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LETTERS ON LITERATURE
by Andrew Lang


Contents:

Introductory: Of Modern English Poetry
Of Modern English Poetry
Fielding
Longfellow
A Friend of Keats
On Virgil
Aucassin and Nicolette
Plotinus (A.D. 200-262)
Lucretius
To a Young American Book-Hunter
Rochefoucauld
Of Vers de Societe
On Vers de Societe
Richardson
Gerard de Nerval
On Books About Red Men
Appendix I
Appendix II




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_.




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 a 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.




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, 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," 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, 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 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
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}




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
remain in memories which forget all but a general impression of the vast
"Earthly Paradise," that huge decorative poem, in which slim maidens and
green-clad men, and waters wan, and flowering apple trees, and rich
palaces are all mingled as on some long ancient tapestry, shaken a little
by the wind of death. They are not living and breathing people, these
persons of the fables; they are but shadows, beautiful and faint, and
their poem is fit reading for sleepy summer afternoons. But the
characters in the lyrics in "The Defence of Guinevere" are people of
flesh and blood, under their chain armour and their velvet, and the
trappings of their tabards.

There is no book in the world quite like this of Mr. Morris's old Oxford
days when the spirit of the Middle Ages entered into him, with all its
contradictions of faith and doubt, and its earnest desire to enjoy this
life to the full in war and love, or to make certain of a future in which
war is not, and all love is pure heavenly. If one were to choose
favourites from "The Defence of Guinevere," they would be the ballads of
"Shameful Death," and of "The Sailing of the Sword," and "The Wind,"
which has the wind's wail in its voice, and all the mad regret of
"Porphyria's Lover" in its burden.

The use of "colour-words," in all these pieces, is very curious and
happy. The red ruby, the brown falcon, the white maids, "the scarlet
roofs of the good town," in "The Sailing of the Sword," make the poem a
vivid picture. Then look at the mad, remorseful sea-rover, the slayer of
his lady, in "The Wind":

"For my chair is heavy and carved, and with sweeping green behind
It is hung, and the dragons thereon grin out in the gusts of the wind;
On its folds an orange lies with a deep gash cut in the rind;
If I move my chair it will scream, and the orange will roll out far,
And the faint yellow juice ooze out like blood from a wizard's jar,
And the dogs will howl for those who went last month the war."

"The Blue Closet," which is said to have been written for some drawings
of Mr. Rossetti, is also a masterpiece in this romantic manner. Our
brief English age of romanticism, our 1830, was 1856-60, when Mr. Morris,
Mr. Burne Jones, and Mr. Swinburne were undergraduates. Perhaps it wants
a peculiar turn of taste to admire these strange things, though "The
Haystack in the Floods," with its tragedy, must surely appeal to all who
read poetry.

For the rest, as time goes on, I more and more feel as if Mr. Morris's
long later poems, "The Earthly Paradise" especially, were less art than
"art manufacture." This may be an ungrateful and erroneous sentiment.
"The Earthly Paradise," and still more certainly "Jason," are full of
such pleasure as only poetry can give. As some one said of a
contemporary politician, they are "good, but copious." Even from
narrative poetry Mr. Morris has long abstained. He, too, illustrates Mr.
Matthew Arnold's parable of "The Progress of Poetry."

"The Mount is mute, the channel dry."

Euripides has been called "the meteoric poet," and the same title seems
very appropriate to Mr. Swinburne. Probably few readers had heard his
name--I only knew it as that of the author of a strange mediaeval tale in
prose--when he published "Atalanta in Calydon" in 1865. I remember
taking up the quarto in white cloth, at the Oxford Union, and being
instantly led captive by the beauty and originality of the verse.

There was this novel "meteoric" character in the poem: the writer seemed
to rejoice in snow and fire, and stars, and storm, "the blue cold fields
and folds of air," in all the primitive forces which were alive before
this earth was; the naked vast powers that circle the planets and
farthest constellations. This quality, and his varied and sonorous
verse, and his pessimism, put into the mouth of a Greek chorus, were the
things that struck one most in Mr. Swinburne. He was, above all, "a
mighty-mouthed inventer of harmonies," and one looked eagerly for his
next poems. They came with disappointment and trouble.

The famous "Poems and Ballads" have become so well known that people can
hardly understand the noise they made. I don't wonder at the scandal,
even now. I don't see the fun of several of the pieces, except the
mischievous fun of shocking your audience. However, "The Leper" and his
company are chiefly boyish, in the least favourable sense of the word.
They do not destroy the imperishable merit of the "Hymn to Proserpine"
and the "Garden of Proserpine" and the "Triumph of Time" and "Itylus."

Many years have passed since 1866, and yet one's old opinion, that
English poetry contains no verbal music more original, sonorous, and
sweet than Mr. Swinburne wrote in these pieces when still very young,
remains an opinion unshaken. Twenty years ago, then, he had enabled the
world to take his measure; he had given proofs of a true poet; he was
learned too in literature as few poets have been since Milton, and, like
Milton, skilled to make verse in the languages of the ancient world and
in modern tongues. His French songs and Greek elegiacs are of great
excellence; probably no scholar who was not also a poet could match his
Greek lines on Landor.

What, then, is lacking to make Mr. Swinburne a poet of a rank even higher
than that which he occupies? Who can tell? There is no science that can
master this chemistry of the brain. He is too copious. "Bothwell" is
long enough for six plays, and "Tristram of Lyonesse" is prolix beyond
even mediaeval narrative. He is too pertinacious; children are the joy
of the world and Victor Hugo is a great poet; but Mr. Swinburne almost
makes us excuse Herod and Napoleon III. by his endless odes to Hugo, and
rondels to small boys and girls. _Ne quid nimis_, that is the golden
rule which he constantly spurns, being too luxuriant, too emphatic, and
as fond of repeating himself as Professor Freeman. Such are the defects
of so noble a genius; thus perverse Nature has decided that it shall be,
Nature which makes no ruby without a flaw.

The name of Mr. Robert Bridges is probably strange to many lovers of
poetry who would like nothing better than to make acquaintance with his
verse. But his verse is not so easily found. This poet never writes in
magazines; his books have not appealed to the public by any sort of
advertisement, only two or three of them have come forth in the regular
way. The first was "Poems, by Robert Bridges, Batchelor of Arts in the
University of Oxford. _Parva seges satis est_. London: Pickering,
1873."

This volume was presently, I fancy, withdrawn, and the author has
distributed some portions of it in succeeding pamphlets, or in books
printed at Mr. Daniel's private press in Oxford. In these, as in all Mr.
Bridges's poems, there is a certain austere and indifferent beauty of
diction and a memory of the old English poets, Milton and the earlier
lyrists. I remember being greatly pleased with the "Elegy on a Lady whom
Grief for the Death of Her Betrothed Killed."

"Let the priests go before, arrayed in white,
And let the dark-stoled minstrels follow slow
Next they that bear her, honoured on this night,
And then the maidens in a double row,
Each singing soft and low,
And each on high a torch upstaying:
Unto her lover lead her forth with light,
With music and with singing, and with praying."

This is a stately stanza.

In his first volume Mr. Bridges offered a few rondeaux and triolets,
turning his back on all these things as soon as they became popular. In
spite of their popularity I have the audacity to like them still, in
their humble twittering way. Much more in his true vein were the lines,
"Clear and Gentle Stream," and all the other verses in which, like a true
Etonian, he celebrates the beautiful Thames:

"There is a hill beside the silver Thames,
Shady with birch and beech and odorous pine,
And brilliant under foot with thousand gems
Steeply the thickets to his floods decline.
Straight trees in every place
Their thick tops interlace,
And pendent branches trail their foliage fine
Upon his watery face.

* * * * *

A reedy island guards the sacred bower
And hides it from the meadow, where in peace
The lazy cows wrench many a scented flower,
Robbing the golden market of the bees.
And laden branches float
By banks of myosote;
And scented flag and golden fleur-de-lys
Delay the loitering boat."

I cannot say how often I have read that poem, and how delightfully it
carries the breath of our River through the London smoke. Nor less
welcome are the two poems on spring, the "Invitation to the Country," and
the "Reply." In these, besides their verbal beauty and their charming
pictures, is a manly philosophy of Life, which animates Mr. Bridges's
more important pieces--his "Prometheus the Firebringer," and his "Nero,"
a tragedy remarkable for the representation of Nero himself, the
luxurious human tiger. From "Prometheus" I make a short extract, to show
the quality of Mr. Bridges's blank verse: