Chapter I: Part 1

Transcriber’s Note: Italics are enclosed in _underscores_, boldface in =equals signs=. Additional notes will be found near the end of this ebook.

ON BOOKS AND ARTS

ON BOOKS AND ARTS

BY
FREDERICK WEDMORE

LONDON
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
27 PATERNOSTER ROW
1899

Edinburgh: T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to Her Majesty

_NOTE_

_In the pages that here follow I have gathered up such of my more or less critical contributions to various Reviews, and to one great daily paper, as I am least unwilling to preserve within the covers of a book._

_As the proportion borne by things reprinted from the ‘Standard’ will seem small to those who know during how many years I have been permitted to contribute to its columns the expression of opinion on many of those arts which have been both my delight and my laborious study, let me just simply say that every line that I have written in that paper has been written with a single eye to the needs of the occasion and the moment, and the more expressly any writing is designed for a particular need and place, the less, I think, is it adapted for transplanting._

_There has been no attempt to bring these essays, or these fragments, ‘up-to-date’--to bring them to the point of view, I mean, of the time at which they chance to be republished. A suppression here, and there the alteration of a phrase--little else is attempted. They remain, frankly, ‘contributions.’_

_F. W._

_Westminster, October 1899._

CONTENTS

PAGE
THE SHORT STORY 1

MY RARE BOOK 25

BALZAC 44

GEORGE ELIOT 55

MY FEW THINGS 64

ANNE OLDFIELD 97

SIDDONS AND RACHEL 103

JOSEPH JEFFERSON 109

ZOLA’S ‘THÉRÈSE RAQUIN’ 113

‘MACBETH’ AND IRVING 118

‘THE DUCHESS OF MALFI’ 122

REMBRANDT 128

DUTCH SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY DRAWINGS 144

VELASQUEZ 157

FRENCH EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PAINTING 164

CHARDIN 172

MOREAU 188

GAINSBOROUGH 202

COTMAN 219

H. G. HINE 233

THOMAS COLLIER 235

LORD LEIGHTON 237

MILLAIS 248

BURNE-JONES 257

BOSBOOM AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES 263

HENNER 270

FRANCIS JAMES 275

THE SHORT STORY

One of the most engaging of the wits of our day wrote lately in a weekly newspaper that it is, for the most part, only those who are not good enough actors to act successfully in Life, who are compelled to act at the Theatre. Under the influence of such an amiable paradox it is possible that we may ask ourselves, in regard to story-writing, whether the people singled out to practise it are those, chiefly, to whose personal history Romance has been denied: so that the greatest qualification even for the production of a lady’s love-tale, is--that the lady shall never have experienced a love-affair. Eminent precedents might be cited in support of the contention. A great editor once comfortably declared that the ideal journalist was a writer who did not know too much about his subject. The public did not want much knowledge, he said. The literary criticism in your paper would be perfect if you handed it over to the critic of Music; and the musical criticism would want for nothing if you assigned it to an expert in Art. And Mr. Thackeray, speaking of love-tales, said something that pointed the same way. He protested, no one should write a love-story after he was fifty. And why? Because he knew too much about it.

But it was a personal application I was going to have given to the statement with which this paper begins. If the actor we see upon the boards be only there because more capable comedians are busy on the stage of the world, I am presumably invited by the Editor of _The Nineteenth Century_ to hold forth on the Short Story because I am not a popular writer. The Editor, in the gentle exercise of his humour, bids me to fill the place which should be filled by the man of countless editions. It is true that in the matter of short stories, such a writer is not easy to find; and this too at a time when, if one is correctly informed, full many a lady, not of necessity of any remarkable gifts, maintains an honourable independence by the annual production of an improper novel. Small as my personal claims might be, were they based only on my books--_Renunciations_, for example, or _Pastorals of France_--I may say my say as one who, with production obviously scanty, has for twenty years been profoundly interested in the artistic treatment of the Short Story; who believes in the short story, not as a ready means of hitting the big public, but as a medium for the exercise of the finer art--as a medium, moreover, adapted peculiarly to that alert intelligence, on the part of the reader, which rebels sometimes at the _longueurs_ of the conventional novel: the old three volumes or the new fat book. Nothing is so mysterious, for nothing is so instinctive, as the method of a writer. I cannot communicate the incommunicable. But at all events I will not express opinions aimed at the approval of the moment: convictions based on the necessity for epigram.

In the first place, then, what is, and what is _not_, a short story? Many things a short story may be. It may be an episode, like Miss Ella Hepworth Dixon’s, or like Miss Bertha Thomas’s; a fairy tale, like Miss Evelyn Sharp’s: the presentation of a single character with the stage to himself (Mr. George Gissing); a tale of the uncanny (Mr. Rudyard Kipling); a dialogue of comedy (Mr. Pett Ridge); a panorama of selected landscape, a vision of the sordid street, a record of heroism, a remote tradition or an old belief vitalised by its bearing on our lives to-day, an analysis of an obscure calling, a glimpse at a forgotten quarter. A short story--I mean a short imaginative work in the difficult medium of prose; for plot, or story proper, is no essential part of it, though in work like Conan Doyle’s or Rudyard Kipling’s it may be a very delightful part--a short story may be any one of the things that have been named, or it may be something besides; but one thing it can never be--it can never be ‘a novel in a nutshell.’ That is a favourite definition, but not a definition that holds. It is a definition for the kind of public that asks for a convenient inexactness, and resents the subtlety which is inseparable from precise truth. Writers and serious readers know that a good short story cannot possibly be a _précis_, a synopsis, a _scenario_, as it were, of a novel. It is a separate thing--as separate, almost, as the Sonnet is from the Epic--it involves the exercise almost of a different art.

