Letters on Literature(关于文学)

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Letters on Literature

By Andrew Lang

Letters on Literature

DEDICATION

Dear Mr. Way,

After so many letters to people who never existed, may I venture a

short one, to a person very real to me, though I have never seen him, and

only know him by his many kindnesses? Perhaps you will add another to

these by accepting the Dedication of a little work, of a sort experimental in

English, and in prose, though Horace--in Latin and in verse--was

successful with it long ago?

Very sincerely yours,

A. LANG.

To W. J. Way, Esq. Topeka, Kansas.

Letters on Literature

PREFACE

These Letters were originally published in the Independent of New

York. The idea of writing them occurred to the author after he had

produced "Letters to Dead Authors." That kind of Epistle was open to

the objection that nobody would write so frankly to a correspondent about

his own work, and yet it seemed that the form of Letters might be

attempted again. The Lettres e Emilie sur la Mythologie are a well-

known model, but Emilie was not an imaginary correspondent. The

persons addressed here, on the other hand, are all people of fancy--the

name of Lady Violet Lebas is an invention of Mr. Thackeray's: gifted

Hopkins is the minor poet in Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes's "Guardian

Angel." The author's object has been to discuss a few literary topics with

more freedom and personal bias than might be permitted in a graver kind

of essay. The Letter on Samuel Richardson is by a lady more frequently

the author's critic than his collaborator.

Letters on Literature

INTRODUCTORY: OF

MODERN ENGLISH POETRY

To Mr. Arthur Wincott, Topeka, Kansas.

Dear Wincott,--You write to me, from your "bright home in the setting

sun," with the flattering information that you have read my poor "Letters

to Dead Authors." You are kind enough to say that you wish I would

write some "Letters to Living Authors;" but that, I fear, is out of the

question,--for me.

A thoughtful critic in the Spectator has already remarked that the great

men of the past would not care for my shadowy epistles--if they could

read them. Possibly not; but, like Prior, "I may write till they can spell"--

an exercise of which ghosts are probably as incapable as was Matt's little

Mistress of Quality. But Living Authors are very different people, and it

would be perilous, as well as impertinent, to direct one's comments on

them literally, in the French phrase, "to their address." Yet there is no

reason why a critic should not adopt the epistolary form.

Our old English essays, the papers in the Tatler and Spectator, were

originally nothing but letters. The vehicle permits a touch of personal

taste, perhaps of personal prejudice. So I shall write my "Letters on

Literature," of the present and of the past, English, American, ancient, or

modern, to you, in your distant Kansas, or to such other correspondents as

are kind enough to read these notes.

Poetry has always the precedence in these discussions. Poor Poetry!

She is an ancient maiden of good family, and is led out first at banquets,

though many would prefer to sit next some livelier and younger Muse, the

lady of fiction, or even the chattering soubrette of journalism. Seniores

priores: Poetry, if no longer very popular, is a dame of the worthiest

lineage, and can boast a long train of gallant admirers, dead and gone.

She has been much in courts. The old Greek tyrants loved her; great

Rhamses seated her at his right hand; every prince had his singers. Now

we dwell in an age of democracy, and Poetry wins but a feigned respect,

Letters on Literature

more out of courtesy, and for old friendship's sake, than for liking.

Though so many write verse, as in Juvenal's time, I doubt if many read it.

"None but minstrels list of sonneting." The purchasing public, for poetry,

must now consist chiefly of poets, and they are usually poor.

Can anything speak more clearly of the decadence of the art than the

birth of so many poetical "societies"? We have the Browning Society,

the Shelley Society, the Shakespeare Society, the Wordsworth Society--

lately dead. They all demonstrate that people have not the courage to

study verse in solitude, and for their proper pleasure; men and women

need confederates in this adventure. There is safety in numbers, and, by

dint of tea-parties, recitations, discussions, quarrels and the like, Dr.

Furnivall and his friends keep blowing the faint embers on the altar of

Apollo. They cannot raise a flame!

In England we are in the odd position of having several undeniable

poets, and very little new poetry worthy of the name. The chief singers

have outlived, if not their genius, at all events its flowering time. Hard it

is to estimate poetry, so apt we are, by our very nature, to prefer "the

newest songs," as Odysseus says men did even during the war of Troy.

Or, following another ancient example, we say, like the rich niggards who

neglected Theocritus, "Homer is enough for all."

Let us attempt to get rid of every bias, and, thinking as dispassionately

as we can, we still seem to read the name of Tennyson in the golden book

of English poetry. I cannot think that he will ever fall to a lower place, or

be among those whom only curious students pore over, like Gower,

Drayton, Donne, and the rest. Lovers of poetry will always read him as

they will read Wordsworth, Keats, Milton, Coleridge, and Chaucer. Look

his defects in the face, throw them into the balance, and how they

disappear before his merits! He is the last and youngest of the mighty

race, born, as it were, out of due time, late, and into a feebler generation.

