Chapter VI: Part 6

Think of it, Rudyard! think of it! Art ready to cope with Phill? Wilt meet Potts on his own ground? Deem not thyself Eden's superior, for he "understands," according to the _Athenæum_, "proportion, contrast, balance, and the value of unhalting movement," things that inferior persons like Scott, Thackeray, Balzac, and others had to study all their lives long. Moreover, another journal dictatorially announces that "novel-readers must prepare to welcome" Phillpotts. Mark that "must"! That "must" would fain seize the Ass-public by the throat, and make it eat Phillpotts like a turnip. But the Ass is a fastidious ass sometimes--it likes to nose its food before devouring; it will nose Phillpotts at its pleasure. Meantime, it is nosing thee, friend Kipling, dubiously and with a faint touch of derision. Ridicule kills; beware of it, my boy. And to avoid ridicule and secure dignity, hist!--a side-whisper, meant kindly--_Put down your Boom business!_ Stamp it out. Hush it up. If you don't take my advice you'll regret it. The thing has been over-done. You have had more friends than are good for you; a few stanch foes would have brought you much more benefit in the long run. When your ill-advised flatterers quote your jingly "Barrack-Room Ballads" as though they were things immortal--when good Frank Harris, of _Fortnightly_ prowess, imposes a growling recital of scraps of your doggerel, "Fuzzy-wuz," on patiently-bored people sitting at a social meal, with the air of one considering it a finer production than "The Isles of Greece," or Shelley's "Cloud"--we say with Hamlet, "Somewhat too much of this." In the year of grace 1900 "Barrack-Boom Ballads" will have gone the way of all "occasional verse," and not a line will remain in the memory of the public. The English people know perfectly well what poetry is, and no critic will ever persuade them that you can write it. At the same time no one wishes to deny your surface cleverness or your literary ability. You are on the same rank with Bret Harte, Frank Harris, Frank Stockton, Anstey, and a host of others, and there is no objection taken to your standing along with these; but there is objection, honest objection, made to your being forced higher aloft than your compeers, by means of a ridiculously exaggerated, aggressively ubiquitous "boom." When Walter of the _Times_ rushed frantically into a court of law about his copyright in a Kipling article (he having taken no such heed of any other author's article till then), the outside public laughed and shrugged their shoulders at the absurdity of the thing. From the fuss made, one would have imagined that God Himself read the _Times_ every morning, and was particularly interested in Kipling. This sort of nonsense never lasts. The reaction infallibly sets in. Never was a name sent up sky-high like a rocket, but it did not fall plump down like a stick. And so, excellent Rudyard, beware! You are not "the greatest English author" by a long way. In weak moments I admit that the newspaper-gushers work me into a delirium-tremens of ecstasy about you, and, like my friend Frank Harris, my hand trembles and my voice takes on a rich growl as I quote "Fuzzy-wuz" and the "immortal" (alas!) "Tomlinson"--but in these fits I am not answerable for my words or actions. When I put away "Plain Tales" and "Life's Handicap," and forget all your press notices, I can think of you calmly and quite dispassionately, as one literary labourer among hundreds of others, who are all striving to put their little brick into the building of the Palace of Art, and I perceive that yours is a very small brick indeed! I fear it will scarcely be perceived in the wall twenty years hence. And my present opinion of you is--would you care to know it? Of course not, but you shall have it all the same. I consider you, then, to be a talented little fellow with a good deal of newspaper-reporter "smartness" about you, and an immense idea of your own cleverness, an idea fostered to a regrettable extent by the overplus of "beans" which gentle Edmund Yates, among others, is sorry to have given you. You have some literary skill, and you use a rough brevity of language which passes for originality in these days of decadence, but you are shallow, Rudyard; as shallow as the small mountain brook that makes a great noise in the rapidity of its descent, but can neither turn a mill-wheel or bear a boat on its surface. Your men characters are mostly coarse bears--unmannerly ruffians in their speech at least--your women are, on the average, either trifling or despicable. Though unlovable, they are, however, interesting for the moment, but only for the moment. Because a good many of us know fellows who are brave and "virile" and all the rest of it, and yet who are not obliged to use a slang word in every sentence; and we also know women who are not solely occupied with the subjugation of the "masculine persuasion"; and we prefer these decent folk as a rule. But, whatever your literary failings or attainments, and however you may display them _in futuro_, be wise in time and put down your "boom." No man can live up to a "boom"; it is not humanly possible. As for your "strong strain of humour," I am disposed to accept that as a fact. It _is_ a strain--your humour. Your hydraulic pump is for ever going, and if the result is not always witty, it is flippant enough. And flippancy passes for wit nowadays. "Chaff" has replaced epigram, except when one finds a _bon mot_ in an old forgotten French play or novel, and passes it off in English as one's own "to set the table in a roar." As a matter of fact though, human life is tragic; and the comedy part of it is only invented hurriedly and inserted by the clowns of the piece.

And now Kip--though I perceive you are staring at me, wondering who the d----l I am--I will e'en leave you to your own devices, and, as the police say, "move on." Not even with the aid of your spectacles can you peer through the folds of my domino--not till I choose. I am not going about masked always--oh no! You shall see me face to face one day. And if, when these attractive features of mine are unveiled to your ken, you find yourself at all put out by the familiar manner of my speech to you, why, we will cross the Channel to some convenient scene of action, and you shall order (if you like) pistols for two and coffee for one. I am really one of the best of your friends, because I do not flatter you. The only place on which my observations may hurt you is a soft spot in every man's composition called Conceit. It is a spot that bruises easily and keeps sore for a long period. But the true artist requires to have this spot taken out of him if possible. It is as bad as a cancer, and needs instant cutting. Again I say, I do not flatter you. And if I had more time, I think I should possibly warn you against one of _your_ "boomers," and _my_ dear friends, Daddy _Lang_-legs. He has the caprices of a fine lady, has Daddy--you can never be sure when he is going to be pleased or displeased. He may discontinue a promising young "boom" quite suddenly, or on the other hand he may go on with it for an indefinite period. Of course he is an adorable creature, only it is not prudent to judge the position of all Literature by the phases of his humour.

And so, ta-ta Rudyard! See you again by and by! Don't inflate that little literary personality of yours too much, lest it should burst. Don't you believe you are a "stronger Dickens"; it won't do. It's bad for you. A little modesty will not hurt you; it is an old-fashioned manner, but is still considered good form. Read and compare the greater authors who never were "boomed"; who starved and died, some of them, to win greatness; they who are the positive "Immortals," and whom neither you nor any of us will ever distance; mistrust your own powers and "go slow." If there is anything very exceptional in you, time will prove it; if not, why, Time will sweep you away, my good fellow, as remorselessly as it has swept away many another pampered and petted "Press" baby out of the very shadow of remembrance. Don't swallow _all_ the "beans" my boy! Leave a few. Better die of starvation than surfeit!

XVII.

CONCERNING A GREAT FRATERNITY.

Ha! I spy a Critic. Hail fellow, well met! Whether you have a strawberry mark on your left arm or not, you are my own, my long, my never-lost brother. I love you as the very apple of mine eye! And to speak truly, I love all critics, from the loftiest oracle to the lowest half-crown paragraphist; they are dear to me as the fibres of my heart, and I am never so happy as in their company. And why? Why, because I am a critic myself; one of the mystic band; and, moreover, one of the joyous throng wearing (for the present moment) the safety-badge marked "Anonymous"; one of the pleasant personal friend-detectives who watch the unsuspicious author playing his game of literary "baccarat," and, on the merest hint, decide that he is cheating. I shake the unsuspicious author's hand, I break his bread, I drink his wine, I smoke his best havanas; I tell him verbally that he is a first-rate fellow, almost a genius, in fact, and then?--well, then I sneak cautiously behind the sheltering sidewall of a leading journal with the rest of my jolly compeers, and at the first convenient opportunity I stab him in the back!--"dead for a ducat." And how we all laugh when he falls, his foolish face turned up in dumb appeal to the callous stars; he was a star-gazer from the first, we say, chucklingly--these ambitious dunderheads always are!

By Heaven! there is nothing in all the length and breadth of literature so thoroughly enjoyable as the life of a critic, if one were only better paid. One is member of a sort of "_Vehmgericht_," or secret inquisition, where great intellects are broken on the wheel, and small ones escape scot free, not being dangerous. The only unfortunate thing about it is that we are losing power a little. The public read too many books, and begin to know too much about us and our ways, which is very regrettable. We like to toss together our own style of literary forage and force it down the gaping throat of the public, because somehow we have always considered the public an Ass, whose best food was hay and thistles. But our Ass has lately turned restive and frequently refuses to accept our proferred nourishment. It snorts dubiously at our George Meredith Eccentricity, it kicks at the phonographic utterances of Browning, and it positively bolts at Ibsen. A disgusting Ass, this public! It actually devours volumes we have decided to ignore--it relishes poems which We pretend never to have heard of--it tosses its head at novels which We recommend, and hangs fondly over those We abuse; and it even goes and fawns at the feet of certain authors who show unrestrained passion and idealism in their writings, and whom, on account of that very passion and idealism, we have determined to send to Coventry. My heart sank to zero on a recent occasion when the editor of the _Academy_ said to me, despondently, "The time is past, my friend, when criticism can either make or mar an author's reputation." Good God! I mentally ejaculated; then what am _I_--what are _we_--to do? What becomes of our occupation? If we may neither stuff nor flay authors, where is our fun? And how are we to get our bread-and-butter? The selling of three-volume novels alone will not keep us, though we always add a little to our incomes by that business.

This is how we generally manage. A Three-volumer comes in "for review," nicely bound, well got up; we look at the title-page, and if it is by some individual whom we know to be a power in one or other of the cliques, we pay strict attention to it, cover its faults, and quote platitudes as epigrams. But if it is by some one we personally dislike, or if it is by a woman, we never read it. We simply glance through it in search of a stray ungrammatical sentence, a misprint, or a hasty slip of the pen. (The misprints we invariably set down to the author, as though he had personally worked the printing-press and muddled the type out of sheer malice.) We obtain a vague idea of the story by this means, and if we find the ungrammatical sentence or the slip of the pen we are happy--we have quite enough to go upon. We tuck our Three-volumer under our arm and make straight for a secondhand book-store (where we are known), and there we sell it, after somewhat undignified bargaining, for three or five shillings, perhaps more, if its author has any reputation with the public. Then we go home and write half a column of "smart" abuse about it, or what is worse, luke-warm praise, for which we are paid from about five shillings to half a guinea, which, added to what we have wrested out of our secondhand bookseller, makes a respectable little sum, particularly when we get many Three-volumers, and effect many sales. (Poverty-stricken editors who write all their "reviews" themselves, or get their young sons and daughters at home to do it to save their pockets, and who sell for their own advantage all the "books received," naturally make quite a decent thing out of it.) And we can take our money always with the holy consciousness of having done more than our duty.

