Books New and Old

A WELL-KNOWN English Review has recently entered a proper enough protest against the unnecessary multiplication of short biographies. The past decade, not, so far as we can see, overfruitful in strong creative work, has achieved a great deal of grubbing in the old dust-heaps; and much turning over of material already unearthed and in some way sorted. In certain instances this work has been done perfunctorily, or, with whatever zeal, by hands naturally fitted for other tasks; but the number of valuable finds, major and minor, has been remarkable. The growing popularity of the brief biographical study is not undeserved. It aims not to supplant but to supplement the fuller and more formal type of biography. Its brevity does, of course, give it a chance with readers who shrink from anything in two volumes octavo; and the serial method of publication, bestowing a kind of cumulative dignity upon each succeeding number, secures a wide circulation among conventionally bookish persons. The established success of the English Men of Letters Series has led to a repetition of the experiment by other publishers. Naturally there is much to choose in point of quality among these compact studies, by whomever published; but the present commentator, who has chanced to read many of them, has found very few of them merely impertinent.

I

The original English series it has been judged proper to extend to the treatment of distinctly minor figures in English letters, and of the greater Americans. Sydney Smith and Bryant are among the latest inclusions; there is little doubt as to which of them has the better right to a place of dignity among producers of literature in English.¹ Mr. Bradley’s study, as the work of an American critic of the younger generation, may be taken to represent, in a way, the opinion of an early posterity. He treats Bryant “not merely as the earliest American poet, but as one of the more considerable luminaries of our small constellation, —the most imaginative, perhaps, of all our poets save Poe.” There is, as the passage suggests, no spread-eagling done in this volume; the author has too real a respect for his subject, and for the critical office, to be in any danger from local pride. The result is what seems a perfectly reasonable estimate of Bryant as a poet who, if he did not achieve greatness, achieved distinction. As for his specific service to American literature, Mr. Bradley seems to say all that can be said: “Our racial consciousness is necessarily lacking in a reminiscence of that remote past when faith in things eternal first took form in beautiful mythologies and legends of gods and heroes. But in Bryant there is present something of the mood out of which such things spring, and he supplies, in his feeling toward nature, a little of that freshness of delight in all created things, and even more of that pristine poignancy of regret at the briefness of their span, which is needed to give spiritual perspective to our literature.” With so clear a recognition of the “elemental quality” of Bryant’s poetry, it is a little odd that the critic should not couple a recognition of the inevitable brevity of its expression. If Bryant’s precocity was as remarkable as that of a Shelley or a Keats, its exercise was even more shortlived. It hardly suffices to say that the poet “even in his most productive period devoted only a small portion of his energies to the writing of poetry.” There Were, no doubt, in Bryant’s youth, obstacles to the adoption of “literature as a profession” which, using the word literature in a vague sense, no longer obtain in America. But to live by poetry has always been the most painful of enterprises and the most precarious; apparently a professional “career” in poetry was forbidden Bryant by the conditions of his natural endowment as well as by “the exigencies of his situation in life.” At his poetical best he was one of the most remarkable of youthful prodigies; and it would be as reasonable to regret his subsequent activity and usefulness in affairs as to lament the narrowness of his range and the paucity of his product in poetry. For what we have received let us be duly thankful. Bryant’s long-continued and deep-grounded effectiveness as a public character is an aspect of his career upon which Mr. Bradley by no means fails to cast due emphasis. But why go back of the facts to surmise that if the man had not put himself in the way of a life of varied activities, he might have produced more, or better, poetry ?

Mr. Russell’s study of Sydney Smith pretends to offer nothing particularly fresh in matter or treatment; he has admittedly been “working in a field where a succession of diligent gleaners had preceded him.” He has had a few new letters at his command, and that is all. Yet the book has been undertaken seriously, and the labor by no means wasted. Those “diligent gleaners” had been content with a more or less fragmentary and inaccurate method of presentation: Mr. Russell has assembled, corrected, and verified these scattered data, and made them the basis for an independent interpretation of the work and character of his subject. He seems, in short, pretty thoroughly to have summed up the Sydney Smith question; no more elaborate study of him is likely to be needed. That is to say, the biographer’s task was in many respects easier than that of Mr. Bradley. Mystery hangs about a poet, but a wit, whatever his stature, belongs to our common world. It must be said that there is nothing in the present study to convince us that Sydney Smith was not rather a wit than a man of letters. Of the famous but now somewhat faded Sydney jokes our biographer is, on the whole, commendably continent. Such things rarely stand the test of even a generation of years; and it is the penalty which a joker has to pay to posterity that innumerable verbal jests with a counterfeited water-mark should be saddled upon his memory. But Sydney Smith was a wit in the older and larger sense, a bel esprit, a keen intellect united to a genial fancy.

