Chapter XIV: The 'athenaeum'

AS the first review which Mr. Watts-Dunton contributed to the 'Athenaeum' has been so often discussed, and as it is as characteristic as any other of his style, I have determined to reprint it entire. It has the additional interest, I believe, of being the most rapidly executed piece of literary work which Mr. Watts-Dunton ever achieved. Mr. MacColl, having secured the new writer, tried to find a book for him, and failed, until Mr. Watts-Dunton asked him whether he intended to give an article upon Skelton's 'Comedy of the Noctes Ambrosianae.' The editor said that he had not thought of giving the book a considerable article, but that, if Mr. Watts-Dunton liked to take it, it should be sent to him. As the article was wanted on the following day, it was dictated as fast as the amanuensis--not a shorthand writer--could take it down.

It has no relation to the Renascence of Wonder, nor is it one of his great essays, such as the one on the Psalms, or his essays on Victor Hugo, but in style it is as characteristic as any:--

'Is it really that the great squeezing of books has at last begun?
Here, at least, is the 'Noctes Ambrosianae' squeezed into one volume.

Long ago we came upon an anecdote in Castellan, the subject of which,
as far as we remember, is this. The library of the Indian kings was
composed of so many volumes that a thousand camels were necessary to
remove it. But once on a time a certain prince who loved reading
much and other pleasures more, called a Brahmin to him, and said:
'Books are good, O Brahmin, even as women are good, yet surely, of
both these goods a prince may have too many; and then, O Brahmin,
which of these two vexations is sorest to princely flesh it were hard
to say; but as to the books, O Brahmin, squeeze 'em!' The Brahmin,
understanding well what the order to 'squeeze 'em' meant (for he was
a bookman himself, and knew that, as there goes much water and little
flavour to the making of a very big pumpkin, so there go much words
and few thoughts to the making of a very big book), set to work,
aided by many scribes--striking out all the idle words from every
book in the library; and when the essence of them had been extracted
it was found that ten camels could carry that library without
ruffling a hair. And therefore the Brahmin was appointed 'Grand
Squeezer' of the realm. Ages after this, another prince, who loved
reading much and other pleasures a good deal more, called the Grand
Squeezer of his time and said: 'Thy duties are neglected, O Grand
Squeezer! Thy life depends upon the measure of thy squeezing.'
Thereupon the Grand Squeezer, in fear and trembling, set to work and
squeezed and squeezed till the whole library became at last a load
that a foal would have laughed at, for it consisted but of one book,
a tiny volume, containing four maxims. Yet the wisdom in the last
library was the wisdom in the first.

The appearance of Mr. Skelton's condensation of the 'Noctes
Ambrosianae' reminds us of this story, and of a certain solemn
warning we always find it our duty to administer to those who show a
propensity towards the baneful coxcombry of authorship--the warning
that the literature of our country is already in a fair way of dying
for the want of a Grand Squeezer, and that unless such a functionary
be appointed within the next ten years, it will be smothered by
itself. Yet our Government will keep granting pension after pension
to those whom the Duke of Wellington used to call 'the writing
fellows,' for adding to the camel's burden, instead of distributing
the same amount among an army of diligent and well-selected
squeezers. We say an army of squeezers, for it is not merely that
almost every man, woman, and child among us who can write, prints,
while nobody reads, and, to judge from the 'spelling bees,' nobody
even spells, but that the fecundity of man as a 'writing animal' is
on the increase, and each one requires a squeezer to himself. This
is the alarming thing. Where are we to find so many squeezers? Nay,
in many cases there needs a separate sub-squeezer for the writer's
every book. Take, for instance, the case of the Carlyle
squeezer--what more could be expected from him in a lifetime than
that he should squeeze 'Frederick the Great'--that enormous, rank and
pungent 'haggis' from which, properly squeezed, such an ocean would
flow of 'oniony liquid' that compared with it the famous
'haggis-deluge' of the 'Noctes' which nearly drowned in gravy
'Christopher,' 'the Shepherd,' and 'Tickler' in Ambrose's parlour,
would be, both for quantity and flavour, but 'a beaker full of the
sweet South'? Yet what would be the squeezing of Mr. Carlyle; what
would be the squeezing of De Quincey, or of Landor, or of Southey, to
the squeezing of the tremendous Professor Wilson--the mighty
Christopher, who for about thirty years literally talked in type upon
every matter of which he had any knowledge, and upon every matter of
which he had none; whose 'words, words, words' are, indeed, as
Hallam, with unconscious irony, says, 'as the rush of mighty waters'?

What would be left after the squeezing of him it would be hard to
guess; for, says the Chinese proverb, 'if what is said be not to the
purpose, a single word is already too much.'

Mr. Skelton should have borne this maxim in mind in his manipulations
upon the 'Noctes Ambrosianae.' He loves the memory of the fine old
Scotsman, and has squeezed this enormous pumpkin with fingers that
are too timid of grip. In squeezing Professor Wilson you cannot
overdo it. There are certain parts we should have especially liked
squeezed away; and among these--will Mr. Skelton pardon us?--are the
'amazingly humourous' ones, such as the 'opening of the haggis,'
which, Mr. Skelton tells us, 'manifests the humour of conception as
well as the humour of character, in a measure that has seldom been
surpassed by the greatest masters'; 'the amazing humour' of which
consists in the Shepherd's sticking his supper knife into a 'haggis'
(a sheep's paunch filled with the 'pluck' minced, with suet, onions,
salt, and pepper), and thereby setting free such a flood of gravy
that the whole party have to jump upon the chairs and tables to save
themselves from being drowned in it! In truth, Mr. Skelton should
have reversed his method of selection; and if, in operating upon the
Professor's twelve remaining volumes, he will, instead of retaining,
omit everything 'amazingly humourous,' he will be the best
Wilson-squeezer imaginable.

