Chapter V: Part 5

And never was a man more mistaken than the old preacher who said to his congregation, “If you have a talent in your napkin, you should take care not to hide it; but if you have no talent, but only a napkin, you should not so flourish your napkin as to create the impression that it is full of talents.” Why, this is just what nine men in ten who court fame have to do. Nature is kind, but seldom profuse. If she really endows a man with what, if trumpeted, would make him famous, the odds are she couples with her gifts pride, modesty, or self-respect, which, to say the least, heavily handicap him in the race for reputation. When she does not endow with the reality, she compensates by bestowing the power of acquiring the credit for it. She is, as a rule, much too thrifty to heap on the same man the keen pleasures of genuine enthusiasm and the sweets of popular applause. An impartial mother, she loves all her children, and divides her favours equally between shams and true men. This Churchill marks in his brutal way; speaking of a certain contemporary, he describes him as endowed with

“That low cunning which in fools supplies,
And amply too, the place of being wise,
Which Nature, kind, indulgent parent, gave
To qualify the blockhead for a knave.”

But our business is not with knaves and blockheads, but with “gentler cattle,” and the quotation demands an apology.

The importance of the art of self-advertisement, as must be abundantly clear from the preceding remarks, can scarcely be overestimated. Though it is perhaps still in its infancy, its progress during the last few years has been most encouraging. The old coarse methods so familiar to us in the past, and still successfully practised in the present--we mean mutual admiration cliques, log-rolling, and what is vulgarly known as “pulling the strings”--have been greatly improved upon and refined. Bentley’s famous remark when, explaining how it was that he took to commentating, he said, that as he despaired of standing on his own legs in the Temple of Fame, he got on to the shoulders of the Ancients, appears to have suggested one of the most ingenious of modern expedients. This consists of “getting up” a memorial to some distinguished man--a statue, it may be, or modest bust. Some labour, some ability, and some learning are involved in the more cumbrous device of Bentley. But here all is simple and very easy. You are on the shoulders of your great man at a bound, and stand side by side with him in a trice. There is nothing which redounds to his credit which does not redound to your own. As the Red Indian is under the impression that in possessing himself of a scalp he possesses himself of the virtues belonging to the former owner of the scalp, so this tribute of enthusiastic admiration quietly assumes, without trouble, all that enthusiastic admiration naturally implies. Is the object of your homage a poet, a critic, a scholar, the very fact that you pay him homage is, in itself, testimony of your own right to one or other of these honourable titles. If, moreover it should happen that you know very little about the writings of the author whom you have elected to honour, this is of no consequence; for of all the disguises which ignorance can assume, “enthusiasm” is the most effective. Nor are these the only advantages of this particular method of getting reputation. The collection of subscriptions and the formation of a committee bring you into contact, or may, if judiciously managed, bring you into contact with all your distinguished contemporaries; and we know what the proverb says--“Noscitur a sociis”--a man is what his companions are.

But nothing is more effectual, for purposes of self-advertisement, than a device which has lately been practised with signal success. This consists of scraping up an acquaintance with some person, whose name is not unknown to the public,--even a second-rate novelist will do--and waiting till he dies. As there is a tide in the affairs of men, so, as we all know, there is a moment at the demise of literary men when the voracity of public curiosity knows neither distinction nor satiety. This is the moment for the self-advertiser to nick; this is the time for him to float, with his defunct friend, on the lips of men. He will find readers for anything he may choose to print--that letter with its exquisite compliments, that conversation in which his poor attainments were so generously over-estimated, or the importance of his slight literary services so much exaggerated. Of course, the value of such advertisements will be in proportion to the eminence of the subject of the reminiscences--and happy, thrice happy, those who were able to turn men like Darwin, Tennyson, and Browning to this account; their reputation may be regarded as made. But it is not always necessary to wait till great men die, though it is an experiment too bold and perilous for most aspirants to make this sort of capital out of them while they are still alive. Still _audentes fortuna juvat_, and it has been done. A certain minor poet published in an American magazine, not many years ago, an article entitled “A Day with Lord Tennyson,” in which he represented the Laureate as turning the conversation on his (the minor bard’s) poetry. We are told how the great man, after fervently reiterating a stanza of that minor bard which pleased him, requested his son to take it down in writing; how that son, though the day was cold and blowy, took it down; how Tennyson grasped, at parting, his brother poet’s hand, and begged in transport that he would “come again and come often.” He came, we believe, no more. But what of that? He had accomplished a feat so simple and yet so original that it may fairly be questioned whether what Mr. Burnum used to call his masterpiece was in any way comparable to it. To interview a great man, even on an assumption of equality, is, as we all know, a comparatively easy matter, but to turn the conversation of the great man into a seasonable puff of yourself requires a combination of qualities not often united in a single person. The worst of feats like these is that they must have a tendency to make great men a little shy of encouraging the acquaintance of those to whom they can be so useful. But simplicity, as Thucydides remarks, is one of the chief ingredients of greatness, and it is a quality very difficult to wear out.

