Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

It is understood that Edgar Allen Poe is still unforgiven in New England. "Those singularly valueless verses of Poe," was the now celebrated _dictum_ of a Boston prophet. It is true that, if "that most beguiling of all little divinities, Miss Walters of the _Transcript_," is to be implicitly believed, Edgar Poe was very rude and naughty at the Boston Lyceum in the spring of 1845. But surely bygones should be bygones, and Massachusetts might now pardon the _Al Aaraaf_ incident. It is not difficult to understand that there were many sides on which Poe was likely to be long distasteful to Boston, Cambridge, and Concord. The intellectual weight of the man, though unduly minimised in New England, was inconsiderable by the side of that of Emerson. But in poetry, as one has to be always insisting, the battle is not to the strong; and apart from all faults, weaknesses, and shortcomings of Poe, we feel more and more clearly, or we ought to feel, the perennial charm of his verses. The posy of his still fresh and fragrant poems is larger than that of any other deceased American writer, although Emerson may have one or two single blossoms to show which are more brilliant than any of his. If the range of the Baltimore poet had been wider, if Poe had not harped so persistently on his one theme of remorseful passion for the irrecoverable dead, if he had employed his extraordinary, his unparalleled gifts of melodious invention, with equal skill, in illustrating a variety of human themes, he must have been with the greatest poets. For in Poe, in pieces like _The Haunted Palace_, _The Conqueror Worm_, _The City in the Sea_, and _For Annie_, we find two qualities which are as rare as they are invaluable, a new and haunting music, which constrains the hearer to follow and imitate, and a command of evolution in lyrical work so absolute that the poet is able to do what hardly any other lyrist has dared to attempt, namely, as in _To One in Paradise_, to take a normal stanzaic form, and play with it as a great pianist plays with an air.

So far as the first of these attributes is concerned, Poe has proved himself to be the Piper of Hamelin to all later English poets. From Tennyson to Austin Dobson there is hardly one whose verse-music does not show traces of Poe's influence. To impress the stamp of one's personality on a succeeding generation of artists, to be an almost (although not wholly) flawless technical artist one's self, to charm within a narrow circle to a degree that shows no sign, after forty years, of lessening, is this to prove a claim to rank with the Great Poets? No, perhaps not quite; but at all events it is surely to have deserved great honour from the country of one's birthright.

_1889._

WHAT IS A GREAT POET?

What is a Great Poet?

The answer to the question, "Has America produced a Poet?" which was published in the _Forum_, called forth a surprising amount of attention from the press in England as well as in America. It was quite impossible, and I did not expect, that such an expression of personal opinion would pass without being challenged. In America, particularly, it could not but disturb some traditions and wound some prejudices. But in the present instance, as always before, it has been my particular fortune to find that where criticism--by which I mean, not censure, but analysis--is candid and sincere, it meets in America with sincere and candid readers. In parenthesis, I may add, that when literary criticism of this kind is ill received in America, the fault usually lies with that unhappy system of newspaper reverberation by which "scraps" or "items," removed from their context and slightly altered at each fresh removal, go the round of the press, and are presently commented upon by journalists who have never seen what the critic originally wrote. In reading some of the principal articles which my essay called forth, I find one point dwelt upon, in various ways, in almost all of them. I find a fresh query started as to the standard which we are to take as a measurement for imaginative writers; and it seems to me that it may be interesting to carry our original inquiry a step further back, and to ask, What is a great poet?

If we are to limit the number of the most illustrious and commanding names, as I attempted to do, it is plain that we must also confine the historical range of our inquiry. Some of my reviewers objected to my selection being made among English poets only, and several of them attempted lists which included the poets of Europe or of the world. Yet, without exception, those critics displayed their national bias by the large proportion of Anglo-Saxon worthies whom they could not bring themselves to exclude from their dozen. Shakespeare must be there, and Milton, Chaucer, Wordsworth, and Shelley; already a third of the majestic company is English. One reviewer, who had been lately studying the Anthology, could not persuade himself to omit several of those dying dolphins of Byzantine song that drew the shallop of Agathias up into the Golden Horn; and this when the whole tale of bards was not to exceed fifteen at most. One reviewer went to Iceland for a name, and another to Persia--charming excursions both of them, but calculated to exhaust our resources prematurely. The least reflection will remind us that the complexity and excessive fulness of modern interests have invaded literature also, and the history of literature; to select from all time a dozen greatest names is a task of doubtful propriety, and certainly not to be lightly undertaken. It was all very well, in the morning of time, for the ancient critics to regulate their body-guards of Apollo by the numbers of the Muses or the Graces. Nothing could be pleasanter than that tale of the great lyrical poets of the world which we find so often repeated in slightly varying form:

"The mighty voice of Pindar has thundered out of Thebes. The lyre of Simonides modulates a song of delicate melody. What brilliancy in Ibycus and Stesichorus! What sweetness in Alcman! From the mouth of Bacchylides there breathe delicious accents. Persuasion exhales from the lips of Anacreon. In the Æolian voice of Alcæus we hear once more the Lesbian swan; and as for Sappho, that ninth great lyric poet, is not her place, rather, tenth among the Muses?"

