'entremise 
 de cordes k boyaux et de pistons comme k I'orchestre, 
 qui est ddja industrielj mais c'est la mSme chose que 
 I'orchestre, sauf que litterairement ou silencieusement. 
 Les poetes de tous les temps n'ont jamais fait autrement et 
 il est aujourd'hui, voilk tout, amusant d'en avoir con- 
 science. Employez Musique dans le sens grec, au fond 
 signifiant Id^e au rythme entre les rapports; la, plus 
 divine que dans son expression publique on Symphon- 
 ique. Trfes mal dit, en causant, mais vous saisissez ou 
 plutot aviez saisi toute au long de cette belle ^tude qu'il 
 faut garder telle quelle et intacte. Je ne vous chicane 
 que sur I'obscurite ; non, cher poete, except^ par mala- 
 dresse ou gaucherieje ne suis pas obscur, du moment 
 qu'on me lit pour y chercher ce que j'dnonce plus haut, 
 oil la manifestation d'unart qui se sert — mettons incidem- 
 ment, 3 'en sais la cause profonde— du langage : et le 
 deviens, bien sfir ! si Ton se trompe et croit ouvrir le 
 journal — Votre 
 
 SxiPHANE MaLLARM^, 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 In one volume, crown 8vo, red buckram., gilt top., ys. 6d. 
 
 GOSSIP IN A LIBRARY, 
 
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 In one volume, crown SvOt grey buckram^ 5s. 
 
 THE SECRET OF NARCISSE, 
 
 A ROMANCE. 
 
 "This story, with its peaceful, almost idyllic prelude, and its cruel 
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 of the author's reputation." — Times. 
 
 LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN. 
 
Uelegcapbfc BAbtesB : 
 
 Stinlochs, London, 
 
 Bi Bedford Street, w.c 
 
 March iSg^. 
 
 A LIST OF 
 
 Mr. WILLIAM HEINEMANN'S 
 
 Publications 
 
 AND 
 
 Forthcoming Works 
 
 The Books mentioned in this List can 
 be obtained to order by any Book' 
 Seller if not in stocky or "will be sent 
 by the Publisher post free on receiM 
 9f price. 
 
MS. WILLIAM HEINEMANN'S LIST. 
 
 
 5n5ej of Butbors. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Alexander 13 
 
 Kipling and Balestier ... 10 
 
 ArbuChnot . 
 
 
 
 8 
 
 Lanza . 
 
 
 
 13 
 
 Atherton . 
 
 
 
 13 
 
 Le Caron . 
 
 
 
 
 6 
 
 Baddeley . 
 
 
 
 8 
 
 Lee . 
 
 
 
 
 10 
 
 Balestier 
 
 
 
 9. 13 
 
 Leighton . 
 
 
 
 
 9 
 
 Barrett 
 
 
 
 
 Leland 
 
 
 
 
 . 16 
 
 Behrs . 
 
 
 
 6 
 
 Lie . 
 
 
 
 
 II 
 
 Bcndall . 
 
 
 
 16 
 
 Lowe . 
 
 
 
 
 . 6,7 
 
 BjGrnson 
 
 
 
 II, 14 
 
 Lowry 
 
 
 
 
 10 
 
 Bowen 
 
 
 
 5 
 
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 13 
 
 Brown 
 
 
 
 9 
 
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 10 
 
 Brown and Grifliths 
 
 
 
 16 
 
 Maeterlinck 
 
 
 
 
 14 
 
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 8 
 
 , lOj 14 
 
 Maude 
 
 
 
 
 6 
 
 Butler 
 
 
 
 S 
 
 Mantegazza 
 
 
 
 
 4 
 
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 8,12 
 
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 II 
 
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 16 
 
 Maurice 
 
 
 
 
 6 
 
 Cambridge . 
 
 
 
 12 
 
 Merriman . 
 
