LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS(致已故作者)

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LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

LETTERS TO DEAD

AUTHORS

By Andrew Lang

LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

PREFACE

Sixteen of these Letters, which were written at the suggestion of the

Editor of the "St. James's Gazette," appeared in that journal, from which

they are now reprinted, by the Editor's kind permission. They have been

somewhat emended, and a few additions have been made. The Letters to

Horace, Byron, Isaak Walton, Chapelain, Ronsard, and Theocritus have

not been published before.

The gem on the title-page, now engraved for the first time, is a red

cornelian in the British Museum, probably Graeco-Roman, and treated in

an archaistic style. It represents Hermes Psychagogos, with a Soul, and

has some likeness to the Baptism of Our Lord, as usually shown in art.

Perhaps it may be post-Christian. The gem was selected by Mr. A. S.

Murray.

It is, perhaps, superfluous to add that some of the Letters are written

rather to suit the Correspondent than to express the writer's own taste or

opinions. The Epistle to Lord Byron, especially, is "writ in a manner

which is my aversion."

LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

LETTER--To W. M. Thackeray

Sir,--There are many things that stand in the way of the critic when he

has a mind to praise the living. He may dread the charge of writing

rather to vex a rival than to exalt the subject of his applause. He shuns

the appearance of seeking the favour of the famous, and would not

willingly be regarded as one of the many parasites who now advertise each

movement and action of contemporary genius. "Such and such men of

letters are passing their summer holidays in the Val d'Aosta," or the

Mountains of the Moon, or the Suliman Range, as it may happen. So

reports our literary "Court Circular," and all our Precieuses read the tidings

with enthusiasm. Lastly, if the critic be quite new to the world of letters,

he may superfluously fear to vex a poet or a novelist by the abundance of

his eulogy. No such doubts perplex us when, with all our hearts, we

would commend the departed; for they have passed almost beyond the

reach even of envy; and to those pale cheeks of theirs no commendation

can bring the red.

You, above all others, were and remain without a rival in your many-

sided excellence, and praise of you strikes at none of those who have

survived your day. The increase of time only mellows your renown, and

each year that passes and brings you no successor does but sharpen the

keenness of our sense of loss. In what other novelist, since Scott was

worn down by the burden of a forlorn endeavour, and died for honour's

sake, has the world found so many of the fairest gifts combined? If we

may not call you a poet (for the first of English writers of light verse did

not seek that crown), who that was less than a poet ever saw life with a

glance so keen as yours, so steady, and so sane? Your pathos was never

cheap, your laughter never forced; your sigh was never the pulpit trick of

the preacher. Your funny people--your Costigans and Fokers--were not

mere characters of trick and catch-word, were not empty comic masks.

Behind each the human heart was beating; and ever and again we were

allowed to see the features of the man.

Thus fiction in your hands was not simply a profession, like another,

LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

but a constant reflection of the whole surface of life: a repeated echo of

its laughter and its complaint. Others have written, and not written badly,

with the stolid professional regularity of the clerk at his desk; you, like the

Scholar Gipsy, might have said that "it needs heaven-sent moments for

this skill." There are, it will not surprise you, some honourable women and

a few men who call you a cynic; who speak of "the withered world of

Thackerayan satire;" who think your eyes were ever turned to the sordid

aspects of life--to the mother-in-law who threatens to "take away her silver

bread-basket;" to the intriguer, the sneak, the termagant; to the Beckys,

and Barnes Newcomes, and Mrs. Mackenzies of this world. The quarrel

of these sentimentalists is really with life, not with you; they might as

wisely blame Monsieur Buffon because there are snakes in his Natural

History. Had you not impaled certain noxious human insects, you would

have better pleased Mr. Ruskin; had you confined yourself to such

performances, you would have been more dear to the Neo-Balzacian

school in fiction.

You are accused of never having drawn a good woman who was not a

doll, but the ladies that bring this charge seldom remind us either of Lady

Castlewood or of Theo or Hetty Lambert. The best women can pardon

you Becky Sharp and Blanche Amory; they find it harder to forgive you

Emmy Sedley and Helen Pendennis. Yet what man does not know in his

heart that the best women--God bless them--lean, in their characters, either

to the sweet passiveness of Emmy or to the sensitive and jealous affections

of Helen? 'Tis Heaven, not you, that made them so; and they are easily

pardoned, both for being a very little lower than the angels and for their

gentle ambition to be painted, as by Guido or Guercino, with wings and

harps and haloes. So ladies have occasionally seen their own faces in the

glass of fancy, and, thus inspired, have drawn Romola and Consuelo. Yet

when these fair idealists, Mdme. Sand and George Eliot, designed

Rosamund Vincy and Horace, was there not a spice of malice in the

portraits which we miss in your least favourable studies?

That the creator of Colonel Newcome and of Henry Esmond was a

snarling cynic; that he who designed Rachel Esmond could not draw a

good woman: these are the chief charges (all indifferent now to you,

LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

who were once so sensitive) that your admirers have to contend against.

A French critic, M. Taine, also protests that you do preach too much. Did

any author but yourself so frequently break the thread (seldom a strong

thread) of his plot to converse with his reader and moralise his tale, we

also might be offended. But who that loves Montaigne and Pascal, who

that likes the wise trifling of the one and can bear with the melancholy of

the other, but prefers your preaching to another's playing!

Your thoughts come in, like the intervention of the Greek Chorus, as

an ornament and source of fresh delight. Like the songs of the Chorus,

they bid us pause a moment over the wider laws and actions of human fate

and human life, and we turn from your persons to yourself, and again from

yourself to your persons, as from the odes of Sophocles or Aristophanes to

the action of their characters on the stage. Nor, to my taste, does the

mere music and melancholy dignity of your style in these passages of

meditation fall far below the highest efforts of poetry. I remember that

scene where Clive, at Barnes Newcome's Lecture on the Poetry of the

Affections, sees Ethel who is lost to him. "And the past and its dear

histories, and youth and its hopes and passions, and tones and looks for

ever echoing in the heart and present in the memory--these, no doubt, poor

Clive saw and heard as he looked across the great gulf of time, and parting

and grief, and beheld the woman he had loved for many years."

FOR EVER ECHOING IN THE HEART AND PRESENT IN THE

MEMORY: who has not heard these tones, who does not hear them as he

turns over your books that, for so many years, have been his companions

and comforters? We have been young and old, we have been sad and

merry with you, we have listened to the mid-night chimes with Pen and

Warrington, have stood with you beside the death-bed, have mourned at

that yet more awful funeral of lost love, and with you have prayed in the

inmost chapel sacred to our old and immortal affections, e leal souvenir!

And whenever you speak for yourself, and speak in earnest, how magical,

how rare, how lonely in our literature is the beauty of your sentences! "I

can't express the charm of them" (so you write of George Sand; so we may

write of you): "they seem to me like the sound of country bells,

provoking I don't know what vein of music and meditation, and falling

LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

sweetly and sadly on the ear." Surely that style, so fresh, so rich, so full

of surprises--that style which stamps as classical your fragments of slang,

and perpetually astonishes and delights--would alone give immortality to

an author, even had he little to say. But you, with your whole wide world

of fops and fools, of good women and brave men, of honest absurdities

and cheery adventurers: you who created the Steynes and Newcomes,

the Beckys and Blanches, Captain Costigan and F. B., and the Chevalier

Strong--all that host of friends imperishable--you must survive with

Shakespeare and Cervantes in the memory and affection of men.

LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

LETTER--To Charles Dickens

Sir,--It has been said that every man is born a Platonist or an

Aristotelian, though the enormous majority of us, to be sure, live and die

without being conscious of any invidious philosophic partiality whatever.

With more truth (though that does not imply very much) every

Englishman who reads may be said to be a partisan of yourself or of Mr.

Thackeray. Why should there be any partisanship in the matter; and why,

having two such good things as your novels and those of your

contemporary, should we not be silently happy in the possession? Well,

men are made so, and must needs fight and argue over their tastes in

enjoyment. For myself, I may say that in this matter I am what the

Americans do NOT call a "Mugwump," what English politicians dub a

"superior person"--that is, I take no side, and attempt to enjoy the best of

both.

It must be owned that this attitude is sometimes made a little difficult

by the vigour of your special devotees. They have ceased, indeed, thank

Heaven! to imitate you; and even in "descriptive articles" the touch of Mr.

Gigadibs, of him whom "we almost took for the true Dickens," has

disappeared. The young lions of the Press no longer mimic your less

admirable mannerisms--do not strain so much after fantastic comparisons,

do not (in your manner and Mr. Carlyle's) give people nick-names derived

from their teeth, or their complexion; and, generally, we are spared

second-hand copies of all that in your style was least to be commended.

But, though improved by lapse of time in this respect, your devotees still

put on little conscious airs of virtue, robust manliness, and so forth, which

would have irritated you very much, and there survive some press men

who seem to have read you a little (especially your later works), and never

to have read anything else. Now familiarity with the pages of "Our

Mutual Friend" and "Dombey and Son" does not precisely constitute a

liberal education, and the assumption that it does is apt (quite

unreasonably) to prejudice people against the greatest comic genius of

modern times.

LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

On the other hand, Time is at last beginning to sift the true admirers of

Dickens from the false. Yours, Sir, in the best sense of the word, is a

popular success, a popular reputation. For example, I know that, in a

remote and even Pictish part of this kingdom, a rural household, humble

and under the shadow of a sorrow inevitably approaching, has found in

"David Copperfield" oblivion of winter, of sorrow, and of sickness. On

the other hand, people are now picking up heart to say that "they cannot

read Dickens," and that they particularly detest "Pickwick." I believe it

was young ladies who first had the courage of their convictions in this

respect. "Tout sied aux belles," and the fair, in the confidence of youth,

often venture on remarkable confessions. In your "Natural History of

Young Ladies" I do not remember that you describe the Humorous Young

Lady. {1} She is a very rare bird indeed, and humour generally is at a

deplorably low level in England.

Hence come all sorts of mischief, arisen since you left us; and it may

be said that inordinate philanthropy, genteel sympathy with Irish murder

and arson, Societies for Badgering the Poor, Esoteric Buddhism, and a

score of other plagues, including what was once called AEstheticism, are

all, primarily, due to want of humour. People discuss, with the gravest

faces, matters which properly should only be stated as the wildest

paradoxes. It naturally follows that, in a period almost destitute of

humour, many respectable persons "cannot read Dickens," and are not

ashamed to glory in their shame. We ought not to be angry with others

for their misfortunes; and yet when one meets the cretins who boast that

they cannot read Dickens, one certainly does feel much as Mr. Samuel

Weller felt when he encountered Mr. Job Trotter.

How very singular has been the history of the decline of humour! Is

there any profound psychological truth to be gathered from consideration

of the fact that humour has gone out with cruelty? A hundred years ago,

eighty years ago--nay, fifty years ago--we were a cruel but also a

humorous people. We had bull-baitings, and badger- drawings, and

hustings, and prize-fights, and cock-fights; we went to see men hanged;

the pillory and the stocks were no empty "terrors unto evil-doers," for

there was commonly a malefactor occupying each of these institutions.

LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

With all this we had a broad-blown comic sense. We had Hogarth, and

Bunbury, and George Cruikshank, and Gilray; we had Leech and Surtees,

and the creator of Tittlebat Titmouse; we had the Shepherd of the

"Noctes," and, above all, we had YOU.

From the old giants of English fun--burly persons delighting in broad

caricature, in decided colours, in cockney jokes, in swashing blows at the

more prominent and obvious human follies--from these you derived the

splendid high spirits and unhesitating mirth of your earlier works. Mr.

Squeers, and Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp, and all the Pickwickians, and

Mr. Dowler, and John Browdie--these and their immortal companions

were reared, so to speak, on the beef and beer of that naughty, fox-hunting,

badger-baiting old England, which we have improved out of existence.

And these characters, assuredly, are your best; by them, though stupid

people cannot read about them, you will live while there is a laugh left

among us. Perhaps that does not assure you a very prolonged existence,

but only the future can show.

The dismal seriousness of the time cannot, let us hope, last for ever

and a day. Honest old Laughter, the true LUTIN of your inspiration,

must have life left in him yet, and cannot die; though it is true that the

taste for your pathos, and your melodrama, and plots constructed after

your favourite fashion ("Great Expectations" and the "Tale of Two Cities"

are exceptions) may go by and never be regretted. Were people simpler,

or only less clear-sighted, as far as your pathos is concerned, a generation

ago? Jeffrey, the hard- headed shallow critic, who declared that

Wordsworth "would never do," cried, "wept like anything," over your

Little Nell. One still laughs as heartily as ever with Dick Swiveller; but

who can cry over Little Nell?

Ah, Sir, how could you--who knew so intimately, who remembered so

strangely well the fancies, the dreams, the sufferings of childhood- -how

could you "wallow naked in the pathetic," and massacre holocausts of the

Innocents? To draw tears by gloating over a child's death-bed, was it

worthy of you? Was it the kind of work over which our hearts should

melt? I confess that Little Nell might die a dozen times, and be

welcomed by whole legions of Angels, and I (like the bereaved fowl

LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS

mentioned by Pet Marjory) would remain unmoved.

She was more than usual calm, She did not give a single dam,

wrote the astonishing child who diverted the leisure of Scott. Over

your Little Nell and your Little Dombey I remain more than usual calm;

and probably so do thousands of your most sincere admirers. But about

matter of this kind, and the unseating of the fountains of tears, who can

argue? Where is taste? where is truth? What tears are "manly, Sir,

manly," as Fred Bayham has it; and of what lamentations ought we rather

to be ashamed? Sunt lacrymae rerum; one has been moved in the cell

where Socrates tasted the hemlock; or by the river-banks where Syracusan

arrows slew the parched Athenians among the mire and blood; or, in

fiction, when Colonel Newcome says Adsum, or over the diary of Clare

Doria Forey, or where Aramis laments, with strange tears, the death of

Porthos. But over Dombey (the Son), or Little Nell, one declines to

snivel.

When an author deliberately sits down and says, "Now, let us have a

good cry," he poisons the wells of sensibility and chokes, at least in many

breasts, the fountain of tears. Out of "Dombey and Son" there is little we

care to remember except the deathless Mr. Toots; just as we forget the

melodramatics of "Martin Chuzzlewit." I have read in that book a score

of times; I never see it but I revel in it--in Pecksniff, and Mrs. Gamp, and

the Americans. But what the plot is all about, what Jonas did, what

Montagu Tigg had to make in the matter, what all the pictures with plenty

of shading illustrate, I have never been able to comprehend. In the same

way, one of your most thorough-going admirers has allowed (in the

licence of private conversation) that "Ralph Nickleby and Monk are too

steep;" and probably a cultivated taste will always find them a little

precipitous.

"Too steep:"--the slang expresses that defect of an ardent genius,

carried above itself, and out of the air we breathe, both in its grotesque and

in its gloomy imaginations. To force the note, to press fantasy too hard,

to deepen the gloom with black over the indigo, that was the failing which

proved you mortal. To take an instance in little: when Pip went to Mr.

Pumblechook's, the boy thought the seedsman "a very happy man to have

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LETTERSTODEADAUTHORS1LETTERSTODEADAUTHORSByAndrewLangLETTERSTODEADAUTHORS2PREFACESixteenoftheseLetters,whichwerewrittenatthesuggestionoftheEditorofthe"St.James'sGazette,"appearedinthatjournal,fromwhichtheyarenowreprinted,bytheEditor'skindpermission.Theyhavebeensomewhatemended,andafewadditionshavebee...

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