If we are contributing lists of a dozen great poets, here are three-fourths of the company already summoned; yet splendid as are these names, and doubtless of irreproachable genius, the roll is, for modern purposes, awkwardly overweighted. Even if for those whose works Time has overwhelmed, we substitute the Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Theocritus, whom he has spared, the list is still impracticable and one-sided. Yet who shall say that these were not great poets in every possible sense of the word? From each of several modern European nations, from Italy and from France at least, a magnificent list of twelve could be selected, not one of whom their compatriots could afford to lose. Nay, even Sweden or Holland would present us with a list of twelve which should seem indisputably great to a Dutchman or a Swede. It is not possible to spread the net so wide as to catch whales from all the ancient and all the modern languages at once. Let us restrain our ambition and see what criterion we have for measuring those of our own tongue and race.

Passing in review, then, the whole five centuries which divide us from the youth of Chaucer, we would seek to discover what qualities have raised a limited number of the poetical writers of those successive ages of English thought to a station permanently and splendidly exalted. Among the almost innumerable genuine poets of those five hundred years, are there ten or twelve who are manifestly greater than the rest, and if so, in what does their greatness consist?

We are not here occupied with the old threadbare question, "What is a poet"? but we may reply to it so far as to insist that when we are speaking and thinking in English the term excludes all writers, however pathetic and fanciful, who do not employ the metrical form. In many modern languages the word poet, _dichter_, includes novelists and all other authors of prose fiction. I once learned this to my cost, for having published a short summary of the writings of the living "poets" of a certain continental country, one of the leading (if not the leading) novelist of that country, exclusively a writer in prose, indignantly upbraided me for the obviously personal slight I had shown him in leaving him entirely unmentioned. In English we possess and should carefully maintain the advantage which accrues from having a word so distinct in its meaning; and we may recollect that there is no trick in literary criticism more lax and silly than that of talking about "prose poetry" (a contradiction in terms), or about such men as Carlyle, Mr. Ruskin, or Jefferies as "poets." The greatness we are discussing to-day is a quality wholly confined to those who have made it their chief duty to speak to us in verse.

On these lines, perhaps, the main elements of poetical greatness will be found to be originality in the treatment of themes, perennial charm, exquisite finish in execution, and distinction of individual manner. The great poet, in other words, will be seen, through the perspectives of history, to have been fresher, stronger, more skilful, and more personal than his unsuccessful or less successful rival. When the latter begins to recede into obscurity it will be because prejudices that blinded criticism are being removed, and because the candidate for immortality is being found to be lacking in one or all of these peculiar qualities. And here, of course, comes in the disputed question of the existence of genius. I confess that that controversy seems to me to rest on a mere metaphysical quibble. Robert McTavish is a plough-boy, and ends at the plough's tail. Robert Burns is a plough-boy, and ends by being set up, like Berenice's hair, as a glory and a portent in the intellectual zenith of all time. Are they the same to start with? Is it merely a question of taking pains, of a happy accident--of luck, in short? A fiddlestick's end for such a theory! Just as well might we say that a young vine that is to produce, in its season, a bottle of corton, is the same as a similar stick that will issue in a wretched draught of _vin bleu_. That which, from its very cotyledons, has distinguished the corton plant from its base brother, that is genius.

But even thus the discussion is vain and empty. What we have to deal with is the work and not the man. So long as we all feel that there is some quality of charm, vigour, and brightness which exists in Pope and is absent in Eusden, is discoverable in a tragedy of Shakespeare and is wanting in a transpontine melodrama, so long, whether we call this quality by the good old name of genius, or explain it away in the jargon of some new-fangled sociography, we shall have basis enough for the conduct of our particular inquiry.

Perhaps I may now be permitted to recapitulate the list of a dozen English poets whom I ventured to quote as the manifest immortals of our British Parnassus. They are Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Gray, Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats. It will be noticed that there are thirteen names here, and my reviewers have not failed to remind me that it is notoriously difficult to count the stars. The fact is that Gray, the real thirteenth, was an after-thought; and I will admit that, although Gray is the author of what is perhaps the most imposing single short poem in the language, and although he has charm, skill, and distinction to a marvellous degree, his originality, his force of production, were so rigidly limited that he may scarcely be admitted to the first rank. When he published his collected poems Gray confessed himself "but a shrimp of an author," and conjectured that the book would be mistaken for "the works of a flea or a pismire." No doubt the explosive force which eggs a very great writer on to constant expression was lacking in the case of Gray, and I yield him--a tender babe, and the only one of my interesting family which I will consent to throw to the wolves. The rest are inviolable, and I will defend them to the last; but I can only put a lance in rest here for two of them.