If Tennyson’s interviewer has ever had a rival in the important art which has been discussed--for the benefit of youthful ambition--in this article, we are inclined to think that that rival was the Rev. Aris Willmott. This now almost forgotten writer was a very voluminous author both in verse and prose; but his merits were not appreciated by an ungrateful public so much as they ought to have been. He resorted, therefore, to the following exquisitely ingenious device. He published a handsome volume, which is now before us, entitled _Gems from English Literature_, thus arranged: Bacon, Rev. Aris Willmott, Jeremy Taylor, Rev. Aris Willmott, Barrow, Rev. Aris Willmott, sandwiching himself regularly through the prose classics, and in the same way through the poets--Shakespeare, Rev. Aris Willmott, Milton, Rev. Aris, etc. As birthday books, press notices, interviews at home, portraits of distinguished authors in their studies, and the like are getting a little stale, we cordially recommend this rev. gentleman’s expedient--it may be judiciously modified--to the notice of all who are unable to distinguish fame from notoriety.

R. L. STEVENSON’S LETTERS[22]

[Footnote 22: _The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson to his Family and Friends._ Selected and Edited with Notes and Introduction by Sidney Colvin. 2 vols.]

The late Robert Louis Stevenson is a writer who has every title to commiseration, and the appearance of the volumes before us may be said to mark the climax of his misfortunes. Diseased and sickly from his birth, with his life frequently hanging on a thread, he probably never knew the sensation of perfect health. During the impressionable years of early youth his surroundings appear to have been most uncongenial; he was forced into a profession for which he had no taste and no aptitude. In constant straits for money, at times he was miserably poor; his apprenticeship to letters was long and arduous, for he was not one of Nature’s favourites, and attained what he did attain by unsparing and severe labour. His wandering and restless life, bringing him as it did into contact with all phases of humanity and with all parts of the world, was of course in many respects favourable to his work, but it had at the same time serious disadvantages. It gave him little time for reflection; it imported a certain feverishness into his energy, and rendered that concentration and steadiness, without which no really great work can be accomplished, impossible. That in these circumstances Stevenson should have produced so much, and so much which is of a high order of merit, is most creditable to him, and not a little surprising. “He stands,” says his friend Professor Colvin, “as the writer who in the last quarter of the nineteenth century has handled with the most of freshness and inspiriting power the widest range of established literary forms--the moral, critical and personal essay, travels sentimental and other, parables and tales of mystery, boys’ stories of adventure, memoirs; nor let lyrical and meditative verse both English and Scottish, and especially nursery verse, a new vein for genius to work in, be forgotten.” With some reservation this may be conceded, and this is as far as eulogy can legitimately be stretched.

But, unhappily, some of Stevenson’s admirers have made themselves and their idol ridiculous, by raising him to a position his claims to which are preposterous. If he be measured with his contemporaries the comparison will generally be in his favour--he certainly did best what hundreds can do well. His essays have distinction and excellence; his novels, travels, and short tales, though scarcely entitled to the praise of originality, as they strike no new notes and are mere variants of the work of Scott, Kingston, Ballantyne, De Quincey and Poe, bear the impress of genius as distinguished from mere talent, and reflect a very charming personality; his verse, too, is pleasing and skilful. But when we are told that he will stand the third in a trio with Burns and Scott, and when we have to listen to serious appeals to Edinburgh to raise a statue to him beside the author of _Marmion_ and the Waverley Novels, all who truly appreciate his work may well tremble for the reaction which is certain to succeed such extravagant overestimation. The truth is that poor Stevenson, himself one of the simplest, sincerest and most modest of men, got involved with a clique who may be described as manufacturers of factitious reputations,--the circulators of a false currency in criticism. In these days of appeals to the masses it is as easy to write up the sort of works which are addressed to them--popular essays, tales and novels--as it is to write up the commodities of quack doctors and the shares of bogus companies. The production of popular literature is now a trade, and in some cases this kind of puffery is the work of deliberate fraud, originating from various motives. In many cases it simply springs from ignorance and critical incompetence, current criticism being, to a considerable extent, in the hands of very young men who, having neither the requisite knowledge nor the proper training, are unable to judge a writer comparatively. In other cases it is to be attributed to good nature and the tendency in the genial appreciation of real merit to indulge in extravagant expression. But the result is the same. A reputation, so grotesquely out of proportion to what is really merited that sober people are inclined to suspect that all is imposture, is gradually inflated. Eulogy kindles eulogy; hyperbole is heaped on hyperbole; a ludicrous importance is attached to every trifle which falls, or which ever has fallen, from this Press-created Fetish. While he is alive he is encouraged, or rather importuned, to force his power of production to keep pace with the demand for everything bearing his signature; when he is dead the very refuse of his study finds eager publishers.

This kind of thing has obviously many advantages, which are by no means confined to the object of the idolatry itself. In the first place it means business; it is the creation of a goose which can lay golden eggs, and it is, in the second place, a creation which reflects no little glory on the creators. Is it nothing to be the satellites of so radiant a luminary? When the familiar correspondence of the great man is printed, will not what he was pleased to say, with all the friendly license of private intercourse, in the way of compliment and eulogy, be proclaimed from the house-tops?