Let it be admitted that the gold is not without alloy, that he has a touch

of voluntary affectation, of obscurity, even an occasional perversity, a

mannerism, a set of favourite epithets ("windy" and "happy"). There is a

momentary echo of Donne, of Crashaw, nay, in his earliest pieces, even a

touch of Leigh Hunt. You detect it in pieces like "Lilian" and "Eleanore,"

Letters on Literature

and the others of that kind and of that date.

Let it be admitted that "In Memoriam" has certain lapses in all that

meed of melodious tears; that there are trivialities which might deserve

(here is an example) "to line a box," or to curl some maiden's locks, that

there are weaknesses of thought, that the poet now speaks of himself as a

linnet, singing "because it must," now dares to approach questions

insoluble, and again declines their solution. What is all this but the

changeful mood of grief? The singing linnet, like the bird in the old

English heathen apologue, dashes its light wings painfully against the

walls of the chamber into which it has flown out of the blind night that

shall again receive it.

I do not care to dwell on the imperfections in that immortal strain of

sympathy and consolation, that enchanted book of consecrated regrets. It

is an easier if not more grateful task to note a certain peevish egotism of

tone in the heroes of "Locksley Hall," of "Maud," of "Lady Clara Vere de

Vere." "You can't think how poor a figure you make when you tell that

story, sir," said Dr. Johnson to some unlucky gentleman whose "figure"

must certainly have been more respectable than that which is cut by these

whining and peevish lovers of Maud and Cousin Amy.

Let it be admitted, too, that King Arthur, of the "Idylls," is like an

Albert in blank verse, an Albert cursed with a Guinevere for a wife, and a

Lancelot for friend. The "Idylls," with all their beauties, are full of a

Victorian respectability, and love of talking with Vivien about what is not

so respectable. One wishes, at times, that the "Morte d'Arthur" had

remained a lonely and flawless fragment, as noble as Homer, as polished

as Sophocles. But then we must have missed, with many other admirable

things, the "Last Battle in the West."

People who come after us will be more impressed than we are by the

Laureate's versatility. He has touched so many strings, from "Will

Waterproof's Monologue," so far above Praed, to the agony of "Rizpah,"

the invincible energy of "Ulysses," the languor and the fairy music of the

"Lotus Eaters," the grace as of a Greek epigram which inspires the lines to

Catullus and to Virgil. He is with Milton for learning, with Keats for

magic and vision, with Virgil for graceful recasting of ancient golden lines,

Letters on Literature

and, even in the latest volume of his long life, "we may tell from the

straw," as Homer says, "what the grain has been."

There are many who make it a kind of religion to regard Mr. Browning

as the greatest of living English poets. For him, too, one is thankful as

for a veritable great poet; but can we believe that impartial posterity will

rate him with the Laureate, or that so large a proportion of his work will

endure? The charm of an enigma now attracts students who feel proud of

being able to understand what others find obscure. But this attraction

must inevitably become a stumbling-block.

Why Mr. Browning is obscure is a long question; probably the answer

is that he often could not help himself. His darkest poems may be made

out by a person of average intelligence who will read them as hard as, for

example, he would find it necessary to read the "Logic" of Hegel. There

is a story of two clever girls who set out to peruse "Sordello," and

corresponded with each other about their progress. "Somebody is dead

in 'Sordello,'" one of them wrote to her friend. "I don't quite know who it

is, but it must make things a little clearer in the long run." Alas! a

copious use of the guillotine would scarcely clear the stage of "Sordello."

It is hardly to be hoped that "Sordello," or "Red Cotton Night Cap

Country," or "Fifine," will continue to be struggled with by posterity.

But the mass of "Men and Women," that unexampled gallery of portraits

of the inmost hearts and secret minds of priests, prigs, princes, girls, lovers,

poets, painters, must survive immortally, while civilization and literature

last, while men care to know what is in men.

No perversity of humour, no voluntary or involuntary harshness of

style, can destroy the merit of these poems, which have nothing like them

in the letters of the past, and must remain without successful imitators in

the future. They will last all the better for a certain manliness of religious

faith--something sturdy and assured-- not moved by winds of doctrine, not

paltering with doubts, which is certainly one of Mr. Browning's attractions

in this fickle and shifting generation. He cannot be forgotten while, as he

says -

"A sunset touch, A chorus ending of Euripides,"

remind men that they are creatures of immortality, and move "a

Letters on Literature

thousand hopes and fears."

If one were to write out of mere personal preference, and praise most

that which best fits one's private moods, I suppose I should place Mr.

Matthew Arnold at the head of contemporary English poets. Reason and

reflection, discussion and critical judgment, tell one that he is not quite

there.

Mr. Arnold had not the many melodies of the Laureate, nor his

versatile mastery, nor his magic, nor his copiousness. He had not the

microscopic glance of Mr. Browning, nor his rude grasp of facts, which

tears the life out of them as the Aztec priest plucked the very heart from

the victim. We know that, but yet Mr. Arnold's poetry has our love; his

lines murmur in our memory through all the stress and accidents of life.

"The Scholar Gipsy," "Obermann," "Switzerland," the melancholy majesty

of the close of "Sohrab and Rustum," the tenderness of those elegiacs on

two kindred graves beneath the Himalayas and by the Midland Sea; the

surge and thunder of "Dover Beach," with its "melancholy, long-

withdrawing roar;" these can only cease to whisper to us and console us in

that latest hour when life herself ceases to "moan round with many

voices."

My friends tell me that Mr. Arnold is too doubting, and too didactic,

that he protests too much, and considers too curiously, that his best poems

are, at most, "a chain of highly valuable thoughts." It may be so; but he

carries us back to "wet, bird- haunted English lawns;" like him "we know

what white and purple fritillaries the grassy harvest of the river yields,"

with him we try to practise resignation, and to give ourselves over to that

spirit

"Whose purpose is not missed, While life endures, while things

subsist."

Mr. Arnold's poetry is to me, in brief, what Wordsworth's was to his

generation. He has not that inspired greatness of Wordsworth, when

nature does for him what his "lutin" did for Corneille, "takes the pen from

his hand and writes for him." But he has none of the creeping prose

which, to my poor mind, invades even "Tintern Abbey." He is, as Mr.

Swinburne says, "the surest-footed" of our poets. He can give a natural

Letters on Literature

and lovely life even to the wildest of ancient imaginings, as to "these

bright and ancient snakes, that once were Cadmus and Harmonia."

Bacon speaks of the legends of the earlier and ruder world coming to

us "breathed softly through the flutes of the Grecians." But even the

Grecian flute, as in the lay of the strife of Apollo and Marsyas, comes

more tunably in the echo of Mr. Arnold's song, that beautiful song in

"Empedocles on Etna," which has the perfection of sculpture and the

charm of the purest colour. It is full of the silver light of dawn among the

hills, of the music of the loch's dark, slow waves among the reeds, of the

scent of the heather, and the wet tresses of the birch.

Surely, then, we have had great poets living among us, but the

fountains of their song are silent, or flow but rarely over a clogged and

stony channel. And who is there to succeed the two who are gone, or

who shall be our poet, if the Master be silent? That is a melancholy

question, which I shall try to answer (with doubt and dread enough) in my

next letter. {1}

Letters on Literature

OF MODERN ENGLISH

POETRY

My dear Wincott,--I hear that a book has lately been published by an

American lady, in which all the modern poets are represented. The

singers have been induced to make their own selections, and put forward,

as Mr. Browning says, their best foot, anapaest or trochee, or whatever it

may be. My information goes further, and declares that there are but

eighteen poets of England to sixty inspired Americans.

This Western collection of modern minstrelsy shows how very

dangerous it is to write even on the English poetry of the day. Eighteen is

long odds against a single critic, and Major Bellenden, in "Old Mortality,"

tells us that three to one are odds as long as ever any warrior met

victoriously, and that warrior was old Corporal Raddlebanes.

I decline the task; I am not going to try to estimate either the eighteen

of England or the sixty of the States. It is enough to speak about three

living poets, in addition to those masters treated of in my last letter. Two

of the three you will have guessed at-- Mr. Swinburne and Mr. William

Morris. The third, I dare say, you do not know even by name. I think

he is not one of the English eighteen--Mr. Robert Bridges. His muse has

followed the epicurean maxim, and chosen the shadowy path, fallentis

semita vitae, where the dew lies longest on the grass, and the red rowan

berries droop in autumn above the yellow St. John's wort. But you will

find her all the fresher for her country ways.

My knowledge of Mr. William Morris's poetry begins in years so far

away that they seem like reminiscences of another existence. I remember

sitting beneath Cardinal Beaton's ruined castle at St. Andrews, looking

across the bay to the sunset, while some one repeated "Two Red Roses

across the Moon." And I remember thinking that the poem was nonsense.

With Mr. Morris's other early verses, "The Defence of Guinevere," this

song of the moon and the roses was published in 1858. Probably the

little book won no attention; it is not popular even now. Yet the lyrics

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LettersonLiterature1LettersonLiteratureByAndrewLangLettersonLiterature2DEDICATIONDearMr.Way,Aftersomanyletterstopeoplewhoneverexisted,mayIventureashortone,toapersonveryrealtome,thoughIhaveneverseenhim,andonlyknowhimbyhismanykindnesses?PerhapsyouwilladdanothertothesebyacceptingtheDedicationofalittlew...

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