Chapter III: Part 3

Now that our century has entered upon its last decade, and draws near the hour which will despatch it to join its too frequently and most unjustly despised predecessor, it is pleasing to note how well it has learnt to play the old man’s part. One has only to compare the _Edinburgh Review_ of, say, October, 1807, with its last number, to appreciate the change that has come over us. Cocksureness, once the badge of the tribe of critics, is banished to the schoolroom. The hearty hatreds of our early days would ill befit a death-bed. A keen critic has observed what a noisy place England used to be. Everybody cried out loud in the market-place, in the Senate-house, in the Law Courts, in the Reviews and Magazines. In the year 1845 the _Times_ newspaper incurred the heavy and doubtless the just censure of the Oxford Union for its unprincipled tone as shown in its ‘violent attempts to foment agitation as well by inflammatory articles as by the artifices of correspondents.’ How different it now is! We all move about as it were in list slippers. Our watchword is ‘Hush!’ Dickens tells us how, at Hone’s funeral, Cruikshank, being annoyed at some of the observations of the officiating minister, whispered in Dickens’ ear as they both moved to kneel at prayer, ‘If this wasn’t a funeral I would punch his head.’ It was a commendable restraint. We are now, all of us, exercising it.

A gloomy view is being generally taken of our literary future in the next century. Poetry, it is pretty generally agreed, has died with Lord Tennyson. Who, it is said, can take any pride or pleasure in the nineties, whose memory can carry him back to the sixties? What days those were that gave us brand-new from the press ‘Philip’ and ‘The Four Georges,’ ‘The Mill on the Floss’ and ‘Silas Marner,’ ‘Evan Harrington’ and ‘Rhoda Fleming,’ ‘Maud,’ ‘The Idylls of the King,’ and ‘Dramatis Personæ,’ Mr. Arnold’s New Poems, the ‘Apologia pro Vitâ Suâ,’ and ‘Verses on Various Occasions,’ four volumes of ‘Frederick the Great,’ and ‘The Origin of Species’! One wonders in the retrospect how human stupidity was proof against such an onslaught of wit, such a shower of golden fancies. Why did not Folly’s fortress fall? We know it did not, for it is standing yet. Nor has any particular halo gathered round the sixties--which, indeed, were no better than the fifties or the forties.

From what source, so ask ‘the frosty pows,’ are you who call yourselves ‘jolly candidates’ for 1900, going to get your supplies? Where are your markets? Who will crowd the theatre on your opening nights? What well-graced actors will then cross your stage? Your boys and girls will be well provided for, one can see that. Story-books and handbooks will jostle for supremacy; but your men and women, all a-hungered, how are you going to feed them and keep their tempers sweet? It is not a question of side dishes, but of joints. Sermons and sonnets, and even ‘clergy-poets,’ may be counted upon, but they will only affront the appetites they can never satisfy. What will be wanted are Sam Wellers, Captain Costigans, and Jane Eyres--poetry that lives, controversy that bites, speeches that stir the imagination.

Thus far the aged century. To argue with it would be absurd; to silence it cruel, and perhaps impossible. Greedy Time will soon do that.

But suppose it should turn out to be the fact that we are about to enter upon a period of well-cultivated mediocrity. What then? Centuries cannot be expected to go on repeating the symptoms of their predecessors. We have had no Burns. We cannot, therefore, expect to end with the beginnings of a Wordsworth and a Coleridge; there may likely be a lull. The lull may also be a relief. Of all odd crazes, the craze to be for ever reading new books is one of the oddest.

Hazlitt may be found grappling with this subject, and, as usual, ‘punishing’ it severely in his own inimitable style. ‘I hate,’ says he, in the second volume of ‘The Plain Speaker’--in the essay entitled ‘On Reading Old Books’--‘to read new books;’ and he continues, a page further on, ‘Contemporary writers may generally be divided into two classes--one’s friends or one’s foes. Of the first we are compelled to think too well, and of the last we are disposed to think too ill, to receive much genuine pleasure from the perusal, or to judge fairly of the merit of either. One candidate for literary fame who happens to be of our acquaintance writes finely and like a man of genius, but unfortunately has a foolish face, which spoils a delicate passage; another inspires us with the highest respect for his personal talents and character, but does not come up to our expectations in print. All these contradictions and petty details interrupt the calm current of our reflections.’

Hazlitt was no doubt a good hater. We are now of milder mood. It ought not to be difficult for any of us, if we but struggle a little, to keep a man’s nose out of his novel. But, for all that, it is certain that true literary sway is borne but by the dead. Living authors may stir and stimulate us, provoke our energies, and excite our sympathy, but it is the dead who rule us from their urns.

Authority has no place in matters concerning books and reading, else it would be well were some proportion fixed between the claims of living and dead authors.

There is no sillier affectation than that of old-worldism. To rave about Sir Thomas Browne and know nothing of William Cobbett is foolish. To turn your back upon your own time is simply to provoke living wags, with rudimentary but effective humour, to chalk opprobrious epithets upon your person. But, on the other hand, to depend upon your contemporaries for literary sustenance, to be reduced to scan the lists of ‘Forthcoming Works’ with a hungry eye, to complain of a dearth of new poems, and new novels, and new sermons, is worse than affectation--it is stupidity.