All this is exactly what has happened in the case of poor Stevenson. No man ever took more justly his own measure, or would have been more annoyed at the preposterous eulogies of which he has been made the subject, on the part of interested or ill-judging friends. We wonder what he would himself have said, could he have seen the letters before us described, as they were described in one of the current Reviews, as “the most exhaustive and distinguished literary correspondence which England has ever seen.” We entirely absolve Professor Colvin from any suspicion of being actuated by unworthy motives in publishing them. It is abundantly clear that he has not published them to puff himself, that his labour has been a labour of love, and that he believed himself to be piously fulfilling a duty to his friend. But they ought never to have been given to the world. More than two-thirds have nothing whatever to justify their appearance in print, and merely show, what will surprise those who knew Stevenson by his literary writings, how vapid, vulgar and commonplace he could be. In their slangy familiarity and careless spontaneity they remind us of Byron’s, but what a contrast do these trivial and too often insipid tattlings present to Byron’s brilliance and point, his wit, his piquancy, his insight into life and men! Only here and there, in a touch of description, or in a casual reflection, do we find anything to distinguish them from the myriads of letters which are interchanged between young men every day in the year. Their one attraction lies in the glimpses they reveal of Stevenson’s own charming personality, his kindliness, his sympathy, his great modesty, his manliness, his transparent truthfulness and honesty. It is amusing to watch him with one of his correspondents who was evidently endeavouring to establish a mutual exchange of flattery. The urbane skill with which this gentleman’s persistently fulsome compliments are either fenced or waived aside, the ironical delicacy with which, when a return is extorted, they are repaid, in a measure strictly adjusted to desert and yet certain not to disappoint expectant vanity, are quite exquisite. “The suns go swiftly out,” he writes to him, referring to the death of Tennyson and Browning and others, “and I see no suns to follow, nothing but a universal twilight of the demi-divinities, with parties like you and me beating on toy drums, and playing on penny whistles about glow-worms.” The indignant letter to the _New York Tribune_, in defence of James Payn, who had been accused of plagiarising from one of Stevenson’s fictions, well deserves placing on permanent record, as an illustration of his chivalrous loyalty to his friends.

We are sorry, we repeat, that these letters have been given to the world. So far as Stevenson’s reputation is concerned they can only detract from it. When they illustrate him on his best side they merely emphasise what his works illustrate so abundantly that further illustration is a mere work of supererogation. When they present him, as for the most part they do, in dishabille, they exhibit him very greatly to his disadvantage. If Professor Colvin had printed about one-third of them, and retained his excellent elucidatory introductions, which form practically a biography of Stevenson, he would have produced a work for which all admirers of that most pleasing writer would have thanked him. As it is, he has been guilty, in our opinion, of a grave error of judgment.

LITERARY ICONOCLASM[23]

[Footnote 23: _The Authorship of the Kingis Quair._ A New Criticism by J. T. T. Brown.]

Among the worthies of the fifteenth century there is no more interesting and picturesque figure than the Poet-King of Scotland, James I. Long before the poem on which his fame rests was given to the world, tradition had assigned him a high place among native makers, and his countrymen had been proud to add to the names of Dunbar and Douglas, of Henryson and Lyndsay, the name of the best of their kings. Great was their joy, therefore, when, in 1783, William Tytler gave public proof that the good King’s title to the laurel was no mere title by courtesy, but that he had been the author of a poem which could fairly be regarded as one of the gems of Scottish literature. There cannot, in truth, be two opinions about the _Kingis Quair_. It is a poem of singular charm and beauty, and, though it is modelled closely on certain of Chaucer’s minor poems, and is in other respects largely indebted to them, it is no servile imitation; it bears the impress of original genius, not so much in details and incident as in tone, colour, and touch; it is a brilliant and most memorable achievement, and Rossetti hardly exaggerates when he describes it as

“More sweet than ever a poet’s heart
Gave yet to the English tongue.”

For more than a hundred years it has been the delight of all who care for the poetry of the past, and the story it tells, and tells so pathetically, is now among the “consecrated legends” which every one cherishes. “The best poet among kings, and the best king among poets,” the name of the author of the _Kingis Quair_ heads the list of royal authors. The stanza which he employed, though invented or adopted by Chaucer, takes its title from the King, and “the rime royal” will be in perpetual evidence of his services to poetry, as the University of St. Andrews will be of his services to learning and education. No generation has passed, from Sir Walter Scott to Mrs. Browning, and from Mrs. Browning to Gabriel Rossetti, which has not been lavish of honour and homage to him.

But, it seems, we have all been under a delusion. Our simple ancestors believed that James was the author of _Peebles to the Play_ and _Christ’s Kirk on the Green_; but _Peebles to the Play_ and _Christ’s Kirk on the Green_ “are now”--Mr. J. T. T. Brown is speaking--“relegated to the anonymous poetry of the sixteenth century, inexorably deposed by the internal evidence”; and Mr. Brown aspires to send the _Kingis Quair_ the same way. His fell purpose is “to deprive James of his singing garment, and reduce him to the humbler rank of a King of Scots.” There is something almost terrible in the exultation with which Mr. Brown assumes that--the King’s claim to every other poem attributed to him having been completely demolished--it only remains to deprive him of the _Kingis Quair_, to make his poetical bankruptcy complete. And to the demolition of the King’s claim to the “Quair” Mr. Brown ruthlessly proceeds. Now we have no intention of entering into the question of the authenticity of the minor poems to which Mr. Brown refers; but we shall certainly break a lance with this destructive critic in defence of James’s claim to the _Kingis Quair_.

Mr. Brown contends, first, that there is no satisfactory external evidence in favour of the King’s authorship of the poem; and, secondly, that the internal evidence is almost conclusive against him. What are the facts? In the Bodleian Library is a MS. the date of which is uncertain, but it cannot be assigned to an earlier period than 1488. This MS. contains certain poems of Chaucer, Hoccleve, Lydgate, and others, together with the _Kingis Quair_. Of the _Kingis Quair_ it is, so far as is known, the only MS., and to it alone we owe the preservation of the poem. Both title and colophon assign the work to James I., the words being: “Heireefter followis the quair Maid be King James of Scotland ye first, callit ye Kingis quair, and Maid quhen his Ma. wes in Ingland,” the colophon running, “Explicit, &c., &c., quod Jacobus primus scotorum rex Illustrissimus.” This is surely precise enough; but Mr. Brown insists that the statement carries very little weight, being no more than the _ipse dixit_ of not merely an irresponsible, but of an unusually reckless copyist. The recklessness of this copyist Mr. Brown deduces from the fact that, of ten poems attributed to Chaucer in the same MS., five undoubtedly do not belong to him. On this we shall only remark that it would be interesting to know whether these poems have been attributed to Chaucer in other MSS. In any case, Mr. Brown must surely know that it is a very different thing for a copyist to miss-assign a few short poems and to make a statement so explicit as the statement here made with regard to the _Kingis Quair_. He must either have been guilty of deliberate fraud--and what right have we to assume this?--or he must have been misled, an hypothesis which is equally unwarrantable, unless it be adequately supported. And how does Mr. Brown proceed to support it? He contends that we have no satisfactory evidence from other sources that James was the author of the poem. Walter Bower, the one contemporary historian, though he gives in his _Scotichronicon_ an elaborate account of the King’s accomplishments, is silent, Mr. Brown triumphantly observes, about his poetry. This may be conceded. But Weldon is equally silent about the poetry of James VI., and Buchanan about the poetry of Mary. And what says the next historian, John Major? “In the vernacular”--we give the passage in Mr. Brown’s own version--“he was a most skilful composer.... He wrote a clever little book about the Queen before he took her to wife and while he was a prisoner,” a plain reference to the _Kingis Quair_. Testimony to his poetical ability is also given by Hector Boyes in his _History of Scotland_, “In linguâ vernaculâ tam ornata faciebat carmina, ut poetam natum credidisses.” So say John Bellenden, John Leslie, and George Buchanan. Of these witnesses Mr. Brown coolly observes that they carry little or no weight, because they only echo each other and Major. Major, Mr. Brown insists, is “the sole authority for the ascription to James of the vernacular poems.” Certainly fame in the face of such critics as Mr. Brown is held on a very precarious tenure. Dunbar, in his _Lament of the Makaris_, enumerates, continues our critic, twenty-one Scottish poets, but passes James over in silence, therefore James’s title to being a poet was unknown to him. Possibly; but that Dunbar’s list was not meant to be exhaustive is proved by the fact that he makes no mention of a poet, and of a considerable poet, who must have been well known to him, Thomas of Ercildoune. Nothing can be more misleading than deductions like these. Ovid has given us an elaborate catalogue of the poets of his time, but makes no mention of Manilius. Heywood and Taylor have given elaborate catalogues of the contemporary Elizabethan dramatists and make no mention of Cyril Tourneur. Addison has given us an account of the principal English poets, and makes no mention of Shakespeare. If Dante’s and Chaucer’s acquaintance with their distinguished brethren is to be estimated by those whom they noticed, it must have been far more limited than we know it, by other evidence, to have been. Lyndsay, again, is cited as testimony of ignorance of James’s title to rank among poets; but in the list, in which he is silent about James, he is silent about poets so famous as Barbour, Blind Harry, Wyntown, Kennedy, and Douglas.

Mr. Brown next proceeds to the question of internal evidence. He cannot understand how it could come to pass, that a Scotchman, who left his native country when he was under twelve years of age, and who was educated by English tutors in England, should, after eighteen years of exile, employ “the Lowland Scottish dialect.” This is surely not very difficult to explain. Nothing so much endears his country to a man as exile, and nothing is more cherished by a patriot than his native language. Ten years’ exile among the Getæ did not corrupt the Latinity of Ovid, and more than twenty years’ exile did not impair the purity of Thucydides’ Attic. The King may have had English tutors, but Wyntown distinctly tells us that he was allowed to retain, as his companions, four of his countrymen. When he served in France he had a Scottish bodyguard. The document in the King’s own handwriting, printed by Chalmers, proves that in 1412 he was conversant with the Lowland dialect. In all probability, therefore, he carefully cherished his native language. The consensus of tradition places it beyond all doubt that he composed poetry in the vernacular, and as he wrote the _Kingis Quair_ when he knew that he was about to return to Scotland as its king, it was surely the most natural thing in the world that he should compose a poem which told the story of himself and his young bride, whom he was introducing to his subjects as their queen, in the language of the country. But, says Mr. Brown, it is the Lowland dialect, with inflexions peculiar to Midland English, with many Chaucerian inflections engrafted on it. And what more natural? The Midland dialect was the dialect of his English teachers. The poems of Chaucer he probably had by heart.

Mr. Brown’s object in all this is to relegate the _Kingis Quair_ to that group of poems which are represented by the _Romaunt of the Rose_, _The Court of Love_, and _Lancelot of the Lak_, which appeared late in the fifteenth century, and in which all these peculiarities are very pronounced. Into philological details we have not space to enter, but this we will say. We will admit that _ane_ before a consonant, the past participle in _yt_ or _it_, the pronouns _thaire_ and _thame_, the plural form _quhilkis_, the employment of the verb _to do_ in the emphatic conjugation and the like, are peculiarities which belong to a period not earlier than about 1440, and that all these peculiarities are to be found in the poem. But, we contend that these are just as likely to be due to the transcriber as they are to the author. Nothing was so common with copyists as to import into their texts the peculiarities of their own dialects, indeed it was habitual with them. Thus Hampole’s _Pricke of Conscience_ was greatly altered by southern scribes. Thus, in the Bannatyne MS., Chaucer’s minor poems were similarly altered by northern scribes. It is, in truth, the very height of rashness to dispute the genuineness of an original, in consequence of the presence of peculiarities which might quite well have been imported into it by a copyist. The resemblances between this poem and the _Court of Love_ are, we admit, not likely to have been mere coincidences, and we are quite ready to admit that the _Court of Love_ in the form in which we have it now, must be assigned to a much later date, more than a century later, than the date (1423) assigned to the _Kingis Quair_. But this is certain--that many, and very many, of the resemblances between the two poems are to be attributed to the fact that the writers were saturated with the influence of Chaucer, and delighted in imitating and recalling his poetry. If, again, it be assumed that one poem was the exemplar of the other, this is indisputable, that the _Court of Love_ was modelled on the _Kingis Quair_, and not the _Kingis Quair_ on the _Court of Love_. For, setting aside peculiarities which may be assigned to transcribers, there can be little doubt that the _Court of Love_ belongs to the sixteenth century at the very earliest, while Mr. Brown himself admits that the MS. of the _Kingis Quair_ may be approximately fixed at 1488.

Nothing can be more unsatisfactory than Mr. Brown’s attempt to show that the poem breaks down in autobiographical details, and that it derives these details from Wyntown’s _Chronicle_. James does not mention the exact year in which he was taken prisoner. He tells us that he commenced his voyage when the sun had begun to drive his course upward in the sign of Aries, that is, on or about the 12th of March--and that he had not far passed the state of innocence, “bot nere about the nowmer of zeris thre”--in other words, that he was about ten years of age. Hereupon Mr. Brown, assuming that Wyntown gives the date of the King’s birth correctly, proceeds to point out that the King was not at this time “about ten,” but that he was about eleven and a half; and then asks triumphantly whether James would have been likely to forget his own age. Again, he contends that the King’s capture could not have taken place in March, because it is highly probable that at the end of February, or at the beginning of March, the King was in the Tower. For the fact that he was in the Tower at that date there is not an iota of proof, or even of tolerably satisfactory presumptive evidence. How the author of the _Kingis Quair_ could have been indebted to Wyntown’s _Chronicle_ for the autobiographical details it is, indeed, difficult to see. The poem gives March as the date of the capture; the _Chronicle_ gives April. According to the poem, the King’s age at the time of his capture was about ten; according to the _Chronicle_, about eleven and a half. The _Chronicle_ gives the year of the capture; the poem does not. The _Chronicle_ gives details not to be found in the poem; the poem details not to be found in the _Chronicle_. Mr. Brown has no authority whatever for asserting that Book IX. chap. xxv. of the _Chronicle_ was certainly written years before James returned to Scotland. All we know about the _Chronicle_ is that it was finished between the 3rd of September, 1420, and the return of James in April, 1424.

Mr. Brown must forgive us for expressing regret that he should have wasted so much time and learning, in attempting to support a paradox which can only serve to perplex and mislead. Scholars, especially in these days, would do well to remember, that nothing can justify destructive criticism but a conscientious desire, on the part of those who apply it, to correct error and to discover truth. And they would also do well to ponder over Bacon’s weighty words: “Like as many substances in Nature which are solid do putrify and corrupt into worms, so it is the property of good and sound knowledge to putrify and dissolve into a number of subtle, idle, unwholesome, and, as I may term them, vermiculate questions, which have indeed a kind of quickness and life of spirit, but no soundness of matter nor goodness of substance.”

WILLIAM DUNBAR[24]

[Footnote 24: _William Dunbar._ By Oliphant Smeaton. Edinburgh: Oliphant.]

Boswell tells us that he once offered to teach Dr. Johnson the Scotch dialect, that the sage might enjoy the beauties of a certain Scotch pastoral poem, and received for his reply, “No, sir; I will not learn it. You shall retain your superiority by my not knowing it.” It would not be true to say that Dr. Johnson’s indifference to the Scotch language and to Scotch poetry has been shared by all cultivated Englishmen, but it has certainly been shared by a very large majority in every generation. The superb merit of many of the Scotch ballads, the lyrics of Burns and the novels of Scott have practically done little to diminish this majority and to induce English readers to acquire the knowledge which Dr. Johnson disdained. Nine Englishmen out of ten read Burns, either with an eye uneasily fishing the glossary at the bottom of the page, or _ad sensum_, that is, in contented ignorance of about three words in every nine. And this is, perhaps, all that can reasonably be expected of the Southerner. Life is short; the world of Scotch drink, Scotch religion and Scotch manners is not, as Matthew Arnold observed, a lovely one, and the time which such an accomplishment would require would be far more profitably spent in acquiring, say, the language of Dante and Ariosto, or even the language of the _Romancero General_ and of Cervantes. A modern reader may stumble, with more or less intelligence, through a poem of Burns, catching the general sense, enjoying the lilt, and even appreciating the niceties of rhythm. But this is not the case with the Scotch of the fifteenth century--the golden age of the vernacular poetry, the age when poets were writing thus:--

“Catyvis, wrechis, and ockeraris,
Hud-pykis, hurdaris, and gadderaris,
All with that warlo went;
Out of thair throttis thay schot on udder
Hett moltin gold, me thocht, a fudder
As fyre-flawcht, maist fervent,
Ay as thay tumit them of schot,
Feyndis fild thame new up to the thrott
With gold of allkin prent.”

