Literary Centennials

IT is always a welcome pleasure to learn that somebody special was born a hundred years ago. There is saving grace in a century, we have come to feel. Once in a hundred years enchanted villages rise from depths of earth to the light; for a hundred years a sleeping princess must repose before the kiss of the marrying prince. We should be perversely blind to analogy if, after a hundred years, we failed to peer among the dusty treasures of ‘olde bokes,’to find, if only for a day, a forgotten beauty waked out of trance; for where is magic more likely to be?

And a literary centennial is a relief to our latent bookishness, our sneaking fondness for an occasional backward glance at familiar things. We may cease for a bit to toe the mark of the current literary issue and remember a little at our leisure, with the complacence of recognition, the cherished things which we are in the habit of knowing. Yes, let us be thankful for the world’s growing leniency, which allows us to be antiquated if we will be antiquated enough, and grants an old subject to be all very well if only it be old a century.

For each of us at home, in his own library, is in some odd way old-fashioned. Indeed, that we have once loved a book gives it a reflected sacredness in our secret predilection, for there is involved in a refusal to forget former tastes an appropriate loyalty, just as Sir Roger de Coverley never changed the cut of his clothes after his memorable affair with the Widow. For these things have entered our experience with favor, and we owe them at least a pleasant thought and a lucky word as we pass them by in the walks of later years.

Nor is the relapse to retrospect a treason to the alert forwardness of modern habit. Still we may choose the front seat in the car and watch the road ahead, may steadily scan the sky to know as soon as others if a new planet swims within our ken. But we shall judge only the more shrewdly of the procession of progress if we can recapture a little in off hours the critical naïveté of old times before we grew so wondrous wise.

There is the chance, of course, that we may find shrunken some favorite bit of the dear old world of fiction that used to loom large with the largeness of discovery. For other things than years have lost size since the time-machine began to accelerate its revol ving pace. ‘He that hath never seen a river, the first he seeth he taketh it to be an ocean.’ There are strange disappointments of aftersight. We have to be careful of our oceans nowadays, lest there should turn out to be only five.

Such faint-hearted scruple may perhaps hold a few lagging from the pleasant society of the Dickens centennial reunion. What if some jovial old comrade should have grown to look amazingly like a clown? What if those gentle young ladies should be really unable to bleed after a good pricking? What if that grand hurly-burly of clamoring excitement should no longer rush us on, pale and tense, to know the worst ? It would be a pity if the laugh should ring loud with more mirth than it is master of, if the tear should drop bigger than the molecular composition of a tear allows, if the caricatures should strain at their insistence so that we ‘could not miss ’em.’

We are advisedly reluctant perhaps to disturb with a too critical invasion the recollection of good things once found perfect. We are grown staid and crabbed, to be sure, and correspondingly hard to please. The dear old ways of romance, revisited, seem often homeless and inhuman ways. Nor is the rumble and racket of words still a charmed incantation. There used to be a great line of poetry:—

Just who these high beings were, I always dreaded to learn, lest the spell should break, though I knew them worshipful to be so called. But now I care not for them. I would just as lief hear about Goody Blake and Harry Gill, or George and Sarah Green. Day now dawns on Norham’s castled steep unheeded, and Brian the Hermit’s curses rouse no answering shudder in my blood.

And it is perhaps with justice that the Dickens doubters depose to a growing fastidiousness. We no longer fancy the quintain type of humor; we would rather not cry upon compulsion; we like an author to take our subtlety somewhat for granted. A worse confession is behind, for we concern ourselves about a mere correctness of style. We want a sentence to be etymologically a sentence, words to say what they mean; and we are even become sticklers for grammar. We deserve to be disappointed, and so sometimes we are.

But the free-handed old novelists with whose memory t hese passing years are busy, knew a reality firm and potent to outweigh more faults than we shall ever have wit to find. Yes, a hundred years ago, more or less, was a promising time to come into the world; and if the corner of the century has anything to do with endowment, we may have every confidence in the babies of the present. At least of the world of letters Stevenson was nearly right, that

We may neglect them in our conscientious curiosity for modern miniatures, vignettes, novelettes, storiettes, but when we want them, they are there, known by our more tolerant comprehension, which is life’s gift, though richer and livelier, perhaps, for excellences which we used not to suspect.

And to distrust Dickens is surely the cowardice of little faith. To-day we are wiser than once to know what strength is worth, — that robust sympathy so much warmer than good taste that excess matters little; spirits so buoyant that their maintenance is a reasonable and exalted service; the easy control of the seething world whose vulgarity no longer shocks our hardened public; the sustained vitality of the definite and lighted vision. And we understand even better why Thackeray loved to praise the work of his more copious and popular rival, why he found him ‘how much the best of all.’

To Thackeray, of Victorian novelists always most modern, we have grown happily closer in the freedom of current reminiscence. The personal Thackeray, kindly man of the world, has touched us almost with the charm of a new acquaintance, — the grownup boy who could never see a boy without wanting to give him a sovereign; the chivalrous editor, unparalleled to-day, who withdrew from the management of the Cornhill Magazine because he could not bear to reject the manuscripts of women contributors. And in the novelist, keen, but human and tender, we now look in vain for the insufferable cynic who had the elfish trick of spoiling a story, — who chose in cold blood to turn out a ‘novel without a hero,’ who preferred a Lady Castlewood unreasonable, inconsistent, and jealous, a silly Amelia, an irresponsible Pendennis, — when they might more easily have been capital specimens of their kind. We acknowledge too with a more wholesome respect the artist Thackeray, the master strong and light of touch, moderate of effect, careless with the sufficiency of genius which has no need of emphasis or of trick vocabulary. Him we had almost missed in earlier days.

The fuller field of vision is natural to mature sight, for our early impatient taste is freely impressionistic. It is sensitive to color and shade, to atmosphere and light; it vibrates to the wave of the passionate and the momentous, but recoils from the unsparing observation of motive which is the touchstone of the critic, ignores with careless indifference the repose and reserve of good form, the tranquil exactness and level sincerity which are the life of essential prose, rejects frankly whatever is coldly classical or so unpretentious as to seem trivial to questing ardor. For fresh young eyes cannot afford to notice small things near at hand, so many lovely scenes at a distance are waiting to be hailed.

With Browning we shall have this year no old reserves to discard or enthusiasms to correct, still less a sense of retrocession to a past mode of thought; for the Browning domination, grown with the slowness of the higher organism to maturity, is still an inherent part of modern life, charged with an elemental force which lies too far below the surface to be disturbed by the flux of fashion. Except for a few sporadic protests, there has not been time even for a reaction. For we are still learning Browning, confident to find more of his ‘stuff for strength’ within the most heady and protuberant outpourings. His virile genius has traceably modified our personal consciousness, has wrought a prophet’s revelation for the infinite consequence of each blind moral choice, the potential worth of each grotesque fragment of humanity, its utter difference from all its fellows. The centennial comes too close for a readjustment of public opinion, for the formation of a more serene cult; but it may open the way. Shall we, with Mr. Santayana, judge Browning the pioneer Vandal of verse-disintegration, snapping his fingers at form with a superfluity of naughtiness; or with M. Jusserand, ‘sans comparaison l’âme la plus haute et la plus forte que compte la poésie anglaise depuis Shakespeare’? There may be something new to be said about Browning yet.

Edward FitzGerald used to complain that in the company of one special friend his spirit was rebuked to a rather uncomfortable oppression, reduced to a somewhat overmastering meekness. I fancy he would have felt the same with Browning. We are sure to value most choicely an intimacy with a high genius, but are quite as glad to see again those old comrades, wort hy of our steady affection, whom we can hail unabashed by too profound a reverence. In bookland, too, we are sometimes more at ease with lesser folk. A proved mind there was here and there, pure and large, but too complaisant to contemporary taste to be passed on by it to the next age, save as the author of a single book or perhaps of two. Shy folks there were, who kept their privacy too far apart from the onward movement of the time to go forward in the centre of the current. And if we find these too, at the century’s touch, better and bigger than we guessed, the pleasure of our meeting has the added flavor of a gratified vanity that we had the gift to know them. So has it been with the translator of Omar, himself.

Three years ago the centennial unburied from beneath the weight of the Rubaiyat’s terrible popularity, and restored to our fellowship, that savant, hermit, musician, gypsy, artist, fisherman, friend, Edward FitzGerald. No doubt he would shrink from our prying, even as in his lifetime he constantly laughed at his own ‘fine parts’ and ‘great works,’ concealed his little adventures in print with the shyness of inverted pride, and withheld from the eyes of a peering future the intimate relics of his personality. More retiring than Kipling’s muskrat, Chuchundra, who could never make up his mind to run into the middle of the room, he guarded with careful pains the freedom of his ‘invisibility,’ fled even from the friends for whom he hankered, if he must risk for them ‘the sight of a new face in polite circles.’ Yet it is easy to understand the hearty remembrance in which he was held by the famous friends who could not beguile him from his obscurity: Spedding, Laurence, Frederick and Alfred Tennyson, Carlyle, and Thackeray. And perhaps we can better appreciate his quality today, when the fine old connoisseur has so nearly given place to the less pleasant person, the scholar. For FitzGerald seems to have relished more ripely than others all things clean and rare under the sun and the light of his own whimsical fancy; to have pictured them with a sight poetic and humorous at once, a delightful trick of odd analogy. Which was dearest, we wonder, Persian poetry or the ‘Old Sea,’ the friendly sands, the turnips in their rows, the captain of his herring-lugger, the sweet field winds, the exhibits of the National Gallery for which he would now and then dodge up to London, ‘the merry old writers of more manly times,’ or the achievements of his immortal friends with which, as he grew in years, his anxious ambition was never satisfied? But FitzGerald should never have grown old, for his early blitheness was the truth of him. ‘Such as life is, I believe I have got hold of a good end of it.’

Mrs. Gaskell too has been well-nigh eclipsed by the fame of her greatest work. But if we took, from the birthday of two years ago, impulse for a less sluggish acceptance, we have found her after her hundred years a more various person than the author of Cranford. We may have laughed at the occasional trace of an obsolete pattern in the diverse old tales, — the insufferable beauty of an ill-starred heroine, a solemn regard for the ubiquitous moral which often beguiles to an overgrown simplicity, a voice too audibly raised in the plaint of a pathos too searching, and the bent common to most women novelists of the middle century to put the story through every vicissitude of ruthless woe. But the least of her once famous novels has the promise of a firmer touch, a wiser control, and the more competent tenderness which knows in kindly laughter the ease and healing of sorrow.

Looking beyond Cranford, we are almost startled, as if come suddenly upon new fields unseen before in a familiar country. There is, even in the forgotten stories, an emotional suggestiveness for apt environment, singular among Victorian novelists, — for the thrill of pure color under the sky, the winging changes of sun and shadow in a world of shifting light and touching air, — all in a kindled phraseology sometimes curiously relapsing to the prim fineries of the old-time manner. But despite her quick eye for natural aspects Mrs. Gaskell, like her contemporaries, cared immeasurably more for the human. Hers it was to detect with a perpetual zest all little realities of character in a world where small things are more full of meaning than large. We have known them in Cranford, with its minature gentilities understood to be world-wide conventions, its faded dreams and album-pressed remembrances. But we feel them only less appealing in the simple purity of Cousin Phillis, in the poignant social passion of Mary Barton, in the overwrought but rending pathos of Sylvia’s Lovers, or below the equal poise of North andSouth, written at a time when few but the indifferent to labor troubles were calm. We find perhaps better than Cranford in the comfortable economy of Wives and Daughters, its hearty folk not too precisely typed or tagged, by no means exempt from sorrow’s waste or folly’s price, but supported by a humorous reserve of astute common sense. Elizabeth Bennet would have loved to know Molly Gibson. More liberal praise than that would be hard to find for Molly, or for Wives and Daughters. And two years ago I, for one, had never heard of Wives and Daughters.

All thanks to the centennials. They have made miracles more real for us than the magic lore of the fairy tales. For what less than a miracle happens ever when ‘fresh flowers spring up from hoarded seed,’ and a new season begins for life, once harvested and stored, come out to leaf and bloom again under the sun? The associations of a literary centennial are not to be put aside, when it is past, to lie unhandled for a hundred years. They leave a reality quickened, a personal contact renewed with things noble and precious, found alive and undying, to be a more actual presence and a richer heritage. In the fairy tale, when the day is over, the suddenly awakened castle turns again to stone, the little village sinks with its ephemeral bustle once more to the depths of the ground. But the beauty of old books remains with us, unblemished, like the exquisite bodies of martyrs found instinct with life and sweet savor after the lapse of centuries. The centennial has been not a memorial only, but a renaissance.