Yet, considering the earnestness with which we go to work, we are really very miserably rewarded. We do not make half such big incomes as the authors we judge and condemn. I say this advisedly, because, as a positive fact, the men and women writers whom we most hold up to opprobrium are the wretches who make the most money. The very devil is in it! The poets we go out of our way to praise, our Oxford and Cambridge pets and our heavy men, don't "sell"; not as they ought to (in our opinion), by any manner of means. And then they come to us--these children of the Muse--and complain bitterly that certain Press-ignored fellows, who never had a "boom" in their lives, _do_ sell. And it is all the fault of the Ass-public, and we are supposed to be responsible for the humours of the Ass. It is too bad. We cannot help it if the Ass persists in remaining idiotically ignorant of the astounding wisdom contained behind the thick skull and solemn brow of a certain dear and choice morsel of mannerism we know, who dwelleth at Oxford, and who is called by some of his disciples "A Marvel." Aye, a marvel so marvellous that he hath grown weighty with the burden of his own wonder. And the phrase "I wonder!" is a frequent and favourite murmur of this impassive phenomenon; this "leader" of an excessively narrow literary "set"--this true "heavy father" of the little low comedy of Clique. For the rest, his voice is mild and dreamy, his eyes reserved and bilious, his step as of one in doubt, who deems the morning come when it is yet but night. Of a truth he is a good and simple goose, well stuffed with savoury learning; but whether the world will ever benefit by the dish is a matter which only the world itself can decide. Personally, I like the "Marvel"; I know him for a harmless soul, a gentlemanly dull _poseur_, whose posing vexes no one and amuses many. Only I have ceased to try and "write him up," because I have read his classic novel, and having accomplished that daring and difficult feat I consider I have done enough.

Among the minor entertaining experiences in the life of a critic are the appeals made to one's "quality of mercy" by the tender green goslings in authorship, who fondly imagine that by a coaxing word, or a flattery delicately turned, they can persuade Us to praise them. I saw a young woman striving to beguile my friend Lang in this way on one occasion, using sundry bewitchments of eye and gesture for the accomplishment of her fell purpose, and I caught a fragment of her soft yet desperate petition. "I am sure you will say a good word for my poems, Mr. Lang!" Her poems! ye gods and goddesses! A woman's poems, and--Andrew Lang! Surely a Mephistophelian "ha, ha, ha!" rang out in the infernal regions of log-rolling at such a ridiculous combination, for when ever did the "Sign of the Ship" wave hopeful encouragement to a female rhymester? No, no; Lang, like myself, must know better than to give any foothold to the "vapid" feminine climber who wantonly attempts to scale Parnassus (a mountain exclusively set apart for the masculine gender), and threatens to overcome our "intensely moving, intensely virile stern strength;" _vide_ publisher's advertisements of our ever-glorious Kipling.

Another curious feature of the critical disposition is our rooted dislike to be known as critics. In this we somewhat resemble those dear old robbers of legendary lore who went out pillaging and murdering merrily by night, and were the most perfect fine gentlemen in the daytime. Such altogether fascinating fellows they were! But we play our parts almost as cleverly, and I am sure with quite as much ease and charm. In polite society we claim to be "literary men"; the term is delightfully vague and may imply anything or everything. Some of us, however, say boldly out and out that we are not critics, but poets--_i.e._, not judges, but criminals. We feel quite proud and glad when we have said this sort of thing. Take my amiable acquaintance, William Sharp, for instance. _He_ says he is a poet, and he has a most refreshingly ingenuous and positive faith in his own statement. Few agree with him, but what does that matter, provided he is happy? Then there is Edmund Gosse; he also says he is a poet, and so he is, in a pretty daff-a-down-dilly, lady-like fashion. Only he sits as critic on other poets occasionally, and, strange to say, is never able to find anything in their productions quite equal to the sounds once evoked from "Lute and Viol." "Young" McCarthy, Justin Huntly (he is only called "young" lest he should be mistaken for "old"), he who uttereth oracles concerning plays and playwrights, he not only says he is a poet, but he once went so far as to call himself Hafiz--Hafiz in London. Yes; very much in London. Between the real Hafiz and the sham is a "great gulf fixed," and the ghost of the Persian singer is more valuable to literature than all the McCarthy substance. Now as to Edwin Arnold--Sir Edwin Arnold, C.S.I. (it never does to forget his C.S.I.), the admirer of those pretty ladies whose portraits appear on tea-trays--is he a poet?--is he a critic? Well, some of his own verses were described in the journal with which he is, or used to be, chiefly connected, _i.e._ the _Daily Telegraph_, as "the finest things that had appeared since the New Testament." Now, I consider this pretty strong, and I don't wish to comment upon it. If such an eulogy had been uttered by some other newspaper we should have said that the reviewer was some unduly excited personal friend who wanted to "use" Edwin afterwards for his own private purposes, but in the _Daily Telegraph_, C.S.I.'s own pulpit, it suggested--no matter what! Anyway, I am quite sure Edwin was not in Japan at the time.

