1 

 
 I 
 
 I OF 
 
 /Q 
 
 7t?

 
 Of this edition 450 copies have been printed for England
 
 AND OTHER. PAPERS 
 BY 
 
 IWRJAMLS 
 
 / 
 
 / 
 
 .\> 
 
 Z 1 
 
 '.?.?I«» 
 
 L0ND0N°LLKIN MATHEWS&JOHN LANLi 
 ATTHL5IGN0rTHEB0DLLYhLAD f 
 
 [NEW yORK o fiACMILLAN^CONPr 1394-1 
 
 5wv/®3 
 
 :/A
 
 Edinburgh : T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty
 
 TO 
 
 F. B.
 
 The following papers are re- 
 printed, with revision, one from 
 Blackwood's Magazine, and the 
 others from MacmillarCs Maga- 
 zine, with the kind permission 
 of the respective proprietors
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 ROMANTIC PROFESSIONS, I 
 
 THE NEMESIS OF SENTIMENTALISM, . . -41 
 
 ROMANCE AND YOUTH, 69 
 
 ON THE NAMING OF NOVELS, .... 98 
 
 NAMES IN NOVELS, 128 
 
 THE HISTORICAL NOVEL, 155 
 
 THE POET AS HISTORIAN, 1 78 
 
 THE GREAT WORK, 193
 
 ROMANTIC PROFESSIONS 
 
 An American moralist not long ago com- 
 plained that the American girl, perverted by 
 the reading of fairy tales in her childhood, 
 turned up her pretty nose at the dry-goods- 
 man of her native land and fed her romantic 
 fancy with dreams of English dukes. This, 
 if true, is beyond question deplorable. And 
 yet I imagine that no fair-minded dry-goods- 
 man with a competent knowledge of romantic 
 literature would seriously propose himself, in 
 his character of dry-goodsman, as a fitting 
 hero for a maiden's dreams. Ignorant Briton 
 that I am, I have only the vaguest notion of 
 what the dry-goods business consists in, but 
 I feel pretty confident that the records of 
 authoritative romance might be searched in 
 vain for a precedent. The American moralist 
 must not however run away with the idea 
 that herein this respectable profession labours 
 under an exceptional disability, or that his 
 
 A I
 
 ROMANTIC PROFESSIONS 
 
 countrywomen indulge a more fastidious 
 fancy than their sisters in less democratic 
 lands. It is lamentable, indeed, when you 
 come to reflect on it, how large a proportion 
 of useful and respectable callings falls under 
 the ban of romance. What poet or romancer 
 ever made his first lover, for example, a 
 bailiff or a beadle ? Yet bailiffs and beadles 
 are men and brothers. They may do their 
 often-times dangerous duty with the dash of 
 a Rupert or the cool courage of a Cromwell, 
 yet they are frankly impossible as heroes of 
 romance. De Ouincey makes a remark 
 somewhere to the effect that one would not 
 be inclined to think highly of a man who, in 
 the absence of predisposing circumstances, 
 deliberately and for the love of the business 
 decided to be a butcher. Yet butchers are 
 husbands and fathers, and have blood in 
 their veins as well as on their aprons. As a 
 matter of statistics, I suppose hardly a day 
 passes but some solicitor falls in love ; yet 
 no court of love or literature will give him 
 audience as a lover, or take cognisance of 
 his pleadings. The breast of the stock- 
 broker is swayed by the bears and bulls of 
 
 2
 
 ROMANTIC PROFESSIONS 
 
 passion, no less than by the subtler influ- 
 ences of financial speculation. Yet his name 
 is not honoured in the more than royal ex- 
 change of romance. Then, with one stroke 
 of the pen, romance rules out the whole 
 amorous mob of retail traders. 
 
 They are not altogether absent from the 
 pages of romance, these worthy citizens. 
 Only they have to forego the heroic parts, 
 and put up with being supernumeraries or 
 villains or comic characters. About the 
 butcher I am doubtful. Not even Dickens, 
 I think, found room for a butcher amid his 
 Babylon of trades. A bailiff he has and 
 eight sheriff's officers, half-a-dozen beadles, 
 and half as many more brokers. The 
 sheriff's officer is of course a familiar enoueh 
 figure from the days of our literary drama. 
 An ingenious American has compiled a list 
 of Dickens's characters, classified by callings, 
 and it reads like nothing so much as a trades' 
 directory. There are architects, auctioneers, 
 bankers, barbers, boarding-house keepers 
 blacksmiths, carpenters, carriers, chandlers, 
 chemists, clerks (a perfect army of them), 
 coachmen, coal-merchants, constables, corn- 
 
 3
 
 ROMANTIC PROFESSIONS 
 
 chandlers, costumiers, detectives, doctors, 
 domestic servants, dry-salters, engineers, 
 engine-drivers, farmers, fishermen, game- 
 keepers, grocers, greengrocers, haberdashers, 
 hop-growers, jailers and turnkeys, labourers, 
 lamplighters, lawyers, law-stationers, lock- 
 smiths, manufacturers, merchants, medical 
 students, money-lenders, notaries, ostlers, 
 pawnbrokers, parish-clerks, plasterers, por- 
 ters, post-masters, pot-boys, reporters, robe- 
 makers, saddlers, sailors, sextons, shipwrights, 
 stewards, stokers, stonemasons, sugar- 
 bakers, tailors, teachers, tobacconists, toy- 
 makers and merchants, umbrella-makers, 
 undertakers, watermen, weavers, wharfingers, 
 wheelwrights. The list might be made 
 longer, but that perhaps is long enough to 
 make you realise how amply provided with 
 trades and tradesmen are the teeming streets 
 of Dickens's imagination. And where in all 
 the crowd is your hero of romance ? Barkis, 
 the carrier, no doubt, was willing, but it takes 
 more than willingness to make the ideal lover. 
 Nor did Dickens content himself with the 
 ordinary trades. He loved to collect speci- 
 mens of bizarre callings. There is Jo the 
 
 4
 
 ROMANTIC PROFESSIONS 
 
 crossing-sweeper, and Wegg the ballad- 
 monger, and Boffin the dustman ; he has a 
 hangman and a resurrection-man ; he has two 
 balloonists, a bird-fancier, and a begging- 
 letter writer ; an astrologer and a pugilist, — 
 Mr. Toots's friend the Game Chicken ; 
 dancing-masters, jugglers, cheap-jacks, show- 
 men with a giant and a dwarf and a kept poet, 
 a verger and a pew-opener, a stenographer 
 and a statistician, a shoe-binder and a maker 
 of nautical instruments ; nor let me by any 
 means forget Mr. Venus, articulator of bones. 
 1 You 're casting your eye round the shop, 
 Mr. Wegg. Let me show you a light. My 
 working-bench. My young man's bench. A 
 wice. Tools. Bones, warious. Skulls, warious. 
 Preserved Indian baby. African ditto. 
 Bottled preparations, warious. Everything 
 within reach of your hand, in good preser- 
 vation. The mouldy ones atop.' Mr. Venus, 
 it is true, as became his mythological name, 
 had his little romance with Rogue Rider- 
 hood 's daughter. Now Pleasant Riderhood 
 had no call to be squeamish. She was 
 meagre and of muddy complexion, looked 
 twice her age, and had a swivel eye. Yet 
 
 5 
 
 i
 
 ROMANTIC PROFESSIONS 
 
 even this apology for a girl had the hardi- 
 hood to cast the good man's calling in his 
 teeth, intimating that she neither regarded 
 herself, nor wished to be regarded, in a bony 
 light. 
 
 Another out-of-the-way trade in the same 
 novel, and a prettier fancy, is that of Jenny 
 Wren, the dolls' dressmaker. When Charley 
 Hcxam and Bradley Headstone called at 
 Jenny Wren's house to look for Hexam's 
 sister Lizzie, the quaint little ' person of the 
 house' put them to guess the name of her 
 trade and they had to give it up. Who but 
 Dickens, indeed, would ever have thought of 
 such a trade ? Who but Dickens, did I say ? 
 Why, by an uncommonly curious coincidence 
 M. Alphonse Daudct did actually hit upon 
 precisely the same pretty fancy, for his 
 Desiree Delobelle. He had been especially 
 particular about a trade for her. She was 
 the daughter of an actor ; and he determined 
 that the theatricality of the father should in 
 the crippled girl take the form of sentimen- 
 tal reverie, and that she must have some 
 pretty and poetical business suggesting a 
 luxury in contrast with her own poor sur- 
 
 6
 
 ROMANTIC PROFESSIONS 
 
 roundings. Dolls' dressmaking, the very 
 thing ! Poor and deformed herself, she could 
 gratify her natural tastes for refinement and 
 elegance, and dress her dreams instead of 
 herself in silks and gold lace. It was M. 
 Daudet's custom to compose his novels out 
 loud, and he told Andre Gill one day about 
 his little dolls' dressmaker. From him he 
 learnt for the first time to his great dismay 
 that there was already a dolls' dressmaker 
 known to the world of fiction in a novel by 
 Dickens, which M. Daudet happened not to 
 know. The parallel was exact, the concep- 
 tion was the same and had been carried out 
 with all the English novelist's sympathy 
 with the poor, with all his f eerie de la rue. 
 M. Daudet knew that he had often before 
 this been likened to Dickens, before he had 
 read a line of him, and long before he had 
 been told by a friend who had been in Eng- 
 land that David Copperfield took a friendly 
 interest in Le Petit Chose. He had much 
 the same early experiences as Dickens, and 
 shared his sympathy with the poor and 
 wretched. Save so far as this community of 
 experience and sympathy explained it, the 
 
 7
 
 ROMANTIC PROFESSIONS 
 
 coincidence about the dolls' dressmaker was 
 pure chance. He recognised, however, that 
 he would have to sacrifice his specially 
 selected trade. How find another so ideally 
 suitable, — aussi ' poctiquement cJiimcrique ? He 
 felt with Balzac that such things could not 
 be evolved out of a writer's inner conscious- 
 ness. So he did what Balzac and Dickens 
 often did in the like cases. He roamed the 
 streets with his eyes open and climbed many 
 a dark and dank staircase. At last he was 
 rewarded. He saw a sign whose inscription 
 dazzled him, faded though the gold letters 
 were, Oiseaux et mouches pour modes. 
 And a trade had been found, fairy-like and 
 fantastic enough for pauv' petite Mamzelle 
 Zizi. 
 
 Balzac's Comcdie Hiunaine teems like the 
 world of Dickens with all sorts and con- 
 ditions of men. A repertoire compiled by 
 two pious and industrious Balzaciens takes 
 between five and six hundred ample French 
 octavo pages merely to enumerate his char- 
 acters with the briefest possible description 
 of them. From this source the curious 
 might readily lengthen Dickens's extensive 
 
 8
 
 ROMANTIC PROFESSIONS 
 
 and peculiar list, and add thereto some un- 
 savoury trades. But I have digressed too 
 long, tempted by the pleasures of wandering 
 in the by-ways of romance. I was looking 
 for the ideal lover, and among all these 
 curious crowds I find him not. Nor with 
 Shakespeare is it any better. Quince the 
 carpenter, Snug the joiner, Bottom the 
 weaver, Flute the bellows-mender, Snout 
 the tinker, and Starveling the tailor, are all 
 very well to play the fool, to divert the 
 duke and the ladies, but none of them, not 
 even Bottom translated, is a fit object for a 
 lady's love. As the democratic Whitman 
 has complained, in a Shakespearian play the 
 mass of industrious citizens is just a mob 
 to throw up its sweaty night-caps in some 
 Caesar's honour at the bidding of an Antony. 
 What is there about a trade thus to incapa- 
 citate a man for romance ? 
 
 Strictly speaking, there are but two 
 normal heroes of romance, the warrior and 
 the fairy prince. If there is no fairy prince 
 at hand, an ordinary prince will do. The 
 English duke is, as the American moralist 
 rightly enough divined, only a modern 
 
 9
 
 ROMANTIC PROFESSIONS 
 
 variety of fairy prince. To be mistaken 
 for a fairy prince the English duke no 
 doubt needs to be looked at from the other 
 side of the Atlantic. Seen at close quarters, 
 in the House of Lords, on the race-course, 
 or in the law-courts, he is apt to appear 
 fleshy. But he has the essential attribute 
 of the fairy prince, which is rarity. There 
 are but two dozen or so of him all told, 
 and most of these have been bespoken or 
 used up. He has besides, for the American 
 girl, another of the essential secrets of 
 romance ; he is exotic. It is the good 
 fortune and fascinating fashion of the fairy 
 prince to descend always from some un- 
 known upper and diviner air. That it is 
 which makes the Prince Charming of the 
 fairy tale so irresistible. So it was that 
 Cupid came to Psyche, to cherish her with 
 his secret and invisible godhead. So Perseus 
 floated on winged sandals through the wel- 
 coming air to Andromeda's feet, to slay the 
 monster. So Lohengrin came flashing in a 
 swan-drawn skiff from the mysterious halls 
 of the Holy Grail, to champion maiden 
 innocence against treachery and slander. 
 
 10
 
 ROMANTIC PROFESSIONS 
 
 The fairy prince, you see, commonly in- 
 cludes the warrior's part, and is doubly 
 resistless coming in the nick to fight a 
 distressed damsel's battles and to slay her 
 dragons. Another good plan is to come in 
 a shower of gold, as Zeus came to Perseus's 
 mother. The charm of strangeness, how- 
 ever, and of unlooked-for arrival, is mighty 
 of itself; it is potent with princes and 
 princesses as with humbler folk. You may 
 recall the case of Prince Camaralzaman and 
 Princess Badoura. In spite of his father's 
 wishes and entreaties, Prince Camaralzaman 
 was obstinately set against matrimony. 
 Seeing no one to his fancy about him, he 
 inveighed, as man will, against the whole 
 sex. He told his match-making old father 
 that the mischief which history taught him 
 women had caused in the world, and the 
 accounts he daily heard to their disadvan- 
 tage, powerfully influenced him, so that he 
 was more and more confirmed in his resolu- 
 tion not to marry. By way of retort, the 
 king very properly shut him up in a tower 
 on short commons for his contumacy and 
 cynicism. Meanwhile in far off China the 
 
 ii
 
 ROMANTIC PROFESSIONS 
 
 Princess Badoura was likewise in durance, 
 for being no less wilfully set against the 
 slit-eyed suitors she pictured to her imagi- 
 nation from the celestial specimen which 
 had fallen under her observation. Well, no 
 sooner had the fairy Maimoune and the 
 genie Danhasch, to decide a private wager 
 of their own, whisked this precious couple 
 through the air into each other's presence, 
 than lo ! these hardened celibates were afire 
 in a twinkling. 
 
 You may depend upon it that what tells 
 chiefly with the girls against the eminently 
 respectable race of bankers and brewers 
 and doctors and lawyers is their appalling 
 commonness, their frequency, I mean, and 
 familiarness. What should there be in one 
 brass plate out of a dozen in the same street 
 to throw a romantic girl off her emotional 
 balance ? So far as Miss Rosamond Vincy 
 could be described as thrown off her emo- 
 tional balance, the charm that subdued her 
 was not Lydgate's fine professional enthusi- 
 asm, but the descent of a stranger and gentle- 
 man into the mediocrity of Middlcmarch. 
 He was for Rosamond the prince of the fairy 
 
 12
 
 ROMANTIC PROFESSIONS 
 
 stories. His devotion to science, and his 
 connection with Bulstrode's hospital, were 
 humiliations to be endured for a season. 
 And so you will often find it. When the 
 modern novelist would surmount the pro- 
 fessional high hat with the aureole of 
 romance, he tricks out his tame hero to 
 mimic the traditional advantages of prince 
 or champion. 
 
 Of the warrior as hero, what need of 
 argument? His praise is in all the churches 
 of orthodox romance. From the heroes of 
 Troy down to Ouida's Guardsmen and Mr. 
 Kipling's Musketeers, he simply dominates 
 the record. History (it is the bitter cry 
 of the scientific historian) has been but 
 the gallery of his triumphs and trophies. 
 The epic was invented to do him honour. 
 Throughout the romances proper, of Roland 
 and Richard, of the Round Table and the 
 Romancero, he reigns without a rival. In 
 the Sagas his pre-eminence is, if possible, 
 even more pronounced. These be docu- 
 ments, no doubt, of fighting epochs. Yet 
 the sentiment is the same in the sovereign 
 cycle of modern romance, the Waverley 
 
 13
 
 ROMANTIC PROFESSIONS 
 
 Novels, the author whereof was bred a 
 lawyer in a literary and civilised city. Sir 
 Walter did not set great store by his heroes, 
 but such as they are, they are all good 
 men of their hands. They are either 
 soldiers, or gentlemen at large ready to 
 strike a blow for liege or lady. Personally 
 he felt more enthusiasm about the creation 
 of Bailie Nicol Jarvie ; but he did not ex- 
 pect the girls to take the same view. Ap- 
 parent exceptions, like Frank Osbaldistone 
 or Darsie Latimer, do but prove the rule. 
 There is no more of the lawyer about the 
 one than there is of the merchant about 
 the other. They are simply spirited young 
 gentlemen with the knack for getting on 
 the track of an adventure, the one real 
 business after all of a hero of romance. 
 Roland Graeme of The Abbot, by the way, 
 reminds one of another traditional type of 
 hero of romance : my lady's page, who for 
 mediaeval reasons plays a pretty part in 
 mediaeval romance. 
 
 Scott was a man of letters and a lawyer, 
 but the imaginative Clerk of Session had 
 the blood of the fighting Borderers in his 
 
 14
 
 ROMANTIC PROFESSIONS 
 
 veins, and was prouder of that than of his 
 legal or his literary status. He was a 
 soldier at heart; he would have loved to 
 be a soldier indeed ; he flung himself into 
 volunteering when the Frenchman loomed 
 large on the national apprehension ; so soon 
 as he had a son to serve, he made a soldier 
 of him. Yet he does not need this tradi- 
 tional taste in Scott's own case to explain 
 the predilection of the romancer in him for 
 soldier heroes. It is the general sentiment. 
 The soldier is the natural hero. In a recent 
 book of Chinese stories, Professor Douglas 
 contrasts the Chinese sentiment in this 
 matter with the rest of the world's. Military 
 prowess, he says, does not attract popular 
 applause in China. In the eyes of the 
 Chinese, a man is a model hero who takes 
 the highest degrees at the examinations 
 and quotes the classics with the greatest 
 fluency. The rest of the world thinks differ- 
 ently. Even the cynical youngster whom 
 Woolwich or Sandhurst sends forth to pro- 
 vide the dark places of the provinces with 
 polo matches and private theatricals, shines 
 with some of the reflected glory of Achilles 
 
 15
 
 ROMANTIC PROFESSIONS 
 
 and Lancelot. Besides the glory of tradi- 
 tion, there is moreover the glory of the 
 uniform. The influence of a uniform in 
 romance is beyond gainsaying. The effect 
 of a red coat on susceptible hearts below 
 stairs is accounted by the most unsenti- 
 mental critics an effective ally of the recruit- 
 ing sergeant. It is perhaps, as Sir Lucius 
 O'Trigger surmised, a bit of the old serpent 
 in the women that makes the little creatures 
 be caught like vipers with a piece of red 
 cloth. But there is a deeper reason. The 
 ideal soldier is the ideal man. To be ever 
 a fighter, as Browning boasted, is it not 
 after all man's destiny and function ? The 
 eighteenth is not accounted one of the most 
 romantic centuries, nor was Samuel Johnson 
 its most feather-headed thinker ; yet this 
 is what he thought of soldiers. 
 
 'Johnson : Every man thinks meanly of 
 ' himself for not having been a soldier, or 
 ' not having been at sea. Bosivell: Lord 
 1 Mansfield does not. Johnson : Sir, if 
 ' Lord Mansfield were in a company 
 ' of General Officers and Admirals, who 
 • have been in service, he would shrink ; 
 
 16
 
 ROMANTIC PROFESSIONS 
 
 ' he 'd wish to creep under the table. Boswell : 
 ' No ; he 'd think he could try them all. 
 1 Johnson : Yes, if he could catch them ; but 
 'they'd try him much sooner. No, sir; 
 'were Socrates and Charles the Twelfth of 
 ' Sweden both present in any company, and 
 ' Socrates to say, " Follow me, and hear a 
 ' lecture in Philosophy ; " and Charles, laying 
 ' his hand on a sword, to say " Follow me 
 'and dethrone the Czar," a man would be 
 ' ashamed to follow Socrates. Sir, the im- 
 'pression is universal. Sir, the profession 
 ' of soldiers and sailors has the dignity of 
 ' danger. Mankind reverence those who 
 ' have got over fear, which is so general a 
 ' weakness.' 
 
 The great doctor was right. Courage is 
 at the root of all worth. The late Edward 
 Fitzgerald, a literary hermit of great discern- 
 ment, was fond of insisting on the un- 
 diminished need for physical prowess and 
 the barbaric virtues in advanced and refined 
 stages of civilisation. A woman is right in 
 demanding in her hero a stout heart and a 
 strong arm, — strength, courage and loyalty, 
 the soldier's virtues. 
 
 B 17
 
 ROMANTIC PROFESSIONS 
 
 Johnson couples the sailor with the soldier, 
 and who shall deny the sailor's place in 
 romance ? Not the Englishman surely, the 
 islander, the descendant of Vikings and of 
 Elizabeth's sea-dogs, the countryman of 
 Drake and Nelson and the men of the little 
 Revenge. In fiction, too, the sailor has a 
 whole province to himself from Marryat to 
 Mr. Clark Russell, and a dynasty of heroes 
 from noble Amyas Leigh to the queer crew 
 of The Wrecker. Literature has little to add 
 to the picturcsqueness, the natural poetry 
 and romance of their calling who go down 
 to the sea in ships and exercise their busi- 
 ness in great waters. The sea itself has been 
 a passion with poets from yEschylus to 
 Mr. Swinburne. There arc ballads, too, of 
 the lass that loved a sailor, and a lax 
 tradition gives Jack a wife in every port, — 
 a privilege which the latest romancer among 
 the French Immortals has illustrated with a 
 licence of exotic grace which does more 
 credit to his aesthetic than his moral sensi- 
 bility. And yet, for all this, the sailor is no 
 real rival for the soldier in romance. The 
 sailor is a hero for a romance of adventure, 
 
 iS
 
 ROMANTIC PROFESSIONS 
 
 excellent among icebergs or pirates or on a 
 treasure-hunt. He is a sort of specialist in 
 romance. Whereas the ideal soldier is, as I 
 have said, simply the ideal man. One may 
 perhaps venture to say so now that the 
 tyranny of Cobdenism is overpast. An era 
 of economic industrialism was mightily 
 shocked at the barbarism of the soldier, 
 and the brutality of war. Tennyson's fierce 
 denunciation of the canker of ignoble peace 
 was treated as an outbreak of hysteria. 
 Wordsworth's uncompromising salutation of 
 Carnage as 'God's daughter' was decided to 
 be the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost. 
 Well, we have had industrial wars since then ; 
 which seem to have all the cruelty and none 
 of the heroism of old-fashioned warfare. 
 
 Is not this the explanation of the incon- 
 gruousness of most trades and professions 
 for a hero ? Is it not because there is 
 something essentially dehumanising about 
 this minute division of labour, on which 
 economic civilisation prides itself? Rogue 
 Riderhood's daughter was right ; her taunt 
 was fair. What a girl wants is a man, not 
 an articulator of bones, nor even, for the 
 
 19
 
 ROMANTIC PROFESSIONS 
 
 matter of that, a man of law or medicine. 
 A professional man is a subdivided man or 
 a warped man ; a man with a crease in him, 
 as the French say. And it is just this 
 warping which makes him unmeet for a 
 hero, and at the same time so useful on the 
 stage of a Balzac or a Dickens. It adds the 
 grotesque and bizarre touch, affords piquant 
 contrasts, supplies a characteristic chorus. 
 Shakespeare uses such effects, the juxta- 
 position for example of the pessimism of 
 the apothecary with the passion of Romeo, 
 Hamlet's metaphysical horror of death, and 
 the grave-digger that had so little feeling of 
 his business that he sang at grave-making, 
 custom having made it in him, as Horatio 
 explained, a property of easiness. We have 
 noted an example of the dramatic value of 
 a metier in Dickens's dolls' dressmaker, and 
 M. Daudet's substitute, the making-up of 
 artificial birds. Trades and professions 
 have, many of them, such traditional dram- 
 atic values ; the professional gloom of the 
 undertaker, the glibness of the auctioneer, 
 the astuteness of the lawyer. It is a wonder, 
 in this age of laborious and methodical 
 
 20
 
 ROMANTIC PROFESSIONS 
 
 fiction, that no one has projected a series 
 of novels to exploit the dramatic possibilities 
 of the various callings after an encyclopaedic 
 fashion. It would have been a task worthy 
 of M. Zola's solid perseverance. Flaubert 
 did propose to devote a novel to Monsieur 
 le Prefet, affirming that nobody had fully 
 grasped how comical, how self-important, and 
 how useless a character a prefet was. Balzac 
 in fact made considerable contributions : Le 
 Medecin de Campagne, Le Cure de Village, 
 Scenes de la Vie Militaire, Scenes de la Vie 
 Politique. What titanic tradesmen he would 
 have given us, had he set his mind to it ! 
 
 When I hinted that nine out of ten men 
 sold their birthright of romance for a mess 
 of pottage when they made choice of a 
 respectable profession, I used the word 
 ' respectable ' advisedly. For if your calling 
 be the exact opposite of respectable there 
 is no difficulty whatever about your figuring 
 as a hero. Rogues and vagabonds, adven- 
 turers, outlaws, smugglers, highwaymen and 
 pirates have ever been dear to romance. 
 The ' picaresque ' novel is one of the largest 
 and most ancient kinds. It may be said to 
 
 21
 
 ROMANTIC PROFESSIONS 
 
 have begun with the very beginning of prose 
 fiction, with that most delightful of books, the 
 Golden Ass of Apuleius, and with the Satyri- 
 con of Petronius, whose indescribable filth is 
 redeemed by undeniable genius. Nash's 
 Unfortunate Traveller, Jack Wilton, was an 
 arrant scamp, a true forerunner of the 
 Captain Carletons and Jonathan Wilds, 
 whose legitimate rank nobody denies. Jack 
 Sheppard and Claud Duval have vied in 
 popular vogue with any knight-errant of 
 them all ; so has Robin Hood, who no 
 doubt was a bit of a socialist and carried on 
 his depredations on sentimental principles. 
 The successful trickster has been a favourite 
 in fiction from Ulysses to Brer Rabbit. Gil 
 Bias was a rogue and a vagabond if ever 
 there was one, and no hero in fiction has a 
 more esteemed following. Le Sage is the 
 direct ancestor of Fielding and Smollett, 
 and Joseph Andrews, like Gil Bias, was a 
 lacquey, at first blush you would say the 
 most unheroic of parts. 
 
 If a would-be hero have not the mental 
 qualifications for playing the rogue, it is an 
 excellent plan for him to be a foundling like 
 
 22
 
 ROMANTIC PROFESSIONS 
 
 Tom Jones, or to get cruelly changed at 
 birth, a seeming mischance that has made 
 the romantic fortunes of hundreds of heroes. 
 Another good plan is to turn strolling 
 player ; the status of rogue and vagabond 
 has indeed been conferred on strolling and 
 unlicensed players by statute. The high 
 rank of the strolling player in modern 
 fiction dates at least as far back as the 
 ' Roman Comique.' Scarron's Destin is the 
 acknowledged first parent of Gautier's Capi- 
 taine Fracasse, and the family includes vari- 
 ous specimens from the harmless Nicholas 
 Nickleby to the didactic and unwholesome 
 Wilhelm Meister. 
 