That, perhaps, is one reason why it is generally--in spite of temporary vogue as pleasant pastime--a little underrated as an intellectual performance. That is why great novelists succeed in it so seldom--or at all events fail in it sometimes--even a novelist like Mr. Hardy, the stretch of whose canvas has never led him into carelessness of detail. Yet with _him_, even, in his short stories, the inequality is greater than befits the work of such an artist, and greater than is to be accounted for wholly by his mood; so that by the side of _The Three Strangers_, or, yet better, that delightful thing, _Interlopers at the Knap_, you have short tales tossed off with momentary indifference--as you can imagine Sheridan, with his braced language of comedy, stooping once to a charade. And if a _master_ nods sometimes--a master like Hardy--does it not almost follow that, by the public at least, the conditions of the short story are not understood, and so, in the estimate of the criticism of the dinner-table, and by the criticism of the academic, the tale is made to suffer by its brevity? But if it is well done, it has done this amazing thing: it has become quintessence; it has eliminated the superfluous; and it has taken _time_ to be brief. Then--amongst readers whose judgments are perfunctory--who have not thought the thing out--it is rewarded by being spoken of as an ‘agreeable sketch,’ ‘a promising little effort,’ an ‘earnest of better things.’ In this wise--not to talk of any other instance--one imagines the big public rewarding the completed charm of _The Author of Beltraffio_ and of _A Day of Days_, though pregnant _brevity_ is not often Mr. James’s strength. And then Mr. James works away at the long novel, and, of course, is clever in it, because with him, _not_ to be clever might require a passiveness more than American. Very good; but I go back from the record of all that ‘Maisie’ ought not to have known, to _The Author of Beltraffio_ and to _A Day of Days_--‘promising little efforts,’ ‘earnests of better things.’

Well, then, the short story is wont to be estimated, not by its quality, but by its size; a mode of appraisement under which the passion of Schumann, with his wistful questionings--in _Warum_, say, or in _Der Dichter spricht_--would be esteemed less seriously than the amiable score of _Maritana_! And a dry-point by Mr. Whistler, two dozen lines laid with the last refinement of charm, would be held inferior to a panorama by Philippoteau, or to the backgrounds of the contemporary theatre. One would have thought that this was obvious. But in our latest stage of civilisation it is sometimes only the obvious that requires to be pointed out.

While we are upon the subject of the hindrances to the appreciation of a particular form of imaginative work, we may remind ourselves of one drawback in regard to which the short story must make common cause with the voluminous novel: I mean the inability of the mass of readers to do justice to the seriousness of any artistic, as opposed to any moral, or political, or pretentiously regenerative fiction. For the man in the street, for the inhabitant of Peckham Rye, for many prosperous people on the north side of the Park, perhaps even for the very cream of up-to-date persons whose duty it is to abide somewhere where Knightsbridge melts invisibly into Chelsea. Fiction is but a _délassement_, and the artists who practise it, in its higher forms, are a little apt to be estimated as contributors to public entertainment--like the Carangeot Troupe, and Alexia, at the Palace Theatre. The view is something of _this_ nature--I read it so expressed only the other day: ‘The tired clergyman, after a day’s work; what book shall he take up? Fiction, perhaps, would seem too trivial; history, too solid.’

The serious writer of novel or short story brings no balm for the ‘tired clergyman’--other than such balm as is afforded by the delight of serious Art. At high tension he has delivered himself of his performance, and if his work is to be properly enjoyed, it must be met by those only who are ready to receive it; it must be met by the alert, not the fatigued, reader; and with the short story in particular, with its omissions, with the brevity of its allusiveness, it must be met half way. Do not let us expect it to be ‘solid,’ like Mill, or Lightfoot, or Westcott--or even like an A B C Railway Guide. You must condone the ‘triviality’ which puts its finger on the pulse of life and says ‘Thou ailest _here_ and _here_’--which exposes, not a political movement, like the historian of the outward fact, but the secrets of the heart, rather, and human weakness, and the courage which in strait places comes somehow to the sons of men, and the beauty and the strength of affection--and which does this by intuition as much as by science.

But to go back to considerations not common in some degree to all Fiction, but proper more absolutely to the short story. I have suggested briefly what the short story may be; we have seen briefly the one thing it _cannot_ be--which is, a novel told within restricted space. Let us ask what methods it may adopt--what are some of the varieties of its form.

The short story admits of greater variety of form than does the long novel, and the number of these forms will be found to be increasing--and we must not reject conventionally (as we are terribly apt to do) the new form because we are unfamiliar with it. The forms that are open to the novel are open to the short imaginative piece, and, to boot, very many besides. Common to both, of course, is the most customary form of all--that in which the writer narrates as from outside the drama, yet with internal knowledge of it--what is called the ‘narrative form,’ which includes within its compass, in a single work, narrative proper and a moderate share of dialogue. Common again to both short and long stories, evidently, is a form which, in skilled hands, and used only for those subjects to which it is most appropriate, may give strange reality to the matter presented--the form, I mean, in which the story is told in the first person, as the experience and the sentiment of one character who runs throughout the whole. The short story, though it should use this form very charily, adopts it more conveniently than does the long novel; for the novel has many more characters than the short story, and for the impartial presentation of many characters this form is a fetter. It gives of a large group a prejudiced and partial view. It commended itself once or twice only to Dickens. _David Copperfield_ is the conspicuous example. Never once, I think, did it commend itself to Balzac. It is better adapted, no doubt, to adventure than to analysis, and better to the expression of humour than to the realisation of tragedy. As far as the presentation of _character_ is concerned, what it is usual for it to achieve--in hands, I mean, much smaller than those of the great Dickens--is this: a life size, full length, generally too flattering portrait of the hero of the story--a personage who has the lime-light all to himself--on whom no inconvenient shadows are ever thrown--the hero as beheld by Sant, shall I say? rather than as beheld by Sargent--and then, a further graceful idealisation, an attractive pastel, you may call it, of the lady he most frequently admired; and, of the remainder, two or three Kit-Cat portraits, a head and shoulders here, and there a stray face.