I come now to another point in our careers as critics, and not such a very pleasant point either. We are the victims of toadyism. The little men of the Press, the dwarfs of journalism, toady us to the verge of distraction, as soon as we attain to Half-a-Guinea-a-Column power. Of course we are really somebodies then, and we have to pay the penalty of greatness. Still it is a bore. We are told all sorts of things that we know are not true, concerning our "fine literary abilities," our "keen discrimination," and our "quiet humour," but we are perfectly aware all the time that such "flattering unction" is merely the distilled essence of the most strongly concentrated humbug. No sane man, unless he has some private end in view which he hopes to gain by blandishment, would dream of giving us credit for "fine literary abilities," because if we had such abilities we should be doing something more paying than criticism. But our pigmy flatterers think we can swallow anything. Here is a small specimen of what I call Press-toadyism, which was bestowed on my dearest Andrew in _Galignani's Messenger_ by somebody calling himself a _London Correspondent_. It purported to be a "review" of that amazingly dreary production, "The World's Desire," which, whatever its faults, had at least the effect of showing the joint authors thereof exactly what position they occupied as compared to Homer. Otherwise they might possibly have made some mistake about precedence. And thus ran the glib remarks of the _London Correspondent_:--

"That some parts are well written (Mr. Lang's) and some badly written (Mr. Haggard's), and that fights are many and blood is plentiful, and that there are many bits of delightful verse (Mr. Lang's, of course), and a cackling old person (the invention of Mr. Haggard evidently);" but there! I need not go on. The inquisitive individual who yearns to read the whole so-called "critique" can refer back to _Galignani_ of December 8, 1890. The gratuitous and unnecessary insolence to Mr. Haggard, and the equally unnecessary and gratuitous licking-of-the-boots of Mr. Lang must have been decidedly offensive to both authors. This _London Correspondent_ may be a man, but he certainly is not a brother.

_Apropos_ of the subject of Press-toadyism, _in re_ my friend Andrew, I must not forget here to chronicle my boundless admiration for that elaborate and beautiful witticism once contained in the _Saturday Review_. Criticising Andrew's "Essays in Little," the _Saturday_ said:--"The public may like Little, but they certainly prefer it Lang!" _O mirabile dictu!_ Shade of Joe Miller, retire discomfited! Was ever heard the like? What are the quips and cranks of a Yorick compared to this? Poor and feeble are the epigrammatic sentences of Molière; miserable to the verge of bathos every "happy thought" beside this sparkling production of the _Saturday_; this scintillating firework of atticism, launched with so much delicacy! Let me wipe my fevered brow, moist with the dews of ecstasy; I had always hoped the _Saturday_ might one day be witty, but I never thought to see the fond anticipation realised. "Moribund," quotha? Never was the Jumbo of Reviews so frisky or so full of life before! Glorious old _Saturday Slasher_! As our American cousins say, "_Lang_ may you wave!" Whoever perpetrated that delicious conceit on Andrew--Andrew, the very Pythias of my Damon worship--let him look me up at the Savile Club, and if I am there when he chances to call, he shall have such wine and welcome as can only be offered by a Critic with cash to a Critic of humour!

XVIII.

EULOGISETH ANDREW.

In speaking of Andrew I wish it to be very distinctly understood that there is only one Andrew; and he is "the" Andrew as pronouncedly and positively as "the" Mactavish or "the" Mackintosh. He is, to use the words of the old Scottish song, "Lang, Lang, Lang a'comin'," always "a'comin'" it in every English printed journal and newspaper under the sun. His finger is in every literary pie. His shrill piping utterance is even as the voice of Delphic oracles, pronouncing judgment on all men and all things. He is the Author's Own Patent Incubator. His artificial warmth hatches all sorts of small literary fledglings who might otherwise have perished in the shell; and out they come chirping, all fuss and feathers, with as much good stamina as though they had been nursed into being under the wings of that despised old hen, Art. Andrew is better than Art, because he is the imitation of Art, and he comes cheaper than the real article. The way in which the old hen hatches her chicks is slow and infinitely laborious; the Lang Patent Incubator does the work in half the time and ever so much less worry. If you can only manage to place a literary egg close enough to the Incubator for him to "take notice" as it were, why there you are; out comes a chuckling author immediately and begins to pick his food from the paragraph-men with quite an appetite. He is quite a curious and wonderful institution in literature, is my dear Andrew. The pensters have had all sorts of things "occur" to them in their profession, such as "booms," "blackmail," "puffs," "burkings," "cliques," "literary societies," and the like, but I believe it has been left to our time to produce a literary Incubator. Of course Art goes on hatching strange birds in her own tedious and trying way--birds that soar sky-high and refuse paragraph-crumbs--but then they are a special breed that would have died of suffocation in the Lang Incubator. And they are a troublesome sort of fowl at best; they will never fly where they are told, never sing when they are bidden, and are never to be found scratching up dust in the press-yard by any manner of means. Now the Incubator produces no wild brood of this kind. He hatches excellent tame chicks, who make the prettiest little clucking noise imaginable, and scratch among the press-dust with grateful and satisfied claws, the while they prune each other's feathers occasionally with the tenderest "Savile" solicitude. Even timid spinsters could take up such pretty poultry in their aprons without harm. There are no horrible, snapping, strong-winged eagles among them? Lord bless you, no! Andrew would never be bothered with an eagle. It might bite his nose off! Eagles--_i.e._, geniuses--are detestable creatures; you never know where to have them. And the Incubator must know where to have his chicks, else how could he look after them? Besides, geniuses always cause disaster and confusion in the press-yard--they find fault with the food there, and object to roost on the critically appointed perches. Fortunately, however, they are rare; and when Art does let loose such big troublesome chickabiddies the world generally lets them forage for themselves. Andrew certainly never troubles his head about them--indeed, he does his best to forget the unpleasant fact that they are flying about and might at any moment pounce on his "yairdie" and make havoc of his own carefully-incubated little literary brood.

Needless to say I am devoted to Andrew. He has done me the greatest kindness in the world. He does not know how kind he has been; in fact, he has such an open, guileless disposition that I believe he is quite unconscious of the heavy debt of gratitude I owe him. I have often thought I would try to express my sentiments towards him in some way, but my emotions have choked me, and I have refrained. Besides, great souls do not require to be thanked, and Andrew has a great soul. A great soul and "brindled hair." These qualities make him what he is, worthy of the admiration of all true Scots and inferior men. And of the "inferior" I will stand second to none in Lang-worship. Have I not followed him at a respectful distance when he has started off to rummage old bookstalls in search of literary provender? And have I not always admired the "pawkie" manner in which he has fathomed the childlike ignorance of the British public? For are not the contents of the books he picks up secondhand, forgotten, or unknown by the British public? and is it not well and seemly that he, Andrew, should revive them once more as specimens of pure Lang wit and wisdom? Certainly. No one would do the Incubator the hideous injustice of imagining him to be capable of any new ideas. New ideas have from time immemorial been an affront and an offence to the reviewer, and Andrew is not only a reviewer himself but the friend of reviewers. New ideas are therefore very properly tabooed from his list. But for old ideas, carefully selected and re-worded, no one can beat Andrew. He is a wandering "complete edition" of ideas taken from "dead" as well as living authors. As for poetry, I don't suppose any one will dispute the right he has to the Laureateship. The stamp of immortality rests on "Ballads in Blue China"--that same immortality which attends Kipling's "Barrack-Room" marvels. These things will be read what time future generations ask vaguely, "Who was Tennyson?"

Yes, Andrew, it is even so. You are a great creature, and a useful creature too, because you can turn your hand to anything. You are not dominated by any cerebral monomania. You are a Press jack-of-all-trades, and, like G. A. S., could write as smartly about a pin as about a creed. It is very clever of you, and I appreciate your cleverness thoroughly. I have had the patience to listen to some lectures of yours, sitting at your feet as at the feet of another Gamaliel, drinking in the wisdom of the secondhand bookstalls without a murmur. Only the most intense admiration of your qualities could have made me do that. I have even managed to spell out some of your calligraphy, which resembles nothing so much as the casual pattern which might be made by a spider crawling on the paper after having previously fallen into the ink. That was a feat performed in your honour--a feat of which I am justly proud. Then again I shall always love you for your frankly-open detestation of literary females. Females who presume to take up our writing weapons--and use them almost as well as we do ourselves--these are our pet aversion. We hate scribblers in petticoats, don't we, good Andrew? Yea, verily! We loathe their verses, we abominate their novels; we would kick them if we dared. We do kick them, metaphorically, whenever we can, in whatever journals we command; but that is not half as much as we would like to do. Almost we envy Hodge who can (and does) give an interfering woman a good dig in the ribs with his heavy hob-nailed boot whenever she provokes him; and in the close competition for literary honours we would fain be Hodges too, every man-jack of us. It is an absurdity that should not be tolerated in any civilised nation, this admission of women into the literary profession. What has she done there? What will she ever do? Ask Walter of the _Times_ (he is a great authority) what he thinks of women who write. He will tell you that they are merely the weak imitators of men, and that they are absolutely incapable of humour or epigram. And I am convinced he is right. Mrs. Browning, Charlotte Bronté, Georges Sand, George Eliot, and others whose names assume to be "celebrated," are really nobodies after all. Walter of the _Times_ could himself beat them out of the field--if he liked. But he is too mercifully disposed for this: he reserves his genius. Sparkling all over with witticism, he only permits occasional flashes of it to appear in the columns of his magnificent journal, lest the public should be too much dizzied and dazzled. No wonder the _Times_ costs threepence; you could not expect to get even a glimpse of a man like Walter for less. We ought to be glad and grateful for his opinions at any price.

And these epithets "glad" and "grateful" occur to me as the only suitable terms to apply to you, most super-excellent Andrew; my good friend to whom I owe so much. I am glad and grateful to know that your "lang" personality is a familiar object at so many newspaper offices. I am delighted to feel that English literature would come to a dead halt without your pleasantly long finger to push it on. It rejoices my heart to realise what a power you are. I am lost in astonishment at the extraordinary collection of Lilliputian authors you have hatched by your incubating process. They are the prettiest little brood imaginable, and what is so charming about them is that they are all so tame and well-behaved that they will never fly. This is such a comfort. Just a little scurrying and flopping through the press-yard is all they are capable of, and quite enough too. Comfortable hencoop sanity in literature is the thing; we don't want any of Professor Lombroso's maniacs in the way of geniuses about. They are dangerous. They do strange things and break out in strange places, and often succeed in stopping all the world on its way to look at them. Nothing would alarm you so much, I assure you, my dear Andrew, as the involuntary hatching of a genius. In fact, I believe it would be all over with you. You could not survive.

But, thanks to a merciful Providence, you run no risk of this. The old hen Art is a savage bird and lays her eggs among wild thorns and bracken out in the open, where no man can find them to bring to you for the artificial bursting heat of a "boom." You only get the dwarf product of the domestic poultry of the press-yard. And these are easily incubated by your patent process--in fact, they almost hatch themselves, they are in such a hurry to chirp forth their claims to literary distinction. But being fragile of constitution they need constantly looking after, which I should imagine must be rather a bore. Relays of paragraph-men have to come and throw corn and savouries all the while lest your little chicks should die of inanition, they having no stamina in themselves. Some will die, some are dying, some are dead; yet weep not, gentle Incubator, for their fate. It better suits thy purpose that such should perish, so long as thou dost remain to hatch fresh fowl upon demand. The press-yard relies upon thee for its stock of guaranteed male birds--its gifted "virile" roosters, whose "cocksure" literary crowings may wake old Granny Journalism at stated hours from too-prolonged and loudly-snoring slumbers; but produce no hens, Andrew, for if thou dost, thou art a mistaken patent and workest by a wrong process! Continue in the path of wisdom, therefore, and faithfully incubate only masculine fledglings for the literary coops. More we do not expect of thee, save that thou continue to be the king of compilers and the enemy of blue stockings. For myself, personally speaking, admiring thee as I am fain to do, I naturally implore thee to go on in all the magazines and journals telling me the things I knew before--the old stories I read when I was a thoughtless child, the scraps of information familiar to me as copybook maxims, the ancient jokes at which my elders laughed, the snatches of French romance and fable I picked up casually at school. For being always a book-lover it is but natural I should have learned the things wherewith thou instructest the ignorant world; but thou shalt tell me of them again and yet again, good Andrew, and yet I will not murmur nor ask of thee one thought original. Aware of all thou canst say, I still entreat thee, say it! Say it (to quote the jovial old _Saturday_ once more) in "little," that I may have it "lang."

And now, ever famous and beloved Andrew, I must for the moment take my leave of thee. The glory of thy reputation is as a band of light around the foggy isles of Britain, and that benighted Europe knows thee not at all is but a trifle to us, though a loss to Europe. When Hall Caine recently found out that he was not celebrated in Germany he wondered thereat and said the Germans had no taste for English literature. No--not though they are the finest Shakesperian scholars in the world and the most ardent lovers of Byron's poesy. "Benighted Fatherland!" inwardly moaned the writer of "Sagas"--"Benighted country that knoweth not my works! Benighted people that have never heard--ye gods, imagine it!--have never heard the name of Kipling!" Oh, dull, beer-drinking, Wagner-ridden disciples of Goethe, Schiller, and Heine! To be ignorant of Kipling! To be only capable of a bovine questioning stare at Caine! To be impervious to the electric name of Lang! To know nothing about the new "Thucydides," R. L. Stevenson! Heaven forgive them, for I cannot. I abjure the Rhineland till it has been to school with Lang's text-books under its arm. Drop Heine, ye besotted slaves of "lager-bier," and read Kipling. _Try_ to read him, anyway. If you can't, my friend Andrew will show you how. Andrew will show you anything that can be shown in English journals and newspapers. But beyond these he cannot go. You must not expect him to expand farther. His incubating work belongs solely to the English Press Poultry-yard--his name, his power, his influence avail, alas! as Nothing, out in the wide, wide world!

XIX.

BYRON LOQUITUR.

If I did not believe, or pretend to believe, in Spiritualism, Theosophism, Buddhism, or some other fashionable "ism" which is totally opposed to Christianity, I should not be "in the swim" of things. And of course I would rather perish than not be in the swim of things. I cannot, if I wish to "go" with my time, admit to any belief in God; like Zola's Jean Bearnat, I say, "Rien, rien, rien! Quand on souffle sur le soleil ça sera fini," or, with the reckless Corelli, I propound to myself the startling question, "Suppose God were dead? We see that the works of men live ages after their death--why not the works of God?" The exclamation of "Rien, rien!" is _la mode_, and those who are loudest in its utterance generally take to a belief in bogies--Blavatsky bogies, Annie Besant bogies, Sinnett bogies, Florence Marryat bogies, many of which disembodied spirits, by the by, talk bad grammar and lose control over their H's. My jovial acquaintance, Captain Andrew Haggard (brother of Rider), and I, have rejoiced in the society of bogies very frequently. We have called "spirits from the vasty deep," and sometimes, if all the "influences" have been in working order, they have come. We know all about them. Haggard, perhaps, knows more than I do, for I believe he confesses to being enamoured of a rather pretty bogie--feminine, of course. She has no substance, so the little flirtation is quite harmless. I regret to say the "spirits" do not flirt with me. They don't seem to like me, especially since the Tomkins episode. The Tomkins episode occurred in this wise. At a certain _séance_ in which I took a somewhat too obtrusive part a "bogie" appeared who announced himself as Tomkins. Some one asked for his baptismal name, and he said "George." A devil of mischief prompted me to hazard the remark that I once knew a John Tomkins, but he was dead.

"That's me!" said the bogie, hurriedly. "I'm John."

"How did you come to be George?" I demanded.

"My second name was George," replied the prompt bogie.

"That's odd!" I said. "I never knew it."

"You can't expect to know everything," remarked the bogie, sententiously.

"No, I can't," I agreed. "And, what is more, I never knew a Tomkins at all, John or George, living or dead! You are a fraud, my friend!"

Confusion ensued, and I was promptly expelled as an "unbeliever" who disturbed the "influences." And since that affair the "spirits" are shy of me.

Whether the memory of the Tompkins episode haunted me, or whether it was the effect of an excellent dinner enjoyed with "Labby" just previously, I do not know, but certain it is that on one never-to-be-forgotten evening I saw a ghost--a _bonâ-fide_ ghost, who entered my sleeping apartment without permission, and addressed me without the assistance of a "medium." He was a ghost of average height and build, and I observed that he kept one foot very carefully concealed beneath his long, cloudy draperies, which were disposed about him in the fashion of the classic Greek. Upon his head, which was covered with clustering curls fit to adorn the brows of Apollo, he wore a wreath of laurels whose leaves were traced in light, and these cast a brilliant circle of supernatural radiance around him. In one hand he grasped a scroll, and as he turned his face upon me he beckoned with this scroll, slowly and majestically, after the style of Hamlet's father on the battlements of Elsinore. I trembled, but had no power to move. Again he beckoned, and his eyes flashed fire.

"My lord----!" I stammered, shrinking beneath his indignant gaze, and fervently hoping that I was not the object of his evident wrath.

"Lord me no lords!" said a deep voice that seemed to quiver with disdain. "Speak, puny mortal! Knowest thou me?"

Know him! I should think I did. There was no mistaking him. He was BYRON all over--Byron, more thoroughly Byronic of aspect than any portrait has ever made him. Involuntarily I thought of the present Lord Wentworth and his occasionally flabby allusions to his "Grandfather," and smiled at the comparison between ancestor and descendant. My ghostly visitant had a sense of humour, and, reading my thoughts, smiled too.

"I see thou hast wit," he was good enough to observe in more pacific accents. "Hear me, therefore, and mark my every word! There are such follies in this age--such literary rascals, such damned rogues of rhymesters--oh, don't be startled! every one swears in Hades--that I have writ some lines and remodelled others, to suit the exigencies of the modern school of Shams. Never did Art stand at a premium in England, but God knows it should not fall to zero as it is rapidly doing. Listen! and move not while I speak; my lines shall burn themselves upon thy brain till thou inscribe and print them for the world to read; then, and then only, having done my bidding, shalt thou again be free!"

I bowed my head submissively and begged the noble Ghost to proceed, whereupon he unfolded his scroll, and read, with infinite gusto, the following:--

"ENGLISH SCRIBES AND SMALL REVIEWERS.

"Still must I hear? Shall SWINBURNE mouth and scream
His wordy couplets in a drunken dream,
And I not sing, lest haply small reviews
Should dub me 'dead' and forthwith damn my muse?
No! My proud spirit shall not suffer wrong;
'Booms' are my theme--let satire be my song.

"Through Nature's new-found gift, Magnetic skill,
My soul obeys an influential Will,
And I from Hades rise to life again
To wield once more mine own especial pen,
Which none have rivalled in these sickly days
Of tawdry epics and translated plays,
When knavish cliques o'er honest Art prevail,
And weigh out judgment by the 'Savile' scale.
The petty vices of the time demand
Another scourging from my fearless hand;
Still are there flocks of geese for me to chase,
Still false pretenders to the 'poet's' place.
Who dare to pile detraction on my name,
Let such beware, for scribblers are my game!
Speed Pegasus! Ye modern pensters small,
WATTS, BRYDGES, MORRIS, ARNOLD, have at you all!
Remember well how once upon a time
I poured along the town a flood of rhyme
So strong and scathing that the little fry
Of rhymesters like yourselves were doomed to die!
Moved by that triumph past, I still pursue
The self-same road, despite the _New Review_
And _Quarterly_, and other journals silly,
That take dull articles by Mr. LILLY.

"Most men serve out their time to every trade
Save book-reviewers--these are ready-made.
Crib jokes from Yankee journals, got by rote,
With just enough of memory to misquote;
Ignore all beauty; find or forge a fault;
Revive old puns and call them 'attic salt';
Then to the '_Speaker_' or to HENLEY go
(The 'pay' for book-reviews is always low);
Fear not to lie--'twill seem a ready hit;
Shrink not from blasphemy--'twill pass for wit;
Care not for feeling; launch a scurrilous jest,
And be a critic with the very best!

"Will any own such judgment? No, as soon
Trust wavering shadows 'neath th' inconstant moon,
Hope that a 'promised' critique will be done
By bland O'Connor of the _Sunday Sun_,
Believe that Hodge's claims will ne'er increase,
Believe in GLADSTONE'S schemes for Ireland's peace,
Or any other thing that's false, before
You trust reviewers, who themselves are sore.
Never let thought or fancy be misled
By LANG'S cold heart or ALFRED AUSTIN'S head;
While such are censors, 'twould be sin to spare;
While such are critics, why should I forbear?
And yet so near these modern writers run
'Tis doubtful whom to seek and whom to shun,
Nor know we when to spare or where to strike,
The bards and critics are so much alike!

"To bygone times my lingering thoughts are cast;
Good taste and reason with those times are past!
Look round and turn each trifling printed page;
Survey the precious works that please the age;
This truth at least let satire's self allow,
No dearth of pens can be complained of now.
The loaded press beneath its labour groans,
And printers' devils shake their weary bones,
While ARNOLD'S epics cram the creaking shelves,
And KIPLING'S ballads shine in hot-pressed twelves
'New' schools of twaddle in their turn arise,
Where jingling rhymsters grapple for the prize,
And for a time these psuedo-bards prevail;
Each public 'library' assists their sale,
And, hurling lawful genius from its throne,
Takes up some puny idol of its own,
And judges Poesy as just a cross
'Twixt ASHBY STERRY, LANG, and EDMUND GOSSE.

"Behold! in various throngs the scribbling crew,
For notice eager, pass in long review;
Each spurs his jaded Pegasus apace:
Rhyme and romance maintain an equal race.
The Grand Old Paradox of Hawarden
Seizes in haste his too prolific pen,
And, heedless how the reading world is bored,
Thrusts to the front a MRS. HUMPHRY WARD,
With 'Robert Elsmere' frightened out of faith,
And 'David Grieve' a-prosing us to death;
Next trumpets CAINE'S 'integrity of aim,'
And gives to 'Mademoiselle Ixe' a name.
O Gladstone, Gladstone! 'Boom' it not so strong
Boomers may 'boom' too often and too long!
If thou wilt write on impulse, prithee spare!
More vapid authors were too much to bear;
But if, in spite of all thy friends can say,
Thou still wilt boomwards boom thy frantic way,
And in long articles to stupid papers
Thou still wilt cut thy literary capers,
Unhappy Art thy fresh intent may rue;
God save us, Gladstone, from thy next 'review'!

"Lo, the mild teacher of the Buddhist school,
The follower of the tamest blank-verse rule,
The simple ARNOLD, with his 'Asia's Light,'
Who wins attention by translation-right;
And both by precept and example shows
That prose is verse, and verse is merely prose,
Convinced himself, by demonstration plain,
There never will be such a book again,
And never such a 'marvellous proper' man
To charm the hearts of ladies in Japan!

"Who out at Putney on the common strays,
Unsocial in his converse and his ways?
'Tis SWINBURNE, the Catullus of his day,
As sweet but as immoral in his lay.
Grieved to condemn, the Muse must still be just,
Nor spare melodious advocates of lust.
Pure is the flame which o'er her altar burns;
From grosser incense with disgust she turns.
Mend, SWINBURNE, mend thy morals and thy taste;
Be warm, but pure; be amorous, but chaste;
Thy borrowed fancies to Villon restore,
And use old Scripture similes no more!

"Behold! ye cliques; one moment spare the text!
HALL CAINE'S last work, and worst--until his next!
Whether he drafts his 'sagas' into plays,
Or damns his brother authors with faint praise,
His elephantine style is still the same,
Forever turgid, and forever tame.
Boom for the 'Scapegoat'! it has been re-writ
To suit the measure of the critics' wit;
'Bondsman' and 'Deemster' tweak each other's toes,
And as a spurious 'genius' Caine doth pose,
Taking himself and all his books on trust,
And getting photographed with Shakespeare's bust!

"Another book of verses? Who again
Inflicts rhymed doggerel on the sons of men?
'Tis Orient KIPLING, the reviewers' boast,
The darling of the Anglo-Indian coast,
Who, on cheap praise and cheaper conquest bent,
Imports slang 'notions' from the soldier's tent,
And crams his lines with 'Tommy Atkins' here
And 'Tommy Atkins' diction everywhere--
'Barrack-Room Ballads!' come, who'll buy! who'll buy!
The precious bargain's low! 'i faith, not I!
For RUDYARD'S verse, despite his 'boom,' is flat,
Though critics bloat him with 'log-rollers'' fat--
O RUDYARD KIPLING! Phoebus! What a name
To fill the speaking-trump of future fame!
O RUDYARD KIPLING, for a moment think
What 'chancey' profits spring from pen and ink!
Thy name already tires the public ear,
One shilling for thy 'Tales' seems monstrous dear;
For though they make a decent show of print
The book as book of worth has 'nothing in 't'.
O RUDYARD KIPLING! cease to scribble rhymes,
And stick to ARTHUR WALTER of the _Times_;
As 'Special Correspondent' or 'Our Own,'
But for God's sake leave Poesy alone;
Scratch not the surface of the mystic East
With flippant pen dipped in reporter's yeast,
For India's riddle is a riddle still
In spite of any 'Plain Tale from a Hill,'
The silent griefs of conquered tribes and nations
Are not explained in military flirtations,
Or 'ditties departmental,' trite of style,
(Any 'jongleur' could scrawl them by the mile;)
As 'Light that Failed,' thy race is nearly run,
Thy goose is cooked; thy stuffing's over-done!

"Lo, great 'Thucydides' of Samoa's isle
Relieves his inspiration and his bile,
And o'er the rolling ocean wide and deep
Sends the _chef-d'œuvres_ that make his readers sleep.
The 'Wrecker' comes and ponderously heaves
O'er weary brains its soothing weight of leaves,
And those who never knew that joy before
Yield to the peaceful pleasure of the snore,
And drowse in chairs at clubs in open day,
Just as they drowsed o'er 'classic' 'Ballantrae.'
Hail to 'Thucydides'! and hail the pen
That writes him up above all other men;
For sleep's a blessing, and whate'er may hap
His works ensure a harmless, perfect nap.

"Lo, with what pomp the daily prints proclaim
The rival candidates for Attic fame;
In grim array though HAGGARD'S Zulus rise,
Yet 'Q' and dull GRANT ALLEN share the prize;
Then come the little train of 'Pseudonyms'--
A set of female faddists full of whims--
Who pour their vapid follies o'er the town,
Excusing Vice and sneering Virtue down;
Next see good BENTLEY'S list of writers small:
I wonder where the deuce he finds them all?
Some 'novel new' he issues every week,
A fiction of the kind that housemaids seek--
Mild tales of goose-love, which he thinks may please,
Sure only geese would purchase books like these!
Broughton's half-vulgar, half-lascivious stories,
And Mrs. Henry Wood's posthumous glories;
Here Madam TROLLOPE whirls her small 'Wild Wheel,'
There Mistress HENNIKER unwinds her reel,
And silly 'fictionists' of no repute
Spring up like weeds to wither at the root.
Excellent BENTLEY! stay thy lavish hand,
Continuous trash were more than we could stand;
Give us good authors who deserve their name,
And save thy once distinguished firm from shame;
Give prominence to Genius--publish less,
Or rivals new thy 'house' will dispossess,
In spite of folks who think the works of Shelley
Inferior to romances by CORELLI.

"GRANT ALLEN hath a 'heaven-sent' tale to tell,
But much he fears its utterance would not 'sell'
Wherefore, to be quite certain of his cash,
He writes (regardless of his 'inspiration') trash;
Practical ALLEN! Noble, manly heart!
Wise huckster of small nothings in the mart,--
To what a pitch of prudence dost thou reach
To feel the 'god,' yet give thy thoughts no speech,
All for the sake of vulgar pounds and pence!
God bless thee, ALLEN, for thy common sense!