Books New and Old

THE steady decrease during the past few seasons in the ratio of novels published is reassuring. One may even take courage to reflect that if the novel is the one literary form to reach a high development in our day, it has yet to prove itself the peer of the great established forms: we have, be it remembered, produced also the graphophone and the pianola. An unusual number of good reprints are now being made in those departments of belles-lettres which were least popular during the latter half of the Victorian period.

A reprint of special importance is the posthumous Birkbeck Hill edition of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets.¹ It is a pleasure to place these three stately volumes on the shelf beside the cherished Birkbeck Hill Boswell. Here are nine books, at least, which are safe from being displaced by later acquisitions: a phalanx complete in itself, a monument to the greatest achievement of Johnsonian scholarship. Birkbeck Hill did not live to see his last work through the press; but left his material in such order as to enable his nephew to complete and present it without recognizable breaks of workmanship. There may be persons who would say that Birkbeck Hill is overliberal with his notes and his appendixes. In these three volumes the editorial matter quite equals the text in bulk. So much the better: for there is a storehouse of lore and comment in these fine printed columns. Here is, in truth, a reference library pretty well covering two centuries of literary life and endeavor. With a knowledge of Birkbeck Hill’s notes, and no other knowledge, one might engage to pass examination in the belles-lettres and the literary biography of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As for the Lives of the Poets themselves, an assiduous rereading of them after many years does not, on the whole, reassure me as to their quality. The situation, indeed, seems to reduce itself to bald terms: a strong masculine intellect, incapable of concerning itself altogether idly with any aspect of human life or letters, undertaking to deal with that aspect in dealing with which it ran most risk of idling. With a dull eye for poetry, sand-blind for Shakespeare, and high-gravel-blind for Milton, with a grotesquely artificial style and a horrid front of prejudices, Johnson says things that are obliquely suggestive of truth more often than things that are true. In the large, his critical judgments are rather more likely to be wrong than right, as in the famous instance of his treatment of Milton. What credit could be given by a good Tory to a poet who was a democrat, even a Cromwellian ? If Milton had been a royalist, his Latin verses might have been acknowledged as good as Cowley’s; his attitude toward divorce might have seemed less heinous, — and our critic’s hearty commendations would not have been postponed till the final sentences of his sketch. But Johnson was clearly incapable of appreciating pure poetry like Milton’s under any circumstances. It was a poor sort of ear which could find the songs in Comus “harsh in their diction, and not very musical in their numbers; ” and a false taste that could pronounce of the sonnets: “They deserve not any particular criticism; for of the best it can only be said that they are not bad, and perhaps only the eighth and the twenty-first are truly entitled to this slender commendation.” A good example of his casual generalization is the following comment on the teaching of science, marked by the characteristic union of acuteness and perversity, bald common sense and orotund phraseology. Milton,it seems, was guilty of the attempt to teach the elements of physical science to certain youths. His attempt does not appear to have been of a very radical nature, as his texts were of respectable age, “ such as the Georgick, and astronomical treatises of the ancients.” But the Cham is pretty severe about it: “The truth is that the knowledge of external nature, and the sciences which that knowledge requires or includes, are not the great or the frequent business of the human mind. Whether we provide for action or conversation, whether we wish to be useful or pleasing, the first requisite is the religious and moral knowledge of right and wrong; the next is an acquaintance with the history of mankind, and with those examples which may be said to embody truth and prove by events the reasonableness of opinions. Prudence and Justice are virtues and excellences of all times and of all places; we are perpetually moralists, but we are geometricians only by chance. Our intercourse with intellectual nature is necessary; our speculations upon matter are voluntary and at leisure. Physiological learning is of such rare emergence that one man may know another half his life without being able to estimate his skill in hydrostaticks or astronomy, but his moral and prudential character immediately appears. . . . Those authors, therefore, are to be read at schools that supply most axioms of prudence, most principles of moral truth, and most materials for conversation; and these purposes are best served by poets, orators, and historians.”

The final sentence, for stiffness and propriety, might have been written by Johnson’s great disciple, Miss Pinkerton. The substance of his contention we find apparently echoed a century later by Temple, Headmaster of Rugby: “ The real defect of mathematics and physical science is that they have not any tendency to humanize. . . . That which supplies the perpetual spur to the whole human race to continue incessantly adding to our stores of knowledge, that which refines and elevates and does not educate merely the moral, nor merely the intellectual faculties, but the whole man, is our communion with each other. . . . That study will do most which most familiarizes a boy’s mind with noble thoughts, with beautiful images, with the deeds and words which great men have done and said, and all others have admired and loved.”

But Dr. Temple is, as the context shows, contending against the substitution of the sciences for literature; himself a mathematician and a student of physical science, he was incapable of the narrow contemptuousness which we can no more than tolerate in Johnson.

“I hate to meet John Wesley,”1 said Johnson to Boswell. “The dog enchants me with his conversation,and then breaks away to go and visit some old woman.” It is of this Wesley, this human and companionable being, with an open and genial nature, with only not time to make a business of social enchantment, that we get the most grateful impression in studying Professor Winchester’s portrait. “He is surely to be remembered not merely as the Methodist, but as the man, — a marked and striking personality, energetic, scholarly, alive to all moral, social, and political questions, and for thirty years probably exerting a greater influence than any other man in England. ” In pursuit of his aim to portray the man, the biographer has given brief space to the discussion of doctrinal matters. At the same time, the larger questions at issue are made very clear. Wesley was not a schismatic, or even, in the doctrinal sense, a dissenter. He desired, not to secede from the Established Church, but to fill it with new life, to restore to it something of the spiritual earnestness and practical efficiency which he felt to be inherent in it, but now, through the rationalism and spiritual lethargy of the age in which he found himself, fallen into almost complete abeyance. The development of that great body of which he was head seems to have been quite casual, or determined by unforeseen needs, and by the expedients adopted without special forethought to meet those needs. The very name Methodist was a chance nickname bestowed by an Oxford undergraduate upon the little group of seriousminded dons of which Wesley was the central figure. At first these young men were brought together rather by kindred tastes and sympathies than by any settled purpose. Gradually they began to recognize certain principles of belief and conduct which they could hold in common, and which somewhat clearly separated them from their fellows. They began to practice charity among the poor, the sick, and the imprisoned, and to deny themselves that their charity might be enlarged. Naturally they were laughed at; whereupon Wesley drew up a set of queries which his worldly critics found it hard to answer: “Whether we may not try to do good to those that are hungry, naked, or sick ? . . . Whether we may not contribute what little we are able toward having the children clothed and taught to read ? . . . Whether we may not try to do good to those that are in prison?” And so on. Uncomfortably direct inquiries these, when addressed to professing Christians; upon such inquiries the whole Methodist movement was founded. But in these Oxford days the tendency was “monastic rather than evangelical.” It was to be years before Wesley succeeded in withdrawing his attention sufficiently from the question of his own spiritual welfare to begin his real lifework. “The Oxford Methodist, self-denying, devout, scrupulously observant of every outward religious requirement, certainly was a Christian, and of a noble sort; but he was not yet the preacher and reformer who could renew the religious life of a nation.” Nor did his experience as a missionary and pastor in Georgia give marked promise of his later success. In the New World he still took himself and his personal work too seriously. He abandons the attempt to convert the Indians because after some search he has “not found or heard of any Indian on the Continent of America who had the least desire of being instructed.” He takes a parish, and is not long in getting into hopeless difficulties with his parishioners by attempting to force his own rigid methods upon them. But in truth he had gone to America with a wrong motive, — for the purpose, as he specifically put it, of saving his own soul. It was with the beginning of his practical open-air work in England, — a work begun by Whitefield, which Wesley took up with no little reluctance, — that he at last shook off his spiritual selfconsciousness and became a great spiritual force. During the rest of his life, with all of its responsibilities and hard labor, he seems to have maintained a singularly even and calm temper, — not that of a saint, but of a very great human figure.

The new life of Scott² by that indefatigable veteran at bookmaking, Mr. Lang, is confessedly a small book written for a series. Its only excuse for being, says the author, lies in the need of an abridged Lockhart for the impatient modern reader. But of course Mr. Lang, as a Scot, familiar with Scott’s own country, has had certain qualifications which the English writers of the preceding brief biographies lacked. He has had access, moreover, to Lockhart’s original manuscript sources; so that the lack of fresh material here is due, not to the biographer’s negligence, but to Lockhart’s skill in appropriating from the Abbotsford manuscript everything of real significance.

But after all, the best excuse Mr. Lang can have for his work, if he needs any, is his love and reverence for Scott. This is not a question of race. As Pepys would have said, it is mighty pleasant to see how Mr. Lang disposes of Carlyle (who, we presently recall, attempted to dispose of Scott as a “ mere Restaurateur ”) as a writer of “splenetic nonsense.” To this critic the novels are not mere pageants, casual though brilliant entertainments; their glory is in their “ crowd of characters.” “The novels are vécus: the author has, in imagination, lived closely and long with his people, whether of his own day, or of the past, before he laid brush to canvas to execute their portraits. It is in this capacity, as a creator of a vast throng of living people of every grade, and every variety of nature, humour, and temperament, that Scott, among British writers, is least remote from Shakespeare. No changes in taste and fashion as regards matters unessential, no laxities and indolence of his own, no feather-headed folly, or leaden stupidity of new generations, can deprive Scott of these unfading laurels.” Does such enthusiasm a little rouse in us the skepticism with which we hearken to the special pleader ? It is, at least, an enthusiasm of which, as applied to what has proved itself stable and is not merely new, we stand just now in need.

Alfred Russel Wallace’s My Life³ may, in one sense, be called The Autobiography of a Crank. The writer’s contributions to modern science have been of a solid kind; and it is noticeable that those parts of the present narrative which have to do with this serious achievement take on a simple dignity of phrase which is elsewhere lacking. The present commentator is not qualified to speak of the points in controversy between Wallace and Darwin and others, but supposes that Wallace is right in asserting that time has thrown the weight of evidence, with regard to many points so disputed, upon his side. But a comparatively small part of the book has to do with the work for which the writer will be remembered. Much of it is a record rather of his avocations and secondary enthusiasms; and here he becomes now and then a little truculent, even strident. The most striking quality of the narrative as a whole is that naïveté, that innocent ingenuousness of attitude toward himself and the world, which so often belongs to the philosopher and the scientist. It was marked in Darwin, as his published correspondence not long ago showed; it is even more marked in Dr. Wallace. The earlier chapters are especially amusing reading, because our scientist, in his mood of detached concentration upon the past, is content with such trivia as may chance to come to him out of that dark backward and abysm. Never was a remembrancer less solicitous as to the appositeness of events; never one with less imaginative power to rehabilitate and glorify, to hit upon the salient and picturesque incidents of a sufficiently varied life. Yet the narrative is not dull; the speaker is himself too sincerely interested in his tale for that; his eye does not glitter, but he holds us with it. What robs the narrative of dullness is, we have suggested, the cheerful preoccupation of the narrator: a zest which, however irrelevant, may be counted on to carry the reader over a thousand places which would otherwise have been heavy going. _

But in truth the narrative has very little literary charm, ingenuous or other. The annalist’s expression is often incorrect, and invariably clumsy. He has no organic mode of speech, and words are but rough counters with him. He is rather complacent over the fact that he is less

crabbed and tongue-tied than Darwin, but it would not occur to him that for simplicity and strength, as well as for finish, he is infinitely inferior to Spencer and Huxley. As for his recorded taste in literary matters, his favorite author was Hood, and, failing him, he was able to put up with strange poetical bedfellows. He quotes, with an altogether innocent air of scientific scrutiny, some early doggerel of his own, containing one good line, which he evidently does not know is lifted bodily from Gray’s Elegy. His brother, however, he tells us later, was “the only one of our family who had some natural capacity as a verse-writer.” This statement we might be inclined to take on faith; but evidence is given to the contrary in the form of a considerable number of alleged poems, from one of which we quote the opening lines:—

Apart from his services to science in the interpretation and development of the Darwinian theory, Dr. Wallace’s most dignified work seems to have lain in his advocacy of socialism. In concluding his account of experiences in America, he takes occasion to point a moral in connection with a matter to which the attention of the American people has just been called very forcibly: “Not only equality before the law, but equality of opportunity, is the great fundamental principle of social justice. This is the teaching of Herbert Spencer, but he did not carry it out to its logical consequence, — the inequity, and therefore the social immorality, of wealth-inheritance. To secure equality of opportunity there must be no inequality of initial wealth. To allow one child to be born a millionaire and another a pauper is a crime against humanity and, for those who believe in a deity, a crime against God.” Dr. Wallace is not one of those who believe in a deity; he believes, however, in astrology, phrenology, and spiritualism.

In connection with spiritualism his character of crank is most fully developed. He is not, be it noted, especially interested in the scientific investigation of occult phenomena, and rather sniffs at the Society for Psychical Research as unnecessarily reluctant and skeptical. “They have worked . . . for a quarter of a century,” he says, “and yet they are only now beginning to approach very carefully and skeptically even the simpler physical phenomena which hundreds of spiritualists, including Sir William Crookes and Professor Zollner, demonstrated more than thirty years ago.” But what are these “physical phenomena,” in detailing which our truant scientist occupies several chapters ? Nothing more nor less than the usual paltry affairs of the table-rapping, the bell-ringing, the slate-writing, the apparition of Indian chiefs and other ghostly persons: all of them, let us hastily admit, sufficiently unaccountable, but none of them marvelous, because they effect nothing. If we are going to be so vapid and trifling in the Beyond, so fond of silly games, so prone to the dialect of servant girls, as these spooks of Dr. Wallace’s, let us by all means pray for annihilation.

If we were seeking contrast, we could hardly name among his own generation a man of prominent achievement more opposed to Wallace in training and quality than the late Archbishop Temple.⁴ Dr. Temple possessed (like Wesley in his prime) a rare union of spiritual power and common sense. He was not a mystic, but a man of unusual ability and the best learning and wisdom that England could give, applying to churchcraft (to use the word in no invidious sense) powers which, in statecraft or any more generally recognized department of affairs, would, by the testimony of all his contemporaries, have been equally effective. It is reassuring evidence against the always popular theory that it is necessary for a man to go to the dogs before he can become useful among men, that Temple in youth, again like Wesley, showed signs of a somewhat exacting seriousness. Just as Wesley while at Oxford “resolved to have only such acquaintances as could help him on the way to heaven,” so Temple, a century later, deplored the Oxford Tutor’s party, “for they are generally made up purposely with a view to mixing the College and preventing the formation of exclusive sets; a good object, no doubt, but the result is very disagreeable; it is by no means agreeable to find yourself in contact with men whose habits you are eager to avoid, and they on the other hand despise all those who are not like themselves. However, yesterday we were all reading men, and our conversation was not about dogs nor horses nor cock-fighting. I got involved in a conversation with Mr. Tait about the National Debt.” . . . Exhilarating theme! Temple was always preoccupied with what seemed to him at the moment the more important matter; but it is a pity there was ever a time when he could not listen with patience to what seemed more important to other people. It is to be observed that the National Debt is a subject of varying significance, — sometimes even its capitals desert it, — but dogs and horses always have been, and we trust always will be, with us as subjects of imperishable moment. Temple was a prodigy in school and university; yet he actually became, as nine out of ten of your academic prodigies signally fail to become, one of the most useful men of his day. The writers who have collaborated in producing the present memoirs are, it seems to that most strayed of strayed sheep, an American “dissenter,” rather overpreoccupied with the thisand-other-worldly advancement involved in the attainment of the headship of the English Establishment. No doubt it is a great thing to be an Archbishop of Canterbury; but the interesting fact is that Temple would have been worth knowing if he had never become “F. Cantuar,” or even Dr. Arnold’s successor at Rugby. He was a man of such liberal mind that his attainment of his first bishopric was “a near squeak;” and, a still more endearing trait, of such independence that he occasionally forgot to be merely civil.

An incumbent once applied for leave of non-residence: —

“The house in which I propose to live, my Lord, is only a mile from the boundary of the parish as the crow flies.”

“You are not a crow,” remarked the Bishop; “and you can’t fly.”

At a public luncheon: —

“May I give your Grace some of this cold chicken?”

“No, you may not; wherever I go they give me cold chicken and the ‘Church’s one foundation,’ and I hate them both.”

“Do you believe in Providential interference, my Lord?” asked another unwary one.

“ That depends on what you mean by it.”

“Well, my aunt was suddenly prevented from going a voyage on a ship that went down, — would you call that a case of Providential interference?”

“Can’t tell; did n’t know your aunt.”

A fine old crusted parson he seems to have become, so far as manners are concerned ; but of a character the mellowest and a service the most devoted. The difference between his religious attitude and that of a Newman is well suggested by a letter written to his mother during his young Oxford days: “There are two courses: to obey the Church as if she had final authority, as if in short she were infallible or nearly so; or carefully to cultivate all those principles in which under her guidance I have been trained, affectionately embracing her commands, but at the same time never pretending to profess on her authority what I did not believe, nay, even leaving her if I felt her commands irreconcilable with conscience.”

William Henry Brookfield1 was somewhat Temple’s senior. He was a Cambridge man, of that remarkable group which included Thackeray, the Tennysons, Venables, Milnes, Spedding, and Hallam. Brookfield became a Church of England parson, and was a man of earnest purpose as well as a fashionable preacher. He had, however, nothing of the ecclesiastic about him. The impression one gets from the numerous letters now published is that he must have been, above all,a good fellow. He has the highest spirits and the readiest wit, — a fit correspondent for the merry lady who became Mrs. Brookfield. It is not to be denied that the reverend gentleman is inclined to be a little flippant in reporting himself to his lady: “My sermon was about the ups and downs of Joseph’s life. . . . Knowing that they all had a double supply of Cambric, I thought it necessary to be pathetic about the Hebrew Prime Minister of Egypt yearning after the scenes of boyhood in Canaan, which called forth abundant blowing of noses.” This cheerful cleric has one habit which must have greatly endeared him to his spouse, — of retailing at length his current bills of fare. His letters are full of such passages as this: “We dined together very comfortably at the Inn, ‘ Jack Straw’s Castle,’ where we dined once before: stewed eels, beefsteak, sparrow grass, potatoes, cheeses, salad, beer, and ‘a comfortable glass,’ five shillings each.” Mrs. Brookfield’s circle is on the whole a distinctly this-worldly one: a circle in which Thackeray felt himself delightfully at home, but in which Miss Brontë was altogether at a loss. Curiously enough, Carlyle was able to get on with it in his crabbed way. There is an amusing story here of Carlyle at a house party, Tennyson being booked to read Maud after breakfast to the company, and the Scot dourly obstructing the ceremony, till Mr. Brookfield is detailed to go with him upon his usual morning walk. Of course Mrs. Carlyle appears frequently, and the Lady Ashburton of whom in connection with Mrs. Carlyle we have heard something too much. The work of the editors is well done, and the book is sure to take its place among remembered annals of the Victorian period.