The absence of a truly catholic taste, and the survival of an exclusive devotion to the romantic ideals of the early part of the present century, must, I suppose, be the cause of a tendency, on the part of some of those who have replied to me, to question the right of Dryden and Pope to appear on my list of great poets. It appears that Dryden is very poorly thought of at Crawfordsville, Indiana, and even at busier centres of American taste he is reported as being not much of a power. "Dryden is not read in America," says one of my critics, with jaunty confidence. They say that we in England are sometimes harsh in our estimates of America; but I confess I do not know the Englishman bold enough to have charged America with the shocking want of taste which these children of her own have so lightly volunteered to attribute to her. Dryden not read in America! It makes one wonder what is read. Probably Miss Amélie Rives?

But to be serious, I can conceive nothing more sinister for the future of English literature than that to any great extent, or among any influential circle of reading and writing men, the majesty and sinewy force of the most masculine of all the English poets should be despised and rejected. Something of a temper less hurried than that of the man who runs and reads is no doubt required for the appreciation of that somewhat heavy-footed and sombre giant of tragic and of narrative song, John Dryden, warring with dunces, marching with sunken head--"a down look," as Pope described it--through the unappreciative flat places of our second Charles and James. Prosaic at times he is, slow, fatigued, unstimulating; but, at his best, how full of the true sublime, how uplifted by the wind of tragic passion, how stirred to the depths by the noblest intellectual and moral enthusiasm! For my own part, there are moments and moods in which nothing satisfies my ear and my brain as do the great accents of Dryden, while he marches down the page, with his elephants and his standards and his kettledrums, "in the full vintage of his flowing honours."

There must be something effeminate and feeble in the nervous system of a generation which cannot bear this grandiose music, this virile tramp of Dryden's soldiers and camp-followers; something singularly dull and timid in a spirit that rejects this robust intellectual companion. And, with all his russet suit of homespun, Dryden is imbued to the core with the truest and richest blood of poetry. His vehemence is positively Homeric; we would not give _Mac Flecknoe_ in exchange even for the lost _Margites_. He possesses in a high degree all the qualities which we have marked as needed for the attribution of greatness. He is original to that extent that mainly by his efforts the entire stream of English poetry was diverted for a century and a half into an unfamiliar channel; he has an executive skill eminently his own, and is able to amaze us to-day after so many subsequent triumphs of verse-power; he has distinction such as an emperor might envy; and after all the poets of the eighteenth century have, as Mr. Lowell says, had their hands in his pockets, his best lines are as fresh and as magical as ever.

Pope I will not defend so warmly, and yet Pope also was a great poet. Two of my American critics, bent on refuting me, have severally availed themselves of a somewhat unexpected weapon. Each of them reminds me that Mr. Lang, in some recent number of a magazine, has said that Pope is not a poet at all. Research might prove that this heresy is not entirely unparalleled, yet I am unconvinced. I yield to no one in respect and affection for Mr. Lang, but in criticising that with which he feels no personal sympathy, he is merely a "young light-hearted master of the oar" of temperament. When Mr. Lang blesses, the object is blest; when he curses, he may bless to-morrow. Some day he will find himself alone in a country-house with a Horace; old chords will be touched, the mystery of Pope will reveal itself to him, and we shall have a panegyric that will make Lady Mary writhe in her grave. Let no transatlantic, or cisatlantic, infidel of letters be profane at the expense of a classic by way of pleasing Mr. Lang; his next emotion is likely to be "_un sentiment obscur d'avoir embrassé la Chimère_."

To justify one's confidence in the great poetic importance of Pope is somewhat difficult. It needs a fuller commentary and a longer series of references than can be given here. But let us recollect that the nature-worship and nature-study of to-day may grow to seem a complete fallacy, a sheer persistence in affectation, and that then, to readers of new tastes and passions, Wordsworth and Shelley will be as Pope is now, that is to say, supported entirely by their individual merits. At this moment, to the crowd, he is doubtless less attractive than they are; he is on the shady side, they on the sunny side of fashion. But the author of the end of the second book of _The Rape of the Lock_, of the close of _The New Dunciad_, of the Sporus portrait, and of the _Third Moral Essay_, has qualities of imagination, applied to human character, and of distinction, applied to a formal and delicately-elaborated style, which are unsurpassed, even perhaps by Horace himself. Satirist after satirist has chirped like a wren from the head of Pope; where are they now? Where is the great, the terrific, the cloud-compelling Churchill? Meanwhile, in the midst of a generation persistently turned away from all his ideas and all his models, the clear voice of Pope still rings from the arena of Queen Anne.

After all, this is mere assertion, and what am I that I should pretend to lay down the law? If we seek, on the authority of whomsoever, to raise an infallible standard of taste, and to arrange the poets in classes, like schoolboys, then our inquiry is futile indeed, and worse than futile. But the interest which this controversy has undoubtedly called forth seems to prove that there is a side on which such questions as have been started are not unwelcome nor unworthy of careful study. It is not useless, I fancy, to remind ourselves now and then of the very high standard which literature has a right to demand from its more earnest votaries. In the hurry of life, in the glare of passing interests, we are apt to lose breadth of sympathy, and to make our own personal and temporary enjoyment of a book the criterion of its value. I may take up Selden's _Titles of Honour_, turn over a page or two, and lay it down in favour of the new number of _Punch_. I must not for this reason pledge myself to placing the comic paper of to-day in a niche above the best work of a great Elizabethan prose writer. But when a modern American says that he finds better poetry in Longfellow than in Chaucer, he is doing, to a less exaggerated degree, precisely this very thing. He feels his contemporary sympathies and limited experience soothed and entertained by the facile numbers of _Evangeline_, and he does not extract an equal amount of amusement and pleasure from _The Knight's Tale_.

From one point of view it is very natural that this should be so, and a critic would be priggish indeed who should gravely reprove such a preference. The result would be, not to force the reader to Chaucer, but to drive him away from poetry altogether. The ordinary man reads what he finds gives him the pure and wholesome stimulus he needs. But if such a reader, in the pride of his heart, should take upon himself to dogmatise, and to tell us that Longfellow's poetry is better than Chaucer's, we should be obliged to remind him that there are several factors to be taken into account before he can carry us away with him on the neck of such a theory. He has to consider how long the charm of Chaucer has endured, and how short a time the world has had to make up its mind about Longfellow; he has to appreciate the relation of Chaucer to his own contemporaries, the boldness of his invasion into realms until his day unconquered, the inevitable influence of time in fretting, wasting, and blanching the surface of the masterpieces of the past. To be just, he has to consider the whirligig of literature, and to ask himself whether, in the year 2289, after successive revolutions of taste and repetitions of performance, the works of Longfellow are reasonably likely to possess the positive value which scholars, at all events, still find in those of Chaucer. Not until all these, and still more, irregularities of relative position are taken into account, can the value of the elder and the later poet be lightly laid in opposite balances.

There has been no great disposition to produce English candidates for the places of any of my original dozen. The _Saturday Review_ thinks that I ought to have included Walter Scott, and the _St. James's Gazette_ suggests Marlowe. There is much to be said for the claims of each of these poets, and I am surprised that no one has put in a plea for Herrick or Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Of Marlowe, indeed, we can to this day write nothing better than Michael Drayton wrote:

_Marlowe, bathed in the Thespian springs,_
_Had in him those brave translunary things_
_That our first poets had; his raptures were_
_All air and fire, which made his verses clear;_
_For that fine madness still he did retain,_
_Which rightly should possess a poet's brain._

He had the freshness and splendour of Heosphoros, the bearer of light, the kindler of morning; as the dawn-star of our drama, he ascended the heavens, in the auroral flush of youth, to announce the approaching majesty of Shakespeare. But his early death, and the unexampled character of the genius who superseded him, have for centuries obscured the name of Marlowe, which scintillated half-extinguished in the blaze of _Hamlet_ and _Othello_. His reputation has, however, increased during the last generation with greater rapidity than that of any other of our elder poets, and a time may yet come when we shall have popularly isolated him from Shakespeare to such a degree as to enforce a recognition of his individual greatness. At the present moment to give him a place among the twelve might savour of affectation.

In the case of Scott, I must still be firm in positively excluding him, although his name is one of the most beloved in literature. The _Waverley Novels_ form Scott's great claim to our reverence, and, save for the songs scattered through them, have nothing to say to us here. Scott's long narrative poems are really Waverley Novels told in easy, ambling verse, and to a great measure, I must confess, spoiled, I think, by such telling. For old memory's sake we enjoy them still,

_Full sore amaz'd at the wondrous change,_
_And frighten'd as a child might be_
_At the wild yell and visage strange,_
_And the dark words of gramarye_;

but the stuff is rather threadbare, surely. The best passages are those in which, with skill not less than that of Milton, Scott marshals heroic lists of Highland proper names. Scott was a very genuine poet "within his own limitations," as has been said of another favourite, whose name I will not here repeat. His lyrics, of very unequal merit, are occasionally of wondrous beauty. I think it will be found, upon very careful study of his writings, that he published eight absolutely perfect lyrical pieces, and about as many more that were very good indeed. This is much, and to how few can so high a tribute be paid! Yet this is not quite sufficient claim to a place on the summits of English song. Scott was essentially a great prose-writer, with a singular facility in verse.

If this amiable controversy, started in the first instance at the request of the Editor of the _Forum_, has led us to examine a little more closely the basis of our literary convictions, and, above all, if it has led any of us to turn again to the fountain-heads of English literature, it has not been without its importance. One danger which I have long foreseen from the spread of the democratic sentiment, is that of the traditions of literary taste, the canons of literature, being reversed with success by a popular vote. Up to the present time, in all parts of the world, the masses of uneducated or semi-educated persons, who form the vast majority of readers, though they cannot and do not appreciate the classics of their race, have been content to acknowledge their traditional supremacy. Of late there have seemed to me to be certain signs, especially in America, of a revolt of the mob against our literary masters. In the less distinguished American newspapers which reach me, I am sometimes startled by the boldness with which a great name, like Wordsworth's or Dryden's, will be treated with indignity. If literature is to be judged by a _plébiscite_ and if the _plebs_ recognises its power, it will certainly by degrees cease to support reputations which give it no pleasure and which it cannot comprehend. The revolution against taste, once begun, will land us in irreparable chaos. It is, therefore, high time that those who recognise that there is no help for us in literature outside the ancient laws and precepts of our profession, should vigorously support the fame of those fountains of inspiration, the impeccable masters of English.

_1889._

MAKING A NAME IN LITERATURE

Making a Name in Literature

An American editor has asked me to say how a literary reputation is formed. It is like asking one how wood is turned into gold, or how real diamonds can be manufactured. If I knew the answer, it is not in the pages of a review that I should print it. I should bury myself in a cottage in the woods, exercise my secret arts, and wait for Fame to turn her trumpet into a hunting-horn, and wake the forest-echoes with my praises. In one of Mr. Stockton's stories a princess sets all the wise men of her dominions searching for the lost secret of what root-beer should be made of. The philosophers fail to discover it, and the magicians exhaust their arts in vain. Not the slightest light is thrown on the abstruse problem, until at last an old woman is persuaded to reveal that it ought to be made of roots. In the same way, the only quite obvious answer to the query, How should a literary reputation be formed? is to reply, By thinking nothing at all about reputation, but by writing earnestly and carefully on the subjects and in the style most congenial to your habits of mind. But this is too obvious, and leads to no further result. Besides, I see that the question is not, how should be, but how is, a literary reputation formed. I will endeavour, then, to give expression to such observations as I may have formed on this latter subject.

A literary reputation, as here intended, is obviously not the eternal fame of a Shakespeare, which appears likely to last for ever, nor even that of a Dickens, which must endure till there comes a complete revolution of taste, but the inferior form of repute which is enjoyed by some dozens of literary people in each generation, and makes a centre for the admiration or envy of the more enthusiastic or idler portion of their contemporaries. There is as much cant in denying the attractiveness of such temporary glory as there is in exaggerating its weight and importance. To stimulate the minds of those who surround him, to captivate their attention and excite their curiosity, is pleasing to the natural man. We look with suspicion on the author who protests too loudly that he does not care whether he is admired or not. We shrewdly surmise that inwardly he cares very much indeed. This instinctive wish for reputation is one of the great incentives to literary exertion.

Fame and money--these are the two chief spurs which drive the author on. The statement may sound ignoble, and the writers of every generation persist in avowing that they write only to amuse themselves and to do good in their generation. The noble lady in _Lothair_ wished that she might never eat, or if at all, only a little fruit by moonlight on a bank. She, nevertheless, was always punctual at her dinner; and the author who protests his utter indifference to money and reputation is commonly excessively sensitive when an attack is made on his claims in either direction. Literary reputation is relative, of course. There may be a village fame which does not burn very brightly in the country town, and provincial stars that look very pale in a great city. The circumstances, however, under which all the various degrees of fame are reached, are, I think, closely analogous, and what is true of the local celebrity is true, relatively, of a Victor Hugo or of a Tennyson. The importance of the reputation is shown by the expanse of the area it covers, not by the curve of its advance. The circle of a great man's fame is extremely wide, but it only repeats on a vast scale the phenomena attending on the fame of a small man.

The three principal ways in which a literary reputation is formed appear to be these: reviews, private conversation among the leaders of opinion, and the instinctive attraction which leads the general public to discover for itself what is calculated to give it pleasure. I will briefly indicate the manner in which these three seem to act at the present moment on the formation of notoriety and its attendant success, in the case of English authors. First of all, it is not unworthy of note that reputation, or fame, and monetary success, are not identical, although the latter is frequently the satellite of the former. One extraordinary example of their occasional remoteness, which may be mentioned without impertinence on the authority of the author himself, is the position of Mr. Herbert Spencer. In any list of living Englishmen eminently distinguished for the originality and importance of their books, Mr. Spencer cannot fail to be ranked high. Yet, as every student of his later work knows, he stated in the preface of one of those bald and inexpensive volumes in which he enshrines his thought, that up to a comparatively recent date the sale of his books did not cover the cost of their publication. This was the case of a man famous, it is not too much to say, in every civilised country in the globe.

In pure literature there is probably no second existing instance so flagrant as this. But, to take only a few of the most illustrious Englishmen of letters, it is matter of common notoriety that the sale of the books of, say, Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Leslie Stephen, the Bishop of Oxford (Dr. Stubbs) and Mr. Lecky, considerable as it may now have become, for a long time by no means responded to the lofty rank which each of these authors has taken in the esteem of educated people throughout the Anglo-Saxon world. The reverse is still more curious and unaccountable. Why is it that there are writers of no merit at all, who sell their books in thousands where people of genius sell theirs in scores, yet without ever making a reputation? At the time when Tupper was far more popular than Tennyson, and Eliza Cook enjoyed ten times the commercial success of Browning, even the votaries of these poetasters did not claim a higher place for them, or even a high place at all. They bought their books because they liked them, but the buyers evidently did not imagine that purchase gave their temporary favourites any rank in the hierarchy of fame. These things are a mystery, but the distinction between commercial success and fame is one which must be drawn. We are speaking here of reputation, whether attended by vast sales or only by barren honour.

Reviews have no longer the power which they enjoyed seventy years ago, of making or even of marring the fortunes of a book. When there existed hundreds of private book clubs throughout the country, each one of which proceeded to buy a copy of whatever the _Edinburgh_ recommended, then the reviewer was a great personage in the land. We may see in Lockhart's _Life of Scott_ that Sir Walter, even at the height of his success, and when, as Ellis said, he was "the greatest elephant in the world" except himself, was seriously agitated by Jeffrey's cold review of _Marmion_, not through irritable peevishness, which was wholly foreign to Scott's magnanimous nature, but because a slighting review was enough to cripple a book, and a slashing review to destroy it. There is nothing of this kind now. No newspaper exists in Great Britain which is able to sell an edition of a book by praising it. I doubt if any review, under the most favourable circumstances and coming from the most influential quarter, causes two hundred copies of a book to be bought. A signed article by Mr. Gladstone is, of course, an exception; yet some have doubted of late whether a book may not be found so inept and so heavy as not to stir even at the summons of that voice.

The reviews in the professional literary papers are still understood to be useful in the case of unknown writers. A young author without a friend, if he has merit, and above all if he has striking originality, is almost sure to attract the notice of some beneficent reviewer, and be praised in the columns of one or other of the leading weeklies. These are the circumstances under which the native kindliness of the irritable race is displayed most freely. The envy which sees merit in a new man and determines to crush it with silence or malignant attack, is inhuman, and practically, I fancy, scarcely exists. The entirely unheard-of writer wounds no susceptibilities, awakens no suspicions, and even excites a pleasurable warmth of patronage. It is a little later on, when the new man is quite new no longer, but is becoming a formidable rival, that evil passions are aroused, or sometimes seem to have been aroused, in pure literary bosoms. The most sincere reviews are often those which treat the works of unknown writers, and this is perhaps the reason why the shrewd public still permits itself to be moved by these when they are strongly favourable. At any rate, every new-comer must be introduced to our crowded public to be observed at all, and to new-comers the review is still the indispensable master of the ceremonies.

But the power of reviews to create this form of literary reputation has of late been greatly circumscribed. The public grows less and less the dupe of an anonymous judgment, expressed in the columns of one of the too-numerous organs of public opinion. A more _naïve_ generation than ours was overawed by the nameless authority which moved behind a review. Ours, on the contrary, is apt to go too far, and pay no notice, because it does not know the name of a writer. The author who writhed under the humiliation of attack in a famous paper, little suspected that his critic was one Snooks, an inglorious creature whose acquaintance with the matter under discussion was mainly taken from the book he was reviewing. But, on the other hand, there is that story of the writer of some compendium of Greek history severely handled anonymously by the _Athenæum_, whose scorn of the nameless critic gave way to horror and shame when he discovered him to have been no other than Mr. Grote. On the whole, when we consider the careful, learned, and judicial reviews which are still to be found, like grains of salt, in the vast body of insipid criticism in the newspapers, it may be held that the public pays less attention to the reviews than it should. The fact seems to remain that, except in the case of entirely unknown writers, periodical criticism possesses an ever-dwindling power of recommendation.

It is in conversation that the fame of the best books is made. There are certain men and women in London who are on the outlook for new merit, who are supposed to be hard to please, and whose praise is like rubies. It is those people who, in the smoking-room of the club, or across the dinner-table, create the fame of writers and the success of new books. "Seen _Polyanthus_?" says one of these peripatetic oracles. "No," you answer; "I am afraid I don't know what _Polyanthus_ is." "Well, it's not half bad; it's this new realistic romance." "Indeed! By whom is it written?" "Oh! a fellow called--called Binks, I think--Binks or Bunks; quite a new man. You ought to see it, don't you know." Some one far down the table ventures to say, "Oh! I think it was the _Palladium_ said on Saturday that it wasn't a good book at all, awfully abnormal, or something of that kind." "Well, you look at it; I think you'll agree with me that it's not half bad." Such a conversation as this, if held in a fructifying spot among the best people, does _Polyanthus_ more good than a favourable review. It excites curiosity, and echoes of the praise ("not half bad" is at the present moment the most fulsome of existing expressions of London enthusiasm) reverberate and reverberate until the fortune of the book is made. At the same time, be it for ever remembered, there must be in _Polyanthus_ the genuine force and merit which appeal to an impartial judge and convert reader after reader, or else vainly does the friendly oracle try to raise the wind. He betrays himself, most likely, by using the expression, "a very fine book," or "beautifully written." These phrases have a falsetto air, and lack the persuasive sincerity of the true modern eulogium, "not half bad."

But there are reputations formed in other places than in London dining-rooms and the libraries of clubs. There are certain books which are not welcomed by the reviews, and which fail to please or even to meet the eye of experts in literature, which nevertheless, by some strange and unaccountable attraction, become known to the outer public, and are eagerly accepted by a very wide circle of readers. I am not aware that the late Mr. Roe was ever a favourite with the writing or speaking critics of America. He achieved his extraordinary success not by the aid, but in spite of the neglect and disapproval of the lettered classes. I have no close acquaintance with Mr. Roe's novels, but I know them well enough to despair of discovering why they were found to be so eminently welcome to thousands of readers. So far as I have examined them, they have appeared to me to be--if I may speak frankly--neither good enough nor bad enough to account for their popularity. It is not that I am such a prig as to disdain Mr. Roe's honourable industry; far from it. But his books are lukewarm; they have neither the heat of a rich insight into character, nor the deathly coldness of false or insincere fiction. They are not ill-constructed, although they certainly are not well-constructed. It is their lack of salient character that makes me wonder what enabled them to float where scores and scores of works not appreciably worse or better than they have sunk.

Most countries possess at any given moment an author of this class. In England we have the lady who signs her eminently reputable novels by the pseudonym of "Edna Lyall." I do not propose to say what the lettered person thinks of the author of _Donovan_; I would only point out that the organs of literary opinion do not recognise her existence. I cannot recollect ever noticing a prominent review of one of her books in any leading paper. I never heard them so much as mentioned by any critical reader. To find out something about "Edna Lyall" I have just consulted the latest edition of _Men of the Time_, but she is unknown to that not excessively austere compendium. And now for the reverse of the medal. I lately requested the mistress of a girls' school, a friend of mine, to ask her elder classes to write down the name of the greatest English author. The universal answer was "Shakespeare." What could be more respectable? But the second question was, "Who is your favourite English author?" And this time, by a large majority, Edna Lyall bore off the bell.

I think this amiable lady may be consoled for the slight which _Men of the Time_ puts upon her. It seems plain that she is a very great personage indeed to all the girls of the time. But if you ask me how such a subterranean reputation as this is formed, what starts it, how it is supported, I can only say I have failed, after some not unindustrious search, to discover. I may but conjecture that, as I have suggested, the public instinctively feels the attraction of the article that satisfies its passing requirement. These illiterate successes--if I may use the word "illiterate" in its plain meaning and without offence--are exceedingly ephemeral, and sink into the ground as silently and rapidly as they rose from it. What has become of Mrs. Gore and Mrs. March? Who wrote _Emilia Wyndham_, and to what elegant pen did the girls who are now grandmothers owe _Ellen Middleton_? Alas! it has taken only forty years to strew the poppy of oblivion over these once thrilling titles.

For we have to face the fact that reputations are lost as well as won. What destroys the fame of an accepted author? This, surely, is a question not less interesting than that with which we started, and a necessary corollary to it. Not unfavourable reviews, certainly. An unjust review may annoy and depress the author, it may cheer a certain number of his enemies and cool the ardour of a few of his friends, but in the long run it is sure to be innocuous in proportion to its injustice. I have in my mind the mode in which Mr. Browning's poems were treated in certain quarters twenty years ago. I remember more than one instance in which critics were permitted, in newspapers which ought to have known better, to exemplify that charge of needless obscurity which it was then the fashion to bring against the poet, by the quotation of mutilated fragments, and even by the introduction of absurd mistakes into the transcription of the text. Now, in this case, a few persons were possibly deterred from the further perusal of a writer who appeared, by these excerpts, to be a lunatic; but I think far more were roused into vehement sympathy for Mr. Browning by comparing the quotations with the originals, and so finding out that the reviewers had lied.

It rests with the author, not the critic, to destroy his own reputation. No one, as Bentley said, was ever written down except by himself, and the public is quite shrewd enough to do a rough sort of justice to the critic who accuses as well as to the author who is arraigned. As Dangle observes, "it certainly does hurt an author of delicate feelings to see the liberties the reviews take" with his writings; but if he is worth his salt at all, he will comfort himself by thinking, with Sir Fretful, that "their abuse is, after all, the best panegyric." To an author who is smarting under a more than common infliction of this kind of peppering, one consolatory consideration may be hinted--namely, that not to be spoken about at all is even worse than being maligned.

One of the most insidious perils that waylay the modern literary life is an exaggerated success at the outset of a career. A very remarkable instance of this has been seen in our time. Thirteen years ago a satire was published, which, although essentially destructive, and therefore not truly promising, was set forth with so much novelty of execution, brightness of wit, and variety of knowledge that the world was taken by storm. The author of that work was received with plaudits of the most exaggerated kind, and his second book was looked forward to with unbounded anticipation. It came, and though fresh and witty, it had less distinction, less vitality than the first. Book after book has marked ever a further step in steady decline, and now that once flattered and belaureled writer's name is one no more to conjure with. This, surely, is a pathetic fate. I can imagine no form of failure so desperately depressing as that which comes disguised in excessive juvenile success. In literature, at least as much as in other professions, the race is not to the swift, although the battle must eventually be to the strong. There is a blossoming, like that of forced annuals, which pays for its fulness and richness by a plague of early sterility.

What the young writer of wholesome ambition should pray for is, not to flash like a meteor on the astonished world of fashion, but by solid and admirable writing slowly to win a place which has a firm and wide basis. There is such a fate as to suffer through life from the top-heaviness of an initial success. Such a struggle as Thackeray's may be painful at the time, and may call for the exercise of a great deal of patience and good temper. It is, nevertheless, a better thing in the long run to serve a novitiate in Grub Street, than, like Samuel Warren, to be famous at thirty, and die almost forgotten at seventy. There is a deadly tendency in the mind which too easily has found others captivated by his effusions, to fancy that anything is good enough for the public. A precocious favourite conceives that he has only to whistle and the world will at any moment come back to him. The soldier who meets with no resistance throws aside his armour and relaxes his ambition. He forgets that, as Andrew Marvell says:

_The same art that did gain_
_A power, must it maintain._

Some danger to a partially established reputation is to be met with from the fickleness of public taste and the easy satiety of readers. If an imaginative writer has won the attention of the public by a vigorous and original picture of some unhackneyed scene of life which is thoroughly familiar to himself, he is apt to find himself on the horns of a dilemma. If he turns to a new class of subjects, the public which has already "placed" him as an authority on a particular subject, will be disappointed; on the other hand, if he sticks to his last, he runs the chance of fatiguing his readers and of exhausting his own impressions. For such an author, ultimate success probably lies on the side of courage. He must reject the temptation to indulge the public with what he knows it wants, and must boldly force it to like another and still unrecognised phase of his talent. He ought, however, to make very sure that he is right, and not his readers, before he insists upon a change. It is not every one who possesses the versatility of the first Lord Lytton, and can conquer new worlds under a pseudonym at the age of fifty. There are plenty of instances of men of letters who, weary of being praised for what they did well, have tried to force down the throats of the public what everybody but themselves could see was ill-done. I remember Hans Christian Andersen, in the last year of his life, telling me that the books he should really be remembered by were his dramas and his novels, not the fairy-stories that everybody persisted in making so much fuss about. He had gone through life without gaining the least skill in gauging his own strength or weakness. Andersen, however, was exceptionally uncritical; and the author who is not blinded by vanity can generally tell, before he reaches middle life, in what his real power consists.

Yet, when we sum up the whole question, we have to confess that we know very little about the causes which lead to the distribution of public praise. The wind of fame bloweth where it listeth, and we hear the sound of it without knowing whence it cometh. This, however, appears to be certain, that, except in the case of those rare authors of exceptionally sublime genius who conquer attention by their force of originality, a great deal more than mere cleverness in writing is needful to make a reputation. Sagacity in selection, tact in dealing with other people, suppleness of character, rapidity in appreciation, and adroitness in action--all these are qualities which go to the formation of a broad literary reputation. In these days an author must be wide awake, and he must take a vast deal of trouble. The age is gone by when he could sit against the wall and let the gooseberries fall into his mouth. The increased pressure of competition tells upon the literary career as much as upon any other branch of professional life, and the author who wishes to continue to succeed must keep his loins girded.

_1889._

THE LIMITS OF REALISM IN FICTION

The Limits of Realism in Fiction

In the last new Parisian farce, by M. Sarcey's clever young son-in-law, there is a conscientious painter of the realistic school who is preparing for the Salon a very serious and abstruse production. The young lady of his heart says, at length: "It's rather a melancholy subject; I wonder you don't paint a sportsman, crossing a rustic bridge, and meeting a pretty girl." This is the climax, and the artist breaks off his relations with Young Lady No. 1. Toward the end of the play, while he is still at work on his picture, Young Lady No. 2 says: "If I were you, I should take another subject. Now, for instance, why don't you paint a pretty girl, crossing a rustic bridge, and met by a sportsman?"

This is really an allegory, whether M. Gandillot intends it or not. Thus have those charming, fresh, ingenuous, ignorant, and rather stupid young ladies, the English and American publics, received the attempts which novelists have made to introduce among them what is called, outside the Anglo-Saxon world, the experimental novel. The present writer is no defender of that class of fiction; least of all is he an exclusive defender of it; but he is tired to death of the criticism on both sides of the Atlantic, which refuses to see what the realists are, whither they are tending, and what position they are beginning to hold in the general evolution of imaginative literature. He is no great lover of what they produce, and most certainly does not delight in their excesses; but when they are advised to give up their studies and paint pretty girls on rustic bridges, he is almost stung into partisanship. The present essay will have no interest whatever for persons who approve of no more stringent investigation into conduct than Miss Yonge's, and enjoy no action nearer home than Zambeziland; but to those who have perceived that in almost every country in the world the novel of manners has been passing through a curious phase, it may possibly not be uninteresting to be called upon to inquire what the nature of that phase has been, and still more what is to be the outcome of it.