Yet, his intentions here were as good as could be. The 'Noctes' are
dying of dropsy, so Mr. Skelton, to save them, squeezes away all the
political events--so important once, so unimportant now--all the
foolish laudation, and more foolish abuse of those who took part in
them. He eliminates all the critiques upon all those 'greatest
poems' and those 'greatest novels of the age' written by
Christopher's friends--friends so famous once, so peacefully
forgotten now. And he has left what he calls the 'Comedy of the
Noctes Ambrosianae,' i.e. 'that portion of the work which deals with
or presents directly and dramatically to the reader, human life, and
character, and passion, as distinguished from that portion of it
which is critical, and devoted to the discussion of subjects of
literary, artistic, or political interest only.' And, although Mr.
Skelton uses thus the word 'comedy' in its older and wider meaning,
it is evident that it is as an 'amazing humourist' that he would
present to our generation the great Christopher North. And
assuredly, at this the 'delighted spirit' of Christopher smiles
delightedly in Hades. For, however the 'Comic Muse' may pout upon
hearing from Mr. Skelton that 'the "Noctes Ambrosianae" belong to
her,' it is clear that the one great desire of Wilson's life was to
cultivate her--was to be an 'amazing humourist,' in short. It is
clear, besides, that there was one special kind of humour which he
most of all affected, that which we call technically 'Rabelaisian.'
To have gone down to posterity as the great English Rabelaisian of
the nineteenth century, Christopher North would have freely given all
his deserved fame as a prose poet, and all the thirty thousand pounds
hard cash of which he was despoiled to boot. His personality was
enormous. He had more of that demonic element--of which since
Goethe's time we have heard so much--than any man in Scotland.
Everybody seems to have been dominated by him. De Quincey, with a
finer intellect than even his own--and that is using strong
language--looked up to him as a spaniel looks up to his master. It
is positively ludicrous, while reading De Quincey's 'Autobiographic
Sketches,' to come again and again upon the naive refrain: 'I think
so, so does Professor Wilson.' Gigantic as was the egotism of the
Opium-eater, it was overshadowed by the still more gigantic egotism
of Christopher North. In this, as in everything else, he was the
opposite of the finest Scottish humourist since Burns, Sir Walter
Scott. Scott's desire was to create eccentric humourous characters,
but to remain the simple Scottish gentleman himself. Wilson's great
ambition was to be an eccentric humourous character himself; for your
superlative egotist has scarcely even the wish to create. He would
like the universe to himself. If Wilson had created Falstaff, and if
you had expressed to him your admiration of the truthfulness of that
character, he would have taken you by the shoulder and said, with a
smile: 'Don't you see, you fool, that Falstaff is I--John Wilson?'
He always wished it to be known that the Ettrick Shepherd and Tickler
were John Wilson--as much Wilson as Kit North himself, or, rather,
what he would have liked John Wilson to be considered. This
determination to be a humourous character it was--and no lack of
literary ambition--that caused him to squander his astonishing powers
in the way that Mr. Skelton, and all of us who admire the man,
lament.

Many articles in 'Blackwood'--notably the one upon Shakspeare's four
great tragedies and the one in which he discusses Coleridge's
poetry--show that his insight into the principles of literary art was
true and deep--far too true and deep for him to be ignorant of this
inexorable law, that nothing can live in literature without form,
nothing but humour; but that, let this flowery crown of literature
show itself in the most formless kind of magazine-article or
review-essay, and the writer is secure of his place according to his
merits.

Has Wilson secured such a place? We fear not; and if Skelton were to
ask us, on our oath, why Wilson's fourteen volumes of brilliant,
eloquent, and picturesque writing are already in a sadly moribund
state, while such slight and apparently fugitive essays as the
'Coverley' papers, the essays of Elia, and the hurried review
articles of Sydney Smith, seem to have more vitality than ever, we
fear that our answer would have to be this bipartite one: first, that
mere elaborated intellectual 'humour' has the seeds of dissolution in
it from the beginning, while temperamental humour alone can live;
and, secondly, that Wilson was probably not temperamentally a
humourist at all, and certainly not temperamentally a Rabelaisian.
But let us, by way of excuse for this rank blasphemy, say what
precise meaning we attach to the word 'Rabelaisian'--though the
subject is so wide that there is no knowing whither it may lead us.
Without venturing upon a new definition of humour, this we will
venture to say, that true humour, that is to say, the humour of
temperament, is conveniently divisible into two kinds: Cervantic
humour, i.e. the amused, philosophic mood of the dramatist--the
comedian; and Rabelaisian humour, i.e. the lawless abandonment of
mirth, flowing mostly from exuberance of health and animal spirits,
with a strong recognition of the absurdity of human life and the
almighty joke of the Cosmos--a mood which in literature is rarer than
in life--rarer, perhaps, because animal spirits are not the common
and characteristic accompaniments of the literary temperament.

Of Cervantic humour Wilson has, of course, absolutely nothing. For
this, the fairest flower in the garden, cannot often take root, save
in the most un-egotistic souls. It belongs to the Chaucers, the
Shakspeares, the Molieres, the Addisons, the Fieldings, the Steeles,
the Scotts, the Miss Austens, the George Eliots--upon whom the rich
tides of the outer life come breaking and drowning the egotism and
yearning for self-expression which is the life of smaller souls.
Among these--to whom to create is everything--Sterne would perhaps
have been greatest of all had he never known Hall Stevenson, and
never read Rabelais; while Dickens's growth was a development from
Rabelaisianism to Cervantism. But surely so delicate a critic as Mr.
Skelton has often proved himself to be, is not going to seriously
tell us that there is one ray of dramatic humour to be found in
Wilson. Why, the man had not even the mechanical skill of varying
the locutions and changing the styles of his two or three characters.
Even the humourless Plato could do that. Even the humourless Landor
could do that. But, strip the 'Shepherd's' talk of its Scottish
accent and it is nothing but those same appalling mighty waters whose
rush in the 'Recreations' and the 'Essays' we are so familiar with.
While, as to his clumsy caricature of the sesquipedalian language of
De Quincey, that is such obtrusive caricature that illusion seems to
be purposely destroyed, and the 'Opium-Eater' becomes a fantastic
creature of Farce, and not of Comedy at all.

The 'amazing humour' of Wilson, then, is not Cervantic. Is it
Rabelaisian? Again, we fear not. Very likely the genuine
Rabelaisian does not commonly belong to the 'writing fellows' at all.
We have had the good luck to come across two Rabelaisians in our
time. One was a lawyer, who hated literature with a beautiful and a
pathetic hatred. The other was a drunken cobbler, who loved it with
a beautiful and a pathetic love. And we have just heard from one of
our finest critics that a true Rabelaisian is, at this moment, to be
found--where he ought to be found--at Stratford-on-Avon. This is
interesting. Yet, as there were heroes before Agamemnon, so there
were Rabelaisians, even among the 'writing fellows,' before Rabelais;
the greatest of them, of course, being Aristophanes, though, from all
we hear, it may be reasonably feared that when Alcibiades, instead of
getting damages out of Eupolis for libel, 'in a duck-pond drowned
him,' he thereby extinguished for ever a Rabelaisian of the very
first rank. But we can only judge from what we have; and, to say
nothing of the tabooed Lysistrata, the 'Birds' alone puts
Aristophanes at the top of all pre-Rabelaisian Rabelaisians. But
when those immortal words came from that dying bed at Meudon: 'Let
down the curtain; the farce is done,' they were prophetic as regards
the literary Rabelaisians--prophetic in this, that no writer has
since thoroughly caught the Rabelaisian mood--the mood, that is, of
the cosmic humourist, gasping with merriment as he gobbles huge piles
of meat and guzzles from huge flagons of wine. Yet, if his mantle
has fallen upon no one pair of shoulders, a corner of it has dropped
upon several; for the great Cure divides his qualities among his
followers impartially, giving but one to each, like the pine-apple in
the 'Paradise of Fruits,' from which every other fruit in the garden
drew its own peculiar flavour, and then charged its neighbour fruits
with stealing theirs. Among a few others, it may be said that the
cosmic humour has fallen to Swift (in whom, however, earnestness half
stifled it) Sterne, and Richter; while the animal spirits--the love
of life--the fine passion for victuals and drink--has fallen to
several more, notably to Thomas Amory, the creator of 'John Buncle';
to Herrick, to old John Skelton, to Burns (in the 'Jolly Beggars'),
to John Skinner, the author of 'Tullochgorum.' Shakspeare, having
everything, has, of course, both sides of Rabelaisianism as well as
Cervantism. Some of the scenes in 'Henry the Fourth' and 'Henry the
Fifth' are rich with it. So is 'Twelfth Night,' to go no further.
Dickens's Rabelaisianism stopped with 'Pickwick.' If Hood's gastric
fluid had been a thousand times stronger, he would have been the
greatest Rabelaisian since Rabelais. A good man, if his juices are
right, may grow into Cervantism, but you cannot grow into
Rabelaisianism. Neither can you simulate it without coming to grief.
Yet, of simulated Rabelaisianism all literature is, alas! full, and
this is how the simulators come to grief; simulated cosmic humour
becomes the self-conscious grimacing and sad posture-making of the
harlequin sage, such as we see in those who make life hideous by
imitating Mr. Carlyle. This is bad. But far worse is simulated
animal spirits, i.e. jolly-doggism. This is insupportable. For we
ask the reader--who may very likely have been to an undergraduates'
wine-party, or to a medical students' revel, or who may have read the
'Noctes Ambrosianae'--we seriously and earnestly ask him whether,
among all the dreary things of this sometimes dreary life, there is
anything half so dreadful as jolly-doggism.