The usual consequences have been the result of this ignorance. The Scotch have had it all their own way in estimating the merits of their vernacular classics, and the few outsiders, whether English or German, who have made the Scotch language and literature a special subject of study, have very naturally not been willing to underestimate the value of what it has cost them labour to acquire, and so have supported the exaggerated estimates of the Scotch themselves. What Voltaire so absurdly said of Dante, that his reputation was safe because no intelligent people read him, is literally true of such poets as Henryson, Douglas, and Dunbar. We simply take them on trust, and, as with most other things which are taken on trust, we seldom trouble ourselves about the titles and guarantees. It may be accepted as an uncontrolled truth that the world is always right, and very exactly right, in the long run. That mysterious tribunal which, resolved into the individuals which compose it, seems resolved into every conceivable source of ignorance, error, and folly, is ultimately infallible. There are no mismeasurements in the reputation of authors with whom readers of every class have been familiar for a hundred years. But, in the case of minor writers who appeal only to a minority, critical literature is the record of the most preposterous estimates. The history of the building up of these pseudo-reputations is generally the same in all cases. First we have the _obiter dictum_ of some famous man whose opinion naturally carries authority, uttered, it may be, carelessly in conversation, or committed, without deliberation, to paper, in a letter or occasional trifle. Then comes some little man, who takes up in deadly seriousness what the great man has said, and out comes, it may be, an essay or article. This wakes up some dreary pedant, who follows with an “edition” or “Study,” which naturally elicits from some kindred spirit a sympathetic review. Thus the ball is set rolling, or, to change the figure, bray swells bray, echo answers to echo, and the thing is done. Meanwhile, all that is of real interest and importance in the author thus resuscitated is lost sight of; in advocating his factitious claims to attention his real claims are ignored. For the true point of view is substituted a false, and the whole focus of criticism, so to speak, is deranged. The first requisite in estimating the work and relative position of a particular author is the last thing which these enthusiasts seem to consider, that is, the application of standards and touchstones derived not simply from the study of the author himself, but from acquaintance with the principles of criticism, and with what is excellent in universal literature.

All this has been illustrated in the case of the poet who is the subject of the volume before us. As Mr. Ruskin has pronounced _Aurora Leigh_ to be the greatest poem of this century, so Sir Walter Scott, who has, by the way, been singularly unjust to Lydgate and Hawes, pronounced Dunbar to be “a poet unrivalled by any that Scotland has ever produced.” a reckless judgment which he could never have expressed deliberately. Ellis followed suit, and in Ellis’ notice Dunbar is “the greatest poet Scotland has produced.” These judgments have, in effect, been reverberated by successive writers and editors. In due time, some fourteen years ago, appeared the inevitable German monograph, “William Dunbar: sein Leben und seine Gedichte,” by Dr. J. Schipper, to whom Mr. Oliphant Smeaton appropriately and reverently inscribes the present monograph.

In Mr. Oliphant Smeaton’s work Dunbar assumes the proportions which might be expected--he is a “mighty genius.” “The peer, if not in a few qualities, the superior of Chaucer and Spenser. By the indefeasible passport of the supreme genius he has an indisputable title to the apostolic succession of British poetry to that place between Chaucer and Spenser, that place which can only be claimed by one whose genius was co-ordinate with theirs.” As probably eight out of every ten of Mr. Smeaton’s readers will know nothing more of Dunbar than what Mr. Smeaton chooses to tell them, and as we, considering the space at our disposal, cannot refute him by a detailed examination of Dunbar’s works, it is fortunate that he has given us a succinct illustration of the value of his critical judgment. The following are four typical stanzas of a poem which Mr. Smeaton ranks with Milton’s _Lycidas_ and Shelley’s _Adonais_; we give them as Mr. Smeaton gives them, modernised:--

“I that in health was and gladness
Am troubled now with great sickness.
Enfeebled with infirmity,
_Timor mortis conturbat me._

“Our pleasure here is all vain glory,
This false world is but transitory,
The flesh is brittle, the fiend is slee,
_Timor mortis conturbat me._

“The state of man doth change and vary,
Now sound, now sick, now blyth, now sary
Now dancing merry, now like to dee,
_Timor mortis conturbat me._

“No state on earth here stands sicker,
As with the wind waves the wicker,
So waves this world’s vanity,
_Timor mortis conturbat me._”

As the following is pronounced to be one of the finest stanzas Dunbar ever penned, it is interesting as illustrating what is, in Mr. Smeaton’s opinion, the best work of this rival of Chaucer and Spenser:--

“Have mercy, love, have mercy, lady bright;
What have I wrought against your womankeid,
That you should murder me a sackless wight,
Trespassing on you nor in word nor deed?
That ye consent thereto, O God forbid;
Leave cruelty and save your man for shame,
Or through the world quite losëd is your name.”

It may be added that what are by far the finest passages in Dunbar’s poems are passed unnoticed and unquoted by Mr. Smeaton. Indeed, his acquaintance with Dunbar, or, at all events, his taste in selection, is exactly on a par with that of Ned Softley’s with Waller. “As that admirable writer has the best and worst verses among our English poets, Ned,” says Addison, “has got all the bad ones by heart, which he repeats upon occasion to show his reading.” Should Mr. Smeaton ever meet his idol in Hades, we would in all kindness advise him to avoid an encounter; let him remember that the fulsome eulogy is his own, but that the verses quoted are the poet’s. Attempted murder--so the irate shade might argue--is less serious than compulsory suicide.

Dunbar was undoubtedly a man of genius, but a reference to the poets who immediately preceded him will make large deductions from the praises lavished on him by his eulogists. He struck no new notes. _The Thistle and the Rose_ and _The Golden Terge_ are mere echoes of Chaucer and Lydgate, and, in some degree, of the author of _The King’s Quair_, and are indeed full of plagiarisms from them. _The Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins_ is probably little more than a faithful description of a popular mummery. His moral and religious poems had their prototypes, even in Scotland, in such poets as Johnston and Henryson. His most remarkable characteristic is his versatility, which ranges from the composition of such poems as _The Merle and the Nightingale_ to the _Twa Maryit Wemen and the Wedo_, from such lyrics as the _Meditation in Winter_ to such lyrics as the _Plea for Pity_. Mr. Smeaton calls him “a giant in an age of pigmies.” The author or authoress of _The Flower and the Leaf_ was infinitely superior to him in point of style, Henryson was infinitely superior to him in originality, and Gavin Douglas at least his equal in power of expression and in description.

Let us do Dunbar the justice which Mr. Smeaton has not done him, and take him at his very best. Here is part of a picture of a May morning,--

“For mirth of May, wyth skippis and wyth hoppis
The birdis sang upon the tender croppis,
With curiouse notis, as Venus Chapell clerkis.
The rosis yong, new spreding of their knoppis,
War powderit brycht with hevinly beriall droppis;
Throu bemes rede, birnyng as ruby sperkis,
The skyes rang for schoutyng of the larkis.”

This is brilliant and picturesque rhetoric touched into poetry by the “Venus Chapell clerkis,” and the magical note in the last line; so too the touch in _The Golden Terge_, likening the faery ship to “blossom upon the spray.” But in his allegorical poem he is too fond of the “quainte enamalit termes,” and his verse has a certain metallic ring. It will be admitted, we suppose, that the best of his moral poems would be _The Merle and the Nightingale_ and “Be Merrie Man”; but the utmost which can be said for them is, that the philosophy is excellent and its expression adequate; that is, that they have little to distinguish them from hundreds of other poems of the same class.

In speaking of Dunbar’s satires, Mr. Smeaton indulges himself in the following nonsense, “From the genial, jesting, and ironical incongruities of Horace and Persius we are introduced at once into the bitter, vitriolic scourgings of Juvenal,” and in the following rhodomontade, telling us that they unite “the natural directness of Hall, the subtle depth of Donne, the delicate humour of Breton, the sturdy vigour of Dryden, the scalding, vitriolic bitterness of Swift, the pungency of Churchill, the rural smack of Gay, united to an approach at least to the artistic perfection of Pope.” Stuff like this and indiscriminate eulogy are, no doubt, much easier to produce than an estimate of a writer’s historical position and importance. Of the relation of Dunbar to his predecessors and contemporaries in England and Scotland, of his prototypes and models in French and Provençal literature, of the influence which he undoubtedly exercised on subsequent poetry, and especially on Spenser, Mr. Smeaton has nothing to say. It never seems to occur to him that his hero, like every one else, must have had his limitations, that “the many-sidedness of that genius which has a ring”--the metaphors are not ours, but Mr. Smeaton’s--“almost Shakespearian, about it,” could hardly have been distinguished by uniformity of excellence; that “that painter of contemporary manners, who had all the vividness of a Callot, united to the broad humour of a Teniers and the minute touch of a Meissonier,” who “reflected in his verse the most delicate _nuances_, as well as the most startling colours of the age wherein he lived,” must have had degrees in success.

We have singled out this volume for special notice, not because of any intrinsic title it possesses to serious attention, but because it is typical of a species of literature which is rapidly becoming one of the pests of our time. While every encouragement should be given to sober, judicious, and competent reviews of our older writers, every discouragement should be given, out of respect to the dead, as well as in the interests of the living, to such books as the present. For they are as mischievous as they are ridiculous. They misinform; they mislead; they corrupt, or tend to corrupt, taste. After laying down a volume like this we feel, and we expect Dunbar would have felt, that there is something much more formidable than the old horror, “the candid friend,” even that indicated by Tacitus--_pessimum inimicorum genus--laudantes_.

A GALLOP THROUGH ENGLISH LITERATURE[25]

[Footnote 25: _A Literary History of the English People from the Origins to the Renaissance._ By J. J. Jusserand.]

There is a breeziness and hilarity, a gay irresponsibility and abandon, about M. Jusserand which is perfectly delightful. He is the very Autolycus of History and Criticism. What more sober students, who have some conscience to trouble them, are “toiling all their lives to find” appears to be his as a sort of natural right. The fertility of his genius is such, that it seems to blossom spontaneously into erudition. Like the lilies he toils not, but unlike the lilies he spins, and very pretty gossamer too. It is impossible to take him seriously.

The truth is that M. Jusserand belongs to a class of writers which, thanks to indulgent publishers, a more indulgent public, and most indulgent reviewers, is just now greatly in the ascendant. “Encyclopædical heads,” who took all knowledge for their province, probably died with Bacon, but encyclopædical heads who take all Literature or all History for their province appear to be as common as the “excellence” which, in opposition to Matthew Arnold’s opinion, the American lady maintained was so abundant on both sides of the Atlantic. These are the gentlemen who complacently sit down “to edit the Literatures of the world,” or “to trace the development of the human race, from its picturesque cradle in the valleys of Central Asia, to its infinite ramifications in our own day”--within “the moderate compass of an octavo volume.”

M. Jusserand’s first feat is to dispose of some six centuries in ninety-three pages, in a narrative which simply tells over again, though certainly after a more jaunty fashion, what Ten Brink, Henry Morley, and others have told much more seriously, and, we may add, much more effectively. The Norman Conquest and an account of the Anglo-Norman literature occupy about a hundred and ten pages, while some eighty pages more, dealing with the fusion of the races and the gradual evolution of the English people and language, bring us to Chaucer. It might have been expected that M. Jusserand would have justified his survey of a period so often reviewed before, either by tracing, with more fulness and precision than his predecessors, the successive stages in the development of our nationality and its expression in literature, or by adding to our knowledge of the characteristics and peculiarities of the literature itself. He has done neither. He has, on the contrary, obscured the first by the constant introduction of irrelevant matter, and he has apparently no notion of the relative importance of the authors on whose works he dilates or touches. Thus Richard Rolle of Hampole fills more space than Layamon, whose work is despatched in a page! Thus two lines in a note suffice for the _Ormulum_, two lines for Mannyng’s _Handlyng of Synne_, a singularly interesting and significant work, ten lines for Robert of Gloucester, who is rather perplexingly described as “a distant ancestor of Gibbon and Macaulay,” while four pages are accorded to _Tristan_ and five to the _Roman du Renart_. How the Latin Chroniclers fare may be judged from the fact that a little more than a page serves for Geoffrey of Monmouth, a line for Ordericus Vitalis, and two for Giraldus Cambrensis. In the chapter on Chaucer M. Jusserand does more justice to his subject, and it is to be regretted for his own sake that he has not confined himself to such essays. He is never safe except when he is on the beaten path. Nothing could be more inadequate than the section on Gower. It certainly indicates that M. Jusserand is not very familiar with the _Confessio Amantis_. Not one word is said about the remarkable prologue, and to dismiss such a work in less than three pages, observing that “it contains a hundred and twelve short stories, two or three of which are very well told, one, the adventure of Florent, being, perhaps, related even better than in Chaucer,” is not quite what we should expect in a work purporting to narrate the “literary history of the English people.” M. Jusserand has not even taken the trouble to keep pace with modern investigation in his subject, but actually tells us that Gower’s _Speculum Meditantis_ is lost! If Gower’s writings are not of much intrinsic value, they are of immense importance from an historical point of view. John de Trevisa, a most important name in the history of English prose, is despatched in eight lines of mere bibliographical information, without a word being said about his great services to our literature, and without any reference being made either to the remarkable preface to his great work, or to his version of the Dialogue attributed to Occam.

The only satisfactory chapter in the book is the chapter dealing with Langland and his works; but it is certainly surprising that no account should be given of the very remarkable anonymous poem entitled _Piers Ploughman’s Crede_. Again, whole departments of literature, such as the Metrical Romances, the Laies, Fabliaux, early lyrics and ballads, are most inadequately treated, some of the most memorable and typical being not even specified. Surely Minot was not a man to be dismissed, with a flippant joke, in half a page, or _King Horn_ and _Havelok_ poems to be relegated to passing reference in a note.

But it is in dealing with the literature of the fifteenth century that M. Jusserand’s superficiality and, to put it plainly, incompetence for his ambitious task become most deplorably apparent. In treating the earlier periods he had trustworthy guides even in common manuals, and he could not go far wrong in accepting their generalizations and statements. Books easily attainable, and indeed in everybody’s hands, could enable him to dance airily through the Anglo-Saxon literature and through the period between Layamon and Chaucer. No one can now very well go wrong in Chaucer and his contemporaries, who has at his side some half-dozen works which any library can supply. But it is otherwise with the literature of the fifteenth century. Here, as every one who happens to have paid particular attention to it knows, popular manuals and histories are most misleading guides. Deterred, no doubt, by the prolixity of the poetry and by the comparatively uninteresting nature of the prose literature, modern historians and critics have contented themselves with accepting the verdicts of Warton and his followers, who probably had as little patience as themselves; and so a kind of conventional estimate has been formed, which appears and reappears in every manual and handbook. We turned, therefore, with much curiosity to this portion of M. Jusserand’s work. We had, we own, our suspicions about his first-hand knowledge of the literature through which he glided so easily in the earlier portions of his book, and here, we thought, would be the crucial test of his pretension to original scholarship. Would he do voluminous Lydgate the justice which, as the specialist knows, has so long been withheld from him? Would he point out the strong human interest of Hoccleve; the great historical interest of Hardyng; the power and beauty of the ballads; or, if he included Hawes within the century, would he show what a singularly interesting poem, intrinsically and historically, the _Pastime of Pleasure_ really is? If, again, he included the Scotch poets, how would he deal with the problems presented by Huchown? Would he accord the proper tribute to the genius of Dunbar; would he estimate what poetry owes respectively to James I., Henry the Minstrel, Robert Henryson, and Gavin Douglas? In our prose literature, would he comment on the great importance of Pecock’s memorable work, of Fortescue’s two treatises, of the _Paston Letters_, of Caxton’s various publications? How would he deal with the one “classical” work of the century, Malory’s _Morte d’Arthur_?