There was a time when old books were hard to procure and difficult to house. With the exception of a few of the greatest, it required as much courage to explore the domains of our old authors as it did to visit Wast Water or Loch Maree before the era of roads and railways. The first step was to turn the folios into octavos, and to publish complete editions; the second was to cheapen the price of issue. The first cheap booksellers were, it is sometimes alleged, men of questionable character in their trade. Yet their names should be cherished. They made many young lives happy, and fostered better taste than either or both the Universities. Hogg, Cooke, Millar, Donaldson, Bell, even Tegg, the ‘extraneous Tegg’ of Carlyle’s famous Parliamentary petition, did good work in their day. Somehow or another the family libraries of the more respectable booksellers hung fire. They did not find their way about. Perhaps their authors were selected with too much care.

‘He wales a portion with judicious care.’

The pious Cottar did well, but the world is larger than the family; besides which it is not always ‘Saturday Night.’ Cooke had no scruples. He published ‘Tom Jones’ in fortnightly, and (I think) sixpenny parts, embellished with cuts, and after the same appetising fashion proceeded right through the ‘British Novelists.’ He did the same with the ‘British Poets.’ It was a noble enterprise. You never see on a stall one of Cooke’s books but it is soiled by honest usage; its odour speaks of the thousand thumbs that have turned over its pages with delight. Cooke made an immense fortune, and deserved to do so. He believed both in genius and his country. He gave the people cheap books, and they bought them gladly. He died at an advanced age in 1810. Perhaps when he came to do so he was glad he had published a series of ‘Sacred Classics,’ as well as ‘Tom Jones.’

We are now living in an age of handsome reprints. It is possible to publish a good-sized book on good paper and sell it at a profit for fourpence halfpenny. But of course to do this, as the profit is too small to bear division, you must get the Authors out of the way. Our admirable copyright laws and their own sedentary habits do this on the whole satisfactorily and in due course. Consequently dead authors are amazingly cheap. Not merely Shakespeare and Milton, Bunyan and Burns, but Scott and Macaulay, Thackeray and Dickens. Living authors are deadly dear. You may buy twenty books by dead men at the price of one work by a living man. The odds are fearful. For my part, I hope a _modus vivendi_ may be established between the publishers of the dead and those of the living; but when you examine the contents of the ‘Camelot Classics,’ the ‘Carisbrooke Library,’ the ‘Chandos Classics,’ the ‘Canterbury Poets,’ the ‘Mermaid Series of the Old Dramatists,’ and remember, or try to remember, the publishing lists of Messrs. Routledge, Mr. Black, Messrs Warne, and Messrs. Cassell, it is easy for the reader to snap his fingers at Fate. It cannot touch him--he can dine for many a day. Even were our ‘lyrical cry’ to be stifled for half a century, what with Mr. Bullen’s ‘Elizabethan Lyrics,’ and ‘More Elizabethan Lyrics,’ and ‘Lyrics from the Dramatists,’ and ‘Lyrics from the Romances,’ and Mr. Palgrave’s ‘Golden Treasury,’ ‘a man,’ as Mr. Markham observes in ‘David Copperfield,’ ‘might get on very well here,’ even though that man were, as Markham asserted himself to be, ‘hungry all day long.’ A British poet does not cease to be a poet because he is dead, nor is he, for that matter, any the better a poet for being alive.

As for a scarcity of living poets proving national decadence, it would be hard to make out that case. Who sang Chatham’s victories by sea and land?

BOOK-BINDING.

There is a familiar anecdote of the ingenious author of ‘The Seasons,’ ‘Rule, Britannia,’ and other excellent pieces, that when he sent a well-bound copy of his poems to his father, who had always regarded him, not altogether unjustly, as a ‘feckless loon,’ that canny Scot handled the volume with unfeigned delight, and believing that his son had bound it, cried out admiringly, ‘Who would have thought our Jamie could have done the like of this?’ This particular copy has not been preserved, and it is therefore impossible for us to determine how far its bibliopegic merits justified the rapture of the elder Thomson, whose standard is not likely to have been a high one. Indeed, despite his rusticity, he was probably a better judge of poetry than of binding.

This noble craft has revived in our midst. Twenty years ago, in ordinary circles, the book-binder was a miscreant who, by the aid of a sharp knife, a hideous assortment of calf-skins and of marbled papers, bound your books for you by slaughtering their margins, stripping their sides, and returning them upon your hands cropped and in prison garb, and so lettered as to tell no man what they were. And the worst of it was we received them with complacency, gave them harbourage upon our shelves, and only grumbled that the price was so high as four shillings a volume. Those days are over. Yet it is well to be occasionally reminded of the rock from whence we were hewn, and the pit out of which we were digged. I have now lying before me a first edition of the essays of Elia which, being in boards, I allowed to be treated by a provincial called Shimmin, in the sixties. I remember its coming home, and how I thought it was all right. Infancy was no excuse for such ignorance.

The second-hand booksellers, a race of men for whom I have the greatest respect, are to blame in this matter. They did not play the part they might have been expected to do. They gave no prominence in their catalogues, which are the true text-books of literature, to specimens of book-binding, nor did they instil into the minds of their young customers the rudiments of taste. Worse than this, some of the second-hand booksellers in the country were themselves binders, and, for the most part, infamous ones.

One did, indeed, sometimes hear of Roger Payne and of the Harleian style, but dimly, and as a thing of no moment, nor were our eyes ever regaled in booksellers’ catalogues with facsimiles of the exquisite bindings of the French and English masters. Nor was it until we went further afield, and became acquainted with the booksellers of Paris, that this new world swam into our ken. It was a great day when a stray copy of a ‘Bulletin Mensuel’ of Damascene Morgand, the famous bookseller in the Passage des Panoramas, fell into the hands of a mere country book-buyer. Then he knew how brutally he had been deceived--then he looked with loathing on his truncated tomes and their abominable devices. The first really bound book I ever saw was a copy of the works of Pierre de Ronsard bearing the devices of Marguerite de Valois. The price was so far beyond my resources that I left the shop without a touch of envy, but the scales had fallen from my eyes, and I walked down the Passage des Panoramas as one who had awakened from a dream.