 
 
 
 4 
 
 Chester 
 
 
 
 7 
 
 Michel 
 
 
 
 
 3 
 
 Clarke 
 
 
 
 10 
 
 Mitford 
 
 
 
 
 13 
 
 Colomb 
 
 
 
 6 
 
 Moore 
 
 
 
 
 g 
 
 Compayre . 
 
 
 
 5 
 
 Murray 
 
 
 
 
 6 
 
 Couperus . 
 
 
 
 11 
 
 Norris 
 
 
 
 
 g 
 
 Crackanthorpe 
 
 
 
 13 
 
 Ouida . 
 
 
 
 
 10 
 
 Davidson . 
 
 
 
 5 
 
 Palacio-Valdds 
 
 
 
 
 II 
 
 Dawson 
 
 
 
 16 
 
 Pearce 
 
 
 
 
 10 
 
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 7 
 
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 7 
 
 Dowson 
 
 
 
 9 
 
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 ^4 
 
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 4 
 
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 13 
 
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 8 
 
 Pinero 
 
 
 
 
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 Ely . . . 
 
 
 
 8 
 
 Rawnsley . 
 
 
 
 
 8 
 
 Farrar. 
 
 
 
 8 
 
 Renan 
 
 
 
 
 7 
 
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 5 
 
 Richter 
 
 
 
 
 8 
 
 Forbes 
 
 
 
 6 
 
 Riddell . 
 
 
 
 
 13 
 10 
 
 Fothergill . 
 
 
 
 9 
 
 Rives . 
 
 
 
 
 Franzos 
 
 
 
 II 
 
 Roberts (C.G.D. 
 
 ) .' 
 
 
 
 9 
 
 Frederic 
 
 
 
 7, 12 
 
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 II 
 
 Garner 
 
 
 
 8 
 
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 7 
 
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 4 
 
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 7 
 
 Gaulot 
 
 
 
 4 
 
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 6 
 
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 10 
 
 Serao . 
 
 
 
 
 II 
 
 Gore ... 
 
 
 16 
 
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 13 
 
 Gosse ... 
 
 
 . 7. 10 
 
 Sienkiewicz 
 
 
 
 
 II 
 
 Grand 
 
 
 9 
 
 Tallentyre 
 
 
 
 4 
 
 Gray . 
 
 
 
 8 
 
 Tasma 
 
 
 
 . 10, 12 
 
 Gray (Maxwell) 
 
 
 
 9 
 
 Terry . 
 
 
 
 4 
 
 Griffiths 
 
 
 
 16 
 
 Thurston . 
 
 
 
 x6 
 
 Hall . 
 
 
 
 16 
 
 Tolstoy 
 
 
 
 . II. 14 
 
 Harland . 
 
 
 
 13 
 
 Tree . . 
 
 
 
 
 15 
 
 Hardy 
 
 
 
 12 
 
 Valera 
 
 
 
 
 II 
 
 Heine . 
 
 
 
 4. 6 
 
 Ward . 
 
 
 
 
 13 
 
 Henderson . 
 
 
 
 14 
 
 Warden . 
 
 
 
 
 13 
 
 Howard 
 
 
 
 10 
 
 Waugh . 
 
 
 
 
 Hughes 
 
 
 
 S 
 
 Weitemeyer 
 
 
 
 8 
 
 Hungerford 
 
 
 5 
 
 10, 13 
 
 West . 
 
 
 5 
 
 Ibsen . 
 
 
 
 14 
 
 Whistler 
 
 
 4, 7 
 
 Irving . . 
 
 
 
 14 
 
 White .... 
 
 
 10 
 
 Ingersoll . 
 
 
 
 9 
 
 Whitman . 
 
 , 
 
 
 8 
 
 Jaeger . 
 
 
 
 7. 15 
 
 Williams . 
 
 ^ 
 
 
 8 
 
 Jeaffreson . 
 
 
 
 6 
 
 Wood 
 
 
 
 14 
 
 Keeling 
 
 
 
 10 
 
 Zangwill . 
 
 
 
 7, 10 
 
 Kimball . 
 
 
 
 16 
 
 Zola . 
 
 . 
 