And now we come reluctantly to the point. It breaks our heart to say
to Mr. Skelton--for we believed in Professor Wilson once--it breaks
our heart to say that Wilson's Rabelaisianism is nothing but
jolly-doggism of the most prepense, affected, and piteous kind. In
reading the 'Noctes' we feel, as Jefferson's Rip van Winkle must have
felt, surrounded by the ghosts on the top of the Katskill mountains.
We say to ourselves, 'How comparatively comfortable we should feel if
those bloodless, marrowless spectres wouldn't pretend to be jolly--if
they would not pretend to be enjoying their phantom bowls and their
ghostly liquor!'

Though John Skinner and Thomas Amory have but a small endowment of
the great master's humour, their animal spirits are genuine. They do
not hop, skip, and jump for effect. Their friskiness is the
friskiness of the retriever puppy when let loose; of the urchin who
runs shrieking against the shrieking wind in the unsyllabled tongue
that all creatures know, 'I live, I live, I live!' But, whatever
might have been the physical health of Wilson, there is a hollow ring
about the literary cheerfulness of the 'Noctes' that, notwithstanding
all that has been said to the contrary, makes us think that he was at
heart almost a melancholy man; that makes us think that the real
Wilson is the Wilson of the 'Isle of Palms,' 'The City of the
Plague,' of the 'Trials of Margaret Lyndsay,' of the 'Lights and
Shadows of Scottish Life,' Wilson, the Wordsworthian, the lover of
Nature, whom Jeffrey describes when he says that 'almost the only
passions with which his poetry is conversant are the gentler
sympathies of our nature--tender compassion--confiding affection, and
gentleness and sorrow.'

He wished to be thought a rollicking, devil-me-care protagonist, a
good-tempered giant ready to swallow with a guffaw the whole cockney
army if necessary. This kind of man he may have been--Mr. Skelton
inferentially says he was; all we know is that his writings lead us
to think he was playing a part. A temperamental humourist, we say
decidedly, he was not.

Is there, then, no humour to be found in this book? In a certain
sense no doubt humour may be found there. Just as science tells us
that all the stars in heaven are composed of pretty much the same
elements as the familiar earth on which we live, or dream we live, so
is every one among us composed of the same elements as all the rest,
and one of the most important elements common to all human kind is
humour. And, if a man takes to expressing in literary forms the
little humour within him, it is but natural that the more vigorous,
the more agile is his intellect and the greater is his literary
skill, the more deceptive is his mere intellectual humour, the more
telling his wit. Now, Wilson's intellect was exceedingly and
wonderfully fine. As strong as it was swift, it could fly over many
a wide track of knowledge and of speculation unkenned by not a few of
those who now-a-days would underrate him, dropping a rain of diamonds
from his wings like the fabulous bird of North Cathay."

No sooner had the article appeared than Appleton went to Danes Inn and saw the author of it. Appleton was in a state of great excitement, and indeed of great rage, for at that time there was considerable rivalry between the 'Athenaeum' and the 'Academy.'

"You belong to us," said Appleton. "The 'Academy' is the proper place for you. You and I have been friends for a long time, and so have Rossetti and the rest of us, and yet you go into the enemy's camp."

"And shall I tell you why I have joined the 'Athenaeum' in place of the 'Academy'?" said Watts; "it is simply because MacColl invited me, and you did not."

"For months and months I have been urging you to write in the 'Academy,'" said Appleton.

"That is true, no doubt," said Watts, "but while MacColl offered me an important post on his paper, and in the literary department, too, you invited me to do the drudgery of melting down into two columns books upon metaphysics. It is too late, my dear boy, it is too late. If to join the 'Athenaeum' is to go into the camp of the Philistines, why, then, a Philistine am I."

* * * * *

I do not know whether at that time Shirley (as Sir John Skelton was then called) and Mr. Watts-Dunton were friends, but I know they were friends afterwards. Shirley, in his 'Reminiscences' of Rossetti, like most of his friends, urged Mr. Watts-Dunton to write a memoir of the poet-painter. I do know, however, that Mr. Watts-Dunton, besides cherishing an affectionate memory of Sir John Skelton as a man, is a genuine admirer of the Shirley Essays. I have heard him say more than once that Skelton's style had a certain charm for him, and he could not understand why Skelton's position is not as great as it deserves to be. 'Scotsmen,' he said, 'often complain that English critics are slow to do them justice. This idea was the bane of my dear old friend John Nichol's life. He really seemed to think that he was languishing and withering under the ban of a great anti-Scottish conspiracy known as the Savile Club. As a matter of fact, however, there is nothing whatever in the idea that a Scotsman does not fight on equal terms with the Englishman in the great literary cockpit of London. To say the truth, the Scottish cock is really longer in spur and beak than the English cock, and can more than take care of himself. For my part, with the exception of Swinburne, I really think that my most intimate friends are either Irish, Scottish, or Welsh. But I have sometimes thought that if Skelton had been an Englishman and moved in English sets, he would have taken an enormously higher position than he has secured, for he would have been more known among writers, and the more he was known the more he was liked.'

As will be seen further on, before the review of the 'Comedy of the Noctes Ambrosianae' appeared, Mr. Watts-Dunton had contributed to the 'Athenaeum' an article on 'The Art of Interviewing.' From this time forward he became the chief critic of the 'Athenaeum,' and for nearly a quarter of a century--that is to say, until he published 'The Coming of Love,' when he practically, I think, ceased to write reviews of any kind--he enriched its pages with critical essays the peculiar features of which were their daring formulation of first principles, their profound generalizations, their application of modern scientific knowledge to the phenomena of literature, and, above all, their richly idiosyncratic style--a style so personal that, as Groome said in the remarks quoted in an earlier chapter, it signs all his work.

As I have more than once said, it is necessary to dwell with some fulness upon these criticisms, because the relation between his critical and his creative work is of the closest kind. Indeed, it has been said by Rossetti that 'the subtle and original generalizations upon the first principles of poetry which illumine his writings could only have come to him by a duplicate exercise of his brain when he was writing his own poetry.' The great critics of poetry have nearly all been great poets. Rossetti used humourously to call him 'The Symposiarch,' and no doubt the influence of his long practice of oral criticism in Cheyne Walk, at Kelmscott Manor, as well as in such opposite gatherings as those at Dr. Marston's, Madox Brown's, and Mrs. Procter's, may be traced in his writings. For his most effective criticism has always the personal magic of the living voice, producing on the reader the winsome effect of spontaneous conversation overheard. Its variety of manner, as well as of subject, differentiates it from all other contemporary criticism. In it are found racy erudition, powerful thought, philosophical speculation, irony silkier than the silken irony of M. Anatole France, airily mischievous humour, and a perpetual coruscation of the comic spirit. To the 'Athenaeum' he contributed essays upon all sorts of themes such as 'The Poetic Interpretation of Nature,' 'The Troubadours and Trouveres,' 'The Children of the Open Air,' 'The Gypsies,' 'Cosmic Humour,' 'The Effect of Evolution upon Literature.' And although the most complete and most modern critical system in the English language lies buried in the vast ocean of the 'Examiner,' the 'Athenaeum,' and the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica,' there are still divers who are aware of its existence, as is proved by the latest appreciation of Mr. Watts-Dunton's work, that contributed by Madame Galimberti, the accomplished wife of the Italian minister, to the 'Rivista d' Italia.' In this article she makes frequent allusions to the 'Athenaeum' articles, and quotes freely from them. Rossetti once said that 'the reason why Theodore Watts was so little known outside the inner circle of letters was that he sought obscurity as eagerly as other men sought fame'; but although his indifference to literary reputation is so invincible that it has baffled all the efforts of all his friends to persuade him to collect his critical essays, his influence over contemporary criticism has been and is and will be profound.

There is no province of pure literature which his criticism leaves untouched; but it is in poetry that it culminates. His treatise in the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica' on 'Poetry' is alone sufficient to show how deep has been his study of poetic principles. The essay on the 'Sonnet,' too, which appeared in 'Chambers's Encyclopaedia,' is admitted by critics of the sonnet to be the one indispensable treatise on the subject. It has been much discussed by foreign critics, especially by Dr. Karl Leutzner in his treatise, 'Uber das Sonett in der Englischen Dichtung.'

The principles upon which he carried on criticism in the 'Athenaeum' are admirably expressed in the following dialogue between him and Mr. G. B. Burgin, who approached him as the representative of the 'Idler.' The allusion to the 'smart slaters' will be sufficient to indicate the approximate date of the interview.

"Having read your treatise on poetry in the 'Encyclopaedia
Britannica,' which, it is said, has been an influence in every
European literature, I want to ask whether a critic so deeply learned
in all the secrets of poetic art, and who has had the advantages of
comparing his own opinions with those of all the great poets of his
time, takes a hopeful or despondent view of the condition of English
poetry at the present moment. There are those who run down the
present generation of poets, but on this subject the men who are
really entitled to speak can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
It would be valuable to know whether our leading critic is in
sympathy with the poetry of the present hour."

"I do not for a moment admit that I am the leading critic. To say
the truth, I am often amused, and often vexed, at the grotesque
misconception that seems to be afloat as to my relation to criticism.
Years ago, Russell Lowell told me that all over the United States I
was identified with every paragraph of a certain critical journal in
which I sometimes write; and, judging from the droll attacks that are
so often made upon me by outside paragraph writers, the same
misconception seems to be spreading in England--attacks which the
smiling and knowing public well understands to spring from writing
men who have not been happy in their relations with the reviewers."

"It has been remarked that you never answer any attack in the
newspapers, howsoever unjust or absurd."

"I do not believe in answering attacks. The public, as I say, knows
that there is a mysterious and inscrutable yearning in the slow-worm
to bite with the fangs of the adder, and every attack upon a writer
does him more good than praise would do. But, as a matter of fact, I
have no connexion whatever with any journal save that of a student of
letters who finds it convenient on occasion to throw his meditations
upon literary art and the laws that govern it in the form of a
review. It is a bad method, no doubt, of giving expression to one's
excogitations, and although I do certainly contrive to put careful
criticisms into my articles, I cannot imagine more unbusinesslike
reviewing than mine. Yet it has one good quality, I think--it is
never unkindly. I never will take a book for review unless I can say
something in its favour, and a good deal in its favour."

"Then you never practise the smart 'slating' which certain would-be
critics indulge in?"

"Never! In the first place, it would afford me no pleasure to give
pain to a young writer. In the next place, this 'smart slating,' as
you call it, is the very easiest thing of achievement in the world.
Give me the aid of a good amanuensis, and I will engage to dictate as
many miles of such smart 'slating' as could be achieved by any six of
the smart slaters. A charming phrase of yours, 'smart slaters'! But
I leave such work to them, as do all the really true critics of my
time--men to whom the insolence which the smart slaters seem to
mistake for wit would be as easy as to me, only that, like me, they
hold such work in contempt. Take a critic like Mr. Traill, for
instance. Unfortunately, Fate has decreed that many hours every day
of his valuable life are wasted on 'leader' writing, but there is in
any one of his literary essays more wit and humour than could be
achieved by all the smart writers combined; and yet how kind is he!
going out of his way to see merit in a rising poet, and to foster it.
Or take Grant Allen, whose good things flow so naturally from him.
While the typical smart writer is illustrating the primal curse by
making his poor little spiteful jokes in the sweat of his poor little
spiteful brow, Grant Allen's good-natured sayings have the very wit
that the unlucky sweater and 'slater' is trying for. Read what he
said about William Watson, and see how kind he is. Compare his
geniality with the scurrility of the smart writers. Again, take
Andrew Lang, perhaps the most variously accomplished man of letters
in England or in Europe, and compare his geniality with the
scurrility of the smart writers. But it was not, I suppose, of such
as they that you came to talk about. You are asking me whether I am
in sympathy with the younger writers of my time. My answer is that I
cannot imagine any one to be more in sympathy with them than I am.
In spite of the disparity of years between me and the youngest of
them, I believe I number many of them among my warmest and most loyal
friends, and that is because I am in true sympathy with their work
and their aims. No doubt there are some points in which they and I
agree to differ."

"And what about our contemporary novelists? Perhaps you do not give
attention to fiction?"

"Give attention to novels! Why, if I did not, I should not give
attention to literature at all. In a true and deep sense all pure
literature is fiction--to use an extremely inadequate and misleading
word as a substitute for the right phrase, 'imaginative
representation.' 'The Iliad,' 'The Odyssey,' 'The AEneid,' 'The
Divina Commedia,' are fundamentally novels, though in verse, as
certainly novels as is the latest story by the most popular of our
writers. The greatest of all writers of the novelette is the old
Burmese parable writer, who gave us the story of the girl-mother and
the mustard-seed. A time which has given birth to such novelists as
many of ours of the present day is a great, and a very great, time
for the English novel. Criticism will have to recognize, and at
once, that the novel, now-a-days, stands plump in the front rank of
the 'literature of power,' and if criticism does not so recognize it,
so much the worse for criticism, I think. That the novel will grow
in importance is, I say, quite certain. In such a time as ours (as I
have said in print), poetry is like the knickerbockers of a growing
boy--it has become too small somehow; it is not quite large enough
for the growing limbs of life. The novel is more flexible; it can be
stretched to fit the muscles as they swell."

"I will conclude by asking you what I have asked another eminent
critic: What is your opinion of anonymity in criticism?"

"Well, there I am a 'galled jade' that must needs 'wince' a little.
No doubt I write anonymously myself, but that is because I have not
yet mastered that dislike of publicity which has kept me back, and my
writing seems to lose its elasticity with its anonymity. The chief
argument against anonymous criticism I take to be this: That any
scribbler who can get upon an important journal is at once clothed
with the journal's own authority--and the same applies, of course, to
the dishonest critic; and this is surely very serious. With regard
to dishonest criticism it is impossible for the most wary editor to
be always on his guard against it. An editor cannot read all the
books, nor can he know the innumerable ramifications of the literary
world. When Jones asks him for Brown's book for review, the editor
cannot know that Jones has determined to praise it or to cut it up
irrespective of its merits; and then, when the puff or attack comes
in, it is at once clothed with the authority, not of Jones's name,
but that of the journal.

In the literary arena itself the truth of the case may be known, but
not in the world outside, and it must not be supposed but that great
injustice may flow from this. I myself have more than once heard a
good book spoken of with contempt in London Society, and heard quoted
the very words of some hostile review which I have known to be the
work of a spiteful foe of the writer of the book, or of some paltry
fellow who was quite incompetent to review anything."

Now that the day of the 'smart slaters' is over, it is interesting to read in connection with these obiter dicta the following passage from the article in which Mr. Watts-Dunton, on the seventieth birthday of the 'Athenaeum,' spoke of its record and its triumphs:--

"The enormous responsibility of anonymous criticism is seen in every
line contributed by the Maurice and Sterling group who spoke through
its columns. Even for those who are behind the scenes and know that
the critique expresses the opinion of only one writer, it is
difficult not to be impressed by the accent of authority in the
editorial 'we.' But with regard to the general public, the reader of
a review article finds it impossible to escape from the authority of
the 'we,' and the power of a single writer to benefit or to injure an
author is so great that none but the most deeply conscientious men
ought to enter the ranks of the anonymous reviewers. These were the
views of Maurice and Sterling; and that they are shared by all the
best writers of our time there can be no doubt. Some very
illustrious men have given very emphatic expression to them. On a
certain memorable occasion, at a little dinner-party at 16 Cheyne
Walk, one of the guests related an anecdote of his having
accidentally met an old acquaintance who had deeply disgraced
himself, and told how he had stood 'dividing the swift mind' as to
whether he could or could not offer the man his hand. 'I think I
should have offered him mine,' said Rossetti, 'although no one
detests his offence more than I do.' And then the conversation ran
upon the question as to the various kinds of offenders with whom old
friends could not shake hands. 'There is one kind of miscreant,'
said Rossetti, 'whom you have forgotten to name--a miscreant who in
kind of meanness and infamy cannot well be beaten, the man who in an
anonymous journal tells the world that a poem or picture is bad when
he knows it to be good. That is the man who should never defile my
hand by his touch. By God, if I met such a man at a dinner-table I
must not kick him, I suppose; but I could not, and would not, taste
bread and salt with him. I would quietly get up and go.' Tennyson,
on afterwards being told this story, said, 'And who would not do the
same? Such a man has been guilty of sacrilege--sacrilege against
art.' Maurice, Sterling, and the other writers in the first volume
of the 'Athenaeum' worked on the great principle that the critic's
primary duty is to seek and to bring to light those treasures of art
and literature that the busy world is only too apt to pass by. Their
pet abhorrence was the cheap smartness of Jeffrey and certain of his
coadjutors; and from its commencement the 'Athenaeum' has striven to
avoid slashing and smart writing. A difficult thing to avoid, no
doubt, for nothing is so easy to achieve as that insolent and vulgar
slashing which the half-educated amateur thinks so clever. Of all
forms of writing, the founders of the 'Athenaeum' held the shallow,
smart style to be the cheapest and also the most despicable. And
here again the views of the 'Athenaeum' have remained unchanged. The
critic who works 'without a conscience or an aim' knows only too well
that it pays to pander to the most lamentable of all the weaknesses
of human nature--the love that people have of seeing each other
attacked and vilified; it pays for a time, until it defeats itself.
For although man has a strong instinct for admiration--else had he
never reached his present position in the conscious world--he has,
running side by side with this instinct, another strong instinct--the
instinct for contempt. A reviewer's ridicule poured upon a writer
titillates the reader with a sense of his own superiority. It is by
pandering to this lower instinct that the unprincipled journalist
hopes to kill two birds with one stone--to gratify his own malignity
and low-bred love of insolence, and to make profit while doing so.
Although cynicism may certainly exist alongside great talent, it is
far more likely to be found where there is no talent at all. Many
brilliant writers have written in this journal, but rarely, if ever,
have truth and honesty of criticism been sacrificed for a smart
saying. One of these writers--the greatest wit of the nineteenth
century--used to say, in honest disparagement of what were considered
his own prodigious powers of wit, 'I will engage in six lessons to
teach any man to do this kind of thing as well as I do, if he thinks
it worth his while to learn.' And the 'Athenaeum,' at the time when
Hood was reviewing Dickens in its columns, could have said the same
thing. The smart reviewer, however, mistakes insolence for wit, and
among the low-minded insolence needs no teaching."

Of course, in the office of an important literary organ there is always a kind of terror lest, in the necessary hurry of the work, a contributor should 'come down a cropper' over some matter of fact, and open the door to troublesome correspondence. As Mr. Watts-Dunton has said, the mysterious 'we' must claim to be Absolute Wisdom, or where is the authority of the oracle? When a contributor 'comes down a cropper,' although the matter may be of infinitesimal importance, the editor cannot, it seems, and never could (except during the imperial regime of the 'Saturday Review' under Cook) refuse to insert a correction. Now, as Mr. Watts-Dunton has said, 'the smaller the intelligence, the greater joy does it feel in setting other intelligences right.' I have been told that it was a tradition in the office of the 'Examiner,' and also in the office of the 'Athenaeum,' that Theodore Watts had not only never been known to 'come down a cropper,' but had never given the 'critical gnats' a chance of pretending that he had to. One day, however, in an article on Frederick Tennyson's poems, speaking of the position that the poet Alexander Smith occupied in the early fifties, and contrasting it with the position that he held at the time the article was written, Mr. Watts-Dunton affirmed that once on a time Smith--the same Smith whom 'Z' (the late William Allingham) had annihilated in the 'Athenaeum'--had been admired by Alfred Tennyson, and also that once on a time Herbert Spencer had compared a metaphor of Alexander Smith's with the metaphors of Shakespeare. The touchiness of Spencer was proverbial, and on the next Monday morning the editor got the following curt note from the great man:--

'Will the writer of the review of Mr. Frederick Tennyson's poems,
which was published in your last number, please say where I have
compared the metaphors of Shakspeare and Alexander Smith?

HERBERT SPENCER.'

The editor, taking for granted that the heretofore impeccable contributor had at last 'come down a cropper,' sent a proof of Spencer's note to Mr. Watts-Dunton, and intimated that it had better be printed without any editorial comment at all. Of course, if Mr. Watts-Dunton had at last 'come down a cropper,' this would have been the wisest plan. But he returned the proof of the letter to the editor, with the following footnote added to it:--

"It is many years since Mr. Herbert Spencer printed in one of the
magazines an essay dealing with the laws of cause and effect in
literary art--an essay so searching in its analyses, and so original
in its method and conclusions, that the workers in pure literature
may well be envious of science for enticing such a leader away from
their ranks--and it is many years since we had the pleasure of
reading it. Our memory is, therefore, somewhat hazy as to the way in
which he introduced such metaphors by Alexander Smith as 'I speared
him with a jest,' etc. Our only object, however, in alluding to the
subject was to show that a poet now ignored by the criticism of the
hour, a poet who could throw off such Shakspearean sentences as
this--

--My drooping sails
Flap idly 'gainst the mast of my intent;
I rot upon the waters when my prow
Should grate the golden isles--

had once the honour of being admired by Alfred Tennyson and
favourably mentioned by Mr. Herbert Spencer."

Spencer told this to a friend, and with much laughter said, 'Of course the article was Theodore Watts's. I had forgotten entirely what I had said about Shakspeare and Alexander Smith.'

If I were asked to furnish a typical example of that combination of critical insight, faultless memory, and genial courtesy, which distinguishes Mr. Watts-Dunton's writings, I think I should select this bland postscript to Spencer's letter.

Another instance of the care and insight with which Mr. Watts-Dunton always wrote his essays is connected with Robert Louis Stevenson. It occurred in connection with 'Kidnapped.' I will quote here Mr. Watts-Dunton's own version of the anecdote, which will be found in the 'Athenaeum' review of the Edinburgh edition of Stevenson's works. The playful allusion to the 'Athenaeum's' kindness is very characteristic:--

"Of Stevenson's sweetness of disposition and his good sense we could
quote many instances; but let one suffice. When 'Kidnapped'
appeared, although in reviewing it we enjoyed the great pleasure of
giving high praise to certain parts of that delightful narrative, we
refused to be scared from making certain strictures. It occurred to
us that while some portions of the story were full of that organic
detail of which Scott was such a master, and without which no really
vital story can be told, it was not so with certain other parts.
From this we drew the conclusion that the book really consisted of
two distinct parts, two stories which Stevenson had tried in vain to
weld into one. We surmised that the purely Jacobite adventures of
Balfour and Alan Breck were written first, and that then the writer,
anxious to win the suffrages of the general novel-reader (whose power
is so great with Byles the Butcher), looked about him for some story
on the old lines; that he experienced great difficulty in finding
one; and that he was at last driven upon the old situation of the
villain uncle plotting to make away with the nephew by kidnapping him
and sending him off to the plantations. The 'Athenaeum,' whose
kindness towards all writers, poets and prosemen, great and small,
has won for it such an infinity of gratitude, said this, but in its
usual kind and gentle way. This aroused the wrath of the
Stevensonians. Yet we were not at all surprised to get from the
author of 'Kidnapped' himself a charming letter.'

This letter appears in Stevenson's 'Letters,' and by the courtesy of Mr. Sidney Colvin and Mr. A. M. S. Methuen I am permitted to reprint it here:--

SKERRYVORE, BOURNEMOUTH.

DEAR MR. WATTS,--The sight of the last 'Athenaeum' reminds me of you,
and of my debt now too long due. I wish to thank you for your notice
of 'Kidnapped'; and that not because it was kind, though for that
also I valued it; but in the same sense as I have thanked you before
now for a hundred articles on a hundred different writers. A critic
like you is one who fights the good fight, contending with stupidity,
and I would fain hope not all in vain; in my own case, for instance,
surely not in vain.

What you say of the two parts in 'Kidnapped' was felt by no one more
painfully than by myself. I began it, partly as a lark, partly as a
pot-boiler; and suddenly it moved, David and Alan stepped out from
the canvas, and I found I was in another world. But there was the
cursed beginning, and a cursed end must be appended; and our old
friend Byles the Butcher was plainly audible tapping at the back
door. So it had to go into the world, one part (as it does seem to
me) alive, one part merely galvanised: no work, only an essay. For a
man of tentative method, and weak health, and a scarcity of private
means, and not too much of that frugality which is the artist's
proper virtue, the days of sinecures and patrons look very golden:
the days of professional literature very hard. Yet I do not so far
deceive myself as to think I should change my character by changing
my epoch; the sum of virtue in our books is in a relation of equality
to the sum of virtues in ourselves; and my 'Kidnapped' was doomed,
while still in the womb and while I was yet in the cradle, to be the
thing it is.

And now to the more genial business of defence. You attack my fight
on board the 'Covenant,' I think it literal. David and Alan had
every advantage on their side, position, arms, training, a good
conscience; a handful of merchant sailors, not well led in the first
attack, not led at all in the second, could only by an accident have
taken the roundhouse by attack; and since the defenders had firearms
and food, it is even doubtful if they could have been starved out.
The only doubtful point with me is whether the seamen would have ever
ventured on the second onslaught; I half believe they would not;
still the illusion of numbers and the authority of Hoseason would
perhaps stretch far enough to justify the extremity.--I am, dear Mr.
Watts, your very sincere admirer,

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

Mr. Watts-Dunton has always been a warm admirer of Stevenson, of his personal character no less than his undoubted genius, and Stevenson, on his part, in conversation never failed to speak of himself, as in this letter he subscribes himself, as Mr. Watts-Dunton's sincere admirer. But Mr. Watts-Dunton's admiration of Stevenson's work was more tempered with judgment than was the admiration of some critics, who afterwards, when he became too successful, disparaged him. Greatly as he admired 'Kidnapped' and 'Catriona,' there were certain of Stevenson's works for which his admiration was qualified, and certain others for which he had no admiration at all. His strictures upon the story which seems to have been at first the main source of Stevenson's popularity, 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,' were much resented at the time by those insincere and fickle worshippers to whom I have already alluded. Yet these strictures are surely full of wisdom, and they specially show that wide sweep over the entire field of literature which is characteristic of all his criticism. As they contain, besides, one of his many tributes to Scott, I will quote them here:--

"Take the little story 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,' the laudatory
criticism upon which is in bulk, as regards the story itself, like
the comet's tail in relation to the comet. On its appearance as a
story, a 'shilling shocker' for the railway bookstalls, the critic's
attention was directed to its vividness of narrative and kindred
qualities, and though perfectly conscious of its worthlessness in the
world of literary art, he might well be justified in comparing it to
its advantage with other stories of its class and literary standing.
But when it is offered as a classic--and this is really how it is
offered--it has to be judged by critical canons of a very different
kind. It has then to be compared and contrasted with stories having
a like motive--stories that deal with an idea as old as the oldest
literature--as old, no doubt, as those primeval days when man awoke
to the consciousness that he is a moral and a responsible
being--stories whose temper has always been up to now of the loftiest
kind.

It is many years since, in writing of the 'Parables of Buddhaghosha,'
it was our business to treat at length of the grand idea of man's
dual nature, and the many beautiful forms in which it has been
embodied. We said then that, from the lovely modern story of Arsene
Houssaye, where a young man, starting along life's road, sees on a
lawn a beautiful girl and loves her, and afterwards--when sin has
soiled him--finds that she was his own soul, stained now by his own
sin; and from the still more impressive, though less lovely modern
story of Edgar Poe, 'William Wilson,' up to the earliest allegories
upon the subject, no writer or story-teller had dared to degrade by
gross treatment a motive of such universal appeal to the great heart
of the 'Great Man, Mankind.' We traced the idea, as far as our
knowledge went, through Calderon, back to Oriental sources, and
found, as we then could truly affirm, that this motive--from the
ethical point of view the most pathetic and solemn of all
motives--had been always treated with a nobility and a greatness that
did honour to literary art. Manu, after telling us that 'single is
each man born into the world--single dies,' implores each one to
'collect virtue,' in order that after death he may be met by the
virtuous part of his dual self, a beautiful companion and guide in
traversing 'that gloom which is so hard to be traversed.' Fine as
this is, it is surpassed by an Arabian story we then quoted (since
versified by Sir Edwin Arnold)--the story of the wicked king who met
after death a frightful hag for an eternal companion, and found her
to be only a part of his own dual nature, the embodiment of his own
evil deeds. And even this is surpassed by that lovely allegory in
Arda Viraf, in which a virtuous soul in Paradise, walking amid
pleasant trees whose fragrance was wafted from God, meets a part of
his own dual nature, a beautiful maiden, who says to him, 'O youth, I
am thine own actions.'

And we instanced other stories and allegories equally beautiful, in
which this supreme thought has been treated as poetically as it
deserves. It was left for Stevenson to degrade it into a hideous
tale of murder and Whitechapel mystery--a story of astonishing
brutality, in which the separation of the two natures of the man's
soul is effected not by psychological development, and not by the
'awful alchemy' of the spirit-world beyond the grave, as in all the
previous versions, but by the operation of a dose of some supposed
new drug.

If the whole thing is meant as a horrible joke, in imitation of De
Quincey's 'Murder considered as One of the Fine Arts,' it tells
poorly for Stevenson's sense of humour. If it is meant as a serious
allegory, it is an outrage upon the grand allegories of the same
motive with which most literatures have been enriched. That a story
so coarse should have met with the plaudits that 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde' met with at the time of its publication--that it should now be
quoted in leading articles of important papers every few days, while
all the various and beautiful renderings of the motive are
ignored--what does it mean? Is it a sign that the 'shrinkage of the
world,' the 'solidarity of civilisation,' making the record of each
day's doings too big for the day, has worked a great change in our
public writers? Is it that they not only have no time to think, but
no time to read anything beyond the publications of the hour? Is it
that good work is unknown to them, and that bad work is forced upon
them, and that in their busy ignorance they must needs accept it and
turn to it for convenient illustration? That Stevenson should have
been impelled to write the story shows what the 'Suicide Club' had
already shown, that underneath the apparent health which gives such a
charm to 'Treasure Island' and 'Kidnapped,' there was that morbid
strain which is so often associated with physical disease.

Had it not been for the influence upon him of the healthiest of all
writers since Chaucer--Walter Scott--Stevenson might have been in the
ranks of those pompous problem-mongers of fiction and the stage who
do their best to make life hideous. It must be remembered that he
was a critic first and a creator afterwards. He himself tells us how
critically he studied the methods of other writers before he took to
writing himself. No one really understood better than he Hesiod's
fine saying that the muses were born in order that they might be a
forgetfulness of evils and a truce from cares. No one understood
better than he Joubert's saying, 'Fiction has no business to exist
unless it is more beautiful than reality; in literature the one aim
is the beautiful; once lose sight of that, and you have the mere
frightful reality.' And for the most part he succeeded in keeping
down the morbid impulses of a spirit imprisoned and fretted in a
crazy body.

Save in such great mistakes as 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,' and a few
other stories, Stevenson acted upon Joubert's excellent maxim. But
Scott, and Scott alone, is always right in this matter--right by
instinct. He alone is always a delight. If all art is dedicated to
joy, as Schiller declares, and if there is no higher and more serious
problem than how to make men happy, then the 'Waverley Novels' are
among the most precious things in the literature of the world."

Another writer of whose good-nature Mr. Watts-Dunton always speaks warmly is Browning. Among the many good anecdotes I have heard him relate in this connection, I will give one. I do not think that he would object to my doing so.

"It is one of my misfortunes," said he, "to be not fully worthy (to
use the word of a very dear friend of mine), of Browning's poetry.
Where I am delighted, stimulated, and exhilarated by the imaginative
and intellectual substance of his work, I find his metrical movements
in a general way not pleasing to my ear. When a certain book of his
came out--I forget which--it devolved upon me to review it. Certain
eccentricities in it, for some reason or another, irritated me, and I
expressed my irritation in something very like chaff. A close friend
of mine, a greater admirer of Browning than I am myself--in fact, Mr.
Swinburne--chided me for it, and I feel that he was right. On the
afternoon following the appearance of the article I was at the Royal
Academy private view, when Lowell came up to me and at once began
talking about the review. Lowell, I found, was delighted with
it--said it was the most original and brilliant thing that had
appeared for many years. 'But,' said he, 'You're a brave man to be
here where Browning always comes.' Then, looking round the room, he
said: 'Why there he is, and his sister immediately on the side
opposite to us. Surely you will slip away and avoid a meeting!'

'Slip away!' I said, 'to avoid Browning! You don't know him as well
as I do, after all! Now, let me tell you exactly what will occur if
we stand here for a minute or two. Miss Browning, whose eyes are
looking busily over the room for people that Browning ought to speak
to, in a moment will see you, and in another moment she will see me.
And then you will see her turn her head to Browning's ear and tell
him something. And then Browning will come straight across to me and
be more charming and cordial than he is in a general way, supposing
that be possible.'

'No, I don't believe it.'

'If you were not such a Boston Puritan,' I said, 'I would ask you
what will you bet that I am wrong.'

No sooner had I uttered these words than, as I had prophesied, Miss
Browning did spot, first Lowell and then me, and did turn and whisper
in Browning's ear, and Browning did come straight across the room to
us; and this is what he said, speaking to me before he spoke to the
illustrious American--a thing which on any other occasion he would
scarcely have done:

'Now,' said he, 'you're not going to put me off with generalities any
longer. You promised to write and tell me when you could come to
luncheon. You have never done so--you will never do so, unless I fix
you with a distinct day. Will you come to-morrow?'

'I shall be delighted,' I said. And he turned to Lowell and
exchanged a few friendly words with him.

After these two adorable people left us, Lowell said: 'Well, this is
wonderful. You would have won the bet. How do you explain it?'

'I explain it by Browning's greatness of soul and heart. His
position is so great, and mine is so small, that an unappreciative
review of a poem of his cannot in the least degree affect him. But
he knows that I am an honest man, as he has frequently told Tennyson,
Jowett, and others. He wishes to make it quite apparent that he
feels no anger towards a man who says what he thinks about a poem.'"

After hearing this interesting anecdote I had the curiosity to turn to the bound volume of my 'Athenaeum' and read the article on 'Ferishtah's Fancies,' which I imagine must have been the review in question. This is what I read:--

'The poems in this volume can only be described as
parable-poems--parable-poems, not in the sense that they are capable
of being read as parables (as is said to be the case with the
'Ruba'iyat' of Omar Khayyam), but parable-poems in the sense that
they must be read as parables, or they show no artistic raison d'etre
at all.

Now do our English poets know what it is to write a parable poem? It
is to set self-conscious philosophy singing and dancing, like the
young Gretry, to the tune of a waterfall. Or rather, it is to
imprison the soul of Dinah Morris in the lissome body of Esmeralda,
and set the preacher strumming a gypsy's tambourine. Though in the
pure parable the intellectual or ethical motive does not dominate so
absolutely as in the case of the pure fable, the form that expresses
it, yet it does, nevertheless, so far govern the form as to interfere
with that entire abandon--that emotional freedom--which seems
necessary to the very existence of song. Indeed, if poetry must,
like Wordsworth's ideal John Bull, 'be free or die'; if she must know
no law but that of her own being (as the doctrine of 'L'art pour
l'art' declares); if she must not even seem to know _that_ (as the
doctrine of bardic inspiration implies), but must bend to it
apparently in tricksy sport alone--how can she--'the singing maid
with pictures in her eyes'--mount the pulpit, read the text, and
deliver the sermon?

In European literature how many parable poems should we find where
the ethical motive and the poetic form are not at deadly strife? But
we discussed all this in speaking of prose parables, comparing the
stories of the Prodigal Son and Kisagotami with even such perfect
parable poetry as that of Jami. We said then what we reiterate now:
that to sing a real parable and make it a real song requires a genius
of a very special and peculiar, if somewhat narrow order--a genius
rare, delicate, ethereal, such as can, according to a certain
Oriental fancy, compete with the Angels of the Water Pot in
floriculture. Mr. Browning, being so fond of Oriental fancies, and
being, moreover, on terms of the closest intimacy with a certain
fancy-weaving dervish, Ferishtah, must be quite familiar with the
Persian story we allude to, the famous story of 'Poetry and
Cabbages.' Still, we will record it here for a certain learned
society.

The earth, says the wise dervish Feridun, was once without flowers,
and men dreamed of nothing more beautiful then than cabbages. So the
Angels of the Water Pot, watering the Tuba Tree (whose fruit becomes
flavoured according to the wishes of the feeder), said one to
another, 'The eyes of those poor cabbage growers down there may well
be horny and dim, having none of our beautiful things to gaze upon;
for as to the earthly cabbage, though useful in earthly pot, it is in
colour unlovely as ungrateful in perfume; and as to the stars, they
are too far off to be very clearly mirrored in the eyes of folk so
very intent upon cabbages.' So the Angels of the Water Pot, who sit
on the rainbow and brew the ambrosial rains, began fashioning flowers
out of the paradisal gems, while Israfel sang to them; and the words
of his song were the mottoes that adorn the bowers of heaven. So
bewitching, however, were the strains of the singer--for not only has
Israfel a lute for viscera, but doth he not also, according to the
poet--

Breathe a stream of otto and balm,
Which through a woof of living music blown
Floats, fused, a warbling rose that makes all senses one?

--so astonishing were the notes of a singer so furnished, that the
angels at their jewel work could not help tracing his coloured and
perfumed words upon the petals. And this was how the Angels of the
Water Pot made flowers, and this is the story of 'Poetry and
Cabbages.'

But the alphabet of the angels, Feridun goes on to declare, is
nothing less than the celestial charactery of heaven, and is
consequently unreadable to all human eyes save a very few--that is to
say, the eyes of those mortals who are 'of the race of Israfel.' To
common eyes--the eyes of the ordinary human cabbage-grower--what,
indeed, is that angelic caligraphy with which the petals of the
flowers are ornamented? Nothing but a meaningless maze of beautiful
veins and scents and colours.

But who are 'of the race of Israfel'? Not the prosemen, certainly,
as any Western critic may see who will refer to Kircher's idle
nonsense about the 'Alphabet of the Angels' in his 'AEdipus
Egyptiacus.' Are they, then, the poets? This is indeed a solemn
query. 'If,' says Feridun, 'the mottoes that adorn the bowers of
Heaven have been correctly read by certain Persian poets, who shall
be nameless, what are those other mottoes glowing above the caves of
hell in that fiery alphabet used by the fiends?'

One kind of poet only is, it seems, of the race of Israfel--the
parable-poet--the poet to whom truth comes, not in any way as
reasoned conclusions, not even as golden gnomes, but comes symbolized
in concrete shapes of vital beauty; the poet in whose work the poetic
form is so part and parcel of the ethical lesson which vitalizes it
that this ethical lesson seems not to give birth to the music and the
colour of the poem, but to be itself born of the sweet marriage of
these, and to be as inseparable from them as the 'morning breath' of
the Sabaean rose is inalienable from the innermost petals--'the
subtle odour of the rose's heart,' which no mere chemistry of man,
but only the morning breeze, can steal."

It was such writing as this which made it quite superfluous for Mr. Watts-Dunton to sign his articles, and we have only to contrast it--or its richness and its rareness--with the naive, simple, unadorned style of 'Aylwin' to realize how wide is the range of Mr. Watts-Dunton as a master of the fine shades of literary expression.