The third and only other form that I remember as common to both novel and short story, though indeed not equally _convenient_ to both, is the rare form of Letters. That again, like any other that will not bear a prolonged strain, is oftener available for short story than for big romance. The most consummate instance of its employment, in very lengthy work, is one in which with infinitely slow progression it serves above all things the purpose of minute and searching analysis--I have named the book in this line of description of it: I have named _Clarissa_. For the short story it is used very happily by Balzac--who, though not at first a master of sentences, is an instinctive master of methods--it is used by him in the _Mémoires de Deux Jeunes Mariées_. And in a much lighter way, of bright portraiture, of neat characterisation, it is used by an ingenious, sometimes seductive, writer of our period, Marcel Prévost, in _Lettres de Femmes_. It is possible, of course, to _mix_ these different forms; but for such mixture we shall conclude, I fancy, that prolonged fiction offers the best opportunity. Such mixture has its dangers for the short story; you risk, perhaps, unity of effect. But there are short stories in which monotony is avoided, and the force of the narrative in reality emphasised, by some telling lines from a letter, whose end or whose beginning may be otherwise imparted to us.

I devote a few lines to but two or three of the forms which by common consent are for the short story only. One of them is simple dialogue. For our generation, that has had the fascination of an experiment--an experiment made perhaps with best success after all in the candid and brilliant fragments of that genuine humorist, Mr. Pett Ridge. The method in most hands has the appearance of a difficult feat. It _is_ one, often--and so is walking on the slack-wire, and the back-spring in acrobatic dance. Of course a writer must enjoy grappling with difficulties. We understand that. But the more serious artist reflects, after a while, that the unnecessary difficulty is an inartistic encumbrance. ‘Why,’ he will ask, ‘should the story-teller put on himself the fetters of the drama, to be denied the drama’s opportunities?’ Pure dialogue, we may be sure, is apt to be an inefficient means of telling a story; of presenting a character. There may be cited one great English Classic who has employed the method--the author of _Pericles and Aspasia_, of that little gem of conversation between Henry the Eighth and Anne Boleyn. But then, with Walter Savage Landor, austere and perfect, the character existed already, and there was no story to tell. Mere dialogue, under the conditions of the modern writer, leaves almost necessarily the problem unsolved, the work a fragment. It can scarcely be a means to an end; though it may, if we like, be a permissible little end in itself, a little social chatter, pitched in a high key, in which one has known tartness to be mistaken for wit. Thus does ‘Gyp’ skim airily over the deep, great sea of life. All are shallows to her vision. And as she skims you feel her lightness. I prefer the adventure of the diver, who knows what the depths _are_: who plunges, and who rescues the pearl.

Then, again, possible, though not often desirable for the short story, is the diary form--extracts from a diary, rather. Applied to work on an extensive scale, your result--since you would necessarily lack concentrated theme--your result would be a chronicle, not a story. Applied to the shorter fiction, it must be used charily, and may then, I should suppose, be used well. But I, who used the form in ‘The New Marienbad Elegy’ in _English Episodes_, what right have I to say that the form, in the hands of a master, allows a subtle presentation of the character of the diarist--allows, in self-revelation, an irony, along with earnestness, a wayward and involved humour, not excluding sympathy? It is a form not easily received, not suffered gladly. It is for the industrious, who read a good thing twice, and for the enlightened, who read it three times.

I throw out these things only as hints; we may apply them where we will, as we think about stories. But something has yet to be said. Of the two forms already named as generally unfitted for the long novel, and fitted only now and then for the short story, one, it will be noticed, is all dialogue; the other, necessarily, a form in which there is no dialogue at all. And I think we find, upon reflection, the lighter work leans oftenest to the one form; the graver work leans oftenest to the other.

Indeed, from this we might go on to notice that as far as the short story is concerned, most of the finer and more lasting work, though cast in forms which quite _permit_ of the dialogue, has, as a matter of fact, but little dialogue in it. Balzac’s _La Grenadière_--it is years since I read it; but has it any dialogue at all? Balzac’s _L’Interdiction_--an extraordinary presentation of a quaint functionary, fossiliferous and secluded, suddenly brought into contact with people of the world, and with the utmost ability baffling their financial intrigue--this is certainly the most remarkable short story ever written about money--_L’Interdiction_ has not much dialogue. In the _Atheist’s Mass_, again--the short story of such a nameless pathos--the piece which, more even than _Eugénie Grandet_ itself, should be everybody’s introduction, and especially every woman’s introduction, to the genius of Balzac: _La Messe de l’Athée_ has no dialogue. Coming to our actual contemporaries in France, of whom Zola and Daudet must still, it is possible, be accounted the foremost, it is natural that the more finished and minute worker--the worker lately lamented--should be the one who has made the most of the short story. And in this order of his work--thus leaving out his larger and most brilliant canvas, _Froment Jeune et Risler Aîné_--what do we more lastingly remember than the brief and sombre narrative of _Les Deux Auberges_?--a little piece that has no story at all; but a ‘situation’ depicted, and when depicted, _left_. There is an open country; leagues of Provence; a long stretching road; and, on the roadside, opposite each other, two inns. The older one is silent, melancholy; the other, noisy and prosperous. And the landlord of the older inn spends all his time in the newer; taking his pleasure there with guests who were once his own, and with a handsome landlady, who makes amends for his departed business. And in his own inn, opposite, a deserted woman sits solitary. That is all--but the art of the master!

Now this particular instance of a pregnant brevity reminds me that in descriptions of landscape the very obligations of the short story are an advantage to its art. Nature, in Fiction, requires to be seen, not in endless detail, as a botanical or geographical study, but, as in Classic Landscape Composition, a noble glimpse of it, over a man’s shoulder, under a man’s arm. I know, of course, that is not the popular view. Blameless novels have owed their popularity to landscape written by the ream. Coaches have been named after them; steamboats have been named after them. I am not sure that, in their honour, inaccessible heights have not been scaled and virgin forests broken in upon, so that somewhere in picturesque districts the front of a gigantic hotel might have inscribed on it the title of a diffuse novel.

But that is not the great way. The great way, from Virgil’s to Browning’s, is the way of pregnant brevity. And where dialogue _is_ employed in the finer short story, every line of it is bound to be significant. The short story has no room for the reply that is only _near_ to being appropriate, and it deserves no pardon for the word that would not have been certainly employed. It is believed, generally, and one can well suppose that it is true, that the average dialogue of the diffuse novel is written quickly. That is in part because so little of it is really dramatic--is really at all the inevitable word. But the limited sentences in which, when the narrator must narrate no more, the persons who have been described in the short story express themselves on their restricted stage, need, if I dare assert it, to be written slowly, or, what is better, re-read a score of times, and pruned, and looked at from without, and surveyed on every side.

But, indeed, of the long story, as well as of the short, may it not be agreed that on the whole the dialogue is apt to be the least successful thing? The ordinary reader, of course, will not be dramatic enough to notice its deficiencies. In humorous dialogue, these are seen least. Humorous dialogue has a legitimate licence. You do not ask from it exactitude; you do not nail it down to its statement. But in the dialogue of the critical moment, when the fire of a little word will kindle how great a matter, how needful then, and how rare, that the word be the true one! We do not want laxity, inappropriateness, on the one hand; nor, on the other, the tortured phraseology of a too resolute cleverness. And those of us who have a preference--derived, it may be, from the simpler generation of Dickens--for an unbending when it is a question of _little_ matters, and, when it is a question of great ones, for ‘a sincere large accent, nobly plain’--well! there is much of modern finessing we are hardly privileged to understand. Yet if one wants an instance, in a long novel, in which the sentence now said at a white heat is the result, inevitable, burningly true to life, of the sentence that was said just before, one condones the obscurity that has had its imitators, and pays one’s tribute of admiration to the insight of _Diana of the Crossways_.

One of the difficulties of the short story, the short story shares with the acted drama, and that is the indispensableness of compression--the need that every sentence shall tell--the difference being, that in the acted drama it must tell for the moment, it must tell till it is found out, and in the short story it must tell for at least a _modest_ eternity, and something more, if that be possible--for if a ‘Fortnight is eternity’ upon the Stock Exchange, a literary eternity is, perhaps, forty years.

Of course the short story, like all other fiction to be read, does not share the other difficulties of the acted drama--above all, the disadvantage which drags the acted drama down--the disadvantage of appealing to, at all events of having to give sops to, at one and the same moment, gallery and stalls: an audience so incongruous that it lies outside the power of Literature to weld it really together. In the contemporary theatre, in some of the very cleverest of our acted dramas, the characters are frequently doing, not what the man of intuition, and the man who remembers life, _knows_ that they would do, but that which they must do to conciliate the dress circle, to entertain the pit, to defer not too long the gentle chuckle with which the ‘average sensual man’ receives the assurance that it is a delusion to suppose our world contains any soul, even a woman’s soul, that is higher and purer than his. To such temptations the writer of the short story is not even exposed, if he be willing to conceive of his art upon exalted lines, to offer carefully the best of his reflection, in a form of durable and chosen grace, or, by a less conscious, perhaps, but not less fruitful, husbanding of his resources, to give us, sooner or later some first-hand study of human emotion, ‘gotten,’ as William Watson says, ‘of the immediate soul.’ But again, contrasting his fortunes with those of his brother, the dramatist, the writer of short stories must, even at the best, know himself denied the dramatist’s crowning advantage--which is the thrill of actual human presence.

I have not presumed, except incidentally and by way of illustration, to sit in rapid judgment, and award impertinently blame or praise to the most or the least prominent of those who are writing short stories to-day. Even an occasional grappler with the difficulties of a task is not generally its best critic. He will criticise from the inside, now and then, and so, although you ought to have from him, now and again, at least--what I know, nevertheless, that _I_ may not have given--illuminating commentary--you cannot have final judgment. Of the art of Painting, where skill of hand and sense of colour count for much more than intellect, this is especially true. It is true, more or less, of Music--in spite of exceptions as notable as Schumann and Berlioz: almost perfect critics of the very art that they produced. It is true--though in a less degree--of creative Literature. We leave this point, to write down, before stopping, one word about _tendencies_.

Among the better writers, one tendency of the day is to devote a greater care to the art of expression--to an unbroken continuity of excellent style. The short story, much more than the long one, makes this thing possible to men who may not claim to be geniuses, but who, if we are to respect them at all, must claim to be artists. And yet, in face of the indifference of so much of our public here to anything we can call Style--in face, actually, of a strange insensibility to it--the attempt, wherever made, is a courageous one. This insensibility--how does it come about?

It comes about, in honest truth, partly because that instrument of Art, our English tongue, in which the verse of Gray was written, and the prose of Landor and Sterne, is likewise the necessary vehicle in which, every morning of our lives, we ask for something at breakfast. If we all of us had to demand breakfast by making a rude drawing of a coffee-pot, we should understand, before long--the quickness of the French intelligence on that matter being unfortunately denied us--the man in the street would understand that Writing, as much as Painting, is an art to be acquired, and an art in whose technical processes one is bound to take pleasure. And, perhaps, another reason is the immense diffusion nowadays of superficial education; so that the election of a book to the honours of quick popularity is decided by those, precisely, whose minds are least trained for the exercise of that suffrage. What _is_ elected is too often the work which presents at a first reading everything that it presents at all. I remember Mr. Browning once saying, _àpropos_ of such a matter, ‘What has a cow to do with nutmegs?’ He explained, it was a German proverb. Is it? Or is it German only in the way of ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’? Anyhow, things being as they are, all the more honour to those younger people who, in the face of indifference, remember that their instrument of English language is a quite unequalled instrument of Art.

Against this happy tendency, one has to set--in regard at least to some of them--tendencies less admirable. For, whilst the only kind of work that has a chance of engaging the attention of Sainte-Beuve’s ‘severe To-morrow’ is work that is original, individual, sincere, is it not a pity, because of another’s sudden success, to be unremittingly occupied with the exploitation of one particular world--to paint for ever, say, in violent and garish hue, or in deep shades through which no light can struggle, the life of the gutter? to paint it, too, with that distorted ‘realism’ which witnesses upon the part of its practitioners to _one thing only_, a profound conviction of the ugly! I talk, of course, not of the short stories of the penetrating observer, but of those of the dyspeptic pessimist, whose pessimism, where it is not the _pose_ of the contortionist--adopted with an eye to a sensational success of journalism, to a commercial effect--is hysteria, an imitative malady, a malady of the mind. The profession of the literary pessimist is already overcrowded; and if I name two writers who, though in different degrees, have avoided the temptation to join it--if I name one who knows familiarly the cheery as well as the more sombre side of Cockney character and life, Mr. Henry Nevinson, the author of the remarkable short-stories, _Neighbours of Ours_, and then again a more accepted student of a sordid existence--Mr. George Gissing, in _Human Odds and Ends_ especially--I name them but as such instances as I am privileged to know, of observant and unbiassed treatment of the subjects with which they have elected to deal.

In France, in the short story, we may easily notice, the uglier forms of ‘Realism’ are wearing themselves out. ‘Le soleil de France,’ said Gluck to Marie Antoinette, ‘le soleil de France donne du génie.’ And the genius that it gives cannot long be hopeless and sombre. It leaves the obscure wood and tangled bypath; it makes for the open road: ‘la route claire et droite’--the phrase belongs to M. Leygues--‘la route claire et droite où marche le génie français.’ Straight and clear was the road followed--nay, sometimes actually cut--by the unresting talent of Guy de Maupassant, the writer of a hundred short stories, which, for the world of his day at least, went far beyond Charles Nodier’s earlier delicacy and Champfleury’s wit. But, somehow, upon De Maupassant’s nature and temperament the curse of pessimism lay. To deviate into cheeriness he must deal with the virtues of the _déclassées_--undoubtedly an interesting theme--he must deal with them as in the famous _Maison Tellier_, an ebullition of scarcely cynical comedy, fuller much of real humanity than De Goncourt’s sordid document, _La Fille Elisa_. But that was an exception. De Maupassant was pessimist generally, because, master of an amazing talent, he refreshed himself never in any rarefied air. The vista of the Spirit was denied him. His reputation he may keep; but his school--the school in which a few even of our own imitative writers prattle the accents of a hopeless materialism--his school, I fancy, will be crowded no more. For, with an observation keen and judicial, M. René Bazin treats to-day themes, we need not say more ‘legitimate’--since much may be legitimate--but at least more acceptable. And then again, with a style of which De Maupassant, direct as was his own, must have envied even the clarity and the subtler charm, a master draughtsman of ecclesiastic and bookworm, of the neglected genius of the provincial town (some poor devil of a small professor), and of the soldier, and the shopkeeper, and the Sous-Préfet’s wife--I hope I am describing M. Anatole France--looks out on the contemporary world with a vision humane and genial, sane and wide. Pessimism, it seems to me, can only be excusable in those who are still bowed down by the immense responsibility of youth. It was a great poet, who, writing of one of his peers--a man of mature life--declared of him, _not_ ‘he mopes picturesquely,’ but ‘he knows the world, firm, quiet, and gay.’ To such a writer--only to such a writer--is possible a happy comedy; and possible, besides, a true and an august vision of profounder things! And _that_ is the spirit to which the Short Story, at its best, will certainly return.

(_Nineteenth Century_, March 1898.)