 , 
 
 
 13 
 
MR. WILLIAM HEINEMANN'S LIST. 3 
 
 In preparation. 
 
 REMBRANDT: 
 
 HIS LIFE, HIS WORK, AND HIS TIME. 
 
 EMILE MICHEL; 
 
 MEMBER OF THE INSTITUTE OF FRjINCE. 
 EDITED AND PREFACED BY 
 
 FREDERICK WEDMORE. 
 
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12 MR. WILLIAM HEINEMANN'S LIST. 
 
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 THE RETURN OF THE O'MAHONY. By Harold 
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MR. WILLIAM HEINEMANN'S LIST. 13 
 
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 WRECKAGE, and other Stories. By Hubert Crackan- 
 
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 A MODERN MARRIAGE. By the Marquise Clara Lanza. 
 Queen. — "A powerful story, dramatically and consistently carried out" 
 Black and White.—" A decidedly clever book " 
 
14 MR. WILLIAM HEINEMANN'S LIST. 
 
 Ipopulat SbtUfng Boofts. 
 
 MADAME VALERIE. By F. C. Philips, Author of "As 
 
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 THE MOMENT AFTER: A Tale of the Unseen. By 
 
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 CLUES ; or, Leaves from a Chief Constable's Note-Book. 
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 IDramatfc OLiteratttte* 
 
 THE MASTER BUILDER. A Play in Three Acts. By 
 
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 A NEW PLAY. By BjSrnstjerne BjSrnson. Translated 
 from the Norwegian. \Jn. preparation. 
 
 THE PRINCESSE MALEINE: A Drama in Five Acts 
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 A iken^7im,—" In the creation of the ' atmosphere ' of the play M. Maeter- 
 linck shows his skill. It is here that he communicates to us the nouveajtjrisson, 
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 THE FRUITS OF ENLIGHTENMENT: A Comedy in 
 
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 E. J. Dillon. With Introduction by A. W. Pinero. Small 4to, with 
 
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 Pall Mall Gazette. — "The whole effect of the play is distinctly Moliferesque; 
 
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 gay." 
 
 HEDDA GABLER; A Drama in Four Acts. By Henrik 
 
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 cloth, with Portrait, 5*. Vaudeville Edition, paper, xs. Also a Limited 
 
 Large Paper Edition, 21;. net. 
 
 7y?««.— "The language in which this play is couched is a model of brevity, 
 
 decision, and pointedness. . ■ . . Every line tells, and there is not an incident 
 
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 perhaps entitled to the place of honour." 
 
 THE DRAMA, ADDRESSES. By Henry Irving. Fcap, 
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MR, WILLIAM HEmEM ANN'S LIST, 15 
 
 SOME INTERESTING FALLACIES OF THE 
 
 Modem Stage. An Address delivered to the Playgoers' Club at St. 
 James's Hall, on Sunday, 6th December, 1891, By Herbert Beerbohm 
 Tree. Crown 8vo, sewed, td, 
 
 THE LIFE OF HENRIK IBSEN. By Henrik J^ger. 
 Translated by Clara Bell. With the Verse done into English from the 
 Norwegian Original by Edmund Gosse. Crown 8vo, cloth, ts. 
 
 SU James's Gazette, — " Admirably translated. Deserves a cordial and 
 emphatic welcome." 
 
 Guardian, — "Ibsen's dramas at present enjoy a considerable vogue, and 
 their admirers will rejoice to find full descriptions and criticisms in Mr. Jaeger's 
 book." 
 
 THE PLAYS OF ARTHUR W. PINERO. 
 
 With Introductory Notes by Malcolm C. Salaman. i6mo. Paper Covers, 
 IS. 6d. ; or Cloth, as, 6d. each. 
 
 THE TIMES: A Comedy in Four Acts. With a Preface by 
 the Author. (Vol. I.) 
 
 Daily Telegraph, — "'The Times 'is the best example yet given of Mr. 
 Pinero's power as a satirist. So clever is his work that it beats down opposition. 
 So fascinating is his style that we cannot help listening to him." 
 