Nowadays it is quite different. The Arts and Crafts Exhibition did much, and the second-hand booksellers, in quite ordinary places, are beginning to give in their catalogues reproductions of noble specimens. Nothing else is required. To see is enough. There was recently, as most people know, a wonderful exhibition of bindings to be seen at the Burlington Fine Art Club, but what is not so generally known is that the Club has published a magnificent catalogue of the contents of that Exhibition, with no less than 114 plates reproducing with the greatest possible skill and delicacy some of the finest specimens. Mr. Gordon Duff, who is credited with a profounder knowledge of pigskins than any living man, has contributed a short preface to the volume, whilst Miss Prideaux, herself a binder of great merit, has written a general introduction, in which she traces the history of the craft, and duly records the names of the most famous binders of Europe. A more fascinating picture-book cannot be imagined, for to the charm of colour and design is added all the feeling which only a book can impart. Such a book as this marks an epoch, and ought to be the beginning of a time when even sale-catalogues shall take pains to be splendid.

When the library of the Baron de Lacarelle came to be dispersed at his death a few years ago, the auctioneer’s catalogue, as issued by Charles Porquet, of the Quai Voltaire, made a volume which, wherever it goes, imparts dignity to human endeavour, and consecrates a virtuoso’s whim. It was but a small library--only 540 books--and to call it well selected would be to abuse a term one has learnt to connect with Major Ponto’s library in ‘The Book of Snobs.’ ‘My library’s small,’ says Ponto, with the most amazing impudence, ‘but well selected, my boy, well selected. I have been reading the History of England all the morning.’ He could not have done this in the Baron’s library.

As you turn the pages of this glorified catalogue, his treasures seem to lie before you--you can almost stroke them. A devoted friend, _de la Société des Bibliophiles français_, contributes an ecstatic sketch of the Baron’s character, and tells us of him how he employed in his hunt after a book infinite artifice, and called to his aid all the resources of learned strategy--‘poussant ses approches et manœuvrant, autour de la place, avec la prudence et le génie d’un tacticien consommé, si bien que le malheureux libraire, enlacé, fasciné, hypnotisé par ce grand charmeur, finissait presque toujours par capituler et se rendre.’ This great man only believed in one modern binder: Trautz. The others did not exist for him. ‘Cherchez-vous à le convertir? Il restait incorruptible et répétait invariablement, avec cet esprit charmant, mais un peu railleur, dont il avait le privilège, que s’il était jamais damné, son enfer serait de remuer une reliure de Capé ou de Lortic!’

It is all very splendid and costly and grand, yet still from time to time,

‘From the soul’s subterranean depth upborne,’

there comes the thought of Charles Lamb amidst ‘the ragged veterans’ he loved so well, and then in an instant a reaction sets in, and we almost hate this sumptuous Baron.

Thomson’s “Seasons,” again, looks best (I maintain it) a little torn and dog’s-eared. How beautiful to a genuine lover of reading are the sullied leaves and worn-out appearance, nay, the very odour (beyond Russia), if we would not forget kind feelings in fastidiousness, of an old “circulating library” “Tom Jones” or the “Vicar of Wakefield”!’ Thus far, Elia.

Let us admit that the highest and noblest joys are those which are in widest commonalty spread, and that accordingly the clay pipe of the artisan is more truly emotional than the most marvellous meerschaum to be seen in the shop-windows of Vienna--still, the collector has his joys and his uses, his triumphant moments, his hours of depression, and, if only he publishes a catalogue, may be pronounced in small type a benefactor of the human race.

POETS LAUREATE.

About forty years ago two ingenious gentlemen, Mr. Austin, of Exeter College, and Mr. Ralph, a member of the Bar, published a book containing short sketches of the lives of Poets Laureate of this realm, beginning with Ben Jonson and ending with Wordsworth, and also an essay on the Title and Office. It has sometimes been rudely said that Laureates came into fashion when fools and jesters went out, but the perusal of Messrs. Austin and Ralph’s introductory essay, to say nothing of the most cursory examination of the table of contents of their volume, is enough to disprove the truth of this saying.

A Laureate was originally a purely University title, bestowed upon those Masters of Arts who had exhibited skill in the manufacture of Latin verses, and had nothing to do with the civil authority or royal favour. Thus, the famous Skelton (1460-1529) was laureated at Oxford, and afterwards obtained permission to wear his laurel at Cambridge; but though tutor to King Henry VIII., and, according to Miss Strickland, the original corrupter of that monarch, he was never a Poet Laureate in the modern sense of the word; that is, he was never appointed to hold the place and quality of Poet Laureate to his Majesty. I regret this, for he was a man of original genius. Campbell, writing in 1819, admits his ‘vehemence and vivacity,’ but pronounces his humour ‘vulgar and flippant,’ and his style a texture of slang phrases; but Mr. Churton Collins, in 1880, declares that Skelton reminds him more of Rabelais than any author in our language, and pronounces him one of the most versatile and essentially original of all our poets. We hold with Mr. Collins.

Skelton was popularly known as a Poet Laureate, and in the earliest edition of his poems, which bears no date, but is about 1520, he is described on the title-page as ‘Mayster Skelton, Poet Laureate,’ as he also is in the first collected edition of 1568, ‘Pithy pleasaunt and profitable works of Maister Skelton, Poete Laureate.’ This title was the University title, and not a royal one.

Spenser is sometimes reckoned amongst the Poets Laureate; but, as a matter of fact, he had no right to the title at all, nor did he or his publishers ever assume it. He is, of course, one of the poetical glories of Cambridge, but he was never laureated there, nor did Queen Elizabeth ever appoint him her poet, though she granted him £50 a year.

The first Laureate, in the modern sense of the word, is undoubtedly Ben Jonson, to whom Charles I. made out a patent conferring upon this famous man £100 a year and ‘a terse of Canary Spanish wine,’ which latter benefit the miserable Pye commuted for £27. From Jonson to Tennyson there is no breach of continuity, for Sir William Davenant, who was appointed in 1638, survived till the Restoration, dying in 1668. The list is a curious one, and is just worth printing: Jonson, Davenant, Dryden, Shadwell, Nahum Tate, Rowe, the Rev. Laurence Eusden, Colley Cibber, William Whitehead, the Rev. Thomas Warton, Henry James Pye, Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, Lord Tennyson.

One must be charitable in these matters. Here are fourteen names and four great ones--Jonson, Dryden, Wordsworth and Tennyson; two distinguished ones--Nicholas Rowe and Robert Southey; two clever names--Shadwell and Colley Cibber; two respectable names--Tate and Warton; one interesting name--Davenant; and three unutterable names--Eusden, Whitehead and Pye. After all, it is not so very bad. The office was offered to Gray, and he refused it. Pope, as a Roman Catholic, was out of the question. It would have suited Thomson well enough, and have tickled Goldsmith’s fancy mightily. Collins died too young.

But Eusden, Whitehead and Pye, how did they manage it? and what in the name of wonder did they write? Eusden was of Irish extraction, but was born the son of an English clergyman, and was like most poets a Cambridge man. He owed his appointment in 1718 to the Duke of Newcastle of the period, whose favour he had won by a poem addressed to him on the occasion of his marriage with the Lady Henrietta Godolphin. But he had also qualified for the office by verses sacred to the memory of George I., and in praise of George II.

‘Hail, mighty monarch! whom desert alone
Would, without birthright, raise up to the throne,
Thy virtues shine peculiarly nice,
Ungloomed with a confinity to vice.’

To do Grub Street justice, it was very angry with this appointment, and Hesiod Cooke wrote a poem called ‘The Battle of the Poets,’ in which the new Laureate was severely but truthfully handled in verse not conspicuously better than his own:

‘Eusden, a laurelled bard by fortune rais’d,
By very few been read--by fewer prais’d.’

Eusden is the author of ‘Verses Spoken at the Public Commencement in Cambridge,’ published in quarto, which are said to be indecent. Our authors refer to them as follows:

‘Those prurient lines which we dare not quote, but which the curious may see in the library of the British Museum, were specially composed and repeated for the edification and amusement of some of the noblest and fairest of our great-great-grandmothers.’ Eusden took to drinking and translating Tasso, and died at his living, for he was a parson, of Coningsby in Lincolnshire.

Of William Whitehead you may read in Campbell’s ‘Specimens of the British Poets.’ He was the son of a baker, was school-tutor to Lord Lymington, and having been treated at Oxford in the shabby way that seat of learning has ever treated poets--from Shirley to Calverley--proceeded to Cambridge, that true nest of singing-birds, where he obtained a Fellowship and the post of domestic tutor to the eldest son of the Earl of Jersey. He was always fond of the theatre, and his first effort was a little farce which was never published, but which tempted him to compose heavy tragedies which were. Of these tragedies it would be absurd to speak; they never enjoyed any popularity, either on the stage or in the closet. He owed his appointment--which he did not obtain till Gray had refused it--entirely to his noble friends.

Campbell had the courage to reprint a longish poem of Whitehead’s called ‘Variety: a Tale for Married People.’ It really is not very, very, bad, but it will never be reprinted again; and so I refer ‘the curious’ to Mr. Campbell’s seventh volume.

As for Pye, he was a scholar and a gentleman, a barrister, a member of Parliament, and a police magistrate. On his father’s death he inherited a large estate, which he actually sold to pay his parent’s debts, though he was under no obligation to do so, as in those days a man’s real estate was not liable to pay the debts he might chance to leave undischarged at his death. To pay a dead man’s debts out of his land was to rob his heir. Pye was not famous as a Parliamentary orator, but he was not altogether silent, like Gibbon; for we read that in 1788 he told the House that his constituents had suffered from a scanty hay-harvest. He was appointed Laureate in 1790, and he died in 1813. He was always made fun of as a poet, and, unfortunately for him, there was another poet in the House at the same time, called Charles Small Pybus; hence the jest, ‘Pye et Parvus Pybus,’ which was in everyone’s mouth. He was a voluminous author and diligent translator, but I do not recollect ever seeing a single book of his in a shop, or on a stall, or in a catalogue. As a Poet Great Pye is dead--as dead as Parvus Pybus, M.P., but let us all try hard to remember that he paid his father’s debts out of his own pocket.

‘Only the actions of the just,
Smell _sweet_ and blossom in their dust.’

PARLIAMENTARY CANDIDATES.