MY RARE BOOK

I wish I could say it was my diligence that discovered it, and that I hunted it out of some fifth-rate bookstall of Goswell Street or of the New Road--‘all this lot at 6d. apiece.’ But no, it has no romantic story as far as I am concerned. Given perhaps, eighty years ago, by friend to friend, or lover to sweetheart, in days when our great-grandmothers were beautiful and our great-grandfathers devoted, it got to be neglected, it got to be sold--somebody ceased to care for it, or somebody wanted the few shillings it then would bring--somehow it tossed about the world, till a keen bookseller or keen bookbuyer rescued it, and took it to a binder of note, and then it was arrayed in seemly dress, and safer for the future. Afterwards--but not for very long, I think--it was a rich man’s possession: one thing, and quite a little thing, in a great library of English classics, from Defoe and Sterne to Dickens and Tennyson. Then it came to be sold, along with most or all of its important companions, and so I got it, in prosaic fashion. I bought it under the hammer at Sotheby’s--or rather, Mr. F. S. Ellis bought it there on my behalf--on the 3rd of March, in this present year of grace. And now it takes up its position on insignificant shelves, by the side of the Rogers with the Turner illustrations; by the side of a few things--but the collector knows them not.

This is how it figures in the auctioneer’s catalogue: ‘Wordsworth (W.) Lyrical Ballads, with a few other Poems (including Rime of the Ancyent Marinere by Coleridge), FIRST EDITION, _green morocco extra g. e. by Riviere_, 1798.’ The ‘g. e.’ means nothing more mysterious than ‘gilt edges.’ The morocco is of a rich and sunny green--the ‘good’ green of modern artistic speech, which rightly enough, I suppose, endows colour and line with moral qualities. I am thankful to the rich man for having saved me both money and trouble, in binding, completely to my taste, it happens, my rare book.

And few things, perhaps, deserve more careful guardianship. The _Lyrical Ballads_, as the world now knows, were a starting-point in the new English Literature, which addressed itself to study in the field of Nature more than in academies, and which taught us the beauty and interest of common life and of everyday incident; and it is a delight to me to see the pages of these simple lyrics and pastorals as Wordsworth’s own eye was content with them when Cottle, the Bristol bookseller, passed them through the press, and printed them, as well as might be, on pleasantly toned paper, bearing here and there on its water-mark the date of its making, ‘1795.’ On the whole, it is a well-printed book; two hundred and ten pages, tastefully arranged, and of _errata_ there are but five. Those were days when centralisation had not brought the best work all to London, and even concentrated it in certain quarters of London; and of what is sometimes called provincial, but of what there is better reason to define as suburban, clumsiness--for nothing is done so ill in the world as what is done in London suburbs--there is only a trace in the gross inequality of the size of the figures in the table of contents: they are taken, it appears, from different founts. But generally the book is printed with smoothness and precision, and, even apart from the high literature which it enshrines, is worthy of its good green coat, joyful of hue, pleasant of smell, and grateful of touch to the fingers that pass over it. And nothing that comes now, even from the Chiswick Press, or from Jouaust or whoever may be the fashionable printing man to-day in Paris, can be much neater than its title-page; the mention of which brings me to a point of interest to the bibliophile.

The book has two title-pages; or, rather, like many of the books of its day, there belong two title-pages to the same edition of it--the custom having been for a second bookseller, who bought what the first bookseller was minded to get rid of, to print his own title-page. This is the course that the thing followed in the matter of _Lyrical Ballads_. The book was printed, as we shall see in detail presently, by Cottle, in Bristol, in the year 1798. Five hundred copies were printed, but they did not sell. ‘As a curious literary fact,’ says Cottle, in his ‘Recollections,’ ‘I might mention that the sale of the First Edition of the _Lyrical Ballads_ was so slow, and the severity of most of the reviews so great, that its progress to oblivion seemed ordained to be as rapid as it was certain.’ ‘I had given,’ he adds, ‘thirty guineas for the copyright; but the heavy sale induced me to part with the largest proportion of the impression of 500, at a loss, to Mr. Arch, a London bookseller.’ Mr. Arch printed his own title-page. My copy has his title-page, ‘_London, printed for J. & A. Arch, Gracechurch Street_’; and so, I think, had the copy sold at Mr. Dew Smith’s sale, about four years ago. The date, of course, remains the same, 1798, and all else remains the same. The British Museum copy--it was Southey’s copy--has the Bristol title-page, and the Museum may possibly acquire a copy with Mr. Arch’s when opportunity occurs. In the only copy of the First Edition which they have at present, the words are, ‘_Bristol, printed by Biggs and Cottle, for T. N. Longman, Paternoster Row, London_.’ Thus the First Edition of five hundred was divided--say two hundred for Mr. Cottle, say three hundred for Mr. Arch when the Bristolian found the sale was ‘slow’ and ‘heavy.’ Where have they all gone to? It was only eighty-four years ago. But where have all the copies of the big edition of the _Christmas Carol_ gone to? That was hardly forty years ago.

To recall a little the origin of the book--the circumstances under which Wordsworth and Coleridge planned and produced it. It was in the Nether Stowey and Alfoxden time, when the men were neighbours, three miles of green Somerset country dividing the home of Coleridge from the home of Wordsworth. I saw the place--that is, the neighbourhood, and Coleridge’s home--a few years since, much in that summer weather which tempted their own more prolonged wanderings, which followed them in that excursion to ‘Linton and the Valley of Stones,’ which was the first cause, Wordsworth says, of the issue of _Lyrical Ballads_. Plain living and high thinking they practised then, and from necessity as much as from choice. A yeoman of Somerset would hardly have lived at that time--and certainly he would not live to-day--in the cottage which was Coleridge’s. Straight from the country road you step to its door: in an instant you are in the small square parlour, with large kitchen-like fireplace, with one, or, I think, two small windows, and a window-seat from which, on days of evil weather, the stay-at-home commanded the prospect of the passing rustic as he walked abroad--perhaps of the occasional traveller on his way to the village inn. But generally, fair weather or foul, the spectacle was scanty--time was marked by shifting light and changes in the colour of the sky, or by the movements of beasts at milking-time, or at hours of rest and of labour. Never, I should say, was one hour merely frittered away by either the poet who lived or the poet who visited in that humble cottage. Never a call of ceremony: an interview that bears no fruit--a social necessity, the continual plague of cities. Never an hour that did not tell in some way, by active work, or by ‘wise passiveness,’ upon the mind that was to be cultivated and the character that was to be developed. Such a life, led not in actual isolation, but in narrowed and selected companionship, was perhaps about the best preparation men could make for work of the concentrated and the self-possessed power of the ‘Ancient Mariner,’ and of the serene profundity of the lines connected with Tintern Abbey. This was the place, and these were the conditions, for the quietude of life and thought felt as the greatest necessity of existence by Wordsworth, ‘a worshipper of Nature,’ ‘unwearied in that service.’

In 1797 came the first thought of the book. Wordsworth’s account of it may already be familiar. Prefixed in later editions to the poem of ‘We are Seven,’ which was printed for the first time in _Lyrical Ballads_, is a note which says: ‘In reference to this poem I will here mention one of the most noticeable facts in my own poetic history, and that of Mr. Coleridge.’ And then he tells the story: ‘In the autumn of 1797, he, my sister, and myself started from Alfoxden pretty late in the afternoon, with a view to visit Linton and the Valley of Stones near to it; and, as our united funds were very small, we agreed to defray the expense of the tour by writing a poem, to be sent to the _New Monthly Magazine_, set up by Phillips, the bookseller, and edited by Dr. Aikin. Accordingly, we set off, and proceeded along the Quantock Hills towards Watchet; and in the course of this walk was planned the poem of the “Ancient Mariner,” founded on a dream, as Coleridge said, of his friend Mr. Cruikshank.’ And then Wordsworth adds some details which are characteristic. ‘Much the greatest part of the story was Mr. Coleridge’s invention,’ he says; ‘but certain parts I suggested.’

Now, what were those parts? They were parts which yield to no other in importance, and which do very much to throw over the work the glamour of noble imagination, the sudden magical charm which was Wordsworth’s own, and with which he was accustomed to illumine the commoner themes of his habitual choice. It was Wordsworth’s suggestion that the Ancient Mariner should be represented as having killed the Albatross, and that ‘the tutelary spirits of these regions’--the regions of the South Sea--‘should take upon them to avenge the crime.’ ‘I also suggested the navigation of the ship by the dead men, but do not recollect that I had anything more to do with the scheme of the poem.’ A detail, however, he had to do with. ‘I furnished two or three lines at the beginning of the poem, in particular--

“And listened like a three years’ child:
The Mariner had his will.”

These trifling contributions, all but one, which Mr. C. has with unnecessary scrupulosity recorded, slipped out of his mind, as they well might.’

If the contributions themselves were characteristic, so certainly is the manner of speaking of them. These men, and the men who were more or less their associates, believed much in each other. In no different spirit from Wordsworth’s did Coleridge himself write, in his introduction to _Poems on Various Subjects_, these words about Charles Lamb: ‘The effusions signed C. L. were written by Mr. Charles Lamb, of the India House; independently of the signature, their superior merit would have sufficiently distinguished them.’ And in no different spirit did Coleridge write of Wordsworth, years afterwards, in the _Biographia Literaria_, when their ways had parted. He could explain generously then ‘what Mr. Wordsworth really intended’ by the theories put forward in that famous preface which was too much for Coleridge.

But to return to the book--or rather, for the moment, to Wordsworth’s account of it. As the friends endeavoured to proceed conjointly in the construction of the ‘Ancient Mariner’--it was still that same evening in which the poem was conceived--their respective manners proved so widely different that it would have been, to Wordsworth’s mind, ‘quite presumptuous in me to do anything but separate from an undertaking upon which I could only have been a clog.’ ‘The “Ancient Mariner” grew and grew,’ he adds, ‘till it became too important for our first object, which was limited to our expectation of five pounds; and we began to think of a volume, which was to consist, as Mr. Coleridge has told the world, of poems chiefly on supernatural subjects taken from common life, but looked at, as much as might be, through an imaginative medium.’ That ‘imaginative medium’ was to distinguish these poems, we have been told elsewhere, from the rhymed stories of Crabbe. Poetic realism and prosaic realism, and what a world between them!