 Morning Post. — "Mr. Pinero's latest belongs to a high order of dramatic 
 literature, and the piece will be witnessed again with all the greater zest after the 
 perusal of such admirable dialogue." 
 
 THE PROFLIGATE : A Play in Four Acts. With Portrait 
 of the Author, after J. Mordecai. (Vol. II.) 
 Pall Mall Gazette. — "Will be welcomed by all who have the true interests 
 of the stage at heart." 
 
 THE CABINET MINISTER: A Farce in Four Acts. 
 (Vol.111.) 
 Observer,— * It is as amusing to read as it was when played." 
 
 THE HOBBY HORSE: A Comedy in Three Acts, 
 (Vol. IV.) 
 St. James's Gazette. — "Mr. Pinero has seldom produced better or more 
 interesting work than in * The Hobby Horse." " 
 
 LADY BOUNTIFUL : A Play in Four Acts. (Vol. V.) 
 
 THE MAGISTRATE : A Farce in Three Acts. (Vol. VI.) 
 
 DANDY DICK : A Farce in Three Acts. (Vol. VII.) 
 
 SWEET LAVENDER. (Vol. VIII.) 
 
 To be followed by The Schoolmistress, The Weaker Sex, Lords and 
 ^ommonSf and The Squire, 
 
i6 MR. Vi^ILLIAM HEINEM ANN'S LIST. 
 
 LOVE SONGS OF ENGLISH POETS, 1500—1800. 
 
 With Notes by Ralph H. Caine. Fcap. 8vo, rough edges, 3J, ()d. 
 •»• Large Paper Edition^ limited to 100 Copies^ zos, 6d. Net. 
 
 IVY AND PASSION FLOWER: Poems. By Gerard 
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 IDYLLS OF WOMANHOOD. By C. Amy Dawson. 
 
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 Ibefnemann'B Scientific Ibanbboofts, 
 
 MANUAL OF BACTERIOLOGY. By A. B. Griffiths, 
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 Pharmaceutical Journal. — "The subject is treated more thoroughly and 
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 prove a useful aid to pharmacists, and all others interested m the increasingly 
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 or no previous knowledge concerning the problems of micro-biology." 
 
 MANUAL OF ASSAYING GOLD, SILVER, COPPER, 
 
 and Lead Ores. By Walter Lee Brown, B.Sc. Revised, Corrected, 
 
 and considerably Enlarged, with a chapter on the Assaying of Fuel, &c. 
 
 By A. B. Griffiths, Ph.D,, F.R.S. (Edin.), F.C.S. Crown 8vo. cloth. 
 
 Illustrated, "js. 6d. 
 Colliery Guardian.' — "A dtelightful and fascinating book." . 
 
 Financial World, — " The most complete and practical manual on everythingjC 
 which concerns assaying of all which have come before us.** \9 
 
 GEODESY. By J. Howard Gore. Crown 8vo, cloth, Illus- 
 trated, 5^ . 
 
 Si. James's Gazette. — " The book may be safely recommended to those who 
 desire to acquire an accurate knowledge of Geodesy." 
 
 Science Gossip* — '* It is the best we could recommend to all geodetic students. 
 It is full and clear, thoroughly accurate, and up to date in all matters of earth- 
 measurements." 
 
 THE PHYSICAL PROPERTIES OF GASES. By 
 
 Arthur L. Kimball, of the Johns Hopkins University. Crown Svo, 
 cloth. Illustrated, 5;. 
 Cketnical News. — " The man of culture who wishes for a general and accurate 
 acquaintance with the physical properties of gases, will find in Mr. Kimball's 
 work just what he requires." 
 
 HEAT AS A FORM OF ENERGY. By Professor R. H. 
 
 Thurston, of Cornell University. Crown 8vo, cloth, Illustrated, $5. 
 Manchester Examiner. — "Bears out the character of its predecessors for 
 careful and correct statement and deduction under the light of the most recent 
 discoveries." 
 
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 WILLIAM HEINEMANN, 
 
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