Mr. Russell shows our wit to have been, if not a great writer, a man of much practical zeal and influence. “What is the conclusion of the whole matter ? It is, in my judgment, that Sydney Smith was a patriot of the purest and noblest type; a genuinely religious man according to his light and opportunity; and the happy possessor of a rich and singular talent which he employed through a long life in the willing service of the helpless, the persecuted, the poor. To use his own fine phrase, the interests of humanity ’got into his heart and circulated with his blood.’ His playful speech was the vehicle of a passionate purpose. From his earliest manhood he was ready to sacrifice all that the sordid world thinks precious for Religious Equality and Rational Freedom.” Not so far from Bryant, the American Poet and Editor, one sees, was this English wit and publicist, leaving the mere question of literary classification out of account. Bryant himself was capable of saying, shortly after the beginning of his connection, destined to last for half a century, with the New York Evening Post, “Politics and a bellyful are better than poetry and starvation.” Politics and questions of reform were later on to become of much more importance to him than a bellyful; but his utterances were always calm, judicial, a little rigid. Sydney Smith, on the contrary, though not far from a contemporary, belonged, as an Edinburgh reviewer, and in other capacities, to the robust English school of letters, and was, after Swift, one of the greatest English masters of satirical invective. So he imagines himself saying to “a regular Tory Lord, whose members regularly vote against the Catholic question: ‘To bring on a civil war for No Popery is a very foolish proceeding in a man who has two courses and a remove. As you value your side-board of plate, your broad riband, your pier-glasses, — if obsequious domestics and large rooms are dear to you, — if you love ease and flattery, titles and coats of arms, — if the labor of the French cook, the dedication of the expecting poet, can move you, — if you hope for a long life of side-dishes, — if you are not insensible to the arrival of the turtlefleets,— emancipate the Catholics! Do it for your ease, do it for your indolence, do it for your safety — emancipate and eat, emancipate and drink — emancipate and preserve the rent-roll and the family estate!’” Nowadays we are inclined to model our diatribes rather upon the style of the Evening Post; but there was a kind of infernal virtue in those unconcealed weapons of assault and battery which Jeffrey and North and Sydney Smith used to such purpose.

There seems, on the whole, to be no reason why Frederic Harrison’s Chatham,² issued by the same publishers, should not have been as fitly included in the English Men of Letters Series as the Sydney Smith. Both were rhetorical improvisators, though one chanced to be an orator and the other a pamphleteer. With all its brevity, Mr. Harrison’s study of the elder Pitt is, as would be expected, of the most finished character. His admiration of Chatham as one of the “four great creative statesmen” whom England has produced gives warmth to his interpretation, though he quite avoids the panegyrical note of Macaulay. His style is, if less lively, and quite untouched by humor, hardly less nervous than that of the eloquent Whig. “He has been charged with being drunk with war, delighting in war for itself; but this is a gross caricature of Pitt’s ambition. . . . Pitt had no love of war. He loved his country with passion, and his ambition was to make his country the first in the world, to hand on to generations to come a mighty and stable inheritance. It was the ambition of Frederick, of Marlborough, of Dupleix, of Lally and of Montcalm, of Choiseul, of Alberoni, as it was of Pitt. But of them all, Frederick and Pitt alone have founded vast empires which, after one hundred and forty years of growth, are still growing to-day.” To such a man the notion of a literature detached from the practical issues of life may well have seemed vanity; the wonder is that it did not seem so to Frederick. Pitt was content to shape an empire; what we have of his writing is laborious and formal, as different as possible from those glowing fragments of his reported discourse. A very different man from the witty Rector of Combe Florey was the Vicar of Morwenstow: far less a person of public affairs, far more a man of letters, — and yet he was not primarily that, either. Seldom has the parochial life, in whatever sense the term be used, produced a more interesting character. Poet, antiquarian, chronicler of Cornish legends, mystic, ecclesiastic, and (lightly his son-in-law biographer breathes it) opium-eater: a man most eccentric, most lovable. For his recluse habit — he hardly left his wild Cornish shore for a quarter-century — and for his fastidious unconventionality in dress and conduct, he strongly resembled that other literary hermit, his contemporary FitzGerald. But while FitzGerald was solacing his somewhat aimless and self-centred existence with random, though, as it turned out, fruitful experiments in Spanish and Persian, Hawker was studying the antiquities of old Cornwall, reading Aquinas, and, above all, performing with hearty goodwill and scrupulous fidelity the thousand and one duties of a country priest who is also squire and magistrate.

II

Two brief, inaccurate, and incomplete memoirs appeared shortly after Hawker’s death. One of them, by S. Baring-Gould, was well received, and has been twice reprinted; but the continued and growing interest in the author of Footsteps of Former Men in Old Cornwall has given good cause for the preparation of a full and reliable biography, such as we now have from the hand of his son-in-law.³ The volume is a Who’s Who for rubicundity and portliness; this being the style just now in fashion for biographies. Its contents are a product of unusual skill and discretion. Hawker was a figure which might easily have been distorted by adulation or carelessness. It appears to be presented here in its natural proportions. As master of a substantial glebe, he developed not only an excellent knowledge of crops and livestock, but a tendency to a very human irascibility in dealing with refractory or delinquent laborers. He shared the superstitions of his Cornish parishioners: made the sign to defend from the evil eye, and had a firm belief in pixies, brownies, and demons of the sterner sort. “As I entered the Gulph between the Vallies today, a Storm leaped from the Sea, and rushed at me roaring — I recognised a Demon and put Carrow to the gallop and so escaped. But it was perilous work. There once I saw a Brownie; and thence at night the Northern Glances gleam.” On another occasion he writes quite soberly to his brother: “You talk of weather. . . . My Cliff Wheat was in the Blade and we thought it would snap with the wind. So on the 8th I had two crosses made of Wood, and on the Transome of one was carved and the letters painted red — ’Imperat Ventis’ from St. Luke, I. E. ‘He commanded the Winds,’ and on the other, ‘Dixit Mari, Tace,’ ‘He said unto the sea, “Peace, Be still.”’ They were fixed and consecrated by Six O’Clock in the evening, amidst so fierce a Gale that the Carpenter could hardly hear the Service on the Cliff. But the Prince of Air heard it and obeyed. By Twelve O’Clock there was a calm, and no Storm from the S. - W. and N. - W. — the points breasted by the Crosses — has entered that field since. Could any man doubt the Power of Words . . . who saw and witnessed, as all our people have, these things?” Upon matters of superstitious belief less closely connected with his daily life he had equally firm convictions: such as that angels have no wings and dress in white (“Are you not instructed,” he writes to an ignorant friend, “that the Alb of the Primal Church, girdled, was an exact copy of the usual garments worn by angels when they communed with men ?”), and that the hair of the Virgin and her Son was of “a blushing brown,” “that of a ripe chestnut with the sun trembling over it.” Yet this man was capable of invective as bitter as that of Sydney Smith; and of such touches of keen humor as: “He appeared to me to be a Protestant devoid of intestines, a most unusual thing. Is he not some other Man’s Backbone ?" To the numerous memorials of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood which have been published of late is now added, in the excellent Literary Lives Series, a study of Patmore.⁴ Coventry Patmore’s career was in many respects singular. Mr. Sargent chose him as model for Ezekiel in the now famous painting in the Boston Public Library; and there was not a little — there was perhaps too much — of the sœva indignatio of the prophet in his make-up. No one of his generation, not even Carlyle or Ruskin, was equally savage in his denunciation of the political and social conditions of the age. Yet his only generally recognized success was a popular success, — an idyl of what might be called the antimacassar school, its theme of deliriously chaste middle - class wedlock mildly decorated with a commodity of curates, crinoline, croquet, red plush sofas, and tea on the lawn. To catch the fashion of the time — witness Dora, for a single instance of the way in which that particular fashion was able to influence better poets than the author of The Angel in the House — and express it to the utmost: not the natural business of an Ezekiel, one would say. And indeed, though that poem is by no means to be disposed of as merely vapid or banal, it cannot justly be said to represent the poet at his best, as some of his later work represented him, — say the Odes, Amelia, and The Unknown Eros. There his didactic intent failed to compromise the utterance of his pure lyrical impulse. Patmore was essentially a singer, and he never knew it. His biographer has a very clear opinion of his place among Victorian poets: —

“It is probably not very unsafe to predict what Patmore’s place will be in literary history. He does not quite stand in the central stream of the age in which he lived. He will not be inevitably thought of as representative of the intellect of his time, like Tennyson, nor as a spreading human force, like Browning, nor as a universal stimulant and irritant, like Matthew Arnold. His contributions to the national mind will be far less general than theirs, mainly because of his curious limitations of sympathy. Those who do not feel broadly may have a deep, but thev cannot expect to have a wide, influence. They cannot suffuse themselves into the civilization of the race. The individuality of the three poets I have named was soluble, and as a matter of fact particles of their substance flow in the veins of every cultivated man. Patmore was narrow, and he was hard; there is that in his genius which refuses to dissolve.”

III

Poetry was as absolutely a profession to Patmore as to Tennyson and Browning, though he found it impossible to apply himself systematically to composition, as they did, and his product was comparatively small. He waited for his rare moments of inspiration with what was for him an excellent passivity. “No amount of idleness is wrong in a poet,”he said placidly. “Idleness is the growing time of his harvest.” Not, one reflects, the harvest of a Browning, which seems to have matured even as he “walked along our roads with step so active, so inquiring eye.” He has never been more unmistakably “a spreading human force” than since the Browning societies became obsolete or obsolescent. The third fresh study of his life and work undertaken during the past two years has just presented itself.⁵ In scale it stands midway between Mr. Chesterton’s and Professor Dowden’s; in quality it is to be compared rather with the latter. The style is not of the “popular” sort, and may indeed be said to verge now and then toward pedantry; but if the book bears the external stamp of a terminology whose agreeable mystifications might, a decade or two ago, have been manna to the cult, it has also the advantage, hardly then to have been appreciated, of really meaning something palpable. The study is in two parts, the first of which might by itself have made an excellent English Men of Letters number. Professor Herford has been successful in his attempt ”to sift out from the picturesque loose drift” of detail and anecdote which has gathered about Browning’s name “the really salient and relevant material.” As little space as possible is devoted to the poet’s forbears and childhood: as few ex post facto premonitions of genius noted in early pranks and babblings. Even the incidents of that memorable courtship are lightly touched upon; while full treatment is given to the fifteen years of married life and poetic heyday which followed. The whole method is critical: events are dwelt upon or slighted according as they bear upon the poet’s actual productiveness. For the rest, Professor Herford is successful in the most difficult part of the Browning critic’s task: in dealing with those poetic extravagances with which Browning’s labors began and ended. We may not at this day be particularly eager for a new exposition of Pippa Passes or The Blot in the Scutcheon, and yet owe something to the critic who is able to make both clear and tolerable Sordello or Red Cotton Night-Cap Country.

The sixty pages on Browning’s “ Mind and Art ” represent, an extreme type of academic criticism: a method of scientific analysis which, of excellent use to a master, our young Ph.D.’s are in the way to make a public nuisance. Professor Herford is a master in this sort; yet one can hardly resist a smile or a shudder at the hard technicality of his procedure. One feels himself helplessly rung into the classroom by the very term “ mind and art.” — and yonder on the bulletin-board is a syllabus of the forthcoming lecture of the day, the first of its eight heads running, “1. Divergent psychical tendencies in Browning — ‘romantic’ temperament, ‘ realist ’ senses — blending of their données in his imaginative activity — shifting complexion of ‘finite’ and ‘infinite.’” But these dry bones of discourse are clothed in due time; with what texture a sentence or two on Browning’s two conceptions of reality may suggest: “His most intense consciousness, his most definite grip upon reality, was too closely bound up with the collisions and jostlings, the limits and angularities, of the world of the senses, for the belief in their illusoriness easily to hold its ground. This ‘infinite soul’ palpably had its fullest and richest existence in the very heart of finite things. Wordsworth had turned for intimations of immortality to the remembered intuitions of childhood : Browning found them in every pang of baffled aspiration and frustrate will. Hence there arose in the very midst of this realm of illusion a new centre of reality; the phantoms took on solid and irrefragable existence, and refused to take to flight.”

Mr. Japp’s book about Stevenson⁶ is top-heavy with a sub-title: it is not consistently a record, an estimate, or a memorial. It contains a good deal of valuable matter presented in the most scrappy and disjointed way; as well as some matter which is not valuable at all. Mr. Japp is far too obviously laden with grievances, some of them Stevenson’s, some of them merely his. He is very severe with Henley, Mr. Gosse, Mr. Symons, et al.; not always, it seems, upon really dignified grounds. It is easily possible to take issue, on the score of taste, with those rather too well-known remarks of Henley’s, but to call them “spiteful perversions” is surely an exaggeration. Such bits of personal controversy as the chapter on Lord Rosebery are mere impertinence; our dour Scots LL.D., F. R. S. E. takes himself a grain too seriously. The fact remains that he was a cherished friend of Stevenson’s, and that his book, with all its formlessness and maladroitness, gives an impression, hardly paralleled elsewhere between two covers, of the generous ardor which this toil-ridden virtuoso had to expend upon life. How he lived, this Louis the Well-Beloved! always with something harum-scarum upon the surface, a wanderer, a rebel against petty conventions, yet with a deep conformity in his heart and in his conduct. Of whom could this be said so truly, unless of Cervantes, whose name is by one of those familiar accidents of the calendar once more fresh upon our lips ? He, to be sure, was a soldier of another sort, pitted against physical foes of more kinds than one; and born an age too early to obtain even in years that warming recognition which fell to Stevenson in his early prime. Mr. Calvert’s timely Life of Cervantes⁷ is, oddly enough, the first brief and satisfactory monograph to be written in English. The more elaborate Life by Mr. FitzmauriceKelly is better worth owning, but it is now hard to obtain. This narrative is compact and well considered; and is admirably illustrated with portraits and title-pages.

1The Life of Cervantes. By ALBERT F. CALVERT. New York : John Lane. 1905.