The best time to study at leisure the habits and manners of the candidate for Parliament is shortly before an anticipated dissolution. Even as once in a series of years the astronomer furbishes up his telescope and observes the transit of a planet across the surface of the sun, so, as a General Election approaches, and when, consequently, candidates are numerous, the curious observer of human nature in all its wayward manifestations hastens to some place where experience has taught him candidates will be found gathered together.

No spot is so favourable for an investigation of this kind as the scene of a contested by-election which takes place when a General Election is at no great distance. The investigation cannot with safety be postponed until a General Election. Then all is hurry and confusion. There is a fight in every constituency. No man can help his neighbour. Everybody is on his own war-path. There is, therefore, no concentration of candidates. They are scattered up and down the land and so flurried that it is almost impossible to observe their humours. To appreciate a candidate properly takes time--a great deal of time. But at a by-election shortly before a General Election candidates are to be found in shoals--genuine candidates who have all gone through the proud process of selection, who enjoy a status peculiarly their own, who have a part to play, and play it with spirit. They hurry to the contest from afar. With what readiness do they proffer their services! Like sea-birds, they come screaming and flapping their wings, and settle down at the same hotel, which for days resounds with their cheerful cries. This is quite the best place to observe them. In the smoking-room at night, after their oratorical labours are over, they are very great, very proud, very happy. Their talk is of their constituencies, as they are pleased to designate the districts which have chosen them. They retail the anecdotes with which they are wont to convulse their audiences. The stories are familiar, but not as they tell them.

What a contrast do these bright, hopeful creatures present to their taciturn, cynical companions!--sombre figures, who sit sucking at their pipes, the actual members of Parliament, who, far from flying joyfully to the field of battle, as the candidate has just done, have been driven there, grunting and grumbling, by the angry crack of the party Whips.

As you listen to the frank, exuberant speech of the candidate, recounting the points he has made during the day, the conviction he has brought home to the waverer, the dilemmas he has thrust upon his opponents, the poor show made by somebody who thought to embarrass him by an interruption, and compare it with the gloomy asides of the member, who, however brave a figure he may have made upon the platform an hour or two before, seems now painfully alive to the inherent weakness of his cause, doubtful of victory anywhere, certain of defeat where he is, it is almost impossible to believe that once upon a time the member was himself a candidate.

Confidence is the badge of the tribe of candidates. How it is born, where it is bred, on what it feeds save vanity, we cannot tell. Figures cannot shake it. It is too majestical to be affected by ridicule. From scorn and brutal jest it turns contemptuously away. When a collision occurs between the boundless confidence of the candidate and the bottomless world-wearied scepticism of the member, it is interesting to note how wholly ineffectual is the latter to disturb, even for a moment, the beautifully poised equilibrium of the former.

‘I always forget the name of the place you are trying for,’ I lately overheard a member, during an election contest, observe at breakfast-time to a candidate.

‘The Slowcombe Division of Mudfordshire,’ replied the candidate.

‘Oh!’ said the member, with a groan, as he savagely chipped at his egg; ‘I thought they had given you something better than that.’

‘I wish for nothing better,’ said the candidate; ‘I’m safe enough.’

And so saying, he rose from the table, and, taking his hat, went off on to the Parade, where he was soon joined by another candidate, and the pair whiled away a couple of hours in delightful converse.

The politics of candidates are fierce things. In this respect the British commodity differs materially from the American. Mr. Lowell introduces the American candidate as saying:

‘Ez to my princerples, I glory
In hevin’ nothin’ o’ the sort.
I ain’t a Whig, I ain’t a Tory--
I’m just a Canderdate, in short.’

Our candidates--good, excellent fellows that they are--are not a bit like Mr. Lowell’s. They have as many principles as a fish has bones; their vision is clear. The following expressions are constantly on their lips:

‘I can see no difficulty about it--I have explained it all to my people over and over again, and no more can they. I and my constituency are entirely at one in the matter. I must say our leaders are very disappointing My people are getting a little dissatisfied, though, of course, I tell them they must not expect everything at once, and I think they see that’--and so on for an hour or two.

There is nothing a candidate hates more than a practical difficulty; he feels discomfited by it. It destroys the harmony of his periods, the sweep of his generalizations. All such things he dismisses as detail, ‘which need not now detain us, gentlemen.’

Herein, perhaps, consists the true happiness of the candidate. He is the embodied Hope of his party. He will grapple with facts--when he becomes one. In the meantime he floats about, cheered wherever he goes. It is an intoxicating life.

Sometimes when candidates and members meet together--not to aid their common cause at a by-election, but for the purpose of discussing the prospects of their party--the situation gets a little accentuated. Candidates have a habit of glaring around them, which is distinctly unpleasant; whilst some members sniff the air, as if that were a recognised method of indicating the presence of candidates. Altogether, the less candidates and members see of one another, the better. They are antipathetic; they harm one another.

The self-satisfaction and hopefulness of the candidate, his noisy torrent of talk ere he is dashed below, his untiring enunciation of platitudes and fallacies, his abuse of opponents, the weight of whose arm he has never felt--all these things, harmless as they are, far from displeasing in themselves, deepen the gloom of the sitting member, into whose soul the iron of St. Stephen’s has entered, relax the tension of his mind, unnerve his vigour, corrode his faith; whilst, on the other hand, his demeanour and utterances, his brutal recognition of failure on his own side, and of merit in his opponent’s, are puzzling to the candidate.

The leaders of parties will do well if they keep members and candidates apart. The latter should always herd together.

To do candidates justice, they are far more amusing, and much better worth studying, than members.

THE BONÂ-FIDE TRAVELLER.

This thirsty gentleman is threatened with extinction. His Sabbatical pint is in danger. He has been reported against by a Royal Commission. Threatened men, I know, live long, and it is not for me to raise false alarms, but though the end of the _bonâ-fide_ traveller may be not yet, his glory has departed. His more than Sabbath-day journeys in search of the liquor that he loves, extended though they are by statute over three dreary, dusty miles of turnpike, have been ridiculed, and, worse than that, his _bonâ-fide_ character--hitherto his proud passport to intoxication--has been roughly condemned as pleonastic. A pretty pleonasm, truly, which has broached many a barrel. The Commissioners say, ‘We think it would be advisable to eliminate the words _bonâ-fide_. No sensible person could suppose that the Legislature in using the word “traveller” meant to include persons who make a pretence only of being such, and are not travellers really and in fact.’ At present there are two classes of Sunday travellers: there is the real traveller and there is the _bonâ-fide_ traveller. It is the latter whose existence is menaced. The sooner he dies the better, for, in plain English, he is a drunken dog.

The Report of the Royal Commission as to the operation of the Welsh Sunday Closing Act of 1881 has been published, and, as the phrase runs, will repay perusal. It is full of humanity and details about our neighbours, their habits and customs. However true it may have been, or still may be, that one half of the world does not know how the other half lives, it is a libel upon the curiosity of mankind to attribute this ignorance to indifference. No facts are more popular, than those which relate to people’s lives. Could it be discovered how many people prefer tea without sugar, the return would be printed in every newspaper of Great Britain, and be made the text of tens of thousands of leading articles. We are all alike in this respect, though some of us are ashamed to own it. We are by no means sure that the man answered badly who, when asked which of George Eliot’s characters was lodged most firmly in human memories, replied boldly, Mrs. Linnet. Everybody remembers Mrs. Linnet, and grins broadly at the very mention of her name. ‘On taking up the biography of a celebrated preacher, she immediately turned to the end to see what disease he died of; and if his legs swelled as her own occasionally did, she felt a stronger interest in ascertaining any earlier facts in the history of the dropsical divine; whether he had ever fallen off a stage-coach, whether he had married more than one wife, and, in general, any adventures or repartees recorded of him prior to the epoch of his conversion. Then she glanced over the letters and diary, and wherever there was a predominance of Zion, the River of Life, and notes of exclamation, she turned over to the next page; but any passage in which she saw such promising nouns as “small-pox,” “pony,” or “boots and shoes,” at once arrested her.’ How inimitable it is! And yet Mr. Oscar Browning prefers ‘Daniel Deronda.’ It is a comforting reflection that whether you write well or whether you write ill, you have always an audience.

But Mrs. Linnet’s deep-rooted popularity proves how fond we all are of escaping from abstractions and predictions, and seizing hold of the things about which we really feel ourselves entitled to an opinion. Mrs. Linnet would have read a great part of the Report to which I have referred with much interest. It is full of most promising nouns. Mrs. Linnet’s opinion as to a _bonâ-fide_ traveller would be quite as valuable as Lord Balfour of Burleigh’s.

But who is a _bonâ-fide_ traveller? He is a person who seeks drink on Sunday during hours when by law public-houses are closed. He has therefore to make out a special case for being supplied with drink. The fact that he is thirsty counts for nothing. Everybody is thirsty on Sunday. His special case is that he is not a resident, but a traveller, and wants refreshment to enable him to go on travelling. But here the law steps in, ‘big-wigged, voluminous-jawed,’ and adds this qualification--that nobody shall be considered a _bonâ-fide_ traveller who is not three miles away from his last bed. An attorney’s clerk of three months’ standing could have foretold what has happened, namely, that everybody who is three miles from home becomes at once and _ipso facto_ a _bonâ fide_ traveller. You rap with your knuckles at the door of the shut inn; it is partially opened, and the cautious publican or his spouse inquires of you where you come from; you name a city of the plain four miles off, and the next moment finds you comfortably seated in the bar-parlour. Falsely to represent yourself as a _bonâ-fide_ traveller is a misdemeanor, but assuming you are three miles away from home, how can such a representation be made falsely? We are all pilgrims in this world. If my sole motive for walking three miles on Sunday is to get a pint of beer at the Griffin, doubtless I am not a _bonâ-fide_ traveler, but if my motive be to get both the walk and the beer, who dare asperse my good faith? Should I have taken the walk but for the beer, or should I have taken the beer but for the walk? are questions far too nice to be made the subject of summary process.

The Commissioners cannot be accused of shirking this difficult question. They brace up their minds to it, and deliver themselves as follows. There is, say they, in language of almost Scriptural simplicity, first the traveler who makes a journey either by railway or otherwise, on business or for some other necessary cause. His case, in the opinion of the Commissioners, is a simple one. He is entitled to drink by the way. But next, proceed the Commissioners in language of less merit, ‘there is the individual who leaves his place of residence in the morning, or it may be later in the day, intending to be absent for some hours, inclusive perhaps, but not necessarily, of his mid-day meal, his object being primarily change of air and scene, exercise, relaxation of some kind, a visit to friends, or some reasonable cause other than merely to qualify for entrance into a licensed house.’ This is the mixed-motive case already hinted at. Then, thirdly, there is the bold bad man ‘who goes from his home to a point not less than three miles distant, either on foot or by wheeled vehicle by road or rail, primarily if not solely to procure the drink which the Act denies him within three miles of where he lodged the previous night.’ This gentleman is the genuine _bonâ-fide_ traveler known to all policemen and magistrates, and it is he who is threatened with extinction. But how is he to be differentiated from the individual who leaves his place of residence in the morning and goes to a place, not in search of drink, but where, for all that, drink is? For example, it appears from this Report that near Swansea is a place of resort called the Mumbles. A great many people go there every Sunday, and a considerable number return home drunk at night; but, say the Commissioners, and we entirely believe them, ‘it is impossible for us to say what proportion of them go for change and exercise and what proportion for the sake of drink.’ But if it be impossible, how is the distinction between the individual who leaves his place of residence in the morning, and the bold bad man, to be maintained?

There are those who would abolish the exemption in favour of travellers altogether. Let him who travels on Sunday take his liquor with him in a flask. There are others who would allow his glass to the traveller who is not on pleasure bent, but would refuse it to everybody else. A third party hold that a man who takes exercise for his health is as much entitled to refreshment as the traveller who goes on business. No one has been found bold enough to say a word for the man who travels in order that he may drink.

The Commissioners, after the wont of such men, steer a middle course. They agree with the Rev. Dr. Parry, Moderator of the General Assembly of the Calvinistic Methodists of Wales, who declared that he would not exclude from reasonable refreshment ‘a man who goes from his place of residence on Sunday to see the country’! I confess I should like to have both Dr. Parry’s and a Welsh collier’s opinion as to what is reasonable refreshment. Then, again, ‘to see the country’ is a vague phrase.

The Commissioners suggest a new clause, to run as follows:

‘No person shall be deemed to be within the exception relating to travellers unless he proves that he was actually engaged in travelling for some purpose other than that of obtaining intoxicating liquor, and that he has not remained on the licensed premises longer than was reasonably required for the transaction of his necessary business or for the purpose of necessary rest, refreshment, or shelter from the weather.’

This is nothing but a repeal of the three-mile limit. How is a wayfaring man to prove that he is travelling for some purpose other than that of obtaining intoxicating liquor? He can only assert the fact, and unless he is a notorious drunkard, both the publican and the magistrate are bound to believe him. Were the suggestion of the Commissioners to be carried out, it probably would be found that our old friend the _bonâ-fide_ traveller could get his liquor and curtail his walk.

I should like Mrs. Linnet’s opinion; but failing hers, can only express my own, which is that Sunday drinking is so bad a thing that if it can be stopped it ought to be so, even though it were to follow as a consequence that no traveller could get drink from Saturday night till Monday morning except at the place where he spent the night.

‘HOURS IN A LIBRARY.’

In the face of the proverb about the pavement of the way to hell, I am prepared to maintain that good intentions are better than bad, and that evil is the wretch who is not full of good intentions and holy plans at the beginning of each New Year. Time, like a fruitful plain, then lies stretched before you; the eye rests on tuneful groves, cool meadow-lands, and sedgy streams, whither you propose to wander, and where you promise yourself many happy, well-spent hours. I speak in metaphors, of course--pale-faced Londoner that I am--my meadows and streams are not marked upon the map: they are (coming at once to the point, for this is a generation which is only teased by allegory) the old books I mean to read over again during the good year of grace 1894. Yonder stately grove is Gibbon; that thicket, Hobbes; where the light glitters on the green surface (it is black mud below) is Sterne; healthful but penetrating winds stir Bishop Butler’s pages and make your naked soul shiver, as you become more and more convinced, the longer you read, that ‘someone has blundered,’ though whether it is you or your Maker remains, like everything else, unsolved. Each one of us must make out his own list. It were cruelty to prolong mine, though it is but begun.

As a grace before meat, or, if the simile be preferred, as the _Zakuska_ or _Vorschmack_ before dinner, let me urge upon all to read the three volumes, lately reissued and very considerably enlarged, called ‘Hours in a Library,’ by Mr. Leslie Stephen.

Mr. Stephen is a bracing writer. His criticisms are no sickly fruit of fond compliance with his authors. By no means are they this, but hence their charm. There is much pestilent trash now being talked about ‘Ministry of Books,’ and the ‘Sublimity of Art,’ and I know not what other fine phrases. It almost amounts to a religious service conducted before an altar of first editions. Mr. Stephen takes no part in such silly rites. He remains outside with a pail of cold water.

‘It sometimes strikes readers of books that literature is, on
the whole, a snare and a delusion. Writers, of course, do not
generally share that impression; and on the contrary have said
a great many fine things about the charm of conversing with the
choice minds of all ages, with the _innuendo_, to use the legal
phrase, that they themselves modestly demand some place amongst
the aforesaid choice minds. But at times we are disposed to retort
upon our teachers. “Are you not,” we observe, “exceedingly given
to humbug?”’

Mr. Stephen has indeed, by way of preface to his own three volumes, collected a goodly number of these very fine things, but then he has, with grim humour, dubbed them ‘Opinions of Authors,’ thus reducing them to the familiar level of ‘Nothing like leather!’

But of course, though Mr. Leslie Stephen, like the wise man he is, occasionally hits his idol over the costard with a club just to preserve his own independence, he is and frankly owns himself to be a bookish man from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot. He even confesses he loves the country best in books; but then it must be in real country-books and not in descriptive poetry, which, says he with Johnsonian calmness, is for the most part ‘intolerably dull.’

There is no better living representative of the great clan of sensible men and women who delight in reading for the pleasure it gives them than Mr. Stephen. If he is only pleased, it is quite shocking what he will put up with, and even loudly commend.