 The criminal, or semi-criminal, hero sug- 
 gests his natural enemy the detective hero — 
 also a very popular class. The police novel 
 is as distinct a kind as the picaresque. The 
 great Gaboriau has been reported to be 
 Prince Bismarck's favourite reading ; like 
 another Greek he conquered his country's 
 conqueror. The illustrious Lecoq of Gabo- 
 riau and Boisgobey is no more, but I am 
 told that Sherlock Holmes is a worthy suc- 
 cessor. And before Lecoq there were In- 
 
 23
 
 ROMANTIC PROFESSIONS 
 
 spector Bucket and the amateur detectives of 
 Poe's mysteries. The tracking of a criminal 
 mystery, like the quest of a hidden treasure, 
 is a staple motive in romance. It was a 
 strong element in Dickens, as the authors of 
 The Wreckers say they found after starting 
 independently on analogous lines. It was 
 the all in all, or nearly all, with his friend 
 Wilkie Collins. But the great parent of the 
 police-novel, as of so much else, was Balzac. 
 The death-struggle of the criminal classes 
 under Vautrin against the police (under 
 Bibi-Lupin, wasn't it ?) is epic in its scale 
 and tragic in its painfulness. 
 
 There is certainly something unheroic 
 about respectability. Lord Brabourne has 
 expressed the opinion (and it is reassuring to 
 have the countenance of even a newly-created 
 peer when one goes about to impugn so re- 
 spectablea British institution as respectability) 
 that Emma's middle-aged Knightley was 
 altogether too respectable for a hero. Three 
 of her heroes, indeed, Miss Austen made not 
 only respectable but reverend, which is re- 
 spectability carried to a higher power. The 
 professional respectability of her clerical 
 
 24
 
 ROMANTIC PROFESSIONS 
 
 lovers was, however, tempered by advantages 
 of worldly position. Edward Ferrars, Henry 
 Tilney, and Edmund Bertram were heirs to 
 titles or properties. The parson in the 
 popular fiction of the last century was 
 neither specially hampered by respectability 
 nor made romantic by position. His fore- 
 ordained fate was the lady's maid. In spite 
 of his comparative popularity with novelists, 
 there is in fiction something uncomfortable 
 about the clerical lover. It may be a sur- 
 vival of a sentiment engendered by a celibate 
 priesthood. In George Eliot's Scenes of 
 Clerical Life Captain Wybrow was the most 
 unheroic of military heroes, yet most girls 
 would have made Tina's mistake of pre- 
 ferring that barber's block to the good- 
 natured Gilfil. As for poor Amos Barton, 
 he is not in the romantic running. Even in 
 Barchester, where the very air you breathe 
 is clerical, and the babies must have been 
 born shovel-hatted, one has this uncomfort- 
 able feeling. Among Mary Bold's lovers the 
 outrageous Bertie Stanhope is a relief by 
 contrast with his clerical rivals, the too 
 academic Arabin and the unspeakable Slope. 
 
 25
 
 ROMANTIC PROFESSIONS 
 
 The disability extends beyond the strict 
 bounds of clericalism. I doubt whether Jan 
 Ridd had the right to make Lorna Doone 
 end her romantic days as the wife of a 
 churchwarden. In spite of Charlotte Bronte, 
 the Professor smacks something too much of 
 edification — Charlotte Bronte was governess 
 to the marrow, and looked at life through the 
 governess's spectacles. The schoolmaster's 
 is almost inevitably an invidious role. He is 
 born to the disdain of your Steerforths and 
 Guy Livingstones, who cannot carry their 
 condescension further than to flirt with his 
 wife. If he is a villain he is as villainous as 
 Bradley Headstone. If he is a hero, his 
 temporary position as usher is undeniably 
 derogatory. Think of Le Petit Chose. Think 
 of Nicholas Nickleby ; not the company of 
 Fanny Squeers and Tilda Price could make 
 his lot romantic. Things are better in Ame- 
 rica. To be ' the master ' of such native 
 daughters of the West as Mr. Bret Harte's 
 Mliss and Cressy cannot be described as a 
 position otherwise than exciting. And, 
 thanks to the snake's spell of Elsie Venner, 
 Mr. Bernard Langdon could not complain of 
 
 26
 
 ROMANTIC PROFESSIONS 
 
 dulness at the Apollinean Female Institute of 
 Rockland. 
 
 The only way to work the clerical hero 
 is to exalt him into a saint or to depress 
 him into a sinner. The last is the more 
 feasible plan. It lends itself better to the 
 essential element of the eternal feminine. 
 That was Hawthorne's way in The Scarlet 
 Letter (a way that has of late been imitated 
 more than once by lady novelists), and the 
 Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale is a romantic 
 success of the first water. The saint, the 
 missionary, the martyr is a type of hero than 
 which none is finer, only he is a bit un- 
 manageable as a lover. There are other 
 types of parsons in fiction ; but it is not as a 
 lover that one loves Dr. Primrose, or Parson 
 Adams, nor was the Reverend Charles 
 Honeyman ever reckoned a hero of romance. 
 
 Another rather interesting point to ob- 
 serve is the contrast, in respect of suscepti- 
 bility of romantic treatment, between what I 
 may call the trades and professions of the 
 town and the simpler country crafts. The 
 plough-boy is perfectly at his ease in poetry, 
 whereas, as some critic has complained, a 
 
 27
 
 ROMANTIC PROFESSIONS 
 
 hatter is unmentionable in serious verse. 
 The shepherd, the hunter, the fisherman, the 
 miller, the village blacksmith, and their vari- 
 ous pursuits are of the very stuff and sub- 
 stance of poetry from the dawn of literature; 
 and they are as picturesque as ever to-day in 
 the village idylls of George Sand or in the 
 boasted realism of Mr. Hardy. About the 
 plumber, on the other hand, in spite of his 
 malignant power, there is an intensity of 
 prose that baffles the transfiguring power of 
 genius. Your over-civilised grand siccle tries 
 to get a whiff of poetry out of sham shepherd- 
 ing in court pastorals. But courtiers never 
 played at plumbers, nor masqueraded as 
 manufacturers. This element of irreducible 
 prose in modern life has been a difficulty 
 with artists and poets, and various ways 
 have been tried of getting over it. They 
 reduce themselves chiefly to Tennyson's way 
 and Walt Whitman's. Tennyson's was essen- 
 tially the device of poetic diction against 
 which Wordsworth waged a victorious war, 
 though it must be confessed that many a 
 creeping line of his has since died of its 
 wounds. Mr. Churton Collins, iu his rather 
 
 28
 
 ROMANTIC PROFESSIONS 
 
 deplorable little book on Tennyson, has 
 denounced it as a presenting of perfectly 
 commonplace things in a euphuism that 
 bordered on the ludicrous. Only one asks, 
 why is the hatter commonplace, while the 
 miller is romantic ? Why is the miller's 
 daughter in every poet's mouth, while the 
 hatter's daughter blooms unsung ? A bailiff's 
 daughter, by the way, has been beatified in a 
 ballad. Well, Walt Whitman, as became the 
 poet of democracy, did not admit the dis- 
 tinction. He faced the difficulty with his 
 customary uncalculating courage. He wrote 
 a poem directly in point for my present pur- 
 pose, calling it A Carol of Occupations. Here 
 are some of the lines — 
 
 Leather-dressing, coach-making, boiler-making, rope- 
 twisting. 
 Distilling, sign-painting, lime-burning, cotton-picking, 
 Electro-plating, electro-typing, stereotyping. 
 The implements for daguerreotyping, the tools of the 
 
 rigger, grappler, sail-maker, block-maker. 
 Goods of gutta-percha, papier-mache, colours, brushes, 
 
 brush-making, glaziers' implements. 
 The veneer and gluepot, the confectioners' ornaments, 
 the decanter and glass, the shears and flat iron. 
 
 Or again — 
 
 Beef on the butcher's stall, the slaughter-house of the 
 butcher, the butcher in his killing-clothes. 
 
 29
 
 ROMANTIC PROFESSIONS 
 
 The pens of live pork, the killing-hammer, the hog- 
 hook, 
 
 The scalder's tub, gutting, the cutler's cleaver, the 
 packer's maul, 
 
 And the plenteous winter- work of pork-packing. 
 
 About which all I will say is this, that we 
 don't call it 'carolling' in the old country. 
 Electro-plating and pork-packing may be 
 the last refinements of American civilisation, 
 but they certainly lack the old-fashioned 
 flavour of romance. This difference of poetic 
 and prosaic callings is indubitable, explain 
 it how one may. Nor is it simply a matter 
 of old fashion and poetic tradition, for Mr. 
 Bret Harte's digger is as romantic as any 
 shepherd of them all, and so, for the matter 
 of that, is the illicit distiller of the Great 
 Smoky Mountain. 
 
 Of course, when the modern novelist 
 grasped the full seriousness of his high call- 
 ing, when instead of a story he felt com- 
 pelled to offer a ' criticism of life,' when he 
 disdained to amuse and aspired to become 
 our spiritual Baedeker, when he took to pro- 
 pounding ' the pure woman ' of the future, to 
 introducing the era of the New Chivalry, or 
 inculcating a divine discontent of things as 
 
 30
 
 ROMANTIC PROFESSIONS 
 
 they are, and generally to reduplicating in- 
 stead of lightening 
 
 ' the heavy and the weary weight 
 Of all this unintelligible world,' 
 
 he could no longer blink the prosaic parts of 
 life. 
 
 The modern maiden, it has to be admitted, 
 wants not merely a man, but a man who will 
 make a decent living ; and, after Balzac's 
 minute preoccupation with ways and means, 
 it has become impossible to leave a hero and 
 a heroine with no visible means of subsis- 
 tence but the empty air of romance. So 
 if all the men were not to be represented 
 in fiction as men of means like Miss Austen's 
 lay lovers, the pampered race of Darcys, 
 Bingleys, Willoughbys and the rest, the pro- 
 fessional or trading hero became inevitable. 
 I dare say that if a patient German critic 
 could take a census of the unnumbered 
 heroes of modern fiction, he might find 
 heroes of all conditions, from an archbishop 
 in his vestments to a butcher in his killing- 
 clothes. I would still, however, hazard the 
 conjecture that they would be found to be 
 
 31
 
 ROMANTIC PROFESSIONS 
 
 represented as heroes in spite of their vari- 
 ous trades and professions rather than by- 
 virtue thereof. You cannot somehow sing a 
 paean over a well-drawn conveyance, or an 
 achievement in painless dentistry, as you can 
 over the smithying of Sigurd's sword. 
 
 There arc, it is true, a few professions 
 about which hangs some faint aroma of ro- 
 mance. There is the profession of politics to 
 which Benjamin Disraeli devoted himself in 
 fiction and fact. The diplomatist ranks high 
 with a certain order of novelist. Ouida in 
 one of her higher flights immortalised a 
 Queen's messenger. The barrister, oddly 
 enough, is a not uncommon hero. Is it the 
 wig and robes, or the prospect (precarious, 
 as Eugene Wrayburn's boy hinted to Mr. 
 Boffin) of ending in the House of Peers ? 
 See, here again, how the conflict crops up 
 between professionalism and romance. It is 
 the briefless barrister who is the more gener- 
 ally accepted hero, — your Darsie Latimer or 
 Arthur Pendennis. Mr. Stryver gets the 
 briefs and pockets the fees ; but it is Syd- 
 ney Carton who plays the hero's part and 
 lays down his life for his love. For one 
 
 32
 
 ROMANTIC PROFESSIONS 
 
 thing, your rising junior is generally bald, 
 and romance abhors a bald head. 
 
 It is one of the grievances of what is invi- 
 diously called the lower branch of the legal 
 profession, that while the briefless barrister is 
 accepted for hero, the attorney is more com- 
 monly the villain of the piece. The attor- 
 ney's record is so bad in fiction, that it would 
 be little better than a bit of bravado to 
 attempt to impose him as hero on a preju- 
 diced public. I do not know whether the 
 task has been attempted even by the modern 
 realist with all his love for the unlovely 
 things of life. It would be highly diverting, 
 though hardly fair to a learned and honour- 
 able profession, to institute a sort of tug of 
 war between the virtuous and vicious attor- 
 neys of fiction, the types of Glossin and 
 Messrs. Dodson and Fogg do so painfully 
 prevail. It adds a deeper discredit to Philip 
 Wakem's deformity that he had in him an 
 attorney's blood. The law itself does not 
 alas ! command affection. Mental subtlety 
 is ever suspect. If a lawyer be not astute he 
 is naught, and astuteness is a quality that is 
 neither honoured, loved nor trusted. Dirk 
 
 C 33
 
 ROMANTIC PROFESSIONS 
 
 Hatteraick was not a nice man for a tea-party ; 
 but he carries the reader with him when 
 he dashes out Glossin's hateful brains. The 
 public has got it into its head that the attor- 
 ney cannot lose the lawyer in the lover, but 
 will, like the young man by the name of 
 Guppy, file a declaration instead of making 
 a proposal, and write his love-letters without 
 prejudice. 
 
 The leech came off almost as badly as the 
 lawyer in the early days of fiction. In Scar- 
 ron, Moliere, and Le Sage, the doctor is 
 simply a quack and is made the butt of un- 
 ceasing satire. Among his diverse rogue- 
 ries Gil Bias was doctor for a bit, and did 
 uncommonly well at it. He practised the 
 system of his employer Sangrado. The 
 system was uniform and simple. It con- 
 sisted, whatever the malady, in bleeding the 
 patient and making him drink hot water till 
 he died. One day Gil Bias had the bad luck 
 to find a rival doctor at a patient's bedside, 
 a disbeliever in Sangrado's system. When 
 his famous system was impeached Gil Bias 
 lightly retorted that some doctors killed their 
 patients with bleedings and hot water, and 
 
 34
 
 ROMANTIC PROFESSIONS 
 
 others killed them without, and that was all 
 the difference. And then, instead of a con- 
 sultation, they came to fisticuffs. But the 
 medical hero has looked up of late. It is 
 one result of the modern prestige of physical 
 science. Some cynics hint that systems 
 bearing a strong family likeness to the sys- 
 tem of Sangrado have their seasons of super- 
 stitious acceptance even in these enlightened 
 days. And quacks and impostors there are 
 still in modern fiction. There is, to take 
 but one example, the odious Dr. Jenkins 
 of M. Daudet 's Nabab. But more com- 
 monly of late he is the good angel of the 
 story like the delightful old doctor in the 
 same author's Jack. They say that an Eng- 
 lish lady, having read about Bianchon in 
 Balzac, would have no other physician and 
 wrote directly to Paris for his address, and 
 no one who knows Bianchon will quarrel 
 with her discretion. The physician's is in 
 truth a noble profession, giving scope for the 
 highest in a man of head and heart. This 
 was George Eliot's ideal in Lydgate, the 
 scientific humanist in reality, not in Mr. 
 Meredith's satirical sense. Lydgate certainly 
 
 35
 
 ROMANTIC PROFESSIONS 
 
 compares very favourably with the bucolic 
 Sir James and the pedant Casaubon, and 
 perhaps with the inconclusive Will, — though 
 that is not saying a great deal. 
 
 The last received into the ranks of roman- 
 tic professions is journalism. Any tolerably 
 wide reader of modern fiction cannot fail to 
 have been struck with the new and wide- 
 spread fashion for the scribbling hero. Mr. 
 Bret Harte gave us for hero the other day a 
 young man, who had 'made the second 
 column of The Clarion famous.' We already 
 had Tom Towers of the Jupiter and Penden- 
 nis and Warrington ; not that Pen was par- 
 ticularly heroic, in truth hardly more heroic 
 than the great F. B., another light of the 
 periodical press — nor half so lovable. Mr. 
 Edmund Yates has recorded the excitement 
 and delight with which the young Bohemian 
 writers of his day found their class for the 
 first time truly depicted in pages destined to 
 become immortal. Nor again will any one 
 be likely to forget the wonderful description 
 in Les Illusions Perdues of Lucien de 
 Rubempre's career as a journalist; the un- 
 mistakable touch of early genius, its discovery 
 
 36
 
 ROMANTIC PROFESSIONS 
 
 and exploiting by the harder heads around 
 him, the sudden success and fame, then 
 intrigues, temptations, and * degradation. 
 It is the tragedy of journalism. These 
 however were pioneers, and exceptional. 
 The species has increased and multiplied 
 mightily of late. We owe most examples 
 perhaps to the American story. Next to 
 prospecting and gambling, fighting in the 
 war and travelling in Europe, being on the 
 staff of a newspaper is the most romantic 
 part for the American hero. They have 
 become common enough among ourselves ; 
 it is surprising in how many recent novels 
 they are to be found. If the young journal- 
 ist is thereby tempted to believe himself a 
 hero and to be puffed up, he may be recom- 
 mended to re-read Mr. Gissing's New Grub 
 Street, or to peruse Schopenhauer's or Mr. 
 George Meredith's opinions of his profession. 
 The pretty oracle whereby young girls try 
 their fortunes in plucking flower-petals re- 
 cognises only seven classes of contingent 
 lovers, — tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, gentle- 
 man, ploughboy, thief. Soldiers, sailors, 
 gentlemen, ploughboys, and thieves we have 
 
 37-
 
 ROMANTIC PROFESSIONS 
 
 already admitted into the heroic hierarchy. 
 There remain tinkers and tailors. I cannot 
 think of a tinker, but two tailors occur at 
 once to the mind, Alton Locke and Evan 
 Harrington. Tradition has been hard on 
 the tailor. The laugh has never died out 
 against the three tailors of Tooley Street 
 who began a petition with ' We the people 
 of England.' And, in spite of the tailor-hero 
 in the old German ballad who cut the devil's 
 tail off, and that other who killed seven flies 
 at one blow of his leathern flap and went 
 a-knight-erranting with ' Seven at one blow ' 
 for his device, an ancient saw reckons nine 
 tailors to a man. Nor, I fear, do my modern 
 instances altogether do away the slur. When 
 a Christian Socialist wrote what the Germans 
 call a Tcndenzroman against the sweating- 
 system, he was almost forced to choose a 
 tailor for hero. Yet even so, Kingsley did 
 not venture to make him a tailor pure and 
 simple. The most Christian of Socialists 
 could not carry the courage of his convic- 
 tions to that length. So he made Alton 
 Locke a tailor-poet. Now poets have been 
 licensed lovers time out of mind, since 
 
 38
 
 ROMANTIC PROFESSIONS 
 
 Alain Chartier was paid for his poesy with 
 a queen's kiss, — nay, since Apollo had all 
 the nine Muses at his heels. And as for 
 Evan Harrington, his is a leading case for 
 the incompatibility of tailoring and romance. 
 For see how Rose Jocelyn felt about it. 
 Rose Jocelyn is one of the nicest girls in 
 the galaxy of the girls of fiction. She was 
 a lady in heart no less than by birth and 
 breeding ; independent in character, fearless 
 in judgment, free from petty prejudice. She 
 had been long and intimately acquainted 
 with Evan Harrington, and was thoroughly 
 in love with him. She knew him to be 
 worthy in all respects, and that no calling 
 could make him other than a gentleman. 
 Yet when the first hint of his being a tailor 
 reached her, there was a sharp twitch in her 
 body as if she had been stung or struck. 
 And when her maid was undressing her at 
 night and talked, as I suppose maids will, of 
 their young ladies' young gentlemen, Rose 
 started off by asking her what was the nick- 
 name people gave to tailors, and was told 
 they were called ' snips.' And Rose, stand- 
 ing sideways to the glass, repeated the word 
 
 39
 
 ROMANTIC PROFESSIONS 
 
 to herself and then covered her face with her 
 hands and shuddered. And mind you, there 
 had been no warping in Evan's case. He 
 never was a tailor till his mother's rather 
 acrid probity made him one. He never sat 
 cross-legged in his life. No more for the 
 matter of that did the great Mel, the tailor, 
 his father. Mel was as little of a tailor as 
 might be, and was riding gallantly to hounds 
 while the shop was going steadily to the 
 dogs. It was admitted on all hands that 
 Mel was a man of heroic proportions. And 
 yet, because he was a tailor, the whole world 
 laughed at him. 
 
 No, so long as the guinea stamp means 
 so much even when the man is all gold, so 
 long as a man's soul seems thus to get a 
 smirch of trade on it, it is grievously to be 
 feared that even democratic damsels will 
 continue to prefer the duke to the dry- 
 goodsman. 
 
 40
 
 THE NEMESIS OF SENTI- 
 MENTALISM. 
 
 SAINTE-BEUVE, it is well-known, signal- 
 ised Madame Bovary as the herald of a 
 new spirit in literature. Of this spirit he 
 thought he detected symptoms all around 
 him : science, the spirit of observation, 
 maturity, strength, a touch of hardness ; 
 ' Anatomists and physiologists/ he concludes, 
 ' I meet you on all sides.' That was thirty 
 years ago. The world has had enough and 
 to spare since then, in fiction and elsewhere, 
 of anatomy and physiology. Among other 
 manifestations, what Tennyson called Zola- 
 ism has gathered to a head. Flaubert is 
 still by many regarded as one of the high 
 priests of Zolaism, or rather perhaps as one 
 of the prophets to prepare the way for the 
 full revelation of Zolaism, who desired to 
 
 41
 
 THE NEMESIS 
 
 see the things that we see. M. Zola was a 
 personal friend of Flaubert, and claimed for 
 his own work the benefit of the prestige of 
 Flaubert's name and fame. He has found 
 Flaubert worthy of a place in the apostolical 
 succession from Stendhal down to himself, 
 the reigning pope. 
 
 Flaubert himself protested, so far as it lay 
 in his proud and reserved nature to protest, 
 against this enforced consecration. While 
 recognising and encouraging the early 
 promise of his younger friends, M. Zola, 
 M. Daudet and the brothers Goncourt, he 
 resented George Sand's labelling them as his 
 'school.' These friends of his, he pleaded, 
 laboured for what he despised, and were at 
 small pains about that which with himself 
 was the object of tormenting search. The 
 word is not a whit too strong for what Mr. 
 Pater has called Flaubert's martyrdom for 
 style. For himself, he regarded as of very 
 secondary importance technical detail, local 
 information, in short, the historical and 
 literal aspect of things. His supreme aim 
 was beauty, for which his fellow-workers 
 displayed but scant zeal. It is interesting 
 
 42
 
 OF S ENT I M ENT AL I S M 
 
 to know, and to know from his own lips, 
 that he shared with Tourgueneff neither his 
 severity towards 'Jack' nor the immensity 
 of his admiration for ' Son Excellence 
 Eugene Rougon ' : one, in his opinion, had 
 charm, the other strength, but neither one 
 nor other was mainly preoccupied with 
 what for him was the end of art — with 
 beauty. He muses rather sadly, how diffi- 
 cult it is for us to understand one another. 
 Here were two men, whom he was very fond 
 of, both, in his judgment, true artists — 
 Tourgueneff and Zola. Yet all the same 
 they in no wise admired Chateaubriand's 
 prose, and still less Gautier's. They saw 
 nothing in phrases which filled him with 
 rapture. 
 
 In a word, then, so far from regarding 
 himself as the founder of this new school, 
 Flaubert in his own eyes was rather the last 
 of the Romantics. In his letters to George 
 Sand he was fond of calling himself voire 
 vieux romantique. Hugo, Chateaubriand, 
 Gautier were gods of his idolatry. He 
 couples himself with Gautier as a survivor 
 from an earlier age. In those sad days after 
 
 43
 
 THE NEMESIS 
 
 1870, Gautier in Paris, if still a god, was a 
 god in exile. There were new religions in 
 art. ' Poor Theo,' sighs Flaubert, ' no one 
 now speaks his language. We are fossils 
 stranded and out of place in a new world.' 
 We find him again in those later years 
 complaining that men of letters were so 
 little men of letters in his sense. There was 
 hardly any one save Hugo left, with whom 
 he could talk of things that interested him. 
 One day Hugo quoted to him some passages 
 from Boileau and Tacitus ; it was as if he 
 had received a present, Flaubert said, so 
 rare had the thing become. 
 
 Nevertheless, in spite of all this, Sainte- 
 Beuve, being a looker on, perhaps in some 
 sense saw best how the game was going. 
 Flaubert had undeniably more in common 
 with this new world than he would seem to 
 have been himself aware. If he was a 
 Romantic, his Romanticism was at all events 
 not the Romanticism of 1830; he wore 
 his red waistcoat with a very decided 
 difference. There is more science, more 
 observation, in a sense more maturity ; there 
 is none of the froth and exuberance of 1830. 
 
 44
 
 OF S E N T I M E N T AL I SM 
 
 But with the exuberance are gone also the 
 elan and the charm of youth of the early- 
 Romantics. It is Romanticism grown old, 
 which has outlived not only the follies of 
 youth, but also its insouciance, its vigorous 
 spontaneousness, its faith and enthusiasm. 
 There was only one thing he wanted, 
 Flaubert said, but that was a thing not to 
 be had for the asking — an enthusiasm of 
 some sort. In playful seriousness, he signs 
 one letter Direct eur des Dames de la Desil- 
 lusion. Disenchantment is the secret at 
 once of his bitterness and his force. If the 
 beautiful Aladdin's palace of romantic art 
 be only a phantom palace of magic, he will 
 steadfastly fix his disenchanted gaze on the 
 barren site, left more barren by the flight of 
 the past splendour. But his soul still yearns 
 for the beauty of it, and the old enchantment 
 has thus much sway over his imagination 
 still, that the remembered glory dwarfs and 
 makes drearier the natural landscape. 
 
 Disenchantment is the Nemesis of the 
 tricks which romance is apt to play with 
 fact. There is a beauty which includes fact, 
 which is beyond and above fact. That is 
 
 45
 
 THE NEMESIS 
 
 the sphere where Shakespeare dwells — not 
 alone. But there is also a beauty which lies 
 by the side of fact. The weaker impulse of 
 romance is tempted sometimes to shrink 
 from the roughness of the way and to turn 
 aside into By-Path Meadow ; and thereby 
 fails to attain to the Beulah of poetic truth. 
 Rightly enjoyed, By-Path Meadow need 
 prove no primrose path to the everlasting 
 bonfire. Like that other meadow which lay 
 upon the banks of the river of water of 
 life, the meadow beautiful with lilies and 
 green all the year round, where Christian 
 and Hopeful lay down and slept, its sunlit 
 flowers may afford rest and recreation from 
 the dust and heat of the main road of life. 
 But those who mistake it for the highway 
 may find themselves astray. Vain Confid- 
 ence, seeking by this path the Celestial Gate, 
 is apt to fall into the deep pit which is on 
 purpose there made by the prince of these 
 grounds to catch vain-glorious fools withal, 
 and to be dashed to pieces by his fall. Some 
 nobler souls the path may lead, as it led Chris- 
 tian and his companion, as it led Flaubert, to a 
 sojourn in the dungeons of the Giant De- 
 
 46
 
 OF S E N T I M E N T A L I S M 
 
 spair. A strong Shakespeare absorbs and 
 supersedes the weaker romance, gives us 
 poetry, which is at once more real and more 
 romantic than the romances in vogue before 
 his day. Yet even Shakespeare, before 
 attaining to the ripe graciousness of Pros- 
 pero, had perhaps his fleeting mood of 
 Timon. And from his great contemporary 
 Cervantes the romances drew a spirit, which 
 was only not bitter irony, because it was 
 first of all pitying humour. In the case of 
 Flaubert the spirit of observation, married 
 to his early Romanticism, begot, alas ! no 
 Shakespearian offspring, no radiant romance 
 of reality. The offspring is disillusion, with 
 bitter and mordant irony. 
 
 For all but the strongest natures the 
 romance which is primarily picturesque is a 
 delightful playground, but a bad school. 
 Naturally so, because it was never meant 
 for a school to learn the discipline of life in. 
 For the experienced, for the worker, for 
 the weary, romance is pure blessing. For 
 inexperience and youth the blessing is not 
 without its danger. Thus much foundation 
 at all events Plato had for the severity of 
 
 47
 
 THE NEMESIS 
 
 his famous judgment. After the glowing 
 colour and deep shadows of picturesque 
 romance, the work-a-day world is in danger 
 of appearing too dull and grey ; after its 
 passions and heroisms and adventures the 
 common round is in danger of appear- 
 ing stale and unprofitable. ' My life,' wrote 
 Flaubert when about eighteen years old, 
 'which I had dreamed was to be so full 
 of beauty and poetry and love, will be 
 like the rest, circumscribed, monotonous, 
 reasonable, stupid. I shall read for the law, 
 I shall get admitted; and then, for a fit 
 sequel, I shall go and live in some small 
 provincial town like Yvetot or Dieppe with 
 a post of substitut or procureur du roi! 
 
