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By-ways in Book-land: Short Essays on Literary Subjects
But, as a whole, ‘Don Quixote,’ as rendered into rhyme by Mr. Ward, cannot be recommended for general perusal.
There is, however, a ‘Quixote’ literature apart from ‘Don Quixote’ itself. The great romance suggested more than one English counterpart, such as ‘The Spiritual Quixote,’ by Richard Graves, and ‘The Female Quixote,’ by Mrs. Lennox. The latter, published in the middle of last century, was devoted to the adventures of one Arabella. Of her we read that, supposing the fictions of the Scudéri school to be ‘real pictures of life,’ ‘from them she drew all her notions and expectations.’ She became, in fact, quite a monomaniac upon the subject, and, as a sample, is for ever expecting that her lover, Glanville, will speak and act like the heroes of her favourite tales. In the end she throws herself into a river, gets brain-fever, and is brought back to sanity by a benevolent divine. Then there is ‘The Amiable Quixote; or, The Enthusiasm of Friendship,’ a novel issued later in the century, and having for central figure a young gentleman named Bruce, who
‘found in the slightest acquaintance some virtue or some recommendation. As soon as the enthusiasm of friendship was excited, it overwhelmed his discretion and clouded his perspicacity.’
But this work owed very little to ‘Don Quixote’ – not more than did ‘Tarrataria; or, Don Quixote the Second,’ a romantic poetical medley in two cantos, which appeared in the interval between the two stories just noticed. Early in this century there was issued, for a short space, a literary miscellany, called The Knight Errant, edited by ‘Sir Hercules Quixote, K.E.,’ who, said the prospectus,
‘following the example of his illustrious namesake and ancestor of La Mancha, has, with the assistance of his friends, commenced an era of Civil Knight Errantry, and zealously devoted himself to the comforting of distressed Damsels and disconsolate Widows, the fathering of wronged and destitute Orphans, the promotion of Virtue and chivalrous feeling generally’ —
and so on, and so on. To ‘Don Quixote,’ in some form or other, there will, of course, be literary allusions to the end of time.
BEDSIDE BOOKS
To begin with, ought there to be any such things? Ought we to accustom ourselves to having books by our bedside? Ought not ‘early to bed and early to rise’ to be the motto of every well-conducted person, and is not reading in bed calculated to render the carrying out of that axiom virtually impossible? This is the problem we have first to solve, and it may be said at once that this discourse does not apply virginibus puerisque. Girls and boys, young men and young women, are hereby solemnly exhorted to abjure all nocturnal or matutinal reading of the kind suggested. To them all the lines in the copybooks apply unreservedly. Nay, even for those of mature years it may be allowed that bed is not the proper place for intellectual study. Let the hours for reading and for repose be kept rigidly apart, if the reading is to be systematic and prolonged. So far, everybody is agreed. To make a habit of perusing books in bed is to encourage laziness, and to encourage laziness is (we all know) to sap the foundations of the moral nature. That way destruction lies.
And I am bound to say that habitual, sustained reading in bed is quite as uncomfortable for the human frame as it is dangerous to the human character. It cannot be undertaken with entire success. It looks easy to do, but it is not. If you are sceptical, try it. You begin swimmingly enough. You lie down, say, on your back, settle your head cosily on to the pillow, and perhaps, to start with, hold the book before you in both hands: For a time all goes well, but not for long. The position of the arms becomes fatiguing. You withdraw one from the book and commence again. But the utilized arm speedily grows weary, and the chances are that you drop the volume and go off to sleep, leaving gas, lamp, or candle alight – which is not very safe and not very healthy – nay, is positively unhealthy and unsafe. Perchance you try the effect of reclining on one side, leaning on one arm, and holding the book by means of the other. That, also, is charming for the moment, but has a similar tendency to tire very readily. Your elbow – the one on which your weight is thrown – soon gives signs of boredom. ‘I don’t like this at all,’ it says virtually; and perhaps you turn round and try the other for a spell. But in these matters one elbow is very like its brother, and before long you are on the look-out for another attitude.
What may be called the last infirmity of the determined reader in bed is his final decision to sit up and read in that fashion. Nothing could be better – for a certain more or less brief period. At the expiration of a few minutes, you realize that you are getting a sort of cramp in the knees; moreover, there is a disagreeable strain on your head; you are stooping too much, and bending your spine, and altogether making a toil of pleasure. The situation, it need hardly be said, is still less attractive when the weather is cold, and the effort to keep warm is added to the endeavour to read. You have wrapped yourself up, but apparently not to much purpose. You are conscious of growing chillier and chillier every moment. And, indeed, a very low temperature is usually fatal to the cultivation of bedside books. Even if you lie down, and almost smother yourself in the clothes, you are bound to obtrude one hand out of shelter, or how is the book to be held up? And how quickly that hand gets cold – and how often one’s two hands have to be alternated for the purpose in view – and what a nuisance it is to have to make the continual change! One begins to think that, under the circumstances, reading is not so pleasant as one fancied, and that sleep (as the poet says) is the only certain knot of peace.
One thing is incontrovertible, and that is, that bedside books, if they are to be acceptable, must be, in the first place, small in size and, therefore, not very weighty. The hand must be asked to hold as little as possible. Bed is not the place for heavy tomes; it is the appropriate locale of the duodecimo. And yet the type must not be too small, or the eyesight will suffer, unless the reader can command plenty of illumination – which is not always the case. And the book must be not only fairly diminutive, but bound and stitched in such a way as to allow the hand to clutch it and hold it with ease. There must be no unnecessary extension of the palm and fingers, for it adds so much to the fatigue. Unhappily, every volume does not fulfil this requirement, and the requisite selection must be made with care. Moreover, the ideal bedside book should be not only small, and light, and agreeable to the touch, but distinguished by special internal characteristics. Not only must the print be legible; the matter it furnishes must be in brief instalments. What is wanted is a series of short somethings which the mind can readily grasp and as easily retain. Sustained reading is for the library or the study; the last thing at night and the first thing in the morning, what you desire is simply a number of brevities, at any one of which you can glance with the certainty of being interested.
Wherefore, such works as novels must be discouraged in the bedside library. There is nothing to be gained by perusing a romance, by bits, in such fragments of time as the intending sleeper is inclined or able to accord to it. Keep a novel beside you, if you like, to turn to if the night should prove an obstinately sleepless one, and to that end let the tale be by ‘Miss Braddon or Gaboriau’ – one which shall really fix your imagination fast, and finish, perhaps, by sending you to rest. But for ordinary uses let the book which you take up be one of ‘Jewels, five words long,’ or thereabouts! Let it be a volume of short essays – let it be, for instance, Bacon’s, or the ‘Roundabout Papers,’ now accessible in a handy form. Let it be a volume of brief verse, such as Mr. Gilbert’s ‘Bab Ballads,’ or Mr. Lang’s ‘Ballades in Blue China,’ or Calverley’s immortal ‘Fly Leaves;’ or let it be a collection of more serious lyrics – say, Mr. Palgrave’s ‘Golden Treasury,’ or the selections from Lord Tennyson and Mr. Matthew Arnold. Or, if you like, let it be a treasury of maxims, such as those by Vauvenargues or Chamfort; or a series of select passages, such as those from the works of Lord Beaconsfield or Heine: or let it be a casquet of choice anecdotes, of which happily the supply is large – that incomparable volume of Dean Ramsay’s, for example, or even the triter production by Mark Lemon. There is a whole world from which to choose.
Only, take care that, whatever the literature is, it is not disturbing. The mission of the bedside book is to soothe the mind, not irritate it. When one lies down after a hard day’s work, one’s desire is not that the brain should be stimulated, but that it should be refreshed. It needs, not exercise, but diversion. It wants to be prepared for sleep. And if a book will effect that object, while at the same time adding to the stock of one’s ideas – humorous or sentimental, it does not matter which – that volume is to be thanked and cherished. The difficulty of putting down one’s book and extinguishing the light before the exposition of sleep comes upon one, must be left to be dealt with by the individual man. I have heard of a popular vocalist who was wont, when he had read sufficiently, to extinguish the candle by plumping down upon it whatever book he happened to have in his hand. But this is a rough and ready mode which cannot be generally recommended – at any rate, not in those cases where the book is one’s own! Some other means must be discovered. And let them be efficacious, for when any element of danger or unhealthiness is allowed to attend the use of bedside books, the sooner that use is discontinued the better.
THEIR MUCH SPEAKING
The ‘dreary drip of dilatory declamation’ to which Lord Salisbury, in one of his happiest phrases, once drew attention, shows no sign of exhaustion, or even of diminution; and the Conservative chief has followed up his admirable epigram by picturing the time when, all rational discussion and all beneficial legislation being out of the question, the House of Commons may become a mere mechanical puppet-show, and may present the spectacle of ‘a steam Irish Party, an electric Ministry, and a clockwork Speaker.’ It is certain that there never was so much talk in the Lower House as at the present moment; but it is also certain that the complaint of ‘much speaking’ has before now been frequently preferred against both Chambers. Politicians have always been a wordy race, and many a sharp shaft has been aimed at their besetting weakness. A last-century satirist once wrote:
‘“Do this,” cries one side of St. Stephen’s great hall;“Do just the reverse,” the minority bawl…And what is the end of this mighty tongue-war?– Nothing’s done for the State till the State is done for!’And, unfortunately, the quality of the talk has often been as poor as the quantity was considerable. It was, we believe, a pre-Victorian pen which perpetrated this couplet on the House of Commons:
‘To wonder now at Balaam’s ass were weak:Is there a night that asses do not speak?’Fun has constantly been made of the typical drawbacks of political oratory – of the dull men, of the heavy, of the shallow, of the unintelligible, and what not. We have been told how ‘a lord of senatorial fame’ was known at once by his portrait, because the painter had so ‘play’d his game’ that it ‘made one even yawn at sight.’ It has been said of an M.P., that his speeches ‘possessed such remarkable weight’ that it was ‘really a trouble to bear them.’ Of a third it was written that his discourses had some resemblance to an hour-glass, because, the longer time they ran, the shallower they grew. Of yet another orator we read that his reasoning was really deep, his argument profound, ‘for deuce a bit could anybody see the ground.’ Nor have certain historical personages been able to escape the lash. When Admiral Vernon was appointed to take charge of the herring fishery, Horace Walpole wrote:
‘Long in the Senate had brave Vernon rail’d,And all mankind with bitter tongue assail’d;Sick of his noise, we wearied Heav’n with pray’rIn his own element to place the tar.The gods at length have yielded to our wish,And bade him rule o’er Billingsgate and fish.’From which it will be gathered anew that a somewhat bitter style of debate is no novelty in this country – that strong language has been heard in the House of Commons ante Agamemnona.
Within living memory a member has dared to suggest that certain of his opponents had come into the House not wholly sober. Who does not remember the epigrams which were based on Pitt’s addiction, real or supposed, to intoxicating liquors? Porson is said to have composed one hundred such ‘paper pellets’ in one night, as, for example:
‘“Who’s up?” inquired Burke of a friend at the door;“Oh, no one,” said Paddy, “tho’ Pitt’s on the floor.”’After this, most other insinuations become almost harmless; and the accusation of mere twaddling, such as that which was brought against Mr. Urquhart in the following lines, seems, by comparison, trivial:
‘When Palmerston begins to speak,He moves the House – as facts can prove.Let Urquhart rise, with accents weak,The House itself begins to move.’By the side of twaddling, again, mere rambling grows venial. One of H. J. Byron’s burlesque heroes says of Cerberus:
‘My dog, who picks up everything one teaches,Has got “three heads,” like Mr. Gladstone’s speeches.But, as might naturally be expected,His are considerably more connected.’But it is against Parliamentary long-windedness, in particular, that most sarcasm, whether in verse or in prose, has been directed. Everybody remembers Moore’s comparison of the Lord Castlereagh of his time to a pump, which up and down its awkward arm doth sway,
‘And coolly spout, and spout, and spout away,In one weak, washy, everlasting flood.’This has always been a stock quotation to use against oratory of the ‘dreary’ and ‘dilatory’ order. Then, Brougham had the good sense to recognise his own sins in respect to ‘much speaking.’ Punch made someone ask himself ‘if Brougham thinks as much as he talks;’ but the Lord Chancellor removed the pungency from gibes of that sort by writing his own epitaph, in which he declares that
‘My fate a moral teaches,The ark in which my body liesWould not contain one-half my speeches.’It was asserted of Lord George Bentinck that true sportsmen ‘loved his prate,’ because his speech recalled the ‘four-mile course,’ his arguments the ‘feather-weight.’ One is reminded, in this connection, of the preacher of whom it was observed that he ‘so lengthily his subject did pursue,’ that it was feared ‘he had, indeed, eternity in view.’ And, perhaps, a long discourse is none the more acceptable when it is palpable to the hearers that the discourser has committed it to memory, and is bound to go on to the bitter end. Possibly this adds to the feeling of exasperation. Nevertheless, there are those who must learn their speeches by heart, or else not speak at all. As Luttrell contended that Lord Dudley had said of himself:
‘In vain my affections the ladies are seeking;If I give up my heart, there’s an end to my speaking.’However, it is, perhaps, scarcely fair of laymen to dwell too sternly on the joy which so many legislators seem to feel in hearing their own voices. Man is a talking animal, and can ‘hold forth’ outside the Houses of Parliament as well as in. And though in the term ‘man’ we may include woman, let us give no countenance to the old calumny, that the fairer and weaker is also the more talkative sex. There are some old lines to the effect that Nature wisely forbade a beard to grow on woman’s chin,
‘For how could she be shaved, whate’er the skill,Whose tongue would never let her chin be still?’There is also a certain epitaph on an old maid,
‘Who from her cradle talk’d till death,And ne’er before was out of breath,’and of whom it was opined that in heaven she’d be unblest, because she loathed a place of rest. But these flouts and sneers are as cheap as they are venerable. Let the ladies take heart. Men have been censured for their ‘much speaking’ at least as frequently as women. Prior declared of one Lysander that he ought to possess the art of talk, if he did not, for he practised ‘full fourteen hours in four-and-twenty.’ And we owe to a more recent writer this paraphrase of an epigram by Macentinus:
‘Black locks hath Gabriel, beard that’s white —The reason, sir, is plain:Gabriel works hard from morn till night,More with his jaw than brain.’It is well that satire should go that way for a change. All the talking is not done by women or by Parliament. There is, at times, as much chatter in the smoking-room as in the boudoir and the Senate. Tongues, as well as beards, ‘wag all,’ when we are ‘merry in hall.’
PEERS AND POETRY
The succession of the Hon. J. Leicester Warren to the barony of De Tabley was something more than a change in the personnel of the House of Lords; it amounted to a conspicuous addition to the Chamber’s intellectual power, and especially to the number of its poetic votaries. The author of ‘Philoctetes’ and ‘Orestes,’ of ‘Rehearsals’ and ‘Searching the Net,’ is no mere versifier. He has felt the influence of the old Greek dramatists, and apparently also that of Mr. Swinburne; but, for all that, his work has undoubted individuality, as well as solid interest.
It must be admitted that the House of Lords does not at this moment contain many hereditary peers who are also poets. Lord Tennyson, of course, is an ennobled commoner, and the Bishop of Derry (Dr. Alexander), who has written so much excellent verse, both in the thoughtful and in the imaginative vein, is no longer one of the spiritual lords. But there is Lord Lytton, there is Lord Southesk, and there is Lord Rosslyn; and by all of these Lord de Tabley will be welcomed as a brother in the literary art. What Lord Lytton has done in poetry, need scarcely be recapitulated. He would be remembered as ‘Owen Meredith’ if, since his accession to the peerage, he had not made a new reputation as the author of ‘Fables in Song,’ ‘Glenaveril,’ and other performances. As ‘Owen Meredith’ he was, no doubt, more fresh and spontaneous than he has ever been as Lord Lytton; but his poetic work, as a whole, is of good quality, and some of it will find its way down the stream of time. Equally certain may we be that the ‘Jonas Fisher’ of Lord Southesk, with its unquestionable vigour, both of satire and of sentiment, will remain alive, whatever may be the fate of the author’s ‘Greenwood’s Farewell’ and ‘Meda Maiden.’ Lord Rosslyn, it will be remembered, was one of the most successful of the Jubilee Laureates; but, even before that, he had made himself esteemed by many trustworthy judges as the producer of numerous good sonnets.
‘’Tis ridiculous,’ says Selden, ‘for a lord to print verses; ’tis well enough to make them to please himself, but to make them public is foolish.’ He goes on to add that
‘If a man in his private chamber twists his band-strings, or plays with a rush to please himself, ’tis well enough; but if he should go into Fleet Street, and sit upon a stall, and twist a band-string, or play with a rush, then all the boys in the street would laugh at him.’
No doubt they would have done so in Selden’s time; and much more readily would they do so now. But that is scarcely to the point. Pace Master Selden, there is nothing ridiculous in a lord printing his verses – if they be but good enough for the process. A peer is not necessarily a poet, but a poet is none the worse for being a peer. Nay, there are even certain kinds of verse in which a peer may, other things being equal, be actually expected to excel. There is nothing to prevent his being – as Byron was – a poet of passion; there is every reason why, if he have the requisite literary capacity, he should shine in the poetry of the library, the salon, and the boudoir. He has usually the education for the first, and the leisure for the other two. He generally has culture, he always has breeding, he often has gallantry; and, with these endowments, the poetry par excellence of the peerage is well within his reach.
Considerable, indeed, would be the loss to English literature if by any chance the productions of our noble poets should disappear. Apart from Byron, who, of course, stands a head and shoulders above all his brethren, there is that Henry, Earl of Surrey, who ranks highest of all poets between Chaucer and Spenser, and who did so much to popularize in England both blank verse and the sonnet. But for Surrey both those accomplishments, since so popular among us, might have been long in establishing themselves in English poetry. The other poet-peers of the sixteenth century were admittedly not of the first class. Yet Buckhurst’s share in ‘The Mirror for Magistrates’ and in the tragedy of ‘Gorboduc’ was of undoubted value, both intrinsic and relative; and the world of letters would not willingly let die the work, slight as it was, of Lord Vaux, the Earls of Essex and Oxford, the Earls of Ancrum and Stirling, Lord Brooke, and Francis Bacon, although the great Chancellor wrote but one lyric of any moment – the well-known lines upon ‘The World.’ Lord Vaux’s ‘Of a Contented Mind,’ Lord Essex’s ‘There is None, O None but You,’ Lord Oxford’s ‘If Woman could be Fair and yet not Fond,’ are among the treasures of our verse; while the tragedies of Lord Stirling and Lord Brooke, and the sonnets of Lord Ancrum, are at least curious and interesting, if they are not substantively great.
And when we come to the noble poets of the Stuart and the early Georgian period, we find that the national indebtedness is not less marked. Who would be prepared to surrender the spirited effusions of Montrose? And is there not much to be said for the outcome, flimsy and over-free as it often was, of that mob of noblemen who wrote with ease – including the Earls of Roscommon, Dorset, and Rochester, and the Duke of Buckinghamshire? Had these writers not at least the virtues of lightness and of brightness? Did not Dorset pen the lines, ‘To all you ladies now on land?’ Did not Buckinghamshire produce ‘The Election of the Laureat’ – the prototype of Leigh Hunt’s ‘Feast of the Poets,’ and of a still more recent jeu d’esprit by Mr. Robert Buchanan? The great Lord Peterborough is even now less remembered for his military triumphs than for his ‘Song by a Person of Quality;’ while Chesterfield, if thought of most frequently in connection with his letters and his essays, still lives in poetry as the author of some admirable society verses. Horace Walpole claims mention in the list as Earl of Orford, and room must fairly be made, too, for Lords Lansdowne, Halifax, Nugent, Lyttelton, Egremont, and De la Warre, most of whom left behind them a few fugitive pieces which deserve to be embalmed in poetical collections.
The annals of nineteenth-century song will commemorate, besides Byron, those agreeable versifiers – Lord Holland, Lord Melbourne, and Lord Winchilsea, and those cultured translators – Lord Strangford, Lord Ellesmere, and Lord Derby. It would scarcely be fair to include among noble poets Lord Macaulay, Lord Houghton, or the first Lord Lytton, for they, like Lord Tennyson, were created peers, and won their laurel-wreaths in the character of commoners. In the same way, I have taken no account of the poetical peeresses, or I should have had to dwell upon the achievements of such ladies as Sidney’s sister, Lady Pembroke; the Duchess of Newcastle, the Countess of Winchilsea, the Baroness Nairne, and so on. Enough, indeed, has been said to show how prominent a part the peerage has played in the history of English poetry – not, indeed, in the front rank, in which (omitting Lord Tennyson) it is represented only by Byron, but in the second, where Montrose (for example) is eminent, and wherever, in short, the rhetorical, the amatory, and the witty elements are in the ascendant.
THE PRAISE OF THAMES
Afluent versifier of to-day has complained that, though many a poet has ‘dearer made the names’ of Tweed and Nith and Doon, and what not, no one has ‘sung our Thames;’ and he goes on especially to rate ‘green Kent and Oxfordshire and Middlesex,’ because those counties have offered, he says, no rhythmical tribute to our premier stream. Now, the Thames has not, perhaps, found many laureates of late. The glories of Henley may be celebrated annually in the comic or ‘society’ press, but in these times we hear more, no doubt, of sewage and steam-launches than of any other phenomena of the Thames. We are a practical generation, with a keen eye to business, and disposed to take not only as read, but as written, the praises which might well be bestowed upon the river even as it is.