‘We are indeed told dogmatically that a novelist should never
indulge in little asides to a reader. Why not?... I like to read
about Tom Jones or Colonel Newcome; but I am also very glad when
Fielding or Thackeray puts his puppets aside for the moment and
talks to me in his own person. A child, it is true, dislikes to
have the illusion broken, and is angry if you try to persuade him
that Giant Despair was not a real personage like his favourite
Blunderbore. But the attempt to produce such illusions is really
unworthy of work intended for full-grown readers.’

Puppets indeed! It is evil and wicked treason against our Sovereign Lady, the Art we serve, to talk of puppets. The characters of our living Novelists live and move and have an independent being all their very own. They are clothed in flesh and blood. They talk and jostle one another. Where, we breathlessly inquire, do they do all or any of these fine things? Is it in the printed page? Alas! no. It is only in the minds of their Authors, whither we cannot follow them even if we would.

Mr. Stephen has great enthusiasm, which ought to reconcile us to his discriminating judgment and occasional easterly blast. Nobody loves a good book better than he. Whether his subject be Nathaniel Hawthorne or Daniel De Foe, it is handled cunningly, as by a man who knows. But his highest praise is his unbought verdict. He is his own man. He is dominated by no prevailing taste or fashion. Even his affection does not bias him. He yields to none in his admiration for the ‘good Sir Walter,’ yet he writes:

‘It is a question perhaps whether the firmer parts of Scott’s reputation will be sufficiently coherent to resist after the removal of the rubbish.’

‘Rubbish.’ It is a harsh word, and might well make Dean Stanley and a bygone generation of worshippers and believers in the plenary inspiration of Scott stir uneasily in their graves. It grates upon my own ear. But if it is a true word, what then? Why even then it does not matter very much, for when Time, that old ravager, has done his very worst, there will be enough left of Sir Walter to carry down his name and fame to the remotest age. He cannot be ejected from his native land. Loch Katrine and Loch Leven are not exposed to criticism, and they will pull Sir Walter through.

Mr. Stephen has another recommendation. Every now and again he goes hopelessly wrong. This is most endearing. Must I give instances? If I must I will, but without further note or comment. He is wrong in his depreciation of ‘Wuthering Heights,’ and wrong, amazingly wrong, in his unaccountable partiality for ‘Henrietta Temple.’

The author of ‘Hours in a Library’ belongs, it is hardly necessary to say, to the class of writers who use their steam for the purpose of going straight ahead. He is always greatly concerned with his subject. If he is out fox-hunting, he comes home with the brush, and not with a spray of blackberries; but if, on the other hand, he goes out blackberrying, he will return deeply dyed the true tint, and not dragging behind him a languishing coil of seaweed. Metaphors will, I know, ultimately be my ruin, but in the meantime I hope I make myself reasonably plain. In this honest characteristic Mr. Leslie Stephen resembles his distinguished brother, Sir James Stephen, who, in his admirable ‘Horæ Sabbaticæ’ (Macmillan, 3 vols.), may be discovered at any time tearing authors into little bits and stripping them of their fringe, and then presenting to you, in a few masterly pages, the marrow of their arguments and the pith of their position.

Much genuine merriment is, however, almost always to be extracted from writers of this kind. Mr. Leslie Stephen’s humour, none the worse for belonging to the sardonic species, is seldom absent from a page. It would be both pleasant and easy to collect a number of his epigrams, witty sayings, and humorous terms--but it is better to leave then where they are. The judicious will find them for themselves for many a long day to come. The sensible and truthful writers are the longest livers.

AMERICANISMS AND BRITICISMS.

Messrs. Harper Bros., of New York, have lately printed and published, and Mr. Brander Matthews has written, the prettiest possible little book, called ‘Americanisms and Briticisms, with other Essays on other Isms.’ To slip it into your pocket when first you see it is an almost irresistible impulse, and yet--would you believe it?--this pretty little book is in reality a bomb, intended to go off and damage British authors by preventing them from being so much as quoted in the States. Mr. Brander Matthews, however, is so obviously a good-natured man, and his little fit of the spleen is so evidently of a passing character, that it is really not otherwise than agreeable to handle his bombshell gently and to inquire how it could possibly come about that the children of one family should ever be invited to fall out and strive and fight over their little books and papers.

It is easy to accede something to Mr. Matthews. Englishmen are often provoking, and not infrequently insolent. The airs they give themselves are ridiculous, but nobody really minds them in these moods; and, _per contra_, Americans are not easily laughed out of a good conceit of themselves, and have been known to be as disagreeable as they could.

To try to make ‘an international affair’ over the ‘u’ in honour and the second ‘l’ in traveller is surely a task beneath the dignity of anyone who does not live by penning paragraphs for the evening papers, yet this is very much what Mr. Matthews attempts to do in this pleasingly-bound little volume. It is rank McKinleyism from one end to the other. ‘Every nation,’ says he, ‘ought to be able to supply its own second-rate books, and to borrow from abroad only the best the foreigner has to offer it.’ What invidious distinctions! Who is to prepare the classification? I don’t understand this Tariff at all. If anything of the kind were true, which it is not, I should have said it was just the other way, and that a nation, if it really were one, would best foster its traditions and maintain its vitality by consuming its own first-rate books--its Shakespeares and Bacons, its Taylors and Miltons, its Drydens and Gibbons, its Wordsworths and Tennysons--whilst it might very well be glad to vary the scene a little by borrowing from abroad less vitalizing but none the less agreeable wares.