 Emma Rouault's girlhood was nourished 
 on sentimental religion and romance. Her 
 first dream was of a life of ascetic ecstasy; 
 her next, a dream of a life of love and 
 passion. The actual life that destiny had in 
 store for her was a life to be dragged out by 
 the side of poor blundering Charles Bovary 
 in the blank monotony of Tostes and 
 Yonville l'Abbaye. Emma's sentiment was 
 false ; how false, is pitilessly shown once 
 
 48
 
 OF S E N T I M E N T A L I S M 
 
 for all in the awed reverence she accords to 
 the senile and slobbering Due de Laverdiere 
 because he had been once the lover of a 
 queen. Yet there is pity in the breast of 
 the reader, more pity, as Sainte-Beuve 
 observes, than is in the breast of the author, 
 for the beautiful sentimental girl set in this 
 prison of stupidity and humdrum. Her life 
 is the tragedy of disillusion, from unhappy 
 marriage to unhappier sin, from sin to 
 suicide. In spite of disillusion Emma is 
 Emma to the last. Her suicide is as much 
 a bit of sentimentality as her sin ; and under 
 the very shadow of the great final disillusion, 
 she presses her dying lips to the crucifix 
 with the most passionate kiss of her whole 
 life. 
 
 For a generation Romanticism had been 
 dreaming sentimental dreams of passion 
 set free from the prose of ordinary restraints. 
 The novel of Madame Bovary was the 
 cruel, inevitable awakening. Flaubert's 
 irony was the appointed scourge for the 
 immoral sentimentality of French romance. 
 This is the justification, if justification there 
 can be, for a nakedness in certain scenes 
 
 D 49
 
 THE NEMESIS 
 
 which is abhorrent to English taste, abhor- 
 rent to all true taste. It is not only, as even 
 in his rebuke Sainte-Beuve admits, that the 
 picture of vice is not alluring, that the author 
 neither sympathises nor condones. The true 
 plea is that the stripping of romance from 
 vice is an essential part of the artistic motive. 
 Circe's swine must contemplate in the unflat- 
 tering mirror of truth the naked deformity 
 of their swinishness. Thus only were the 
 bewitched to be disenchanted. It was one 
 of the humours of the Second Empire to 
 greet Madame Bovary with a criminal prose- 
 cution. It was whimsical, and yet a course 
 not difficult to understand, to spare Circe 
 and to punish Ulysses. 
 
 Emma Bovary entered upon life with all 
 the illusions of romance. She visited the 
 bitterness of her disillusion on the head of her 
 doting husband, who anticipated Mr. Casau- 
 bon's trick of making a noise over his soup. 
 
 Flaubert, who had entered upon life in 
 the glow of Romanticism, visited his dis- 
 enchantment upon the provincial life about 
 him. With a touch of pathetic comedy 
 he has told us, in his preface to his friend 
 
 50
 
 OF SENTIMENTAL ISM 
 
 Bouilhet's Dernieres Chansons, of the dreams 
 of himself and his companions in their 
 college days ; of their superb extravagance, 
 the last waves of Romanticism reaching 
 them in the provinces, and making the more 
 violent commotion in their brains, because 
 hemmed in by the barriers of provincial 
 conventionality. They used to be medieval 
 insurrectionary, Oriental ; carried daggers in 
 their pockets and so forth. Foolish enough 
 no doubt, and in no wise laudable, Flaubert 
 admits, but what hatred of commonplace ! 
 what reverence for genius ! how we admired 
 Victor Hugo ! From sheer disgust with the 
 contrast of plain existence, one of his com- 
 panions, he tells us, blew his brains out, 
 another hanged himself in his neckerchief. 
 Flaubert took another way ; he wrote 
 Madame B ovary. He avenged himself at 
 one blow on hated commonplace and betray- 
 ing Romanticism. 
 
 His aim, however, was neither to satirise 
 nor to moralise. Dissection, even, was in 
 his judgment a form of vengeance, and he 
 conceived that he had no call nor claim to 
 be a minister of vengeance. His aim was 
 
 51
 
 THE NEMESIS 
 
 simply to present the truth, to get to the 
 soul of things, to reach and abide by what 
 is essential in life. Of set purpose he turned 
 his back on the accidental and dramatic. 
 Pas de monstres, he exclaims, et pas de he'ros. 
 No monsters and no heroes — that is a far 
 cry from 1830 and Victor Hugo. Looked at 
 closer it is not so far as it at first appears. 
 It is really the next step, the step of reac- 
 tion. After a certain amount of them, the 
 mind fails to take seriously the theatricality 
 of monsters and heroes. Then for a season 
 the only reality that can pass itself off for 
 real is the normal, the average, the unheroic. 
 Flaubert's aim was simply to present life as 
 it is. He succeeded to a miracle in present- 
 ing life as he saw it with eyes from which 
 had just dropped the coloured glasses of 
 Romanticism. Life, unhappily, is only too 
 full of monsters and monstrosities ; the boon 
 of a free Press does not allow us to for- 
 get them for a moment. Life has, too, 
 Heaven be praised for it, its heroisms 
 beyond the skill of romance to surpass, its 
 heroes from Gordon to Alice Ayres. No 
 monsters and no heroes, — that is not reality. 
 
 52
 
 OF S E N T I M E N T A L I SM 
 
 It is but the reality visible in the reaction 
 from romance. It is the art of disillusion. 
 
 But with Flaubert it is art. That is the 
 important point for literary criticism. It is 
 not ' naturalism.' It is not the complacent 
 copying of commonplace ; nor is it a scrap- 
 ing with a muck-rake for the muck's sake 
 We know from Guy de Maupassant, who 
 served a literary apprenticeship with him, 
 that Flaubert, in spite of his great friendship 
 for M. Zola and his great admiration for his 
 vigorous talent, never forgave him his 
 naturalism. Flaubert, caustically remarks 
 his talented disciple, was no mere Realist 
 because he observed life with care any more 
 then M. Cherbuliez is an Idealist because he 
 observes life badly. Art, ideal as it necess- 
 arily is, cannot do without observation, but 
 its kingdom cometh not with observation 
 alone. It penetrates to the spirit and re- 
 veals the significance of the things observed. 
 Madame Bovary is art by its intensity 
 of vision, by its inevitableness, by its style. 
 It is a vision of a certain order of life, 
 penetrating, essential and complete, told in 
 incomparable language. So unerring, so 
 
 53
 
 THE NEMESIS 
 
 convincing is the truth of the vision, so 
 entirely is it without the ornament, the sur- 
 prises, the bending and trimming of fact, 
 which had been customary in romance, that 
 it is little wonder that the cry has been 
 raised, whether for praise or blame, — ' This 
 is not art ; this is life itself.' The cry is 
 intelligible, but it is a very ambiguous 
 piece of praise. In Anna Karenine there 
 is an episode, which, according to Matthew 
 Arnold, turns out to import absolutely 
 nothing, and to be introduced solely to 
 give the author the pleasure of telling us 
 that all Levine's shirts had been packed 
 up. ' Look,' said Arnold in effect. ' It 
 leads to nothing. That is how things 
 happen in life. This is not art ; this is a 
 piece of life itself.' No, it is not a piece of 
 life itself. It is only rather poor art. It 
 falls between the two stools of reality and 
 real art. Between life and a book there 
 must always remain a great gulf fixed. To 
 merely copy in art the apparently meaning- 
 less, anomalous, or unintelligible things of 
 life, on the plea that such things do actually 
 exist, is to mistake the whole aim and scope 
 
 54
 
 OF S E N T I M E N T A L I S M 
 
 of art. Many able writers, no doubt, in 
 order to cheat the reader into taking their 
 story for matter of fact, have employed 
 the device of putting in bits of unnecessary 
 information. It is a trick as old as Defoe. 
 Flaubert's method is the exact contrary. 
 He is real by piercing to the essence of 
 things, by selecting the necessary and inevi- 
 table in life. No ordinary life to ordinary 
 eyes was ever so natural as Emma Bovary's, 
 so free from surprises and accidents. It is 
 life, but life pictured in the seer's vision of 
 fate. The dulness and humdrum of life are 
 so seized by art that they are no longer dull 
 and humdrum, but have become poignant 
 tragedy, searching our hearts with pity and 
 terror. And with all its accuracy of obser- 
 vation, and all its science, the leaven of 
 Romanticism is present and active. Thence 
 that wonderful prose fashioned by Flaubert 
 with incredible effort out of the resources 
 bequeathed by Chateaubriand and Gautier, 
 with its sound, its colour, its fastidious use 
 of an abounding vocabulary. Thence the 
 vivid beauty of the pictures which detach 
 themselves from the narrative and have the 
 
 55
 
 THE NEMESIS 
 
 distinction and distinctness of fine painting. 
 Thence the perpetual beating as of an unre- 
 solved discord between experience and 
 aspiration, every dissonance in the inevitable 
 progression of suspended discords gaining 
 its poignancy from its suggestion of the full 
 romantic chord. 
 
 Sainte-Beuve quarrels with this persistent 
 poignancy of dissonance as at once a flaw in 
 art, and a failure in truth. That it is not the 
 whole truth has already been insisted on. 
 No doubt even Tostes and Yonville l'Abbaye 
 might have yielded something better than 
 the uniform unloveliness of Emma's sur- 
 roundings, some beautiful soul, some charm 
 of first love or glory of self-sacrifice. George 
 Sand, who with consistently Rousseau-like 
 sentiment had passed from singing the woes 
 of the femme incomprise to painting village 
 idylls, was likewise offended by the unvary- 
 ing bitterness of Flaubert's tone, and urged 
 him to turn his unrivalled vision in a similar 
 direction. Flaubert admired George Sand's 
 work heartily, unaffectedly, without reserva- 
 tion. But these idylls he must leave to her. 
 She charmed, but she did not convince. He 
 
 56
 
 OF S E NT I M E N T A L I SM 
 
 must convince, and he felt that he could 
 never convince with the rose-coloured village 
 idyll. He was a critical master of method. 
 He divined that happy accident, convenient 
 coincidence, consoling conversion of char- 
 acter, all the things which go to make up the 
 very essence of the charm of romance, are 
 out of place in that novel of ordinary life, 
 which as the fundamental element of its 
 artistic effect seeks first of all to convince. 
 From his standpoint and for his purposes, 
 they were part of that accidental and dra- 
 matic on which he must resolutely turn his 
 back. It was not enough that his incident 
 might have happened, he must tie himself 
 down to the things that must have happened. 
 Balzac has somewhere a saying to the effect 
 that the actual happening of unlikely things 
 is the only excuse for their unlikelihood ; 
 and that accordingly in fiction, where there 
 can be no actual happening, unlikely things 
 are without excuse. This is a saying that 
 has no application to romance. Romance 
 convinces by pleasing ; in it the wildest 
 improbability justifies itself by beauty and 
 imaginative propriety. But Madame Bovary 
 
 57
 
 THE NEMESIS 
 
 must please by convincing. Of the axiom 
 of art contained in Balzac's saying Madame 
 Bovary is a more perfect illustration than 
 any story of Balzac's own, more perfect even 
 than Euge'nie Grandet. 
 
 Flaubert, too, coming quite at the end of 
 the stir of Romanticism, was addressing an 
 audience which had been glutted with the 
 romantic. Beauty, strength, prowess, hero- 
 ism, striking incident and intricate situation 
 had all come to be regarded as so much 
 stock-property of romance ; and, to a taste 
 grown critical and scientific after a surfeit of 
 romance, were tainted with something of 
 romantic unreality. Art less inexorable than 
 Madame Bovary would have been in danger 
 of appearing sentimental, or merely pretty or 
 picturesque. So Flaubert denied himself 
 things beautiful and engaging in themselves. 
 The solitary exception is the physical beauty 
 of Emma ; and this exception is as signifi- 
 cant as the rule. In romance the beauty of 
 woman is a spell and a power. It dominates, 
 bewitches, maddens, consoles, inspires, glori- 
 fies. It is a counterpoise to the power of 
 princes, stronger than the policy of states- 
 
 58
 
 OF S E N T I M E N T A L I SM 
 
 men. Kings yield to it, heroes live and die 
 for it. That is the kind of sway Emma 
 would love to dream of; and her beauty 
 served but to procure for her two heartless 
 and vulgar intrigues with a soulless libertine 
 and a pusillanimous sentimentalist. Through 
 all her life the shadow of sordid evil is on 
 her beauty ; and after the dreadful death, we 
 are forced to sit beside the corpse through 
 the watches of the night, to mark that this 
 beauty, too, was an illusion that must pass, 
 and with shrinking eyes to observe it under 
 the befouling touch of dissolution. 
 
 So again in the matter of incident. After 
 the intoxicating wealth of incident in ro- 
 mance, Flaubert is temperate to the verge of 
 total abstinence. In romance the seemingly 
 most trivial occurrence leads infallibly, 
 through devious and delightful ways, to 
 death or victory. A face seen by chance in 
 a crowd is certain to reappear in the crisis of 
 your fate. One glance from a pair of bright 
 eyes, and you find yourself entangled hand 
 and foot in inextricable and far-reaching 
 threads of crime or conspiracy. A hasty 
 word to a stranger in a tavern, and your 
 
 59
 
 THE NEMESIS 
 
 humble destiny is interwoven with the plots 
 and passions of queen and cardinal. Wan- 
 derings about strange streets and into un- 
 known houses always lead to something 
 fateful — a glimpse of a girl to be followed 
 and sought thenceforward amid danger and 
 intrigue through mazes of entrancing mys- 
 tery, or the awakening of some malignant 
 enmity never thereafter to cease to haunt 
 your path. And the infinite delight of it all ! 
 Only unfortunately things do not happen so 
 at Tostes or Yonville l'Abbaye ; or if they 
 did, the critical reader would want for it 
 something better than the bare word of the 
 novelist. When Emma goes to the ball at 
 the Chateau, the scent of the old romance- 
 reader sniffs a plot at last. When she enters 
 with alacrity upon her first flirtation, his nose 
 is down on the trail, — to come to a prompt 
 check, however. The aristocratic admirer of 
 the night before rides by as she is on her way 
 homeward ; and they never meet again. 
 That is not how meetings end in romance. 
 Yet in this meeting there was a fatefulness 
 so awful in its implacable necessity, that 
 beside it the fate of romance is but a play- 
 
 60
 
 OF S E N T I M ENT A L I S M 
 
 ing at fate. The man who flirted with her 
 perhaps never gave her another thought ; 
 perhaps recollected his passing attentions as 
 a meritorious act of good-nature to the pretty 
 woman who seemed to know no one of all 
 the company. And he had given a human 
 soul the little determining push over the edge 
 of the inclined plane, down which it must 
 slide through sin and degradation to the self- 
 inflicted death by poison. So it is with the 
 rest of what we must call the incidents of the 
 novel, such as the removal to Yonville, or the 
 first platonic philandering with Leon. This 
 is the only species of incident that Flaubert 
 allows himself. Striking incident or co-in- 
 cidence would savour of the accidental, would 
 awake suspicion of arrangement, of artifice. 
 His incidents must be necessary and inevit- 
 able. They can therefore have no decorative 
 or romantic beauty ; their interest is purely 
 tragic ; they are but moments in the unfold- 
 ing of fate in the soul of Emma Bovary. 
 
 It is assuredly a sombre and pitiless story ; 
 but the truth was, that for Flaubert's epoch 
 the satisfying charm of the simpler cadences 
 had been lost by over-much familiarity. No 
 
 61 
 
   —
 
 THE NEMESIS 
 
 idyllic prettiness of presentation could bring 
 before the mind with the force of Flaubert's 
 irony the romance and passion possible to 
 the dullest human life. Upon her return 
 from the famous ball, the stamp of middle 
 class which was on her husband and her 
 home, the total lack of the style for which 
 she yearned, were to Emma irritating, 
 intolerable, nauseating. And by her side 
 her fond, awkward husband is rubbing his 
 hands with satisfaction at finding himself at 
 home again. Or again later, when Emma 
 has fallen lower, Bovary, returning in the 
 middle of the night from a visit to a patient, 
 is afraid to awake his wife. By the flickering 
 light of the china night-lamp he sees dimly 
 the closed white curtains of his little 
 daughter's cot by the bed-side. He thinks 
 he hears her light breathing, and straightway 
 falls to making plans for her future. He 
 sees the little thing gradually growing up 
 into a girl, into a woman. He will save 
 money and take a little farm in the country. 
 How happy they will be, they three to- 
 gether! When she is fifteen she will be 
 beautiful like her mother, and will wear large 
 
 62
 
 OF S E N T I M E N T A L I S M 
 
 straw hats in the summer, so that the two 
 will look like sisters in the distance. And 
 then some good fellow will be found to 
 marry her ; he will make her happy ; it will 
 go on like that always. But Emma is not 
 really asleep ; she, too, is dreaming her 
 dream. She has fled with her lover to some 
 strange, new country whence they will never 
 return. They wander and wander silent, en- 
 twined in each other's arms. From mountain 
 tops they catch glimpses of foreign-looking 
 towns, with domes, and bridges, and ships, 
 and forests of citron trees, and cathedrals of 
 white marble ; or they stand amidst the 
 mingled sounds of bells, and the neighing of 
 mules, and the murmur of guitars, and the 
 splash of fountains, with statues gleaming 
 under their veil of water, the spray sprink- 
 ling the fruit piled at their feet ; or they are 
 entering a fishing-village in the evening, 
 where the brown nets are drying in the wind 
 along the cliff in front of the huts — some- 
 where away from this home and this husband, 
 in the picturesque realms of romance. And 
 romance, which would have been no dream, 
 lay at her feet in poor Yonville l'Abbaye ; 
 
 - -
 
 THE NEMESIS 
 
 only, blinded and perverted by the false 
 romantic, she passed it by, and could not see 
 it. With motherhood might have come the 
 real bliss and glory, which only begin where 
 the romance of art leaves off. The village 
 idyll is no fiction of literature. Nay, the 
 climax of the husband's blundering incap- 
 acity, the day of his deepest humiliation, 
 might have been the wife's supreme triumph. 
 There was amongst the Bovarys' acquaint- 
 ance in Yonville l'Abbaye a man named 
 Homais, an apothecary, a typical specimen 
 of the provincial scientific smatterer. He 
 gets his opinions and his knowledge ready- 
 made from Parisian journals ; and finds a 
 vent for his self-importance in writing letters 
 to the local prints. He reads in a medical 
 paper of a new surgical operation for club- 
 feet. There was a stable-boy at the village 
 inn with a club-foot, and forthwith he scents 
 a promising scheme of self-advertisement. 
 He writes paragraphs to air his knowledge, 
 hinting that Yonville l'Abbaye is not so far 
 behind Paris in matters scientific and surgi- 
 cal as it is the fashion to suppose. He 
 understands that their clever townsman, 
 
 64
 
 OF S E N T I M E N T A L I SM 
 
 M. Bovary, is likely to undertake this famous 
 operation. Unhappy doctor! unhappy 
 cripple ! they shrink both equally from the 
 experiment. The boy, having been club- 
 footed from birth, was accustomed to his lot, 
 and dreaded the pain and danger; Bovary 
 knew in his heart that he was but a bungler 
 in far less critical operations. Both victims 
 flutter against their fate in vain. The boy is 
 taunted with cowardice, cajoled with flatter- 
 ing promises of straight limbs and maidens' 
 smiles. Bovary, sick at heart with nervous 
 dread, is urged forward by Homais and the 
 talk Homais has evoked. But it is his wife 
 who binds him to the stake. Her romantic 
 sentiment is aroused ; if her husband were to 
 become a celebrity, she might almost like 
 him. The operation is performed. After a 
 deceitful appearance of success followed by a 
 sickening interval of suspense, mortification 
 sets in. Another surgeon has to be sent for, 
 and the limb has to be amputated. Bovary 
 dares not cross the threshold of his house ; 
 he cowers inside, his head on his breast, his 
 hands clasped, his eyes fixed ; the screams 
 of the boy reach him from across the narrow 
 E 6$
 
 THE NEMESIS 
 
 street. In his misery he turns to his wife for 
 comfort, and she repulses him with passion- 
 ate contempt. The pain of it all is almost 
 more than we can bear. But with what 
 force the dissonance suggests the harmony of 
 a true home and true wifehood ! the world 
 outside indignant, contemptuous, cruel ; in- 
 side, husband and wife and love. If, after 
 her struggles and temptation and sins, Emma 
 had had that grace of womanhood and wife- 
 hood left in her to be stirred by this bitter 
 suffering, even then the seven devils had 
 come out of her. Love had turned the mean 
 surroundings, the stupidity, the suffering, to 
 ' a blaze of joy and a crash of song.' 
 
 The episode of the club-foot has been put 
 in the fore-front of their objections by friends 
 and foes. It has been criticised as a piece 
 of naturalism, as mere ugliness, as but an 
 occasion to indulge in description of painful 
 and unnecessary detail. Flaubert's method 
 of setting everything before the reader as 
 distinct and vivid as language will make it 
 is, of course, open to serious criticism, when 
 he has to treat of things which arc physically 
 or morally revolting. Whether in this 
 
 66
 
 OF S E NT I M E N T A L I S M 
 
 episode the artist has wrung music out of the 
 dissonance, whether out of the strong he has 
 succeeded in bringing forth a strange, new, 
 bitter sweet — that is a question upon which 
 taste may be expected always to differ. But 
 it is not naturalism, it is not mere ugliness. 
 It is an integral part of the spiritual tragedy, 
 the fatal triumph of half science and false 
 sentiment ; it is the revealing instance to 
 exhibit Emma's heart, that was a living heart 
 once, morally paralysed by indulged senti- 
 mentality. And it is a turning-point in the 
 action. It is this last revelation of her hus- 
 band's uninteresting incapacity which urges 
 her tottering soul to its final plunge to 
 perdition. 
 
 ' Moralist, you know everything, but you 
 are cruel.' It is in these words that Sainte- 
 Beuve apostrophises the creator of Madame 
 B ovary. Cruelty there is in his unrelenting 
 irony, cruelty born of the bitterness of dis- 
 illusion towards the commonplace, but 
 cruelty chiefly towards sentimentality and 
 ignorant self-conceit. And knowledge there 
 is, deep, wide, minute. And a moral there is, 
 as there must always be in any true picture 
 
 67
 
 THE NEMESIS 
 
 of life ; a moral, guiltless as Flaubert is of 
 seeking to enforce a moral, almost painful in 
 its force. But first and last, there is art : 
 art in the intensity of vision that pierces 
 beneath the surface of fact ; art in the note 
 of tragedy, the inevitable march of fate ; art 
 in the scrupulous avoidance of everything 
 not essential to the idea ; art in the imper- 
 sonal directness of presentation ; art in the 
 style. 
 
 6S
 
 ROMANCE AND YOUTH 
 
 A year or two ago M. Ferdinand Brune- 
 tiere, the austere literary critic of the Revue 
 des Deux Mo7ides, delivered a lecture at the 
 Odeon Theatre upon Moliere's LEcole des 
 Femmes. According to him, so M. Lemaitre 
 reported, the comedy turned upon the 
 question of age. Agnes is sixteen ; Arnol- 
 phe confesses to forty-two. That in itself is 
 enough in the play to make Arnolphe not 
 only ridiculous but odious from beginning 
 to end. His successful rival Horace is 
 twenty. He has nothing but youth to 
 recommend him ; nor is anything more 
 needed. He and Agnes have all the 
 sympathy of author and audience. And 
 quite right too ! cries this austere M. Brune- 
 tiere ; it is a natural and sacred law. In 
 sympathising with Agnes and Horace, the 
 
 69
 
 ROMANCE AND YOUTH 
 
 heart is sympathising with nature and 
 instinct. 
 
 Moliere perhaps does not make the play 
 turn quite so nakedly on the contrast of age 
 as the moral requires. There may not be 
 much in Horace's favour beside his youth ; 
 but there is a good deal more than his forty- 
 two years to be set to the discredit of 
 Arnolphe. He is a system-monger and an 
 egotist. Now the egotist, according to Mr. 
 Meredith, is the chosen sport of the comic 
 spirit ; while woman (bless her !) was created 
 to be the bane of system and the despair of 
 the system-monger. When a mature bache- 
 lor like Arnolphe, in self-conscious dread of 
 becoming as one of the horned herd of 
 husbands about him, captures a babe in long 
 clothes and has her mewed up and artificially 
 trained to be a helpmeet for his special lord- 
 ship, then the imps of mischief gather in a 
 circle on their haunches to wait and watch 
 for the catastrophe. And if the wretched 
 man, after dwarfing the girl's nature and 
 bounding her horizon, demands love on the 
 score of gratitude, the angels of heaven 
 join in the applause over his discomfiture. 
 
 70
 
 ROMANCE AND YOUTH 
 
 Arnolphe's whole conduct was unfair and 
 ignoble, and the heart of the natural man 
 rejoices to see his prey escape him. 
 
 Still, whether or not the comedy was 
 exclusively framed to point this moral, the 
 moral is unquestionably there. Arnolphe's 
 forty-two years count heavily against him. 
 Literature in the mouths of the dramatist 
 and the critic is definitely enough on the 
 side of youth against middle age. Nor 
 could spokesmen be selected for literature 
 less open to suspicion of sentimental bias. 
 As a critic M. Brunetiere has been re- 
 proached with being too much of a school- 
 master and too little of a lover. And as 
 for Moliere, he is the incarnation of that 
 spirit of comedy which is the arch foe of 
 sentimentalism. 
 
 So much for the doctrine of literature ; 
 now for the teaching of life. Shift the scene 
 from the French stage to the Bow Street 
 Police-Court. A defendant, aged twenty- 
 one, described as a pianoforte -tuner, is 
 charged with being drunk and disorderly 
 and with assaulting the police. The police, 
 it appeared, had interfered to protect a 
 
 71
 
 ROMANCE AND YOUTH 
 
 woman, whom prisoner was threatening. 
 Magistrate. — ' Who was the woman ? ' 
 Prisoner. — ' My wife, your worship.' Magis- 
 trate. — 'Your wife! why you have the 
 appearance of a boy. Is your wife here?' 
 She was. A little woman stepped forward 
 and said she was prisoner's wife. She was 
 nineteen. They had been married twelve 
 months. Then the scandalised magistrate 
 delivered his soul. 'There is no place,' he 
 exclaimed, 'where so much misery is seen 
 as at the police-court. There is no place to 
 see so plainly how human misery is produced 
 by human folly, — not by bad laws but by 
 human folly. A boy and girl, just beyond 
 the age when they ought to be whipped, go 
 and get married ! ' 
 
 The age when they ought to be whipped ! 
 Shades of Romeo and Juliet! You see, 
 instead of applauding a natural and sacred 
 law M. Brunetiere ought to have laid 
 Horace and Agnes across his knee, and 
 imagined for a moment he held under his 
 admonitory palm the prostrate form of M. 
 Zola. It is painful to think what would 
 have been the worthy magistrate's feelings 
 
 72
 
 ROMANCE AND YOUTH 
 
 could the precocious babes of Verona have 
 been dragged before his judgment-seat, 
 Indeed if Romeo and Juliet could be trans- 
 lated with their ages unchanged from the 
 poetry of Shakespeare into the prose of 
 modern London life, the stringency of our 
 legislation would make it awkward for the 
 lover of a lady of such tender years. 
 Happily those immortal types of youth 
 and romance, of passionate and tragic love, 
 were not within the jurisdiction. They were 
 Italian, Italians of the Renaissance ; and 
 Italians have a large licence in these matters. 
 It is the naughty sun, as Byron explains, 
 and the naughtier moon. Sun and race 
 make a deal of difference. Do you remem- 
 ber the Indian girl in Mr. Kipling's beautiful 
 story, 'Without Benefit of Clergy/ and her 
 rebellious jealousy of the protracted youth 
 of the ' white mem-logl her rivals ? 
 