In April 1798 Wordsworth wrote to his friend, the Bristol bookseller: ‘You will be pleased to hear that I have gone on adding very rapidly to my stock of poetry. Do come and let me read it to you under the old trees in the park.’ Definite proposals, too, were to be made; and it was written to Cottle--this time, I think, by Coleridge--‘We deem that the volumes offered to you are, to a certain degree, one work in kind.’ That same spring, but later on, Cottle did visit Nether Stowey, and he writes of it in his own book of interesting if sometimes illegitimate gossip: ‘At this interview it was determined that the volume should be published under the title of _Lyrical Ballads_, on the terms stipulated.’ Thirty guineas seems to have been Wordsworth’s share. And, furthermore, it was settled that it should not contain the poem of ‘Salisbury Plain,’ but only an extract from it--Cottle himself, nevertheless, thought that poem the finest Wordsworth had written; that it should not contain the poem of ‘Peter Bell,’ but consist rather of shorter poems, and for the most part of pieces more recently written. ‘I had recommended two volumes,’ Cottle tells us, ‘but one was fixed on, and that to be published anonymously.’ All which speedily came about. Cottle further says, ‘The volume of the _Lyrical Ballads_ was published about midsummer, 1798.’ But it was not really till some while after midsummer, for not only were the Tintern Abbey lines, which close the little volume with so august a calm, not written till the 13th of July, but it is said expressly in Wordsworth’s _Life_ that as late as September the 13th the book was ‘printed, not published.’ Some weeks before, Wordsworth and his sister took up temporary abode in Bristol, that they might be near the printer. Then, at length, in the early part of autumn, the _Lyrical Ballads_ appeared, and Wordsworth and his sister, and Coleridge, left England for Germany.

To the first edition of _Lyrical Ballads_ is prefixed four pages of ‘Advertisement,’ or preface. About it two or three points are noticeable. First, it gives no hint that two poets have been engaged upon the volume: ‘the author,’ who speaks of himself in the third person, is responsible alike for the ‘Ancient Mariner’ and for ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill.’ Secondly, it is written in that familiar language--just our daily speech a little chastened and braced--which Wordsworth employed at the beginning, and employed to the end. Again, it utters, thus early in Wordsworth’s life, that note of warning as to mistaken notions of what Poetry demands, which the writer repeated afterwards with infinite elaboration. ‘It is the honourable characteristic of Poetry that its materials are to be found in every subject which can interest the human mind’--that is, by implication, his first apology for the choice of humble theme. ‘Readers of superior judgment may disapprove of the style in which many of these pieces are executed: it must be expected that many lines and phrases will not exactly suit their taste.’ Expressions may seem too familiar--may seem lacking in dignity. But, ‘it is apprehended that the more conversant the reader is with our elder writers, and with those in modern times who have been most successful in painting manners and passions, the fewer complaints of this kind will he have to make.’ Here is the apology for the fashion of presentation--the germ of that which was afterwards so fully developed in famous writings which borrowed here and there a neat and significant phrase from this first ‘Advertisement.’

The title of the ‘Ancient Mariner’ begins the table of contents, and the poem runs on to the fifty-first page of the volume--nearly a quarter of all that the volume holds. But Coleridge’s remaining contributions were small and few, consisting of ‘The Nightingale,’ and of but one other. That he made even these contributions has sometimes escaped people’s notice. He had intended to do more, for he tells us in the _Biographia Literaria_ that, having written the ‘Ancient Mariner,’ he was preparing, among other poems, ‘The Dark Ladie’ and the ‘Christabel.’ ‘But Mr. Wordsworth’s industry has proved much more successful, and the number of his poems so much greater, that my compositions, instead of forming a balance, appeared rather an interpolation of heterogeneous matter.’ When the ‘Ancient Mariner’ came to be reprinted--under Coleridge’s banner alone--some minor changes were made. Some of them were gains, but some were losses. And there was added then, what the _Lyrical Ballads_ does not contain, the ‘Gloss’--that wonderful telling of the story and yet departing from it--which is set forth in grave and inspired prose. ‘It was an afterthought,’ Wordsworth tells us, in speaking of his friend’s poem.

Of Wordsworth’s own share--that far greater share of his--in the poems, it is interesting to notice how the general title, _Lyrical Ballads with a few other Poems_, is required to cover the whole of it. For they are of two kinds--Wordsworth’s poems in the volume--the simple stories of humble life, which may or may not be dramatic, in which the ‘I’ of the poet is not necessarily himself, and the poems which record unmistakably his personal feeling and experience, such as ‘The Tables Turned, an Evening Scene,’ the noble lines written near Tintern Abbey, and the small poem which rejoices in perhaps the longest title ever bestowed upon verse, ‘Lines written at a small distance from my house, and sent by my little boy to the person to whom they are addressed.’ These, and one or two others, are the contributions to which Coleridge refers when he says that ‘Mr. Wordsworth added two or three poems written in his own character, in the impassioned, lofty, and sustained diction which is characteristic of his genius.’

Many of Wordsworth’s verses, whether of the one class or the other, in the _Lyrical Ballads_, bear reference to the circumstances of the moment and the place--are stamped with the mark of his Alfoxden sojourn. ‘The Thorn’ arose out of his observing on the ridge of Quantock Hill a thorn on a stormy day. He had often passed it unnoticed in calm. ‘I said to myself, Cannot I by some invention do as much to make this Thorn prominently an impressive object as the storm has made it to my eyes at this moment? I began the poem accordingly, and composed it with great rapidity.’ He adds that Sir George Beaumont painted a picture from it, which Wilkie thought his best. Wilkie--sagacious Scotsman!--did not commit himself too much by such praise. But Wordsworth thought the picture nobly done. The only fault of any consequence, he said, was the woman’s figure--too old and decrepit ‘for one likely to frequent an eminence on such a call.’ ‘Expostulation and Reply,’ which Wordsworth learned was a favourite among the Quakers, was composed in front of the house at Alfoxden, in the spring of 1798. ‘The Tables Turned’ was composed at the same time, in praise of the

Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness.