Letters on Literature

Letters on Literature, by Andrew Lang

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Title: Letters on Literature

Author: Andrew Lang

Release Date: May 13, 2005 [eBook #1395]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LETTERS ON LITERATURE***

Transcribed from the 1892 Longmans, Green, & Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

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 Société

On Vers de Société

Richardson

Gérard 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 à 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