 Perhaps the sun of Italy is indirectly 
 answerable for the tender age of the lovers 
 and their lasses in much of English poetry 
 and romance. Our poets and romancers 
 were so long under the influence of Italy 
 and the Renaissance. From the time that 
 
 73
 
 ROMANCE AND YOUTH 
 
 Chaucer transferred his allegiance from 
 French to Italian models, until the pres- 
 tige of the grand siecle and Charles Il.'s 
 connection with the court of Louis XIV. 
 reimposed a French model, Italy set our 
 literary fashion. The tragedy of Webster 
 and the like but reflects the Italy of the 
 Sforzas and Borgias. Boccaccio and Ban- 
 dello were our models for story-telling. 
 With the form of the sonnet we imported 
 from Italy the spirit and features of Italian 
 sonneteering. Italian Juliets were imported 
 into English poetry and romance without 
 being made to pay the duty of added years 
 to a northern climate. What in Italy had 
 been nature became in England a piece of 
 literary convention. The Elizabethan son- 
 neteer, if he was not chanting the mature 
 divinity of the Virgin Queen, would proclaim 
 his devotion to some lady-love of traditional 
 immaturity. At Juliet's age, the English 
 miss is apt, as Byron brutally said, to smell 
 of bread and butter. No sober Briton 
 nowadays toasts the maiden of blushing 
 fifteen, — at least not within earshot of the 
 police. Charles Surface and his friends were 
 
 74
 
 ROMANCE AND YOUTH 
 
 not a particularly sober crew ; but in these 
 days Joseph Surface would belong to a 
 Vigilance Society and there might be the 
 devil to pay. It is absolutely incomprehen- 
 sible how Robert Browning, of all men in 
 the world, should have come to make 
 Mildred Tresham only fourteen years of age 
 when she brought the blot on the 'scutcheon. 
 Dr. Furnivall really should have seen to this. 
 Evelyn Hope was sixteen years old when 
 she died, and the man of forty-eight who 
 loved her confessed that it was not ' her 
 time to love,' and that only somewhere in 
 the seventh heaven could he look for any 
 return. 
 
 It is true that to redress the balance 
 romance has some mature heroines to set in 
 the opposite scale. To begin with, there is 
 Helen of Troy herself, the arch-heroine of 
 romance. Her love affairs began early 
 enough no doubt, early enough to satisfy 
 Mr. Browning. She was a mere child when 
 Theseus ran away with her. But by a 
 shameless statistical inquiry, by reckoning 
 up the episodes of her youth, and by com- 
 paring the date of the Argonautic expedition, 
 
 75
 
 ROMANCE AND YOUTH 
 
 in which her brothers took part, with the date 
 of the Trojan war, the unconscionable Bayle 
 proved to his own ungentlemanly satisfaction 
 that Helen was fifty, more or less, when Paris 
 carried her off in triumph to Troy. Well, 
 then the war lasted ten years ; and at the 
 end of it, not only was Menelaus legitimately 
 proud to get her back again, but her beauty 
 was so potent still that Priam forgot and 
 forgave in his pride of it all the woes it had 
 brought on him and his, and paid his tribute 
 of kingly courtesy to her unabdicated grace 
 of womanhood. Nay, ten years later again, 
 when Telcmachus visited the Spartan court 
 in quest of news of his many-wiled and 
 much -wanted father, Helen was a fine 
 woman still, though at that time, by Bayle's 
 iniquitous calculations, no less than seventy 
 years of age. No doubt her race and 
 lineage must be borne in mind. There is 
 an elderly aristocratic couple in one of 
 Disraeli's novels, or in one of the parodies of 
 his novels — it is difficult sometimes to re- 
 member with Disraeli which is text and 
 which is parody — who might have been 
 taken, so pure was their blood and so perfect 
 
 76
 
 ROMANCE AND YOUTH 
 
 their breeding, for their eldest son and 
 
 daughter's eldest son and daughter. Helen's 
 
 lineage was more than aristocratic ; it was 
 
 divine. Daughter of Zeus and Leda, sister 
 
 of Castor and Pollux, she had in her veins 
 
 the eternal ichor of the gods. That of course 
 
 made a difference. Indeed Bayle takes credit 
 
 for the moderation of his estimate, and hints 
 
 that some would make her out to be at least 
 
 a hundred. But I linger too long over the 
 
 ungallant gossip of this dictionary-making 
 
 sceptic. It was unworthy of a Frenchman 
 
 to canvass the age of the liege-lady of all 
 
 lovers of romance. It was unworthy of the 
 
 caution of a scientific sceptic to clutch at the 
 
 conjectural chronology of mythological fancy. 
 
 If you listen to some of the gossips by the 
 
 way, you would believe that Iphigenia was not 
 
 Agamemnon's daughter, but the daughter of 
 
 Helen and Theseus. That would make Helen 
 
 under thirty (would it not ?) when she eloped 
 
 with Paris. It adds fresh cruelty to the curse 
 
 that blasted Iphigenia's youth, to think that it 
 
 was her own mother that was the cause. But 
 
 she would not be the last daughter who has 
 
 been sacrificed to a mother's flirtation. 
 
 77
 
 ROMANCE AND YOUTH 
 
 If Helen had a grown-up daughter when 
 her face was the fate of nations, Penelope 
 had a grown-up son when the stress of 
 rivalry for her hand was at its keenest. The 
 suitors very likely had set their hearts at 
 least as much upon the estate as on the 
 person of this paragon of prehistoric grass- 
 widowhood. That is what cynicism would 
 suggest, and there was not a little in the 
 conduct of the suitors to give colour to the 
 suggestion. Yet Homer hardly gives us to 
 understand that Penelope was past the prime 
 of her beauty. Nor did scandal spare even 
 her name. The good Homer gave no coun- 
 tenance to it, or it would have put a very 
 distressing complexion on the pretty story 
 of the woven and unwoven web. One ver- 
 sion of the birth of Pan, remember, was that 
 he was born of Penelope in her lord's 
 absence, and that no single suitor could 
 claim the whole credit of the paternity. 
 Pan, you know, had horns and hoofs. 
 
 Pass from romance of legend to romance 
 of history. The wedded names of Antony 
 and Cleopatra remain hardly less than 
 Tristram and Iscult the very symbol of 
 
 78
 
 ROMANCE AND YOUTH 
 
 love's lordship. Now Cleopatra was twenty- 
 one when first she met ' broad-fronted Caesar,' 
 and was twenty-five before the thoughtful 
 knife of Brutus cut the liaison short. Yet 
 these were the green and salad days whereof 
 Shakespeare makes her speak so scornfully. 
 When she captivated Mark Antony she was 
 twenty-eight, and she held him her slave for 
 eleven whole years ; so that when ' by the 
 aspick's bite ' she ' died a queen,' absolute 
 queen of him still soul and sense, she was of 
 the unromantic age of thirty-nine. I named 
 Iseult. A learned friend of mine has un- 
 earthed her epitaph from an old Italian book, 
 whereby it appears she was thirty-one at 
 the time when she fell stricken to death on 
 Tristram's corpse. 
 
 So, you see, it was no such revolutionary 
 innovation, no such Copernican discovery 
 for romance, when Balzac made his much 
 vaunted ' woman of thirty ' the centre of the 
 system of his human comedy. The usually 
 unsympathetic Sainte-Beuve might trumpet 
 the achievement, and talk of these women 
 of thirty waiting dumb and expectant for 
 their discoverer, and of the electric flash 
 
 79
 
 ROMANCE AND YOUTH 
 
 when they met. But really she is an old 
 friend in romance, this woman of thirty ! 
 Nor did Charles de Bernard do any new 
 thing- when he bettered his master and gave 
 the world his 'woman of forty.' Nor did 
 Thackeray, when, by one of the boldest 
 strokes in fiction, he made Harry Esmond 
 turn from Beatrix to her mother Lady 
 Castlevvood. Diane de Poitiers was forty- 
 eight when Henry II. of France was twenty- 
 nine. The young King surrendered at 
 discretion to his enchantress, and gave her 
 his country, himself, ay and his queen too, 
 to do what she would with. She held her 
 sway without check or wane to the end. 
 She was seventy when Brantome saw her, 
 and she was, he says, as fair and fresh and 
 lovable as at thirty. Posterity, said Paul 
 de St. Victor prettily, still looks at Diane 
 through the dazzled eyes of Henry ; and 
 we picture her always, in spite of her really 
 venerable age, as the artists of the Renais- 
 sance immortalised her, in the form of Jean 
 Goujon's goddesses or Cellini's nymph. 
 
 Then there is the famous case of Ninon 
 de l'Enclos. If Ninon was only thirty when 
 
 80
 
 ROMANCE AND YOUTH 
 
 she carried off captive Madame de Sevigne's 
 husband, she was full fifty-five when a 
 generation later she took captive the same 
 Madame de Sevigne's son. And so far as 
 the willingness of the spirit went, she would 
 no doubt have carried her conquests into 
 the third generation, but that the Marquis 
 de Grignan, Madame de Sevigne's grandson, 
 was barely fifteen when she was seventy — 
 the three-score years and ten assigned by 
 the preacher as the limits of life, not of love. 
 Like Emma Bovary, Ninon kept her last 
 kiss for the cross ; she devoted to religion 
 the last two or three of the eighty-nine 
 years allotted to her as the span of her 
 earthly pilgrimage. 
 
 I have been led far afield by my dream 
 of fair women — even the census-taker has 
 his dreams, though it is his invidious duty 
 to ask the ladies' ages. I was thinking 
 rather of the heroes than of the heroines of 
 romance when I started with the contrast 
 between the views of the police-magistrate 
 and the literary critic. As to the age of 
 romance for girls there is no great dis- 
 crepancy between the ideas expressed in 
 
 F 81
 
 ROMANCE AND YOUTH 
 
 literature and those entertained in life. Our 
 Psyches are still girls, if our Cupids begin 
 to wax fat and forty. Neither the tragic 
 childhood of Mildred Tresham nor the trium- 
 phant old age of Ninon de l'Enclos is normal 
 in life or books. Nor, in spite of Sainte- 
 Beuve and the enthusiasm of later and lesser 
 critics, is Balzac's woman of thirty a normal 
 subject of romance. She was bred partly 
 of Balzac's idiosyncrasy, partly of his pride 
 of originality, partly of artificial social con- 
 ditions. The Baby's Grandmother in Mrs. 
 Walford's amusing novel was not regarded 
 by her neighbours as a normal case, least of 
 all by the baby's very conventional parents. 
 It is significant, as M. Lemaitre has ob- 
 served, that Moliere's Agnes is still made up 
 on the modern stage to look sixteen or 
 thereabouts ; whereas the actor who plays 
 Arnolphc to produce the proper effect is 
 bound to add, and in fact always does add, 
 a very considerable number of years to the 
 forty-two Moliere gave him. To a modern 
 audience a prospective husband of forty-two 
 would appear at least as natural as a pro- 
 spective husband of twenty. And if in life 
 
 82
 
 ROMANCE AND YOUTH 
 
 the man of forty-two is not such a terror to 
 the girls as he was in the old comedy, so 
 neither is the youth of twenty such a hero. 
 What strikes one in the old-fashioned stories 
 is the extraordinary capacities of the hero 
 of twenty. There is hardly anything he 
 cannot do. In peace and war, in policy and 
 passion, he is equal to all emergencies. In 
 reality the youth of twenty is not of much 
 account. The girls snub him ; his college 
 gates him ; nobody but his tailor trusts him 
 much. The pianoforte-tuner was twenty-one ; 
 and a gentleman with judicial experience 
 of life and humanity regards him as a boy 
 just beyond the age when he ought to be 
 whipped. The young Duke of Orleans was 
 of the full heroic age of twenty-one when he 
 sought to take his place in the ranks and 
 was put in prison for his pains ; and whether 
 for sympathy or sarcasm the world was 
 agreed in treating his exploit as the prank 
 of a school-boy. At the Bar men are still 
 rising juniors with grey hair or bald head. 
 In politics Mr. Chamberlain is a young man 
 Mr. Balfour is almost a boy, Mr. Curzon is 
 positively an infant, though no doubt a pre- 
 
 83
 
 ROMANCE AND YOUTH 
 
 cocious infant. Used men to ripen earlier 
 or was the world's work simpler? Or has 
 romance been at her tricks, and have we 
 here another of those grievous discrepancies 
 between fact and old-fashioned fiction which 
 make Mr. Howells to go so heavily? 
 
 Old Montaigne did actually fix the age of 
 full maturity at twenty. Like Lord Beacons- 
 field, he was a believer in youth. Even at 
 his epoch he thought men ought to set about 
 the world's work earlier than they did. ' For 
 my part' (I quote the quaint phrases of John 
 Florio's translation which Shakespeare used) 
 ' I think that our minds are as full grown and 
 perfectly jointed at twenty years as they 
 shall be, and promise as much as they can. A 
 mind which at that age hath not given some 
 evident token or earnest of her sufficiency, 
 shall hardly give it afterward, put her to what 
 trial you list. Natural qualities and virtues, 
 if they have any vigorous or beauteous thing 
 in them, will produce and show the same 
 within that time or never.' Yet even with 
 him twenty is the age rather of promise than 
 performance, and when the talk is of actions 
 he raises his limit to thirty. ' Of all humane, 
 
 84
 
 ROMANCE AND YOUTH 
 
 honourable, and glorious actions that ever 
 came into my knowledge, I am persuaded I 
 should have a harder task to number those 
 which both in ancient times and in our own 
 have been produced and achieved before the 
 age of thirty years than such as were per- 
 formed after. Yea, often in the life of the 
 same men.' Yet the only cases he cites are 
 Hannibal, and his ' great adversary,' Scipio. 
 ' Both lived,' says Montaigne, ' the better part 
 of their life with the glory which they had 
 gotten in their youth ; and though afterward 
 they were great men in respect of all others, 
 yet were they but mean in regard of them- 
 selves.' Ultima primis cedebant was Livy's 
 sentence on Scipio. Hannibal was twenty- 
 nine when he invaded Italy. Scipio was 
 thirty-two at Zama, but that was only the 
 crowning victory of his second or third cam- 
 paign ; he had saved his father's life in a 
 battle at the age of sixteen, and at eighteen 
 he fought on the fatal field of Cannae. 
 
 Bacon, who was inclined to agree with 
 Montaigne as to the advantage of youth, 
 does not add many instances. He quotes 
 Cosimo who was appointed Duke of Florence 
 
 85
 
 ROMANCE AND YOUTH 
 
 in 1573 at the age of seventeen and proved 
 an able ruler ; also a certain Gaston de Foix. 
 According to Bacon's last editor, this was 
 probably a Viscount de Beam, born in 1331, 
 who served with distinction at the age of 
 fourteen in military and then in civil business 
 and was described in his later years by 
 Froissart as a pattern of chivalry. Cosimo 
 governed a wily and turbulent population at 
 seventeen, and Augustus Caesar by his brain 
 and by his arm was master of the world at 
 nineteen. Montaigne thought it an anomaly 
 that the same Augustus, ' that had been uni- 
 versal and supreme judge of the world when 
 he was but nineteen years old, would by his 
 laws have another to be thirty before he 
 should be made a competent judge of a 
 cottage or farm.' But Augustus Caesar was 
 an exceptionally wise youth. And yet, — 
 perhaps because, as Lady Blandish hinted, 
 Love does not love exceptionally wise youths, 
 — Cleopatra, who was an expert in love, 
 would have none of him as a lover. Our own 
 Pitt, who, as we are so often reminded, was a 
 minister at twenty-three, as a lover cut no 
 figure at all. 
 
 86
 
 ROMANCE AND YOUTH 
 
 How came Montaigne and Bacon to leave 
 out Alexander? Early in his twenties he 
 had added the conquest of Asia to the con- 
 quest of Greece. Before he died at thirty- 
 two he had married three wives, and sighed 
 for more worlds to conquer ; and besides his 
 unparalleled achievement, he was as beautiful 
 as a god, if the sculptors are to be trusted. 
 He might perhaps have put his youth to 
 better purpose than to running, after Thais 
 and setting fire to Persepolis, but his mar- 
 riage with the fair Roxana, the captive of 
 his bow and spear, was after the most ortho- 
 dox romantic pattern. Then there was the 
 great Conde. He was, I believe, ill-favoured, 
 though I have a portrait which makes him 
 fine-looking. But any way was not the con- 
 queror of Rocroi at twenty-two a hero to fire 
 a girl's imagination ? And any woman, in 
 romance or out of it, might have been proud 
 to have had for lover the famous Due de La 
 Rochefoucauld, with his youth, his handsome 
 face, his clever tongue, and his reckless 
 bravery. Indeed, as a matter of history, a 
 gracious line of remarkable women were 
 proud to have him for their lover. 
 
 87
 
 ROMANCE AND YOUTH 
 
 But these men were exceptions. They 
 only prove the rule. And if I ransacked 
 history for more instances they would be 
 exceptions still. The normal youth of 
 twenty is not at all the omnipotent person 
 that the fancy of romance has painted him. 
 Accordingly, when the novelists took to 
 copying life instead of correcting it, they 
 came round to the magistrate's way of 
 thinking, and the age of the hero went up. 
 I imagine that the hero of twenty is an excep- 
 tion in the ordinary modern novel of ordinary 
 life. Poor Pendennis at twenty was very 
 little of a hero. He may fall in love with a 
 Fotheringay, but a Fotheringay will hardly 
 be so weak as to fall in love with him. If a 
 Laura love him, she will wait and watch for 
 him to grow into a man. Miss Ethel New- 
 come will flirt with Clive with a light heart, 
 but could she be expected to think of the 
 boy seriously ? Jane Austen's Emma, who 
 thoroughly knew her way about in match- 
 making, surrendered her heart to the safe 
 keeping of thirty-eight — such was the sober 
 age of the admirable Knightley. Jane Eyre's 
 Rochester was certainly no chicken. If you 
 
 88
 
 ROMANCE AND YOUTH 
 
 were to apply the brutal methods of Bayle 
 to Ouida's Tricotrin, I believe (though I have 
 never worked it out myself, being a poor 
 hand at figures) that it would turn out that 
 Tricotrin had attained the respectable age of 
 seventy or eighty, when he cheats us of our 
 tears by his apparently premature death at 
 the barricades. Miss Broughton's magnifi- 
 cent ugly men are eminently mature. They 
 are scarred and seamed with experiences like 
 Milton's Satan. And (to the no small sur- 
 prise of some of the clever novelist's sincerest 
 admirers) Miss Broughton has been ranked 
 high among English realists by no less a 
 critic than M. Brunetiere, and held up as a 
 pattern to certain of his own countrymen 
 who make a great cry of their realism — and 
 no little wool. 
 
 Ah, Moliere might say, this may be life, 
 but it is not nature. M. Brunetiere reiterates 
 his point. He argues in his new volume of 
 Critical Essays on the History of French 
 Literature that Moliere's moral was always 
 for a return to nature from unnatural con- 
 vention ; from conventional and unnatural 
 marriage, social fashions, morality, religion. 
 
 89
 
 ROMANCE AND YOUTH 
 
 Well, what precisely is meant by nature ? 
 There is an obvious truth and a number of 
 unobvious fallacies in the ordinary distinction 
 between nature and civilisation. A philoso- 
 pher, whom M. Brunetiere knows a ereat 
 deal better than I do, taught long ago once 
 for all that it is man's nature to be civilised ; 
 and the sentiments and usages of civilisation 
 — as I think M. Lemaitre has urged in 
 answer to M. Brunetiere— mould and control 
 even the instinctive impulses of love and 
 passion. Where in history would Moliere 
 find his golden age or state of nature wherein 
 the girls of sixteen fall in love only with the 
 boys of twenty ? Nausicaa's girl's-heart was 
 given almost at first sight to the middle-aged 
 and much enduring hero, who had a wife and 
 grown-up son and several other things await- 
 ing him at home. It is one of the oldest and 
 prettiest love stories in the world. And if 
 you think that Ulysses got some unfair 
 advantage from the grace that Athena shed 
 about his head and shoulders, when, the 
 maidens looking the other way, he made 
 his toilet on the sea-shore, what do you say 
 to the case of Desdemona and her Moor? 
 
 90
 
 ROMANCE AND YOUTH 
 
 And if Shakespeare's word is not evidence, 
 what do you say of Vanessa and Swift ? A 
 girl's instinct, according to Mr. Meredith, who 
 is notoriously in the secrets of the sex, is for 
 strength. This is, no doubt, a survival from 
 the old-fashioned days when women used to 
 look to men as their protectors and defenders. 
 Well, strength is displayed in different ways 
 in different ages and societies. So far as feats 
 of chivalry went and Homeric derring-do, 
 there was no particular reason, perhaps, why 
 a youth should not be a hero so soon as his 
 muscle was set. It has sometimes struck me 
 in reading the Iliad, that the Trojan War 
 was liker to modern games than to modern 
 warfare. On the half-holidays, so to speak, 
 when the weather was fine, the Greeks and 
 Trojans would turn out for a match on the 
 ringing plains, while the old boys looked on 
 from the walls and the ships. Our play- 
 grounds and hunting-fields could show 
 almost as good a record of damage to life 
 and limb as was suffered by the heroes in 
 many an Homeric combat or medieval tour- 
 ney. But if the girl's instinct is for a man 
 strong in her particular sphere — political, 
 
 91
 
 ROMANCE AND YOUTH 
 
 intellectual, or social ; if her hero is to be a 
 man among men in complex stages of society, 
 she must put up with a lover of a certain 
 age. 
 
 So much the worse for civilisation, Moliere 
 might insist, It is nature that speaks in 
 the poetry and romance of the love of boy 
 and girl. It is nature that speaks in the 
 spectator's instinctive sympathy with the 
 young lovers in the comedies. It is a natural 
 and sacred law that youth should love youth. 
 When civilisation puts youth and youth 
 asunder, man is dividing what nature would 
 join. And if history can produce no such 
 golden age or state of nature an appeal might 
 be made to the customs of the proletariat. 
 The very name proletariat is warrant enough. 
 Undistractcd by conventional ambitions, and 
 undeterred by conventional scruples, the pro- 
 letariat increases and multiplies at an age 
 which makes magistrates and Malthusians, 
 economists and the guardians of the poor, 
 tear their hair in dismay and indignation. 
 And George Sand might be called to support 
 the appeal. George Sand, of all women, 
 could for opposite reasons have had no pre- 
 
 92
 
 ROMANCE AND YOUTH 
 
 judices in favour of immaturity in marriage 
 or love. Yet when she turned to study the 
 country people about her at Nohant and to 
 pourtray it in those charming village tales 
 she wrote towards the close of her full-blooded 
 career, the popular sentiment therein is 
 definitely, not to say despotically, on M. 
 Brunetiere's side. ' Germain,' says Maurice 
 to his son-in-law, in La Mare an Diable, 
 'you must make up your mind to take 
 another wife. It is two years since my 
 daughter died, and your eldest boy is seven. 
 You are going on for thirty, and after that 
 a man is too old to marry.' And then he 
 proceeds to recommend Germain not to 
 think of a young girl, but to look out for a 
 seasoned widow of his own years. Germain 
 in fact was only twenty-eight ; but he re- 
 garded himself, and was generally regarded 
 by his neighbours, as too old to be the 
 husband of a young girl. So when he fell 
 in love with Marie, who was sixteen, he did 
 not dare tell her of his feelings ; and when 
 he married her, it was something of a scandal 
 in the country-side. 
 
 Then Dickens, again. How Dickens loved 
 
 93
 
 ROMANCE AND YOUTH 
 
 to watch the boys and girls falling in love 
 and marrying ! Think of Tommy Traddles, 
 defiant of conventionality, triumphantly play- 
 ing Puss in the Corner with his five sisters-in- 
 law in his business chambers at Gray's Inn ; 
 or of Scrooge's nephew and Scrooge's niece 
 by marriage and Scrooge's niece's sisters at 
 the ghostly Christmas party, and the shame- 
 less way Topper followed up the plump 
 sister with the lace tucker at the game of 
 Blind Man's Buff. 'Why did you get 
 married ? ' Scrooge had asked his nephew 
 on the Christmas Eve in return for his 
 Christmas greetings. ' Because I fell in love.' 
 ' Because you fell in love ! ' growled Scrooge, 
 as if that were the only thing in the world 
 more ridiculous than a merry Christmas. 
 Ebenezer Scrooge, you may remember, 
 boasted that he helped to support the insti- 
 tutions of civilisation, the prison and the 
 workhouse ; and if the boys and girls must 
 marry, and then when want came would 
 rather die than take advantage of these 
 institutions, — well, they had better die, he 
 said, and decrease the surplus population. Or 
 take Bleak House. The Court of Chancery and 
 
 94
 
 ROMANCE AND YOUTH 
 
 the great case of Jarndyce against Jarndyce 
 — there you have, no doubt, a triumph of 
 civilisation ; but Richard Carstone and Ada, 
 with their young love, had nature on their side. 
 Richard confessed upon his deathbed that 
 he had wedded his girl-wife to want, and 
 that he had the world still to begin. Yet 
 they had their reward. 
 
 Let us consult one more authority. Sir 
 Austin Absworthy Bearne Feverel, Baronet, 
 of Raynham Abbey, had, like our worthy 
 magistrate, meditated deeply upon life and 
 marriage. He brought up his son Richard 
 on a system, and meant to marry him by 
 system at the age of twenty-five. Unfor- 
 tunately when this scientific humanist was 
 away consulting family physicians and 
 lawyers about a helpmeet for his peerless 
 son, the magnetic youth sculling down the 
 river had his vision of the magnetic maiden ; 
 and, nature speaking in his bosom less sen- 
 tentiously than the baronet, he straightway 
 took his part in one of the prettiest love- 
 scenes in literature. Richard was only 
 eighteen, Lucy was a year younger ; about 
 the age when they ought to have been 
 
 95
 
 ROMANCE AND YOUTH 
 
 whipped. So precisely thought Adrian 
 Harley, the wise youth. But when the wise 
 youth and the scientific humanist fought 
 romance with civilisation, misery came of it. 
 Mr. Meredith is no sentimentalist, he is indeed 
 our scourge for sentimentalists ; yet his heart 
 is surely all with Richard and Lucy. Which 
 is right ? Richard Feverel or the Wise 
 Youth ? Moliere or the Magistrate ? Ro- 
 mance or Civilisation ? 
 
 Well, suppose for a crooked answer to 
 a cross question we betake ourselves to 
 the lavish oracle of Bulwer Lytton. Bulwer 
 wrote Pelham when he was twenty-two ; and 
 he represented Pelham as dominating a 
 brilliant and cynical society when he had 
 but barely left college. He wrote Devereux 
 the year after ; and Devereux concludes the 
 history of his life at thirty-four with the 
 confession that love was for him a thing of 
 the past. It was twelve years later before 
 Ernest Maltravers and its sequel Alice were 
 finished ; and the reader might gather from 
 those romances that though eighteen may be 
 the age of folly and passion, the age for true 
 heroism is thirty-six. Later, Lytton took 
 
 96
 
 ROMANCE AND YOUTH 
 
 refuge in the old romantic device of an elixir 
 of perpetual youth. At whatever age one 
 finds one's-self, to be persuaded that that is 
 the age of romance, is not this the true elixir 
 of perpetual youth ? 
 
 97
 
 ON THE NAMING OF NOVELS 
 
 When Wilkie Collins died, the journals 
 told anecdotes about the straits he had 
 sometimes found himself in for a title. He 
 was especially perplexed, it seems, over a 
 volume of stories, which ultimately entered 
 the world as Mrs. Zant and the Ghost and 
 other Stories. The title was not so deep as 
 La Reclierclie de FAbsolu nor so wide as 
 Vanity Fair, but it was enough, — it served. 
 
 The pious reader may think a title a 
 matter of small consequence, a thing to be 
 left to the end like the preface ; an accom- 
 plished book might be trusted to name itself. 
 It is something of a shock to him to picture 
 writers of genius racking their brains for a 
 catching title, and then solemnly writing up 
 to it. In practice, however, the title is often 
 found to be a first care even with writers of 
 
 93
 
 ON THE NAMING OF NOVELS 
 
 genius. The name has been known to 
 precede the novel by an interval of thirty- 
 years. Some novels have never got, and 
 never will get, beyond the name. That is 
 the case with La Qiiiquengrogne of Victor 
 Hugo. The name which found its novel 
 after thirty years of waiting was Theophile 
 Gautier's Le Capitalize Fracasse. In the rich 
 and reckless days of 1830 it was a fashion in 
 France with literary beginners to announce 
 on the backs of their first books an impos- 
 ing list of forthcoming works ; it attracted 
 attention and gave them airs of established 
 authorship. They would choose at random 
 a list of high-sounding and bizarre titles in 
 the romantic taste of the time, without being 
 at all in a position to make good the promise 
 or having any definite plan for the books 
 foreshadowed. In this way had appeared 
 on Renduel's covers, a fashionable publisher 
 of the day, an announcement of Le Capitaine 
 Fracasse. Thirty years after date Gautier 
 took up the bill drawn by his youth on 
 futurity, and wrote the book. There was no 
 longer any commercial obligation to meet. 
 People had given up asking, ' When is Le 
 
 99
 
 ON THE NAMING OF NOVELS 
 
 Capitaine Fracasse coming out?' Most 
 people fancied it had come out ; some had 
 gone the length of criticising it. But none 
 the less the thing was on Gautier's con- 
 science. For thirty years, amid the thou- 
 sand cares of life, on his travels, in the 
 ceaseless grind of journalism, he was haunted 
 by a remorseful memory of the unfulfilled 
 promise, long ago forgotten, no doubt, by all 
 save himself. There is an Oriental fantasy 
 that statues and people in pictures crowd 
 round the artist at the Judgment Day 
 clamouring for souls. Gautier had a dread 
 that thus he would meet Le Capitaine 
 Fracasse. His christening had given the 
 hero an inchoate spiritual existence which 
 craved completion, an incontestable right 
 to become a romance in two volumes. And 
 so in the fulness of time Gautier endowed 
 him with his two volumes and housed him, 
 picturesquely if uncomfortably, in the Cha- 
 teau de la Misere. The task was not 
 accomplished without disturbing sentimen- 
 tal memories, and waking regrets for a day 
 that was dead and in course of being ener- 
 getically buried by a later literary genera- 
 
 IOO
 
 ON THE NAMING OF NOVELS 
 
 tion. Like an architect completing an 
 unfinished design, Gautier set himself to 
 write Le Capitaine Fracasse in the fashion of 
 1830. He strove to forget, to shut out the 
 uncongenial present, to live retrospectively 
 in the beaux jours of romanticism. The 
 reader will not find in these pages, Gautier 
 pathetically observes, any political, moral or 
 religious thesis ; no great problem is dis- 
 cussed, no cause argued. Gautier, you see, 
 had lived too long into the day of M. Dumas 
 Jils, the son who had declined an offer from his 
 wonderful pere prodigue of a partnership in his 
 magnificent business of romance manufacture. 
 Even Flaubert, who could still talk after 
 Gautier's own heart about artfor art's sake, had 
 but now written Madame Bovary ; and the art 
 of Madame Bovary is another pair of shoes al- 
 together from the art of Le Capitaine Fracasse. 
 Here should be an awful example to a name 
 not to put off its novel for thirty years. 
 
 The sober English reader may decline to 
 accept, as a normal type in methods of novel 
 writing, the man who flaunted the too 
 famous red waistcoat in token of literary 
 revolution. Will he accept Dickens ? Well, 
 
 101
 
 ON THE NAMING OF NOVELS 
 
 with Dickens, too, the title was the first 
 necessity, the originating impulse. Till he 
 had fixed upon his title, he could not get 
 seriously to work. He was in Genoa in 
 1844, and had a Christmas story to write. 
 He had never, he said, so staggered upon 
 the threshold before. The subject was there, 
 but he had not found a title for it, or the 
 machinery to work it with. ' Sitting down 
 one morning resolute for work though 
 against the grain, his hand being out and 
 everything inviting to idleness, such a peal 
 of chimes arose from the city as he found 
 " maddening." All Genoa lay beneath him, 
 and up from it, with some sudden set of the 
 wind, came in one fell sound the clang and 
 clash of all its steeples pouring into his 
 ears again and again, in a tuneless, grating, 
 discordant, jarring, hideous vibration, that 
 made his ideas "spin round and round till 
 they lost themselves in a whirl of vexation 
 and giddiness and dropped down dead." ' A 
 couple of days later he wrote to Forster a 
 letter of one sentence : ' We have heard the 
 chimes at midnight, Master Shallow.' A 
 few days later again he writes : ' It is a 
 
 102
 
 ON THE NAMING OF NOVELS 
 
 great thing to have my title and see my 
 way how to work the bells. Let them clash 
 upon me now from all the churches and 
 convents in Genoa. I see nothing but the 
 old London belfry I have set them in. In 
 my mind's eye, Horatio.' Thus it was 
 always with Dickens when setting about a 
 new novel. Despondency, doubts, difficulties 
 and endless experimenting, suggesting, sift- 
 ing, rejecting of titles. Then of a sudden, a 
 title found, and he was off on the composi- 
 tion of the book. Never were the prelim- 
 inary throes more protracted than with 
 David Copperfield. Toward the end of 1848 
 he was making holiday at Broadstairs, his 
 mind running on a subject. ' I have not,' he 
 writes from there, 
 
 ' seen Fancy write 
 With a pencil of light 
 On the blotter so solid commanding the sea, — 
 
 but I shouldn't wonder if she were to do it 
 one of these days. Dim visions of diverse 
 things are floating around me : — I must go 
 to work head foremost when I get home.' 
 Home he goes, yet gets no further. In 
 February, 1849, he is in Brighton: 'A sea- 
 
 103
 
 ON THE NAMING OF NOVELS 
 
 fog to-day, but yesterday inexpressibly 
 delicious. My mind running like a high 
 sea on names — not satisfied yet though.' 
 On February 23d he had found a title of 
 some sort, to wit, Mags Diversions, Being 
 the Personal History of Mr. Thomas Mag the 
 Younger of Blunderstone House. Then 
 came a series of variations in the expository 
 part of the title, Blunderstone House after a 
 time becoming Copperfield House. Then 
 came The Personal History of Mr. David 
 Copperfield the Younger and his Aunt Mar- 
 garet. On February 26th he sent Forster 
 a list of six names, which may be found set 
 out at length in the Life. Forster and 
 Dickens's children finally determined his 
 choice among the six, and the title once 
 settled all is plain sailing. He went through 
 this elaborate process with most of his titles. 
 There were a dozen tentative titles for Bleak 
 House, most of them leading off with Toiu- 
 all-alone's, and fourteen for Hard Times. It 
 was the same with A Tale of Two Cities. 
 Martin Chuzslezvit was Martin always ; but 
 he began as Martin Sweezleden, and 
 became in turn Sweezleback, Sweezle- 
 
 104
 
 ON THE NAMING OF NOVELS 
 
 wag, Chuzzletoe, Chuzzleboy, Chubblewig, 
 Chuzzlewig, and finally Chuzzlewit. In 1855 
 Dickens began keeping a book of memor- 
 anda and hints for subsequent working up, 
 which contained among other things nine- 
 teen titles for novels. Of these he used up 
 two for Christmas stories ; another, Nobody's 
 Fault, was the title first adopted for Little 
 Dorrit, the actual title being only substituted 
 just as the first number was going to the 
 printer. Our Mutual Friend was another 
 ultimately used, though there had not been 
 wanting in the interval critics to point out 
 its inaccuracy of language. The rest no 
 doubt will crowd about Dickens at the 
 Judgment Day clamouring for completion. 
 But Dickens was never the man to quail 
 before a gibbering shade ; he would have 
 snapped his fingers at a poor Capitaine 
 Fracasse. Many a hard-pressed living novel- 
 ist, however, might be glad to take his 
 liabilities off his hands. In these times, 
 harder than the hard times of Dickens, it is 
 something to light on a list of eligible titles 
 going begging. Two of them, The Children 
 of the Fathers and Two Generations, have 
 
 105
 
 ON THE NAMING OF NOVELS 
 
 already been absorbed by TourguenefPs 
 great novel, Fathers and Sons ; another, The 
 Young Person, may perhaps be thought now 
 too serious a reality to be lightly played 
 with ; Dust, another of them, has been used 
 by Mr. Julian Hawthorne. 
 
 How names and titles set Dickens's im- 
 agination to work is one of the mysteries of 
 genius. The settled name, it may be, was 
 just an outward sign of the inward crystal- 
 lising of his hitherto floating ideas. But with 
 Dickens's confessed experience before him, 
 nobody can presume to say that the title is 
 of no artistic consequence. In these days, 
 however, of over-population in fiction, the 
 chief difficulties are perhaps rather com- 
 mercial and legal. Art may have no concern 
 with legal and commercial considerations, 
 but the poor artist has often more concern 
 than enough. It is becoming every day more 
 difficult to hit upon a striking title which has 
 not been already used ; and the more obscure 
 the forestalling book, the more tenaciously 
 are proprietary rights in the title insisted on. 
 One hears of authors having been forced 
 to change twice, or even thrice, names over 
 
 1 06
 
 ON THE NAMING OF NOVELS 
 
 which they have been rejoicing with all the 
 pride of a first discovery ; horrid tales are 
 even told of dummy books hastily run up 
 for the express purpose of forestalling and 
 wringing money out of popular writers. We 
 shall probably live to see a corner or ring in 
 titles. Commercially, of course, the essentials 
 of a good title are that it should arrest at- 
 tention and whet appetite. The fierceness 
 of the struggle for life among novels is the 
 only excuse for all the silly, forced, and far- 
 fetched names one hears. It is the com- 
 mercial importance of the title that has given 
 publishers their generally recognised claim to 
 have a word in the choice, and they have 
 often intervened with effect. The excellent 
 title Rob Roy was, as Lockhart tells us, the 
 suggestion of the publisher Constable, but he 
 had great difficulty in persuading the author. 
 ' What,' said Scott, ' Mr. Accoucheur, must 
 you be setting up for Mr. Sponsor too ! — but 
 let us hear it' Constable maintained that 
 the name of the real hero would be the best 
 possible name for the book. ' Nay,' answered 
 Scott, and it is an answer worth a novelist's 
 marking, ' never let me have to write up to a 
 
 107
 
 ON THE NAMING OF NOVELS 
 
 name. You well know I have generally- 
 adopted a title that told nothing.' The 
 bookseller, however, persevered, and after 
 dinner (what magic there is in a dinner !) 
 Scott yielded. Nor was this the only occa- 
 sion on which Constable set up for ' Mr. 
 Sponsor.' He disliked the title of The Abbot, 
 and would fain have had instead The Nun- 
 nery as a sequel to The Monastery. This time 
 Scott did not yield, — perhaps there was no 
 dinner. He, however, soothed the grumbling 
 Constable by accepting his suggestion that 
 he should introduce Oueen Elizabeth into a 
 romance as a companion picture to the Mary 
 Stuart of The Abbot. Constable was in- 
 stantly ready with a title and a subject, The 
 Armada, — a title, forsooth, that told nothing 
 and demanded no writing up to it ! Kings- 
 ley did not shrink from Hypatia, but he 
 would hardly have adventured The Armada 
 for Westward Ho ! For an Elizabethan 
 novel Scott turned to a subject that had long 
 been a favourite with him, the tragic story of 
 Amy Robsart. He meant to call the novel 
 after the ballad, Cumnor Hall ; but Constable 
 again interfered and proposed Kenilworth. 
 
 1 08
 
 ON THE NAMING OF NOVELS 
 
 This, on the other hand, John Ballantyne did 
 not approve of, and prophesied with bad 
 judgment and a worse pun that the result 
 would be something worthy of the kennel. 
 Scott, good easy giant, though his instinct 
 for the practical no less than the literary side 
 of his business was worth that of a street-full 
 of booksellers, fell in with the suggestion of 
 the imperious Constable, whose vanity, ac- 
 cording to his partner Cadell, now boiled 
 over so much at having his suggestion again 
 approved that in his high moods he used to 
 stalk up and down his room exclaiming, ' By 
 
 G , I am all but the author of the 
 
 Waverley Novels ! ' 
 
 Yet Scott had done more wisely to 
 stick to his own idea. The meeting at 
 Kenil worth was but an episode, though it 
 was the episode which precipitated the 
 catastrophe. And the title has moreover the 
 disadvantage of directing attention to the 
 anachronism of the plot. No sensible person 
 is afraid of anachronism in art so long as the 
 art triumphs, and, as here, a fine dramatic 
 situation is gained ; but if the art is to 
 triumph, it is wiser to let the sleeping his- 
 
 109
 
 ON THE NAMING OF NOVELS 
 
 torical conscience lie. Scott was fully alive 
 to the wisdom of this policy. Left to him- 
 self he instinctively avoids the mistake of 
 naming an historical novel after an historical 
 character or event. It is Quentin Durward 
 not Lewis the Eleventh, Anne of Geierstein, 
 not Charles the Bold ; there is no hint of 
 Saladin or crusading Richard in the The 
 Talisman or of masquerading Richard in 
 Ivanhoe. Scott was obviously right. He 
 was writing romance, not history. To give 
 a purely historical title is to bargain with the 
 reader to give him historical treatment. To 
 The Armada Scott could never have con- 
 sented ; Kenikvorth, depend upon it, was a 
 concession against his better judgment. Even 
 the undaunted Dumas, who tackles history 
 more directly and more at large than Scott 
 ever chose to do, calls his famous book not 
 after Richelieu, Mazarin, or Lewis the Four- 
 teenth, but after the Three Musketeers. That 
 is an admirable title by the way, so mysterious 
 and suggestive. There is always something 
 fascinating about numbers in titles ; and here 
 the title is none the less admirable that the 
 musketeers were in fact not three but four, 
 
 no
 
 ON THE NAMING OF NOVELS 
 
 and that the fourth was the best of the bunch, 
 the immortal d'Artagnan. But if Constable 
 did Scott a bad turn over Kenilworth, he 
 made amends by getting Herries changed to 
 the high-sounding romantic name Redgaunt- 
 let. Herries would have served, but it is not 
 the pleasant mouthful that Redganntlet is. 
 Indeed as the Waverley Novels are the best 
 of all romances, so their names are the best 
 of all names. Waverley, Old Mortality, The 
 Heart of Midlothian, — they are perfect. 
 Scott's answer to Constable put the wisdom 
 of the thing in a nutshell. His titles arouse 
 curiosity without discounting it ; they are 
 distinctive and appropriate, come trippingly 
 off the tongue and satisfy the ear, and have 
 withal a twang of romance about them. 
 Scott, of course, besides his genius, had the 
 advantage of coming early in the day, and 
 had no need to shout to make himself heard 
 amid the din of a crowd. Miss Austen died 
 only a very few years after Scott turned from 
 poetry to prose romance, and Lytton was 
 only beginning to write as the wonderful 
 Waverley series was drawing to a close in 
 stress and difficulty. 
 
 in
 
 ON THE NAMING OF NOVELS 
 
 But if Ivanhoe is the name for romance, 
 Tom Jones is the name of a novel. Tom 
 Jones was not by any means a name taken 
 at random. Fielding was quite as anxious 
 in his day, as Thackeray and George Eliot 
 were in theirs, to claim credit for finding and 
 making interesting an ordinary specimen of 
 mere flesh and blood. Tom Jones was a 
 name selected to indicate two things : that 
 the hero was not to be an antiquated hero of 
 romance, but something far more real and 
 substantial ; and that, though a real man, he 
 was to be more than an individual real man 
 — he was to be typical and significant. Tom 
 Jones has many followers ; I do not refer to 
 Lady Bellaston, but to such titles as Tom 
 Brown or Mr. Smith. It has been thought 
 astonishing that a novel should have con- 
 trived to subsist with such a title as Mr. 
 Smith. But this was no makeshift ; it is a 
 singularly happy title. Mr. Smith, a short, 
 stout, grey man, middle-aged, a bachelor and 
 rich, comes as a stranger to settle near the 
 village of Eastworld. The vulgar genteel 
 families of the place are distracted between 
 the professional advantages and social disad- 
 
 112
 
 ON THE NAMING OF NOVELS 
 
 vantages of calling upon him, till they dis- 
 cover late in the day that ' the County ' 
 knows him. The beauty among a set of 
 flirting motherless sisters had given such 
 heart as she had to give to a snob of a soldier, 
 who kissed her at home and denied her in the 
 better houses of the neighbourhood ; but for 
 marriage she schemes to catch the rich 
 middle-aged man honoured with the friend- 
 ship of eligible acquaintance. Mr. Smith, 
 thinking no guile, and equally grateful to 
 kind friends of all sorts and conditions, falls 
 in love with the beautiful girl, but can hardly 
 bring himself to believe that the prize is for 
 him. He thinks no scandal nor will listen to 
 it. And then suddenly, as the author has re- 
 cently said did really happen with his proto- 
 type in life, on the very eve of his marriage he 
 died. His life and his death lift the book, as 
 they lifted Eastworld, out of what had other- 
 wise been a dead level of unendurable vulgar- 
 ity. The soldier and girl marry ; but with eyes 
 opened to see their own unworthiness and with 
 a ' quickened sense of the compass of human 
 feeling' from having once known a simple, 
 noble Christian gentleman, Mr. Smith. 
 H 113
 
 ON THE NAMING OF NOVELS 
 
 Most novels, like this one, naturally derive 
 their point and principle of unity from the 
 character or career, the action or passion, of 
 some one among their personages. And the 
 name of that person, as Constable urged 
 rightly enough, supplies the natural name for 
 the book. Accordingly among the myriads 
 of works of fiction this form of title is out and 
 away the most common. With the excep- 
 tion of Jane Austen's double-barrelled alli- 
 terative titles, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and 
 Sensibility, which also have not been without 
 their influence, up to Scott's time the chief 
 novels were named after the hero or heroine : 
 Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Tom Jones, 
 Amelia, Joseph Andrews, — it is a remark of 
 Mr. Austin Dobson's that Fielding wisely 
 finds room in the full title for Parson Adams, 
 — Pamela, Clarissa Harlowe, — Richardson in- 
 clines to the women, Fielding to the men, — 
 Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Tristram 
 Shandy, Evelina, Cecilia. Then, one step 
 removed, the Vicar of Wakefield and the Man 
 of Feeling. The proper names are amplified 
 with expository phrases such as The Personal 
 History, The Life and Adventures, and so 
 
 114
 
 ON THE NAMING OF NOVELS 
 
 forth ; a fashion to which Dickens returned, 
 perhaps for the sake of its old-fashioned 
 flavour, after Scott had shown a more excel- 
 lent way of brevity. ' His Birth and Other 
 Misfortunes,' the expository sub-title of, if I 
 recollect aright, dux's Baby, might have 
 done for Tristram Shandy except that poor 
 Tristram's misfortunes began long before his 
 birth. The actual title, however, The Life 
 and Opinions of Mr. Tristram Shandy, Gentle- 
 man, is sufficiently diverting. 
 
 Where a book depicts a small community 
 in which no single figure is pre-eminent, we 
 sometimes get titles like Villette — a neat 
 nickname for Brussels, Barchester Towers, 
 Middlemarch, the last as good a title as 
 could be invented for the book. George 
 Eliot could not have christened it after 
 Dorothea or Lydgate without ignoring half 
 its contents. Let us be thankful she spared 
 us that terrible modern form of title, ' A 
 modern Saint Theresa.' It is indeed not 
 always easy to determine which figure is 
 the protagonist. So among George Eliot's 
 characters : not one man probably in a 
 thousand would have picked out Daniel 
 
 ii5
 
 ON THE NAMING OF NOVELS 
 
 Deronda for the honour, such as it is, of 
 naming that not very successful book. I 
 am not sure that, for my part, I should have 
 picked Adam Bede for this honour ; the 
 cast-iron man dear to feminine imagination 
 has no charm for me. Hetty would be the 
 sentimentalist's choice, to remind Adam and 
 Dinah, whom George Henry Lewes had 
 joined, that while they were enjoying their 
 blameless lives Hetty was eating out her 
 shallow little heart in transportation. The 
 beauty of Hetty is as deeply felt as anything 
 in the book ; and, as Mr. Browning's Fra 
 Lippo Lippi says, 
 
 ' If you get simple beauty and nought else 
 You get about the best thing God invents.' 
 
 There are people, however, who would have 
 named the book after Dinah. ' The Tragedy 
 of the Hall Farm ' would have the advantage 
 of bringing into focus Mrs. Poyser's all- 
 conquering tongue. A critic, by the way, 
 has found great significance in the primi- 
 tive and elemental savour of the name 
 Adam Bede. The initials A, B begin the 
 alphabet ; Adam was the first man ; the 
 venerable Bede comes decidedly early in our 
 
 116
 
 ON THE NAMING OF NOVELS 
 
 literature. Plain folk will probably consider 
 such criticism ridiculous. It is a coincidence 
 that Amos Barton begins with A and B. 
 
 For Ivanhoe, Thackeray in parody puts 
 Rebecca and Rowena. I suppose to most 
 readers, certainly to most male readers, 
 Rebecca is more the heroine than Ivanhoe 
 is the hero. Rebecca and Richard Lion- 
 heart share the honours, and that was 
 doubtless Scott's reason for calling the book 
 after Ivanhoe. So in Guy Mannering, The 
 Antiquary, Old Mortality, he of set purpose 
 avoids the conventional hero. 
 
 When one begins shifting titles, one knows 
 not where to stop, — that is always the 
 weakness of the reformer. Would not, for 
 example, Le Pere Grandet be the true title 
 for Euge'nie Grandet ? The masterly delinea- 
 tion of the miser is the achievement of the 
 book. His sacrifice of his daughter serves 
 essentially to throw him into relief. But 
 Balzac, sacrifice being a pet subject with 
 him, prefers always to take his title from the 
 victim of the sacrifice ; Eugenie Grandet, 
 Le Lys dans la Vallee, Le Pere Goriot. Le 
 Pere Goriot is a good name for a fine book ; 
 
 117
 
 ON THE NAMING OF NOVELS 
 
 yet I am not sure that La Maison Vauquer 
 would not fit the book even better. True, 
 the tragedy is the tragedy of a father sacri- 
 ficed to his daughter's lust and avarice. But 
 the pension is the scene and very symbol of 
 his martyrdom, and the house, like the book, 
 has dark secrets not directly connected with 
 Goriot's story. In his treatment of the 
 Maison Vauquer, Balzac reaches romanticism 
 through realistic methods. This one sinister 
 house stands out from the houses about it 
 with a lurid light upon it. Picked out in 
 this light, the mean lodging-house reveals 
 itself as a centre and heart of suffering, 
 scheming, struggling, criminal Paris. To 
 make the work of the builder's hands colour 
 and overshadow the lives of men, to give 
 it a physiognomy and a soul that haunt 
 the imagination as of a thing alive and 
 purposeful, — this is a note of romanticism. 
 It is a function of romance to read its 
 appropriate legend into a tower, a ruin, a 
 stream, a glen, — the legend which expresses 
 and completes it by seizing and making 
 permanent its lurking and evanescent sug- 
 gestiveness. Accordingly, since the era of 
 
 nS
 
 ON THE NAMING OF NOVELS 
 
 romanticism names of places have been 
 almost as common in titles as names of 
 people. The long line of early English 
 novels named after the hero or heroine 
 is significantly broken as early as 1765 
 by a story named after a haunted castle, 
 Horace Wal pole's Castle of Otranto. Even 
 in the eighteenth century the romantic spirit 
 was not left altogether without witness, — 
 the witness baffled, only half serious, only 
 half conscious, of the dilettante Horace 
 Walpole and his friend, the poet Gray. 
 The book was suggested, Walpole tells us, 
 by a dream. ' I had thought myself in an 
 ancient castle (a very natural dream for a 
 head like mine, filled with Gothic story), 
 and that on the uppermost bannister of a 
 great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in 
 armour.' This gigantic hand in armour was, 
 as all readers will remember, the root of the 
 story. Gray reported that at Cambridge 
 the book made ' some of them cry a little, 
 and all in general afraid to go to bed o' 
 nights.' So here in full eighteenth century 
 we already find the temper and furniture of 
 later romance. The Castle of Otranto is 
 
 119
 
 ON THE NAMING OF NOVELS 
 
 the precursor of a whole fantastic procession 
 of castles, abbeys, cathedrals, palaces and 
 prisons, destined in later years to give their 
 names to romance and legend. Words- 
 worth's influence joined to Scott's has put 
 natural scenes and homely buildings along- 
 side of the castles and monasteries of earlier 
 romance. Hareton Earnshaw, Catherine 
 Linton and Heathcliff, with their untamed 
 Yorkshire passions, fantasies, furies, are 
 harmonised and set off against the bleak 
 beauty of the Yorkshire moorland scenery 
 of WutJiering Heights. The first glimpse 
 we get of Maggie Tulliver is of her standing 
 as a child watching the mill-wheel in the 
 Floss. (To be strictly accurate by the way, 
 it was not the Floss but its ' tributary Ripple.') 
 ' Maggie, Maggie,' cries her mother, ' where 's 
 the use o' any one telling you to keep away 
 from the water? You'll tumble in and be 
 drowned some day, an' then you '11 be sorry 
 you didn't do as mother told you.' The 
 rushing of the Floss is her song of destiny 
 in our ears all through the quarrel and 
 trouble about Dorlcote Mill, till in the end 
 the flood closes over the heads of brother 
 
 120
 
 ON THE NAMING OF NOVELS 
 
 and sister reunited in death. Sister Maggie 
 George Eliot herself had called the story ; 
 The Mill on the Floss, (bar the slight inac- 
 curacy, one of the perfect titles), was due 
 to her publisher Blackwood. The House of 
 the Seven Gables is but a dwelling-place for 
 the curse which doomed the Pyncheons, 
 generation after generation, to their choking, 
 bloody death. Of the whole class, perhaps 
 the finest instance is Victor Hugo's Notre 
 Dame de Paris. The great cathedral is a 
 haunting, importunate presence throughout 
 the romance till Frollo's fingers lose their 
 agonised grip on its yielding leads. And 
 withal it is the real and sufficient symbol of 
 Hugo's central idea. In his three great books, 
 Notre Dame, Les Travailleurs de la Mer, and 
 Les Miserables, Hugo set himself to typify 
 the triple tyranny against which humanity 
 struggles, the tyranny of superstition, the 
 tyranny of natural forces, and the tyranny 
 of human law. The great cathedral typi- 
 fies the tyranny of the mediaeval Church, 
 the tyranny of its beauty and grandeur, 
 its morbid and grotesque imagination, its 
 mystery and terror. And then the irony 
 
 121
 
 ON THE NAMING OF NOVELS 
 
 of such a title for the story of a graceful 
 innocent gipsy girl hunted to death by the 
 lust and hate of the consecrated servant of 
 a religion of pity and chastity, of our pure 
 and gentle Lady, Notre Dame de Paris ! 
 
 That is what a great title can do. It not 
 only summarises and clinches ; it is also 
 commentary and chorus. Such titles as Le 
 Roi s Amuse or Fromont Jeune et Risler 
 Aznc are whole volumes in themselves. 
 Hugo was not so happy with the titles of 
 the other two parts of his trilogy. The title 
 Les Miserables is too wide for its idea. We 
 feel after we have done with Javert and Jean 
 Valjean that, as I think Mr. Bret Harte puts 
 it at the close of his diverting parody, there 
 are still plenty of miserables left. 
 
 It indeed often happens that an other- 
 wise fine title is too wide, like an algebraical 
 formula for a specific problem. Thackeray 
 is said to have been finely elated over his 
 title of Vanity Fair; but, as a matter of 
 fact, Vanity Fair does not characterise the 
 scenes of Becky's triumphs and degradation 
 any more specially or properly than it would 
 characterise the rest of Thackeray's works. 
 
 122
 
 ON THE NAMING OF NOVELS 
 
 It has been a custom with some French 
 novelists to adopt a general heading for a 
 series of novels ; Balzac's La Comedie 
 Hnmaine, for example, M. Daudet's Mosurs 
 Parisiennes, M. Ohnet's Les Batailles de la 
 Vie, so much scoffed at by the vivacious Gyp 
 and others. Vanity Fair would have served 
 Thackeray admirably for such a purpose, 
 with his persistent refrain of Vanitas Vani- 
 tatum. Many fine titles of Balzac again 
 have this defect of overwideness. La Femme 
 de Trente Ans, Les Illusions Perdues (which 
 might stand as the title for Flaubert's 
 complete works), Les Parents Pauvres — La 
 Cousine Bette and Le Cousin Pons do not 
 exhaust the dramatic possibilities of the 
 poor relation ; or lastly that very uninviting 
 title, which would characterise a school of 
 novels better than a single story, Les Petites 
 Miseres de la Vie Conjugate. This is indeed 
 precisely what one might expect with Balzac, 
 because Balzac set himself, quite solemnly 
 and in apparent good faith, to exhaust the 
 whole of human experience in the forty little 
 yellow volumes which a modern young man 
 has vowed he would not give in exchange 
 
 123
 
 ON THE NAMING OF NOVELS 
 
 for Shakespeare. Obviously no title could 
 be too wide to indicate the magnificent 
 scope of such a design. Of course it must 
 not be denied that a great novel may so 
 seize and express a typical piece of human 
 experience as to justify the assumption of a 
 generic title, doing in pure fiction the kind 
 of thing which Hamlet has done in poetic 
 tragedy. Perhaps Vanity Fair is such a 
 case. Perhaps Madame B ovary could bear 
 the title Les Illusions Pet-dues. Perhaps 
 Tourgueneff's Fathers and Sons justifies 
 itself by an adequate grasp and by a typical 
 example of the inevitable tragic clash of 
 ideas between succeeding generations in an 
 epoch of change. 
 
 This defect of overlapping the specific 
 subject is one of the many vices of those 
 detestable modern titles consisting of pro- 
 verbs or quotations. Mr. Swinburne once 
 suggested that it would be a benevolent 
 despotism, and worthy of Matthew Arnold's 
 ideal academy, which should make it a penal 
 offence against literature for any writer to 
 affix a proverb, a quotation, but above all 
 things a line of poetry, by way of tag or title 
 
 124
 
 ON THE NAMING OF NOVELS 
 
 to a novel. At the best, titles like Love me 
 little Love me long, Lt is Never too Late to 
 Mend, Red as a Rose is She, One Traveller 
 Returns, are, as Mr. Swinburne calls the first, 
 very silly labels. They are not only awk- 
 ward, they are essentially illegitimate. It is 
 generally speaking an impertinence to use 
 up a proverb, or a fine line of poetry of 
 world-wide application for one's own poor 
 bounded story. It is a sacrilege to desecrate 
 with less choice associations a name enskied 
 and sainted in imperishable poetry, — like 
 Proud Maisie, for instance. It is an outrage 
 to apply to the crude sentimentality of a 
 Kate Chester, to use indeed for any transient 
 love-tale of the hour, the plea rung from the 
 great tortured heart of Othello, ' Tell them I 
 loved not wisely, but too well,' or the cry of 
 Romeo, when he has slain Juliet's kinsman 
 and sees himself caught in the toils of fate, 
 ' Oh I am Fortune's fool ! ' I take examples 
 at random, meaning no disrespect to the 
 able authors of these particular novels ; but 
 they have plenty of wit to invent better titles 
 and leave Othello's jealousy and Romeo's 
 love in peace. 
 
 125
 
 ON THE NAMING OF NOVELS 
 
 It was Lord Lytton, I fancy, who began 
 with What will he do with it? the irritating 
 fashion of using for title an interrogative sen- 
 tence. A sentence for title is almost always 
 clumsy. A phrase, however, not in itself 
 clumsy, nor made offensive by misapplica- 
 tion, may make a good title ; witness the beau, 
 tiful name of Mr. Bret Harte's very beautiful 
 story Left out on Lone Star Mountain. 
 
 If after being pelted with all these in- 
 stances the reader has strength left to ask 
 with Juliet, What's in a name? (I acknow- 
 ledge that that quotation is an outrage) — 
 my answer is, the difference between Is he 
 Popenjoy ? which I take to be one of the 
 worst, and The Scarlet Letter which I take 
 to be one of the very best, of all titles. Con- 
 sider for a moment how perfect a title The 
 Scarlet Letter is. It tells nothing, yet it 
 tells everything. It fascinates before the 
 book is opened, it fascinates even more 
 powerfully after the book is closed. The 
 whole tragedy is in the title. It is the 
 symbol of Hester's sin, and the penalty of 
 her sin, the isolation, and the spiritual blight. 
 The symbol of The Scarlet Letter eats into 
 
 126
 
 ON THE NAMING OF NOVELS 
 
 the imagination of the reader as it ate into 
 the flesh of the remorse-racked Puritan 
 minister, till we see it everywhere in the air 
 before our eyes, as he saw it written on the 
 thunderous sky through the wild night when 
 he stood distracted on Hester's scaffold. 
 The book might have lived and prospered 
 under another name, say The Silence of the 
 Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale ; but it is surely an 
 added perfection that it should find in its 
 title, as it does now, its final sign and seal. 
 
 127
 
 NAMES IN NOVELS 
 
 Every lover of Balzac knows the story of 
 the famous search which ended in the dis- 
 covery of the name Z. Marcas : how Balzac 
 appointed Leon Gozlan to meet him in the 
 Champs Elysees to do him an important 
 service ; how Gozlan, racking his brain to 
 guess what this service might be, kept the 
 appointment on a certain wintry day of June ; 
 how it turned out that what Balzac wanted 
 was a name for the hero of a story he was 
 about to contribute to the Revue Parisienne. 
 In the driving rain Balzac expounded his 
 theory of names. He must have a name, he 
 said, that would fit his hero in every possible 
 respect, and he had exhausted his own 
 resources without being able to find such. 
 Now, names could not be manufactured ; 
 like languages, they were a natural product 
 a growth. 
 
 128
 
 NAMES IN NOVELS 
 
 ' If the name exists/ — began Gozlan, 
 zealously. 
 
 ' It does exist,' Balzac broke in with 
 solemnity. 
 
 So there was but one thing to be done, to 
 start there and then upon a voyage of dis- 
 covery. Gozlan suggested a scrutiny of the 
 names in the streets, and they set to work at 
 once, Balzac taking one side of the road, his 
 friend the other. They ran, head in the air, 
 into the passers-by, who took them for blind 
 men. Street after street Gozlan kept calling 
 Balzac's attention to the most appetising 
 names. Balzac rejected them all. Thus 
 they went from the Rue St. Honore" to the 
 Palais Royal, through all the streets abut- 
 ting on the Gardens, Rue Vivienne, Place de 
 la Bourse, Rue Neuve Vivienne, Boulevard 
 Montmartre : — but here Gozlan mutinied. 
 
 ' It is always the same,' cries Balzac, 
 ' Christopher Columbus deserted by his 
 crew.' 
 
 Then, turning to entreaty, he pleaded for 
 just as far as St. Eustache. That meant a 
 detour through innumerable streets to the 
 Place des Victoires, studded with magnificent 
 
 I 129
 
 NAMES IN NOVELS 
 
 Alsatian names smacking of the Rhine. 
 Again Gozlan threatened to abandon Balzac 
 unless he made an instant choice. 'Just the 
 Rue du Bouloi,' urges the indefatigable dis- 
 coverer ; and off they go once more, until in 
 the last section of the interminable street the 
 novelist stood transfixed and quivering in 
 front of the name ' Marcas.' 
 
 ' That will do splendidly, Marcas ! My 
 hero's name shall be Marcas. There is every- 
 thing I want in Marcas : the philosopher, the 
 writer, the statesman, the misunderstood 
 poet, Marcas implies it all ! ' 
 
 That was what Balzac required — a name 
 that would at a stroke depict and interpret 
 his hero, a name that should match his lot in 
 life, a name not tacked on at random, but 
 fitting naturally. Balzac insisted that the 
 name must answer to his hero's face, figure, 
 voice, his past and his future, his genius and 
 tastes, his passions, misfortunes, and glory. 
 Nothing shoit of that would satisfy him. 
 
 Balzac was not the only novelist thus par- 
 ticular about names. A touching story is 
 told of Flaubert and M. Zola, which I give 
 as I read it. ' The author of Salammbo was 
 
 130
 
 NAMES IN NOVELS 
 
 busy on his last work and with his constitu- 
 tional secretiveness had not revealed plot or 
 characters to his friends. Zola was writing- 
 a novel at the same time, and one afternoon 
 happened to tell Flaubert of a part allotted 
 to a man for whom he had just found the 
 very appropriate name of Bouvard. Flau- 
 bert turned pale and presented a picture of 
 blank discouragement. Some days later a 
 common friend came to Zola informing him 
 that Flaubert was in despair ; that Bouvard 
 was precisely the name he had fixed upon 
 for one of the characters in his own book ; 
 that it had cost him six years of research 
 and labour to find it ; that he had discovered 
 it at last in Normandy, in a village near 
 Yvetot, and could never hope to replace it. 
 It was all over with him if he could no longer 
 couple the name of Bouvard with that of 
 Pecuchet, for together they were the key- 
 stone of the work. "Well," said Zola, 
 gravely and sadly, after a long pause, "let 
 him have it. But I must love him very 
 dearly to give up such a unique and un- 
 approachable name as Bouvard. However, 
 it belongs to an idiot, whose sign I can read 
 
 131
 
 NAMES IN NOVELS 
 
 every day from my windows." The news of 
 the concession was carried to Flaubert, who 
 immediately started to embrace and thank 
 his friend, fully appreciating his disinterested- 
 ness and frankly confessing his inability to 
 have done the same.' 
 
 When Flaubert was writing H Education Sen- 
 timentale, a cousin of his wrote to ask him to 
 chancre the name of his unheroic hero Frederic 
 Moreau, on the ground that there were real 
 Moreaus at Nogent. Absolutely impossible, 
 replied Flaubert. A proper name was a 
 matter of extreme importance in a novel, 'une 
 chose capitate ' (the italics being Flaubert's). 
 A character could no more change his name 
 than the Ethiopian could change his skin. 
 If there happened to be real Moreaus at 
 Nogent, so much the worse for them. 
 
 Nor was it a bit of M. Zola's fun when he 
 professed to make a hard sacrifice to friend- 
 ship' in resigning to Flaubert his chosen 
 name. Quite recently he has made in public 
 a confession of faith that falls not at all short 
 of the Balzacian and Flaubertian fanaticism. 
 He, too, is a fatalist in the matter of names, 
 firmly believing that a mysterious correlation 
 
 132
 
 NAMES IN NOVELS 
 
 exists between the man and the name he 
 bears. What, however, with Balzac was 
 whim and fantasy, M. Zola after his fashion 
 has reduced to system. He does not roam 
 in the rain at hazard through the streets of 
 Paris, — not he ! He uses a directory. There- 
 from he makes a list of names which strike 
 him as likely to prove valuable, and selects 
 from time to time the most appropriate for 
 the parts he has in hand. That M. Zola 
 regards as reducing nomenclature to a 
 ' science.' More interesting is M. Zola's re- 
 mark, that he judges a young author by the 
 names which he bestows upon his characters. 
 If the names strike him as weak or unsuit- 
 able, he loses all interest in the writer and all 
 belief in his capacity. For a dissonance 
 between a name and a character he regards 
 in a novel as a very grave defect. 
 
 I suppose all novelists and story-tellers, 
 whether or not they are so exacting as this, 
 take some proper godfatherly or godmotberly 
 care in the christening of their creatures. 
 If they go no deeper, they at least observe 
 the more superficial and obvious distinctions 
 between character of bourgeois and gentle 
 
 133
 
 NAMES IN NOVELS 
 
 blood. They seek names appropriate to 
 calling or locality, and so forth. Most take 
 some pains at least about the naming of 
 hero and heroine. One class of novelists 
 appeals to a sentiment of romance with high- 
 sounding, historic names ; another betrays 
 the inevitable significance of nomenclature 
 by scrupulously employing none but the 
 most familiar. For myself, I own I like my 
 lady-loves of romance to have names that 
 the lips and the memory can linger over 
 lovingly, — Lorna Doone, Lucy Desborough, 
 Di Vernon, Beatrix Esmond. Clare Doria 
 Forey is like the close of a rich hexa- 
 meter, Mr. Lang has said. Poor Clare liked 
 to write her name so in full, because her 
 cousin's name was Richard Doria Feverel. 
 Nothing short of democratic training and 
 Bostonian naturalism could have hardened 
 Mr. Howells's heart into inflicting upon his 
 Lady of the Aroostook and her many 
 admirers, for the sake of whatever dramatic 
 point, the revolting surname Blood. Beau- 
 tiful and picturesque names are no small 
 element in the picturesque beauty of romance. 
 We revel in a luxury of graceful names in 
 
 134
 
 NAMES IN NOVELS 
 
 Arthur's court — amongst the Guineveres, and 
 
 and Iseults, and Tristrams, and Launcelots. 
 
 They have the flavour of fruit on the lips, 
 
 and haunt the ear like music. Generations 
 
 of hearts have beaten time to the syllables 
 
 Wilfred of Ivanhoe or Lucy of Lammer- 
 
 moor. The degradation of name is a bit 
 
 brutal, even for parody, in the diverting 
 
 •' Rejected Address ' which transforms — 
 
 ' " Charge, Chester, charge ! On, Stanley, on ! " 
 Were the last words of Marmion,' 
 into 
 
 ' " 'Od rot 'em," 
 Were the last words of Higginbottom.' 
 
 Juliet was the daughter of a land of lovely 
 names, or she would never have asked her 
 hackneyed question. To northern ears the 
 vowelled Italian names all sound beautiful 
 and magnificent. One wonders, ignorantly 
 no doubt, how an Italian Dickens would 
 find himself in droll and grotesque names. 
 There must be some temptation to make all 
 the boobies and villains Germans. Thanks 
 to what Matthew Arnold termed the touch 
 of grossness in our race, we are bounti- 
 fully provided with names of all shades of 
 vulgarity and hideousness. With us no 
 
 135
 
 NAMES IN NOVELS 
 
 booby nor villain, at all events, need go 
 inappropriately named. But it is unpardon- 
 able in fiction to burden a charming girl 
 with a vile name, and to make heroes of 
 Higginbottoms is a mere wantonness of 
 Zolaism. Art exists to console us for the 
 hardships and anomalies of life. 
 
 Glaring offences most writers avoid. They 
 succeed in securing at all events the super- 
 ficial proprieties of nomenclature. But what 
 Balzac sought was a propriety of nomen- 
 clature going very much deeper than this. 
 He was a believer in a mysterious affinity 
 and reciprocal influence between names and 
 people in actual life. Philosophers and the 
 mob, he claimed, were at one in holding this 
 view, so that there was no room left for a 
 single heretic without the pale. 
 
 ' Except for me,' interjected Gozlan. 
 
 What ! — didn't Gozlan believe that there 
 were names which recalled special objects — 
 a sword, a flower ? that there were names 
 which at once veiled and revealed the poet, 
 the philosopher, the painter? Racine, for 
 example — the very name, surely, depicted a 
 tender passionate poet. 
 
 136
 
 NAMES IN NOVELS 
 
 On the contrary, said Gozlan, to him it 
 only suggested a botanist or an apothecary. 
 
 'Well, Corneille? Corneille?' 
 
 No ; from Corneille the stubborn heretic 
 got simply the idea of some insignificant 
 bird. And, unconverted, he joined, as a 
 sheer act of good-fellowship, in the Columbus 
 expedition, without a shred of faith in the 
 promised land. Nor, it must be confessed, 
 was his scepticism shaken even by the 
 superb discovery, which intoxicated the 
 romance-writer. Balzac, equally unshaken, 
 carried the courage of his conviction to the 
 pitch of fearlessly guaranteeing actually at 
 the man's door that the veritable Marcas 
 would turn out to be a genius, a Benvenuto 
 Cellini. 
 
 'Wasn't that going rather far?' hinted 
 Gozlan. 
 
 ' With a name like that,' comes the sturdy 
 reply, ' it is impossible to go too far.' 
 
 The real Marcas was a tailor. Balzac's head 
 drooped for a few seconds. In a moment 
 it was proudly raised again. 'The man 
 deserved a better lot,' he said ; ' anyway, it 
 should be his business to immortalise him.' 
 
 137
 
 NAMES IN NOVELS 
 
 Respectable authority might be quoted in 
 support of Balzac's dogma from the days of 
 the solemn naming and renaming amongst 
 the Hebrews, down to the opinion of the 
 immortal Mr. Shandy. But whether we 
 accept it, or feel inclined rather to range 
 ourselves with the Gozlanites, there can be 
 little doubt that, in fiction at all events, 
 there should be some subtle appropriateness 
 in the naming of the dramatis persons. 
 
 What should be the nature of the appro- 
 priateness ? What should be the secret of 
 the affinity ? Should novelists permit them- 
 selves to manufacture names of transparent 
 significance, such as Fielding's Allworthy, 
 to take one of the early and simplest 
 instances? Or, like Balzac, ought they to 
 search for mystic meanings in real names ? 
 Or ought they to avoid significant names 
 altogether ? In the first place, can there 
 possibly be any affinity, apart from associa- 
 tion, between a mere meaningless proper 
 name and a character ? Gozlan said No. 
 He accounted for the significance that Balzac 
 found in such names as Racine and Corneille, 
 by the fact that they had been borne by 
 
 138
 
 NAMES IN NOVELS 
 
 <t 
 those great men. The characteristics of the 
 
 poets had become associated in the mind 
 with the sound of the names. This is no 
 doubt largely true. The influence of associa- 
 tion in matters of this kind is astonishingly 
 powerful, and it is an influence difficult to 
 discount. Of such associations of ideas 
 have not philosophers been found to create 
 worlds and systems, which they have them- 
 selves pronounced to be very good ? Take 
 such names as Keats and Chaucer, for 
 example. Would they not sound poor and 
 mean, could we once rob them of their 
 associations ? And the influence of associa- 
 tion is all the stronger in the case of the 
 men and women in novels, because we know 
 them so much more intimately than we 
 know our friends and neighbours in real 
 life. 
 
 Chadband, Miss Miggs, Micawber, Peck- 
 sniff, Sairy Gamp — were these names, 
 then, really once absolutely non-significant ? 
 Surely, in the mere name of Micawber there 
 already lurk suggestions of a waiting for 
 something to turn up. Enthusiasts have 
 been known to protest that from Silas 
 
 139
 
 NAMES IN NOVELS 
 
 Wegg's bare name they divined the whole 
 man, wooden leg and all. 
 
 Not a bit of it, retorts rationalising common- 
 sense ; make the experiment in a properly 
 scientific spirit, and see. Set a man innocent 
 of Dickens to evolve from the letters of the 
 word Pecksniff the character of the Salisbury 
 architect, or from the data of a misshapen 
 body and sly domestic cruelty ask him to 
 construct the name Quilp. 
 
 Well, and suppose he fail, his failure is by 
 no means fatal to the theory. To begin 
 with, nature undoubtedly affords abundant 
 instances of mysterious affinities between 
 apparently heterogeneous things. There is 
 the story, constantly told by psychologists, of 
 the blind man who, on his receiving his sight 
 by a surgical operation, straightway pro- 
 nounced scarlet to be like the sound of a 
 trumpet. Heliotrope owes its popular name 
 to a curious identity of scent and taste. Novel- 
 readers who follow the fashion may recall 
 the passage in one of those Russian novels 
 which are twice as natural as life, where the 
 capricious child Natacha tries to explain to 
 her mother in bed how she thinks of her 
 
 140
 
 NAMES IN NOVELS 
 
 lover Boris as being quite narrow and pale 
 grey, whereas Besoukhow was blue, dark 
 blue and red, and made her think of a square 
 thing. In very truth, scents, sounds, and 
 colours have infinite capacities of spiritual 
 suggestion. Herein lies the secret of the 
 potency of the sensuous arts. 
 
 What analysis could exhaust the possible 
 suggestiveness of names ? There are forebod- 
 ings in the mere sound of the syllables, and 
 mysterious intimations in the mere look of the 
 letters, which baffle all attempts at rational ex- 
 planation. And on this groundwork associa- 
 tion has woven intricate threads of suggestion, 
 philological, historical, romantic. Then, addi- 
 tional effect is wrought by a subtle conjunc- 
 tion of names. Trace the associations in the 
 two names, Clive, Newcome. Watch how the 
 music of Ethel Newcome's name is troubled 
 into discord by prefixing to the surname the 
 monosyllable Barnes. Nonsense, interrupts 
 common-sense. The monosyllable Clive 
 had served just as well to trouble the music, 
 if Thackeray had but distributed the parts dif- 
 ferently, and made Barnes a hero. It is all the 
 effect of associating man and name together. 
 
 141
 
 NAMES IN NOVELS 
 
 Well, but how comes it, then, that in 
 so many names, in spite of association, we 
 do not feel the affinity? To this day I 
 am persuaded that Arabin was only an 
 assumed name of the Dean of Barchester. 
 Other names, again, there are which answer 
 only to a part of the character. In Hetty 
 Sorrel's name, for example, there is the 
 kittenish grace and rustic charm ; but where 
 is the hard heart and vulgar vanity of 
 Martin Poyser's niece ? (Poyser, by the way, 
 is an excellent name for that admirable 
 couple.) And poor Major Dobbin's foolish 
 name leaves out the gallantry and loyalty, 
 preserving only and accentuating the notion 
 of a certain thick-hided patience. If Balzac's 
 faith ran something near to fanaticism, yet, 
 so far as fiction is concerned, it is surely 
 founded on wisdom. It is true that it is 
 only after name and character have been 
 joined together by the inspiration of the 
 author that they cannot again be put 
 asunder ; but the marriage only reveals, and 
 does not beget, the elective affinity. There 
 is a similar revelation of affinity, in spite of 
 Schopenhauer's dogmatic utterance to the 
 
 142
 
 NAMES IN NOVELS 
 
 contrary, when music is married to immortal 
 verse by a composer of dramatic genius. 
 Common-sense would scarcely evolve Schu- 
 mann's melody from Heine's Ich grolle 
 nicht, or Heine's poetry from Schumann's 
 music ; yet that marriage of music and 
 verse was none the less surely made in 
 heaven. 
 
 Oftentimes, however, either there has been 
 lacking the genius to create or discover 
 names of the miraculous potency of Z. Mar- 
 cas, or novelists have lacked faith in the 
 discernment of their readers ; and recourse 
 has been had to manufactured names with 
 obvious meanings. Dickens, who had a 
 wonderful faculty for creating or discovering, 
 at all events for his ludicrous or vulgar 
 characters, droll and bizarre names of start- 
 ling aptness, has given us also Lord Frederick 
 Verisopht, Sir Mulberry Hawk, Dotheboys 
 Hall, and a multitude of like inventions. 
 How far is this a legitimate practice ? There 
 are people who go into ecstasies of admira- 
 tion over the ingenuity and wit displayed in 
 the invention of names like these. There 
 are others who scornfully condemn the 
 
 143
 
 NAMES IN NOVELS 
 
 device as a symptom of poverty of imagina- 
 tion or mistaken art. Most readers, I fancy, 
 will find themselves differently affected by 
 different examples. Many a reader will be 
 startled and offended by Wrench and Fil- 
 grave as names for doctors in George Eliot 
 and Trollope, who would have an easy 
 tolerance for Lord Frederick Verisopht, and 
 would positively enjoy Jingle and the Veneer- 
 ings. For myself, I revel in the Deuceaces 
 and Bareacres, whereas it is a relief to me 
 that Becky so soon merges her too significant 
 surname in that of poor Rawdon Crawley. 
 
 Upon reflection, the different judgments 
 would seem to be due to no irrational caprice 
 of taste. The kind of name felt to be ap- 
 propriate depends upon the author's method 
 of presenting his creatures. No sane reader 
 quarrels with the Fidessas and Duessas, the 
 Sansfoys and Sansloys of the Faerie Queene. 
 Every reader of sense derives the keenest 
 satisfaction from the names of the diverting 
 population of Bunyan's Vanity Fair — Sir 
 Having Greedy, my Lord Fair-speech, and 
 Mr. Facing-both-ways, Mr. Love-lust and 
 Mr. Live-loose, Mr. Heady and Mr. High- 
 
 144
 
 NAMES IN NOVELS 
 
 mind. The reason is clear. Here we are in 
 a world of allegory. The aim is to teach 
 the reader, not to take him in with a show of 
 reality. Here we are only one step removed 
 from the old miracle-play, with its abstract 
 virtues and vices brought on to the stage 
 without any pretence of substantial personifi- 
 cation. Bunyan's narrative may beguile us 
 till we follow the combat between Christian 
 and Apollyon with a zest like that with 
 which we watch one of d'Artagnan's feats of 
 swordsmanship, or Jan Ridd's prowess with 
 his fists ; yet all the while we remain aware 
 that Christian is not a man, but a personified 
 type. 
 
 Let us go a step nearer to the novel. Of 
 the motley crowd who people the English 
 comic stage, a large proportion are signed in 
 the forehead with these directly significant 
 names — from Madge Mumblecrust and Tibet 
 Talkapace of Ralph Roister Doister, down 
 to the Surfaces, Teazles, Crabtrees, Backbites, 
 Absolutes and Languishes of Sheridan, to 
 come no later. What a world to live in, 
 were it real ! Carlyle had a vision of an 
 unclothed world, where the robes should fall 
 
 K 145
 
 NAMES IN NOVELS 
 
 from king and courtier, leaving only so many 
 forked radishes, with heads fantastically 
 carved. But the ensuing chaos would be 
 order compared with this world of exposed 
 souls. The commerce of life would be at a 
 standstill. What way could be found of 
 being genial with Morose or confidential with 
 Sir Giles Overreach, or with what counte- 
 nance should we introduce Sir Amorous la 
 Foole to the ladies of our family ? We should 
 have to stuff our handkerchiefs down our 
 throats on being gravely introduced to Sir 
 Fopling Flutter and Major Oldfox, unless, 
 perchance, unseasonable mirth were checked 
 by the reflection that our own style and title 
 had to be given in exchange as Dame Pliant 
 or Sir Epicure Mammon. Why do not such 
 absurdities, such patent unrealities, mar our 
 interest in the great comedies? Simply 
 because the world of the comic stage is not, 
 nor is it presented as, the everyday world of 
 decently disguised souls and bodies. This 
 very unreality, the making transparent of 
 opaque realities, is a chief element in the 
 delightfulness of the comic drama. ' The 
 Comic Spirit,' says Mr. Meredith, in his 
 
 146
 
 NAMES IN NOVELS 
 
 introductory remarks to The Egoist, 'has not 
 a thought of persuading you to believe in 
 him. Being a spirit, he hunts the spirit in 
 men : vision and ardour constitute his merit' 
 It is chiefly in his comedy characters that Mr. 
 Meredith allows himself the use of such 
 significant names as that ' masterpiece of 
 scientific nomenclature,' Sir Willoughby Pat- 
 terne. For comedy we settle ourselves in 
 our seats and adjust our opera-glasses, and 
 lay ourselves out to extract the uttermost 
 measure of critical amusement from the 
 sayings and doings of the cleverly constructed 
 world beyond the footlights. Illusion of 
 reality is not sought. Significant names are 
 a part of the game, like the other conventions 
 of the stage, from soliloquy to rouge and 
 powder. They have many special advan- 
 tages in comedy. They do for the comic 
 dramatist what a well-known story did for 
 the ancient tragedians, or for Shakespeare in 
 his historical plays, — they give to the gestures 
 and speeches of the actors pungency of irony 
 and piquancy of revelation. But a comedy 
 must be something more than an allegory. 
 There must be a counterbalancing measure 
 
 147
 
 NAMES IN NOVELS 
 
 of realism. The comic dramatist must 
 make you so far take his dramatis personal 
 for men and women, as to enable you to 
 sympathise with their feelings and lose 
 yourself in their fortunes. A proper regard 
 for young Absolute will not allow us to 
 remember too rigorously Lydia's disparaging 
 maiden name; and we are glad to be beguiled 
 by the realistic touch given by old Absolute 
 that she was not one of the Languishes of 
 Worcestershire, but was the Miss Languish 
 who came with her aunt, Mrs. Malaprop, 
 into their country just before Jack was last 
 ordered to his regiment. 
 
 According as the element of allegory or 
 the element of realism predominate in the 
 artist's method, will be the wisdom or un- 
 wisdom of employing realistic or allegorical 
 names. Where allegory predominates, where 
 our attention is directed chiefly to the skill 
 of the dramatist in showing up the foibles 
 of humanity, and winding mean and vicious 
 actions into situations of laughable entangle- 
 ment, then names which point the character 
 and explain situation come naturally in 
 place. But where it is sought to stir pity 
 
 148
 
 NAMES IN NOVELS 
 
 and fear and sympathy with the sufferings 
 and heroisms of men and women ; where, as 
 in tragedy, self-conscious observation of the 
 writer's art should be lost in overwhelming 
 feeling for the hero's destiny, there, so far as 
 I know, such names have never been adopted. 
 Ben Jonson, much of whose work is, as Mr. 
 Swinburne has recently said, a study not of 
 humanity but of humours, uses significant 
 names almost exclusively in his comedies. 
 Shakespeare, on the other hand, is sparing in 
 his use of them. Justices Shallow, Slender, 
 and Silence, with Fang and Snare the sheriff's 
 officers — the majesty of the law always fares 
 badly in the hands of satire ; the constable, 
 Dull ; Froth, a foolish gentleman ; Martext, 
 a vicar ; and that ragged regiment of Fal- 
 staff's recruits, Mouldy, Shadow, Wart, 
 Feeble, and Bullcalf, — almost exhaust the 
 list. 
 
 Have we not here the explanation of the 
 instinctive shock which we feel on being 
 introduced by George Eliot or Trollope to 
 the doctors, Wrench and Filgrave ? We are 
 taking Middlemarch and the Middlemarchers 
 in perfect seriousness and good faith. We 
 
 149
 
 NAMES IN NOVELS 
 
 know the people well, and understand their 
 life ; we need no prompting to divine the jar 
 between the old humdrum practitioners and 
 Lydgate with his modern science. To be 
 told that the humdrum practitioner is named 
 Wrench or Filgrave is like receiving a slap 
 in the face. We are rudely awakened, the 
 illusion of reality is brusquely dispelled. The 
 names are so glaringly made up ; it is too 
 unnatural to find these names crying in the 
 wilderness, preparing in the medical desert 
 of Middlemarch a highway for a truer 
 science. Where the aim is to produce by 
 art an illusion of everyday reality, where the 
 artist desires to keep himself and his artistic 
 scaffolding entirely out of sight, or only pre- 
 sents himself for the purpose of commenting 
 on people and things which are supposed to 
 exist independently of him, then the flinging 
 in the reader's face of palpably manufactured 
 names is the unpardonable sin of art, incon- 
 sistency. It is not to be pleaded that names 
 of this kind do actually occur in real life, 
 sometimes with startling appropriateness. 
 That truth is stranger than fiction, it has 
 been said, is but another way of saying that 
 
 150
 
 NAMES IN NOVELS 
 
 fiction may not dare to be so strange as 
 truth. And the cleverest disciple of perhaps 
 the greatest master of legitimate naturalism 
 in fiction admitted that the realists should 
 rather call themselves illusionists, and must 
 abstain from reproducing what is startling in 
 reality. In George Eliot's case the explana- 
 tion would seem to be, that she adopted sig- 
 nificant names for the small parts, to serve 
 instead of the long description which they 
 would not bear ; just as at the end of the 
 list of dramatis personce, instead of ' serving- 
 men,' 'sheriff's officers,' or a more unsavoury 
 retinue, the playwright sometimes puts 'Fang, 
 Snare,' etc. But, however legitimate for the 
 playwrights, it is a practice really inadmissible 
 in works like Middlemarch or Trollope's 
 novels. There, small as the point is, it is a 
 flaw. It makes the art obtrusive just where 
 it should remain concealed ; it wakes the 
 reader's suspicious criticism, just where such 
 criticism should be lulled to sleep. It is a 
 reappearance, in the least naive of the arts, of 
 those scrolls which issue so naively out of 
 the mouths of the personages in old pictures. 
 It is not difficult to see with how much 
 
 151
 
 NAMES IN NOVELS 
 
 more of natural ease Dickens can introduce 
 his Jingles and Veneerings. The art of 
 Dickens is often the art of caricature, often 
 it is the art of farce. His world is a gro- 
 tesque, pathetic, lurid, ludicrous world of his 
 own. He has brought together a teeming 
 population of quacks and mountebanks, and 
 waifs and strays, and monstrosities, for whom 
 his most extravagant names are accepted as 
 the only natural and proper ones. Another 
 reason, no doubt, that many of his names fit 
 the people with such convincing exactitude 
 is simply that the people themselves have as 
 little of a third dimension as the names. In 
 his wonderful art Dickens found room for 
 characters that are hardly characters at all 
 — not men and women, that is to say, 
 but rather phantasms, admirably suited to 
 heighten the effect of his mise -en- scene \ 
 phantasms that crack their finger-joints like 
 Newman Noggs, or play some other panto- 
 mime which will add just the ghastly, or 
 droll, or bizarre tone which he needs for his 
 effect. 
 
 But what shall we say of Thackeray and 
 his Deuceaces and Bareacres and the rest ? 
 
 152
 
 NAMES IN NOVELS 
 
 Thackeray is verily as great a realist as a 
 great artist can be. He prides himself on 
 presenting life as it is, unseasoned by the 
 hot spices of artificial romance. Nay he 
 employs devices to entrap the credulity of 
 the reader — the device, for example, of mak- 
 ing Arthur Pendennis, whom we know in- 
 dependently, tell the story of his young 
 friend Clive Newcome, and the noble meek- 
 hearted gentleman with whom he had seen 
 the boy at the Cave of Harmony. His 
 characters are no decorative figments to 
 amuse our fancy. They have become some 
 of the men and women we know best, per- 
 sonal friends or foes of our own. It consoles 
 us for living in these late days of a reformed 
 Parliament, that we have lived late enough 
 to have known Colonel Newcome. They are 
 no tears of unreal sentiment that we weep 
 over his martyrdom ; it is a very genuine 
 itch we feel to kick Barnes. In Thackeray's 
 case the justification of the artificial names 
 lies in this, that with all the solid reality of 
 the life portrayed, we are never allowed to 
 lose sight of the author and his art in por- 
 traiture. He is ever at hand to underline 
 
 153
 
 NAMES IN NOVELS 
 
 the snobbery or laugh off the pathos. The 
 strain of the satirist is strong in him, and 
 satire is akin to allegory ; there is even a 
 strain of the caricaturist ready to emerge in 
 the midst of his noblest art. He is especially 
 fond of putting on the airs and graces of the 
 showman. His preface to Vanity Fair is 
 headed ' Before the Curtain ' ; and this great 
 novel of real life concludes with ' Come, 
 children, let us shut up the box and the pup- 
 pets, for our play is played out.' And we 
 accept Thackeray's showman's humour. He 
 chooses to treat a character as a puppet and 
 call it Deuceace — that is his whim ; we know 
 the man, and believe in him none the less. 
 We are not to be taken in with the made-up 
 name. ' The famous little Becky puppet,' he 
 wrote, 'has been pronounced to be uncom- 
 monly flexible in the joints and lively on the 
 wire.' No : for my part, I cannot allow 
 Thackeray himself to treat Mrs. Rawdon 
 Crawley as a mere puppet ; and that I think 
 is why I resent her artificial maiden name. 
 
 154
 
 THE HISTORICAL NOVEL 
 
 The historical novel has never found favour 
 with the unco critical, nor is their hostility 
 without certain obvious justification. It 
 is a matter of common observation how 
 sadly writers err the moment they leave 
 the sphere of their personal experience. 
 The male novelist, who is wise, shuns the 
 details of his heroine's dress, and, like Mr. 
 Black, contents himself with such safe 
 generalities as 'all in cream white with a 
 bunch of scarlet geraniums in her bosom.' 
 The light brigade of lady novelists, less 
 easily daunted, makes its heroic charge into 
 university slang and the secrets of the 
 smoking-room ; and we exclaim, ' C'est ma- 
 gnifiquel but we do not look for success. 
 If the pitfalls lie so close at our door, to 
 plunge into the dim distances of history 
 must surely be to court disaster. And when, 
 instead of considering probabilities, we turn 
 
 155
 
 THE HISTORICAL NOVEL 
 
 to examples of novels historical and unhistori- 
 cal by the same authors, it may seem to 
 some that a comparison of, say, Romola 
 with Adam Bede, or of Esmond with The 
 Newcomes, goes to support the view of the 
 critics. In spite of the subtle truth of the 
 picture of moral dissolution presented in 
 Tito, most people in reading Romola ex- 
 perience a chilling sense of general unreality, 
 and withal a fatiguing consciousness of the 
 author's effort to be accurately Florentine, 
 which prevents it from taking in their hearts 
 an equal place with the earlier stories of 
 middle-class English life. Esmond is a 
 favourable example for the author : the age 
 of Queen Anne is not very far removed 
 from to-day, and the pages of The Spectator 
 make its character and manners familiar ; 
 Thackeray had an intimate literary know- 
 ledge of it — indeed Professor Seeley has had 
 to combat the heresy that the novelist 
 would have been its best historian. Yet 
 Esmond even, compared with Vanity Fair 
 or The Newcomes, has suffered somewhat in 
 popularity from its constraint of pose. Nay, 
 take Scott himself. Few will dissent from 
 
 156
 
 THE HISTORICAL NOVEL 
 
 the opinion that Scott's strongest characters 
 are to be found among the types he knew, 
 the peasants and lairds and bailies of 
 Scotland and the Border, the immortal race 
 of Dandie Dinmonts and Nicol Jarvies. 
 That was Lockhart's opinion. For the 
 matter of that, it was Scott's own opinion. 
 You may set Isaac of York and Rebecca 
 beside Davie and Jeanie Deans, without 
 any loss of picturesque charm, but hardly 
 without some weakening of the sense of 
 their reality. 
 
 No sooner had the prestige of Scott's 
 triumph waned, and his wand fallen into the 
 hands of weaker wizards, impotent to work his 
 spells, than critical objections to historical 
 romance began to find vigorous expression. 
 The hostility of the professed historians 
 was no doubt to be expected. But there is 
 Mr. Leslie Stephen, a professed literary 
 critic, who has spoken in his time much 
 good sense about fiction, frankly giving up 
 the historical novel. Hypatia and West- 
 ward Ho ! he speaks of as brilliant but 
 almost solitary exceptions to the general 
 dreariness of their class. He is sure they are 
 
 157 
 
 :r.
 
 THE HISTORICAL NOVEL 
 
 full of hopeless inaccuracies : he does not 
 believe that men like the Goths ever existed 
 in this world ; and he is prepared to give up 
 the whole tribe of monks, pagans, Jews, and 
 Fathers of the Church. Even in his ' dear 
 Ivan/we' he thinks that the buff-jerkin 
 business, which aroused Carlyle's easily- 
 aroused contempt, is an element of decay, 
 and that consequently the book is on the 
 high road to ruin, like one of Reynolds's 
 most carelessly painted pictures. He quotes 
 with approval Sir Francis Palgrave's opinion, 
 that historical novels are the mortal enemies 
 of history ; and adds for himself that they 
 are mortal enemies of fiction. 'There may 
 be an exception or two, but as a rule the 
 task is simply impracticable. The novelist 
 is bound to come so near to the facts that 
 we feel the unreality of his portraits.' This 
 is plain speaking ; yet in spite of all this Mr. 
 Stephen confesses that he rejoices in the 
 Amal and Raphael ben Ezra, and that he 
 loves Ivanhoe and Front-de-Bceuf and 
 Wamba the Witless. 
 
 If the lover chastise thus with whips, 
 it were no wonder if the late Professor 
 
 158
 
 THE HISTORICAL NOVEL 
 
 Freeman and the Bishop of Oxford chastised 
 with scorpions. Yet was it with some 
 evident lingering tenderness for the romance 
 that Freeman in a certain lecture admonished 
 the undergraduate anxious to understand 
 the age of the Crusades to forbear, 'if he 
 could so steel himself,' from reading Ivanhoe. 
 Objections, however, from the point of view 
 of the tutor of history are not necessarily 
 valid objections in the sphere of artistic 
 criticism. There are no doubt occasions 
 when the tutor, like the British matron, 
 may have a word to say on artistic 
 questions. But my inquiry is not whether 
 these romances are good science, but whether 
 they are good art ; and historical inaccuracy 
 will only concern me if it spoil the novel 
 as a novel, if it weaken, that is, the interest 
 of the story or the force of the dramatic 
 passion. It is no part of the proper function 
 of art to impart information ; and the 
 judicious novel-reader will rather rejoice 
 that his ' dear Ivanhoe ' is of no use for the 
 schools. If it is to be read at all, let it be 
 read, not for the sake of some illegitimately 
 acquired information, but for its own sake, 
 
 159 
 
 ..r
 
 THE HISTORICAL NOVEL 
 
 that the reader, like Mr. Stephen, may love 
 Wilfred, and Front-de-Bceuf, and Wamba 
 the Witless ; that he may shudder when 
 Rebecca stands on the dizzy edge that 
 sunders death from dishonour ; and in spite of 
 the scoff of the humourist breathe a sigh of 
 honest relief, when the Templar, ' unscathed 
 by the lance of the enemy falls a victim to the 
 violence of his own contending passions.' 
 
 In considering the strictures on historical 
 novels, the first thing that strikes one is, 
 that similar objections might be made as 
 well to most poetical treatments of historical 
 subjects. An undergraduate who should 
 boast, like the great Duke of Marlborough, 
 that he had learnt all his history from 
 Shakespeare, would, there can be no doubt, 
 have fared as badly at Freeman's hands as 
 he who had pinned his simple faith to 
 Ivanhoe or The Talisman. Wonderfully as 
 Shakespeare's Julius Ccesar has caught from 
 Plutarch the spirit of an epoch so different 
 from Elizabethan England, it manifestly 
 would not bear the microscope of modern 
 research. Yet poetry is freely allowed the 
 licence which is, it seems, to be denied to 
 
 1 60
 
 THE HISTORICAL NOVEL 
 
 the novel. There are indeed not wanting 
 signs of a tendency on the part of science to 
 dispute this license in the case of poetry 
 also. But hitherto at all events there has 
 been a clear difference between the attitude 
 of criticism to the historical novel, and its 
 attitude to historical plays or poems in 
 respect of this matter of accuracy. Poetry 
 has been freely allowed to use all history 
 as her storehouse of raw material, and to 
 re-create after her fashion its heroes and 
 heroines in her own image. Indeed a 
 great part of our finest literature is thus 
 derived. This difference of attitude can 
 hardly be accidental. It must be due to an 
 instinctive feeling in the minds of some 
 readers at all events that the novels are 
 spoiled by the inaccuracy, while the poetry 
 is not. And this would imply some essen- 
 tial difference between the methods of poetry 
 and the novel. 
 
 The distinction that immediately occurs 
 to one is that, while poetry comes to us 
 offering itself frankly as ideal re-creation, 
 novels present themselves professedly as 
 narratives of fact. The novel is bound to 
 
 L 161
 
 THE HISTORICAL NOVEL 
 
 be natural, that is, to present its facts in 
 their every-day guise. The reality looked 
 for in the poem is truth and consistency of 
 conception ; but an illusion of literal con- 
 formity to fact is instinctively required of 
 the novel. 'Your Shakespeare fashions his 
 characters from the hearts outwards ; your 
 Scott fashions them from the skin inwards, 
 never getting near the hearts of them.' So 
 wrote Carlyle, himself an unrivalled painter 
 of men from the skin outwards, in his essay 
 on the creator of Nicol Jarvic and Jeanie 
 Deans. Whatever one may think of Car- 
 lyle's grudging estimate of Scott, this remark 
 at least suggests a real contrast between the 
 procedure of poetry and the novel. Life as 
 we actually live it from day to day and from 
 hour to hour is, nine-tenths of it, a matter of 
 physical need and outward circumstance : 
 we eat and drink and sleep, and clothe 
 ourselves and house ourselves, and keep on 
 such terms as we may with our neighbours. 
 All this matter of habitual routine poetry 
 excludes, as irrelevant to the real import of 
 life, selecting only what is alive with purpose 
 and passion, what gives life its significance 
 
 162
 
 THE HISTORICAL NOVEL 
 
 and distinction. The novelist's method is 
 different, though his aim is the same. His 
 method is to present his subject in its every- 
 day dress to the every-day apprehension. 
 He accordingly is bound to wrap his drama 
 in a web of incidents and conversation which 
 shall mimic the routine of every-day life. 
 
 George Eliot's Adam Bede, like the episode 
 of Gretchen in Goethe's Faust, is a tragedy 
 of seduction. In the poetry, each of the 
 Gretchen scenes stands out by itself, essen- 
 tial and significant. The story of Hetty 
 Sorrel, in the novel, on the other hand, is 
 completely wrapped up in the daily life of 
 the old English village — church-going and 
 methodist preaching, Adam's carpentering 
 and Mrs. Poyser's butter-making and all. 
 For Gretchen's soul there is visible victory 
 of the angels of light over Mephistopheles. 
 Hetty Sorrel is convicted and transported. 
 The old grandfather grumbles in the chim- 
 ney corner, ' I mun begin to be looked down 
 on now, an' me turned seventy-two last 
 St. Thomas's, an' all the under-bearers and 
 pall-bearers as I 'n picked for my funeral are 
 i' this parish and the next to 't. It 's o' no 
 
 163
 
 THE HISTORICAL NOVEL 
 
 use now. I mun be ta'en to the grave 
 by strangers.' And Adam, Hetty's lover, 
 marries Dinah, the mcthodist preacher. 
 
 Le Pere Goriot has been well called 
 a French Lear. Both are tragedies of the 
 cruelty of ungrateful daughters. Lear is 
 the typical tragedy on that theme for all 
 time. Le Pere Goriot is an extremely 
 Parisian tragedy. It is curious to note with 
 the parallelism of conception the contrast 
 of method between the unthroned Lear with 
 his dwindling body-guard, and old Goriot 
 exiled from home, driven by degrees from 
 the first floor to the garret in his lodging- 
 house. We divine Lear's degradation by 
 Lear's rage. We divine Goriot's sufferings 
 from our intimate acquaintance with the 
 hideous daily life at the Maison Vauquer, 
 down to the lodging-house smell of the 
 dining-room, and the slang of his fellow- 
 lodgers. 
 
 This difference of method accounts — does 
 it not? — for a large measure of the special 
 difficulties of the historical novel. To 
 realise how abundant and convincing is 
 the familiar detail habitually employed in 
 
 164
 
 THE HISTORICAL NOVEL 
 
 novels like these of Balzac and George Eliot, 
 is to realise the hopelessness of the task 
 of the writer who should set about to do 
 the same thing for the age of the Crusades. 
 It is just because George Eliot conscien- 
 tiously endeavoured to do for Florence, for 
 Savonarola and Tessa, what she did for 
 Hayslope, for Mr. Irwine and Mrs. Poyser 
 and Hetty that the book is the comparative 
 failure that it is. It is not merely that such 
 details are beyond the reach of an archaeo- 
 logy more searching than any novelist can 
 attempt. Even if learning could supply 
 the medieval analogue of every detail in 
 Adam Bede, it would be of no use, because 
 neither the writer nor the reader of to-day 
 would have the necessary instinctive feeling 
 of its dramatic significance. The modern 
 novelist uses his wealth of modern detail 
 intuitively, in a sense unconsciously, feeling 
 immediately and without effort its dramatic 
 effect, indeed feeling the dramatic passion 
 in and by means of the detail. Such 
 tragedies as Adam Bede and Le Pere 
 Goriot are born incarnate in the minds of 
 a Balzac or a George Eliot. Similarly the 
 
 165
 
 THE HISTORICAL NOVEL 
 
 reader immediately and without effort takes 
 in along with the details their full signifi- 
 cance. In the historical novel this is 
 impossible. 'Either,' to quote Mr. Leslie 
 Stephen once more, 'the novel becomes 
 pure cram, a dictionary of antiquities dis- 
 solved in a thin solution of romance, or, 
 which is generally more refreshing, it takes 
 leave of accuracy altogether.' And there is 
 a subtler difficulty. Sentiment — and a novel 
 must deal largely with sentiment — changes 
 rapidly. A writer of to-day can no more 
 put his spirit back some centuries than a 
 man of fifty can feel like a boy of fifteen. 
 And in this matter of accurate sentiment, 
 as in the matter of accurate detail, there is 
 the reader to be considered. If it were 
 possible to reproduce the sentiment of a 
 bygone time, accuracy would be dearly 
 purchased by the sacrifice of dramatic im- 
 pressiveness and of the reader's sympathy. 
 Scott, in the dedicatory epistle to Dr. Dry- 
 asdust prefixed to Ivan/we, shows himself 
 fully alive to this, and as an artist deliber- 
 ately puts dramatic interest above historical 
 accuracy. 
 
 1 66
 
 THE HISTORICAL NOVEL 
 
 ' It is true/ he writes, ' that I neither can 
 nor do pretend to the observation of com- 
 plete accuracy, even in matters of outward 
 costume, much less in the important points 
 of language and manners. But the same 
 motive which prevents my writing the 
 dialogue of the piece in Anglo-Saxon or 
 Norman-French, and which prohibits my 
 sending forth to the public this essay 
 printed with the types of Caxton or 
 Wynken de Worde, prevents my attempt- 
 ing to confine myself within the limits of 
 the period in which my story is laid. It is 
 necessary for exciting interest of any kind 
 that the subject assumed should be, as it 
 were, translated into the manners, as well 
 as the language, of the age we live in. No 
 fascination has ever been attached to Orien- 
 tal literature equal to that produced by Mr. 
 Galland's first translation of the Arabian 
 tales ; in which, retaining on the one hand 
 the splendour of Eastern costume, and on 
 the other the wildness of Eastern fiction, he 
 mixed these with just so much ordinary 
 feeling and expression, as rendered them 
 interesting and intelligible.' 
 
 167
 
 THE HISTORICAL NOVEL 
 
 There is the common-sense of the matter 
 in a nutshell. 
 
 Clearly, then, the historical novel has 
 very definite negative limitations. But 
 to admit thus much is by no means 
 to give it up altogether, as Mr. Leslie 
 Stephen has sorrowfully brought himself to 
 do. A criticism which is bound by its 
 theory to say that Ivanhoe and Les Trot's 
 Mousquetaires are not good novels surely 
 stands self-condemned. The keenest ad- 
 mirer of the art which has given us Eugenie 
 Grandet, Madame Bovary, or Amos Barton 
 will occasionally, when in the swing of 
 Dumas's stride, and under the spell of his 
 matchless buoyancy and resource, recall 
 those masterpieces with something like a 
 mental yawn. Scott and Dumas have fas- 
 cinated and continue to fascinate thousands 
 who are perfectly well aware that the history 
 of their novels is as romantic as the fiction. 
 Whatever else it may do, the inevitable 
 inaccuracy, which, as we see, Scott serenely 
 admits, manifestly does not spoil the novel 
 as a novel for the unsophisticated reader. 
 He instinctively recognises that he has to do 
 
 168
 
 THE HISTORICAL NOVEL 
 
 with a different kind of novel, depending for 
 its effect upon different conditions. To 
 confound the kinds, and require the same 
 conditions in all, is but a blundering criti- 
 cism. 
 
 If Le Pere Goriot is worthy to be called 
 a French Lear, Les Trots Mousquctaires 
 may not unfitly be styled a French Iliad. 
 Scott and Dumas were in fact born story- 
 tellers, and story is not tied down to rigorous 
 scientific accuracy. It depends upon a sense 
 of beauty, rather than on a demand for 
 truth : its appeal is to the imagination. 
 Like much beautiful Oriental decoration it 
 may set literal truth at defiance, yet convince 
 by its decorative propriety. When we read 
 these romances, we are not studying archaeo- 
 logy, nor are we looking for solutions of 
 psychological or moral problems : we simply 
 ask to be interested by the story, and 
 charmed by romantic scenes and stirring 
 incidents. We demand before all things 
 beauty and imaginative satisfaction. We 
 crave a poetic justice, which would be 
 childish in the other sphere : heroism must 
 triumph and villainy die the death. And 
 
 169
 
 THE HISTORICAL NOVEL 
 
 provided the imagination be satisfied, literal 
 accuracy is immaterial. In order to satisfy 
 the imagination, the novelist, it is true, must 
 produce a temporary illusion of reality ; but 
 it is enough if the spirit be cheated or 
 charmed into acquiescence. In a recent 
 book on Shakespeare it was laid down as a 
 canon of dramatic criticism, that impro- 
 bability only apparent to subsequent reflec- 
 tion was no valid objection to a piece of 
 action felt by an actual spectator to be at 
 the time natural and right. Now the magic 
 of these masters of narrative fiction produces 
 at the time just the illusion of reality 
 appropriate to their class and scale of work. 
 While you surrender yourself to their spell 
 you feel yourself moving naturally among 
 historic scenes and personages. While you 
 have faith, you walk the treacherous waters 
 like the firm earth. The interest and charm 
 prevent your being disquieted by critical 
 doubts at the time, whatever history may 
 have to say to you on the morrow when 
 you are in cold blood. And illusion is 
 rendered the easier to produce by the kind 
 of detail and scale of character-drawing 
 
 170
 
 THE HISTORICAL NOVEL 
 
 appropriate to what we may call the epic 
 novel. Minute and elaborate character and 
 familiar detail are here out of place. Yet it 
 is a grave mistake to suppose character and 
 incident independent of each other, much 
 less antagonistic. They are strictly insepar- 
 able : being indeed, if the expression be 
 tolerable, statical and dynamical aspects of 
 the same facts. We may talk of this novel 
 being saved by its drawing of character, and 
 that story by its plot or incidents ; but true 
 salvation lies in the right artistic proportion 
 between character and incident. The in- 
 cidents, for after all they are incidents, of 
 Eugenie Grandet and Madame B ovary are 
 just the inevitable incidents in the evolution 
 of the moral tragedy. So, on the other 
 hand, there is in fact admirable drawing of 
 character in Athos, Porthos, and Aram is, 
 above all in the incomparable d'Artagnan ; 
 but it is of the precise scale fitted to carry 
 the rush of exciting incident. The truth of 
 this may be recognised by imagining the 
 effect on the narrative of replacing these 
 splendid fellows by some of Mr. Henry 
 James's carefully analysed souls ; but, be it 
 
 171
 
 THE HISTORICAL NOVEL 
 
 also observed, we should equally destroy 
 the interest of the narrative by replacing 
 them with the wooden lay-figures of inferior 
 craftsmen. If Dumas's people were mere 
 lay-figures, we should no longer listen with 
 rapture to the click and clash of d'Artag- 
 nan's sword, nor follow the progress of 
 Aramis's subterranean intrigues with breath- 
 less interest, nor weep salt tears, as all right- 
 minded people now do, over the Homeric 
 death of Porthos. An historical novelist 
 can only attempt elaborate character or 
 familiar detail on peril of awakening a fatal 
 critical spirit by inevitable modernisms. He 
 is, however, in no way obliged to incur this 
 peril. As Scott says in the Epistle to Dry- 
 asdust, our ancestors ' had " eyes, hands, 
 organs, dimensions, senses, affections, pas- 
 sions " ; were " fed with the same food, hurt 
 with the same weapons, subject to the same 
 diseases, warmed and cooled by the same 
 winter and summer" as ourselves'; and by 
 confining himself to these permanent ele- 
 ments, and to the simple character suitable 
 to the epic style, he may produce and 
 maintain all the illusion of reality which is 
 
 172
 
 THE HISTORICAL NOVEL 
 
 needed to give the full effect to his 
 story. 
 
 No doubt a very intimate and accurate 
 acquaintance with the history of the period 
 may be effectual to break the charm — alas ! 
 for the hapless wight cursed with a too 
 intrusive knowledge. And it may indeed 
 be that the old historical romances are a 
 delight destined to fade in the noonday 
 glare of science. We shall all eat of the 
 Tree of Knowledge, and shall be as Pro- 
 fessors of History knowing fact from fancy. 
 But we shall lose our paradise, and our 
 sorrow shall be greatly multiplied in our 
 conception of the historical novels of the 
 future. In sorrow we shall bring them forth, 
 and we shall read them in the sweat of our 
 brows. I love in my soul, I confess, the 
 1 fearless old fashion ' of the old romances : 
 yet the bliss of ignorance cannot perhaps 
 last for ever. Possibly one reason, among 
 others, that we cannot to-day write like 
 Scott and Dumas, is that we are in the fatal 
 transition state between blissful ignorance 
 and complete knowledge. We have not 
 acquired the historical mastery which might 
 
 173
 
 THE HISTORICAL NOVEL 
 
 enable us, perhaps, to use historical detail 
 naturally and easily ; yet we are conscious 
 of the demand for accuracy, and work with 
 the fear of the new broom of historical 
 criticism before our eyes. And in this 
 interval, the hand of the artist is only 
 paralysed by the continual demand of the 
 critic for accuracy, and the yearning of 
 historic science to see the abomination of 
 its own desolation standing also where it 
 ought not, in the temple of Romance. 
 
 The foregoing remarks might seem to 
 suggest that it is the romance which charms, 
 and that the historical romance charms not 
 by reason but in spite of its historical 
 character, — the historical character indeed 
 but introducing elements of difficulty and 
 decay. But this is not the case : the charm 
 lies essentially in the historical character. 
 To recognise this, it is enough to let the 
 imagination wander in memory for a few 
 seconds amid the romantic scenes of Scott's 
 historical tales, or the dramatic life of 
 Uumas's great cycles. No, assuredly histori- 
 cal romance has special charms of its own, 
 which the world should not willingly let die. 
 
 174
 
 THE HISTORICAL NOVEL 
 
 What a relief it is to get away from ourselves 
 and our neighbours, our small concerns, 
 petty jealousies or petty ambitions, and all 
 the provinciality of our moment of time and 
 corner of space, to breathe a larger and 
 more heroic air, at whatever cost of archaeo- 
 logical accuracy : to rub shoulders with 
 great events, and feel the stir of mighty 
 principles. And see what boundless wealth 
 of picturesque character and scenic effect 
 and dramatic clashings between devotion 
 to great causes and personal loves and 
 hates, the field of history offers. Are we 
 to rob romance of her Paladins, and Hugue- 
 nots and Covenanters, of her witchcraft, 
 and her Inquisition, of her Cceur de Lion, 
 her Richelieu and her Queen of Scots? 
 What becomes of Iva?thoe, without its strife 
 of English feeling and Norman pride, and 
 its mediaeval Jewbaiting ; or of Les Trois 
 Mousquetaires without the political entangle- 
 ments of loyalty to Richelieu or to the 
 Queen, which but serve to beat out the 
 heroic friendships into a nobler harmony ? 
 And more important and valuable to the 
 story-teller even than this wealth of scenes 
 
 175
 
 THE HISTORICAL NOVEL 
 
 and incidents, of great causes and great 
 characters, is the circumambient air of hero- 
 ism and romance. 
 
 Herein we find perhaps the only substitute 
 now left to us for the mystery and magic of 
 the world's wondering youth. Mr. Louis 
 Stevenson has taken the Arabian Nights as 
 the crowning type of pure romance. But 
 such tales it is not for us to write upon 
 whom the ends of the world are come. For 
 many of us the haunted and mysterious 
 spaces of unknown history are the next best 
 playing-ground for the imagination, and 
 afford to the romancer the witching gloom 
 or glamour of golden haze, wherewith to 
 work his miracles. So let us still cling to 
 the hope that even under the full blaze of 
 the meridian sun of science, the world will 
 keep apart a shady bower of art where the 
 eyes shall discern artistic excellence in the 
 midst of much inaccuracy, that it may still 
 enjoy Scott's genuine enthusiasm for a 
 possibly misunderstood feudalism, as we 
 enjoy the enthusiasm of the Renaissance 
 for a misunderstood paganism, not merely 
 bccause in each case the enthusiasm was 
 
 176
 
 THE HISTORICAL NOVEL 
 
 but the first step to a truer science, but 
 because it was beautiful in itself and pro- 
 duced much beautiful work. However 
 learned the world may grow, it will be an ill 
 day for it when it can no longer take its 
 pleasure in the buoyant narrative and quick 
 invention of Dumas, or in the romantic 
 fancy and healthy humanity of Walter 
 Scott. 
 
 M 177
 
 THE POET AS HISTORIAN 
 
 ' Of all Writers under the Sunne, the Poet is the least Her.' 
 
 Sir Philip Sidney 
 
 The pretension of the historical novelist 
 has been very generally challenged. The 
 right of the poet to treat historical subjects 
 has, until recently, passed without protest. 
 Of late, however, as I remarked in discussing 
 the historical novel, there have not been 
 wanting signs of a tendency on the part 
 of historical Science to dispute this right. 
 Science has exhibited several symptoms of 
 breaking out in a fresh place. (Mr. Huxley 
 once called Science a Cinderella. Might not 
 Bluebeard more fitly serve for a comparison ?) 
 As the first explicit protest that comes to 
 hand I take a passage from a criticism of 
 Browning's ' Parleyings,' by a generally ac- 
 knowledged authority in literary matters. 
 ' We arc by no means sure,' wrote the critic, 
 
 178
 
 THE POET AS HISTORIAN 
 
 ' that poets in creating imaginary characters 
 will in future times continue to think it worth 
 their while to christen them after the char- 
 acters of history, calling them Thomas a 
 Becket, Mary Stuart, Paracelsus, Sordello, 
 Bernard de Mandeville, and what not. We 
 are by no means sure that they will always 
 consider themselves justified in so doing. 
 As Carlyle has said, the mere facts of history 
 have a special and peculiar preciousness of 
 their own, just because they are facts and 
 not poetic fancies about facts.' 
 
 It is rather droll to find Carlyle cited for 
 this high and dry scientific view, Carlyle 
 himself being in the eyes of the sterner sort 
 little better than one of the poets. Professor 
 Seeley, pleading at Birmingham — one would 
 say, a suitable forum — for an organisation of 
 history similar to that by which science was 
 maintained in its seriousness and rigour, in 
 order that history should not any longer live 
 ' under the loose democracy of mere literature, ' 
 confounded in a common condemnation 
 Carlyle with Macaulay and other writers of 
 'delightful history.' The gist of Carlyle's 
 exhortations, moreover, is surely inexcusably 
 
 179
 
 THE POET AS HISTORIAN 
 
 perverted. So far from admonishing imag- 
 inative writers to confine themselves to their 
 own fictions, Carlyle was for ever expostu- 
 lating with them for wasting their gifts on 
 unrealities, and urging them to use all the 
 faculties God had given them, to interpret 
 the real men and real deeds that had made 
 the world what it is. ' In the right interpre- 
 tation of Reality does genuine poetry consist.' 
 This is his express declaration in the essay 
 on Bos well. Homer's Iliad he professed he 
 loved precisely because it was not fiction ; 
 nor of Shakespeare was it the fiction that he 
 admired but the fact. ' To say truth, what I 
 most of all admire are the traces he shows of 
 a talent that could have turned the history of 
 England into a kind of Iliad, almost perhaps 
 into a kind of Bible.' To sing the history 
 of England, that he held would be literature's 
 supremest service. 
 
 For Carlyle was well aware of the funda- 
 mental truth that history is almost wholly a 
 matter of divination. Our good easy critic 
 talks as if the ' mere facts of history' were to 
 be picked up round and ready, like pebbles 
 on the sea shore. Carlyle knew better. In 
 
 1 80
 
 THE POET AS HISTORIAN 
 
 a dozen eloquent passages he made lament 
 that the facts of history had passed into the 
 impenetrable beyond, that written history 
 was but matter of inference and interpre- 
 tation from dubious and perishing clues. 
 Some of the youngest and most infallible of 
 our young historical students have sometimes 
 talked as if they had arrived at the bed-rock 
 of historical truth, when they had got to the 
 ' original document.' Wiser heads know, alas ! 
 what treacherous sands original documents 
 may be. It is mighty hard to get at the 
 ' mere facts ' of an every day occurrence from 
 eye-witnesses on oath in a Court of Justice. 
 Carlyle quotes the old story of Sir Walter 
 Raleigh looking from his prison windows on 
 some street tumult, which afterwards three 
 witnesses reported in three different ways, 
 himself differing from them all. The merest 
 facts of history come to us through some 
 human medium, and come necessarily 
 coloured by the medium through which they 
 have passed. Human record, innocent of all 
 suspicion of ignorance or error or prejudice 
 or passion, it is idle to look for. The only 
 question is, whose gloss you will have — the 
 
 181
 
 THE POET AS HISTORIAN 
 
 chronicler's, the state-paper writer's, the 
 historian's or the poet's. Get away from this 
 fallible human spirit you cannot. Climb up 
 into poetry, it is there ; go down to ' scientific ' 
 history, it is there also. ' Mein Freund,' says 
 Faust to Wagner, eager to plunge into 
 historical studies and imbue himself with the 
 spirit of the past, 
 
 die Zeiten der Vergangenheit 
 Sind uns ein Buch mit sieben Siegeln. 
 Was ihr den Geist der Zeiten heiszt, 
 Das ist im Grund der Herren eigner Geist, 
 In dem die Zeiten sich bespiegeln. 
 
 Yes, for us the past is indeed a book with 
 seven seals, and the spirit of the past but the 
 spirit of him that tells the tale. The ' mere 
 facts of history ' in all their special, peculiar 
 preciousness are simply not to be had. 
 
 Let me not be thought guilty for a moment 
 of the folly of underestimating the import- 
 ance of documents. Probably the most 
 characteristic and valuable work of the 
 century in literature has been to realise the 
 primary importance of contemporary records, 
 to explore the ' sources ' of history, to discrim- 
 inate in historical matters what lawyers call 
 ' the best evidence.' Only let us recognise 
 
 182
 
 THE POET AS HISTORIAN 
 
 how short a way the most authentic record 
 carries us. The most authentic record is 
 but the narrative of what a man has seen 
 with his own eyes and heard with his own 
 ears. How much in the nature of the case 
 can that be ? A word heard here, an act seen 
 there : — scraps of conversation, isolated deeds, 
 conjectures of policy, guesses at character. 
 Real events are complex and simultaneous : 
 real history moves in the mass. The historian 
 cannot move a step without comparing, com- 
 bining, complementing, co-ordinating. The 
 execution of Mary Queen of Scots, for 
 example, is a ' mere fact ' of history. Well, 
 the historian cannot begin to tell of it without 
 a theory of Mary's character, and Elizabeth's, 
 of the manners and public conscience of the 
 time, of the aims and motives of the Catholic 
 powers, of the policy of Elizabeth's ministers 
 and the temper of her people. Here be 
 matters beyond documents. The facts of 
 history while they were not yet history but 
 actual facts were something singularly differ- 
 ent from the valley of dry bones of the 
 ' scientific ' historian ; and to breathe through 
 the bones the breath of life is a matter wholly 
 
 183
 
 THE POET AS HISTORIAN 
 
 beyond the competency of antiquarian 
 research, though organised as seriously and 
 rigorously as Professor Seeley would like to 
 see it. Science has no scales to weigh 
 motives and character, no glass to catch the 
 cross-lights of policy and passion. Nay, the 
 authentic document is dumb, till the historian 
 brings interpretative insight into character to 
 bear on it. ' Alas,' cried Carlyle, the Daniel 
 called to judgment by our scientific critic, 
 'you read a hundred autograph holograph 
 letters signed Charles Rex with the intensest 
 desire to understand Charles Rex, to know 
 what Charles Rex was and what he had in 
 his eye at that moment : and to no purpose.' 
 History, then, is necessarily and essentially 
 a work of ideal reconstruction. Is the poet not 
 to be allowed to take a hand in it ? Why ! a 
 quickening imagination is the very first thing 
 needful for the attainment of the bare truth. 
 For the most vital part of the historian's task 
 the poet has the most essential qualification. 
 He has the insight into human nature and 
 the quick communion with the purpose of 
 the ages that can read a character from a 
 gesture, a policy from a stray recorded word. 
 
 184
 
 THE POET AS HISTORIAN 
 
 And accordingly we find one of our most 
 eminent living historians recording his delib- 
 erate opinion that for the mere hard purposes 
 of history the Iliad and the Odyssey are the 
 most effective books which ever were written, 
 and that the most perfect English History 
 which exists is to be found in the historical 
 plays of Shakespeare. And here is an inter- 
 esting fact. Mr. C. H. Firth, who, I suppose, 
 knows all there is to be known about 
 Strafford and his times, recently had occasion 
 to compare the Life of Strafford, professedly 
 by Forster, but now attributed to Robert 
 Browning, with Browning's tragedy of Straf- 
 ford; and he has pronounced Browning's 
 poetry to be truer than his history. It was 
 curious, he said, to contrast the biography 
 with the play written a year later. In the Life 
 Browning meant to paint Strafford as he was ; 
 in the play he painted him as he wished him 
 to be. And the result is, that with a fuller 
 knowledge of the records than was possible 
 for Browning, Mr. Firth finds in several lead- 
 ing incidents the play more adequate than 
 the Life, and in the whole conception of 
 Strafford's character the poet nearer to the 
 
 185
 
 THE POET AS HISTORIAN 
 
 truth than the biographer. The intuition of 
 the poet, you see, had rightly amended and 
 supplemented the imperfect records before 
 him. 
 
 In the simplest fact or character in history, 
 there is absolutely inexhaustible matter for 
 divination and interpretation. If the world 
 really desire to have the truth of history, it 
 will be wise to discourage neither poet nor 
 plodder, but to encourage workers of the most 
 diverse gifts to present each such aspect 
 thereof as he may have eyes to see or ears to 
 hear. Let the poet utter his vision, and the 
 investigator collate his manuscripts and de- 
 cipher his inscriptions : and when we have 
 looked upon this picture and that, and fitted 
 the facts into a thousand theories, we may by 
 degrees get some partial insight into the sig- 
 nificance of the reality. Experience, Carlyle 
 said, required All-Knowledge to record it. 
 
 It cannot, I fear, be denied that poetry has 
 bequeathed to posterity some deluding 
 portraits. But poetry has by no means erred 
 alone. And even here the advantage is with 
 the poet. He does not hold himself out as 
 an historian in the strict sense. There is no 
 
 1 86
 
 THE POET AS HISTORIAN 
 
 rivalry and there should be no deception. 
 Poetry frankly offers itself as imaginative 
 reconstruction, and should mislead no one, 
 whereas the last historian is always for giving 
 us absolute truth. His predecessors may 
 have been ignorant, careless or prejudiced, — 
 too many but palming off a pack of lies upon 
 a credulous world. But with the rising of 
 the latest luminary the mists of error are to 
 scatter, and we are to have ' the pure severity 
 of perfect light.' Happily sagacious readers 
 do not take the historian nearly so seriously 
 as he takes himself. They are perfectly well 
 aware that in his pages they behold not the 
 very men as they lived and breathed, but the 
 best he had wit to piece together from sur- 
 viving" clues. It is Freeman's ' Cnut ' or Pro- 
 fessor Seeley's Napoleon, every bit as much as 
 it is Browning's Paracelsus or Shakespeare's 
 Hotspur and Harry of Monmouth. The his- 
 torian, however, tenders his narrative as gospel 
 truth, and the unwary may be misled. No 
 man in his senses can be misled by the Harry 
 and Hotspur that are palpably Shakespeare's 
 Harry and Hotspur and no lesser man's. 
 If the gallery of historical portraits with 
 
 187
 
 THE POKT AS HISTORIAN 
 
 which poetry has enriched the world be not 
 of a photographic exactitude, they none the 
 less are ' possessions for ever ' more precious 
 than the great work of Thucydides himself. 
 If they are not real, they are ideal. Nay, 
 the mere literary historians, when they err, at 
 least enrich us with ' delightful history,' 
 which is a joy for the moment if not a 
 possession for ever. The scientific historian 
 does not, I suppose, often fall ; but if he falls, 
 he falls like Lucifer. 
 
 What historian is to give us men and women 
 whom we would take in exchange for Shake- 
 speare's, from Coriolanus to Cleopatra, from 
 Richard the Second to Queen Kathcrine? 
 ' Great men,' Mr. Froude has said, — ' all men 
 properly so called (whatever is genuine and 
 natural in them) — lie beyond prose and can 
 only be really represented by the poet. What- 
 ever may be the cause, the fact is so. Poetry 
 has this life-giving power and prose has it not ; 
 and thus the poet is the truest historian.' 
 
 Or, again, for what amount of information 
 about the tactics of Agincourt would we 
 barter such a single line as Henry's ? — 
 
 ' We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.' 
 
 188
 
 THE POET AS HISTORIAN 
 
 Truth ? This is truth ; this is the truth 
 of Agincourt, — the English patriotism, the 
 warrior-kingship, the brotherhood begotten 
 of the common peril. Poetry is truer than 
 the facts. The poets, as Mrs. Browning 
 sang, are 
 
 ' The only truth-tellers now left to God, 
 The only speakers of essential truth 
 Opposed to relative, comparative 
 And temporal truths.' 
 
 Poetry, according to the often quoted 
 sentence of Aristotle, is not only nobler but 
 more philosophical than history. Hegel 
 taught that in art were to be found the deep- 
 est interests of humanity, the most compre- 
 hensive truths of the mind. The truths of 
 poetry he held to be the more genuine reality, 
 the mere facts of experience the crueller 
 deception. About a certain drawing by 
 Prout of a well at Nuremberg, Mr. Ruskin 
 has written : ' All the projecting windows 
 and all the dormers in this square are of 
 wood. But Prout could not stand the incon- 
 sistency and deliberately petrified all the 
 wood. Very naughty of him! I have nothing 
 to say in extenuation of this offence ; and 
 
 189
 
 THE POET AS HISTORIAN 
 
 alas! secondly, the houses have, in reality, 
 only three stories, and he has put a fourth 
 on, out of his inner consciousness ! I never 
 knew him do such a thing before or since : 
 but the end of it is, that this drawing of 
 Nuremberg is immensely more Nurembergy 
 than the town itself, and a quite glorious 
 piece of mediaeval character.' And if Aris- 
 totle and Hegel, and Mrs. Browning and 
 Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Froude be witnesses 
 all suspect to the scientific, let me call 
 Thucydides. Scientific as was his method, 
 Thucydides too in his famous speeches dared 
 to be truer than the facts, set himself 
 avowedly ' to consider principally what might 
 be pertinently said upon every occasion to 
 the points in debate.' The actual speakers 
 of Corcyra or Plataea never, we may be sure, 
 grasped the import of the situation with the 
 grip of the great historian ; had not the 
 philosophic insight with which he endows 
 them. Yet nowhere shall you find truer 
 Greek history than in those speeches. Poetry 
 and romance and art distil the spirit of truth 
 out of the facts. To them we owe the most 
 vital and fruitful ideas of history. Never in 
 
 190
 
 THE POET AS HISTORIAN 
 
 this work-a-day world was there an historical 
 Age of Chivalry ; never on this sinful earth 
 an historical Age of Faith. Be sure that 
 these too are but an ' added gleam,' a ' light 
 that never was on sea or land,' that here too 
 we have ' the consecration and the poet's 
 dream.' The Catholic Church of devout im- 
 aginations is historically as unreal as Arthur's 
 Round Table. But in another sense both 
 Round Table and Church are real with the 
 highest kind of reality. Such ideals, and 
 such ideals alone, it is which give any per- 
 manent reality to the fleeting generations of 
 men, who, save in so far as they embody 
 them in their lives, are but as the beasts that 
 perish. The real spirit of an age only comes 
 at last to its proper expression in its secular 
 poet. Shakespeare is the highest truth of 
 feudal England, as Dante was the truth of 
 Catholic Italy or Homer of heroic Greece. 
 Shakespeare's England is what England had 
 aspired to be, had striven to be, had attained 
 to being in certain moments and in certain 
 men : 
 
 ' This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle, 
 This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, 
 191
 
 THE POET AS HISTORIAN 
 
 This other Eden, demi-paradise, 
 
 This fortress built by Nature for herself 
 
 Against infection and the hand of war, 
 
 This happy breed of men, this little world, 
 
 This precious stone set in the silver sea, 
 
 Which serves it in the office of a wall, 
 
 Or as a moat defensive to a house, 
 
 Against the envy of less happier lands, 
 
 This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.' 
 
 All honour then to the scientific investi- 
 gator ; but honour likewise to the ' delightful- 
 historians,' and glory in the highest to Shake- 
 speare and the poets. For, as Wordsworth 
 finely said : ' Poetry is the breath and finer 
 spirit of all knowledge ; it is the impassioned 
 expression which is in the countenance of all 
 Science. Poetry is the first and last of all 
 knowledge — it is as immortal as the heart 
 of man.' 
 
 192
 
 THE GREAT WORK 
 
 A WRITER in the Daily News, for reasons 
 of his own, entered a protest lately against 
 what he called the Magnum Opus theory. A 
 man's friends and acquaintance, he com- 
 plained, were continually urging him to write 
 a Great Work. It was in vain that the 
 victim protested that he did not want to 
 write a Great Work ; or that he had written 
 a Great Work which nobody ever heard of; 
 or that he could not live (in this mortal state) 
 by a Great Work, and must produce things 
 which would yield him his daily bread. He 
 might have added that if he did write one, 
 the very last to read it would be these same 
 monitors. 
 
 That a man's female relations should hug 
 the delusion that he was born for some high 
 emprise and should persist in exhortation 
 is, no doubt, in the order of nature. But 
 
 N 193
 
 THE GREAT WORK 
 
 less prejudiced advisers should know better. 
 Certainly censors, whose admonitions get 
 uttered in print, should know better. Believe 
 me, the man who has a Great Work in him 
 does not, save in very exceptional cases, re- 
 quire to have the sides of his intent pricked 
 by the casual friend or the indolent irrespon- 
 sible reviewer. Once in a way, a George 
 Eliot may wait for the encouragement of a 
 George Henry Lewes to turn from West- 
 minster Reviewing to Scenes of Clerical Life. 
 But in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it 
 is true that, admonition or no admonition, a 
 man does exactly what he has it in him to 
 do. If a man is not a Balzac, it is in vain 
 that you will urge him to write a Comidie 
 Humaine. If on the other hand he has a 
 Comedie Humaine in him, he will go on writ- 
 ing rubbish for ten years, in the teeth of 
 parental remonstrance and public neglect, 
 sustained by inward consciousness of power 
 in the sure and certain hope that some 
 day he will produce the Great Work and 
 be famous. 
 
 From gentlemen with a bent for admoni- 
 tion, it must be said parenthetically, there is 
 
 194
 
 THE GREAT WORK 
 
 absolutely no way of escape. Delight your 
 generation with occasional verse or graceful 
 essays full of scholarship and urbane wit, and 
 you are sternly bidden, or perhaps urged by 
 way of flattering expostulation, to leave such 
 trifling and do something worthy of your 
 abilities. Essay an epic, and you are recom- 
 mended to content yourself with shorter 
 flights. The three -volume novelist is re- 
 minded that bigness is not greatness. Masters 
 of the short story are exhorted to do some- 
 thing more ' important.' One man pleads 
 modestly, that to earn his living he must 
 defer to the popular taste, and it is hinted 
 that he is selling his birthright for a mess of 
 pottage. Another in the proud conscious- 
 ness of genius scorns to prostitute his Muse, 
 and he is soundly rated for not thinking 
 first of his family and his social obligations. 
 You lead a life of literary leisure like 
 Edward Fitzgerald, and you are reproved 
 for giving the time to writing letters to 
 your friends which ought to have been 
 given to writing books for the publishers. 
 You throw your soul into poetry like 
 Shelley's, or novels like George Sand's, and 
 
 195
 
 THE GREAT WORK 
 
 in the end the Olympian critic serenely 
 pronounces that nothing but your private 
 letters will live. 
 
 But about this Magnum Opus. There have 
 been men no doubt, men of genius, who have 
 said to themselves deliberately, ' Go to, I will 
 write a Great Work.' For example, there 
 was Gibbon. Everybody remembers the pas- 
 sage where Gibbon tells how the idea of his 
 History occurred to him. ' It was at Rome 
 on the 15th of October 1764, as I sat musing 
 amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the 
 bare-footed friars were singing vespers in the 
 temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing 
 the decline and fall of the city first started to 
 my mind.' And everybody knows to what 
 good purpose he devoted himself to carrying 
 out the conception into superb accomplish- 
 ment. But for our present purpose, the in- 
 teresting thing about Gibbon's case is, that 
 he had made up his extremely well-regulated 
 mind to write a great work of some sort, long 
 before he had a glimmering of what the great 
 work was to be. Then with equal delibera- 
 tion he set about choosing a subject. Already 
 in 1 76 1, then at the age of twenty-five, he 
 
 196
 
 THE GREAT WORK 
 
 had passed in review a number of subjects 
 for a large historical composition, and had at 
 length selected the expedition of Charles VIII. 
 of France into Italy. After this he succes- 
 sively chose and rejected the Crusade of 
 Richard Cceur de Lion, the Barons' Wars 
 against John and Henry III., the history of 
 Edward the Black Prince, the lives and com- 
 parisons of Henry V. and the Emperor Titus, 
 the life of Sir Philip Sidney, and the life of 
 the Marquis of Montrose. At length he 
 seemed to have fixed on Sir Walter Raleigh 
 for his hero ; he was attracted by his eventful 
 story, varied by the characters of the soldier 
 and the sailor, the courtier and the historian. 
 Romantic subjects all of them, and so far 
 not a hint of predilection for the period and 
 subject which were to make him immortal. 
 The next choice was equally wide of his 
 final mark, the history namely of the Liberty 
 of the Swiss, of that independence which a 
 brave people rescued from the House of 
 Austria, defended against a Dauphin of 
 France, and finally sealed. From such a 
 theme, so full of public spirit, of military 
 glory, of examples of virtue, of lessons of 
 
 197
 
 THE GREAT WORK 
 
 government, the dullest stranger would catch 
 fire. What might not himself hope, whose 
 talents, whatsoever they might be, would be 
 influenced with the zeal of partiotism ? For 
 Switzerland was Gibbon's fatherland by adop- 
 tion ; it was the true alma mater to one who 
 found the breasts of Oxford dry ; and, finally, 
 it was the country of Mile. Curchod, the 
 heroine and victim of the famous love-story 
 in one sentence of the iconoclastic historian, 
 ' who sighed as a lover and obeyed as a son.' 
 This subject was rejected because the sources 
 were inaccessible, fast locked in the obscurity 
 of an old barbarous German dialect, which 
 he was ignorant of and not disposed to grapple 
 with. By way of contrast he had in his mind's 
 eye a history of the Republic of Florence, 
 under the House of the Medici ; — singular 
 men and singular events, the Medicis four 
 times expelled and as often recalled, and the 
 Genius of Freedom reluctantly yielding to 
 the army of Charles V. ; the character and 
 fate of Savonarola, and the revival of arts 
 and letters in Italy. At this point, in his 
 search for subjects, came his foreign tour and 
 the sojourn in Rome, during which, as we 
 
 198
 
 THE GREAT WORK 
 
 have seen, his true subject was revealed to 
 him in a flash. 
 
 I have dwelt on Gibbon's case, partly to 
 show the kind of mind which may dream of 
 great works without imputation of fatuity ; 
 partly to show my own candour. Because it 
 undoubtedly is a genuine case to support the 
 theory of the Magnum Opus. Here was a 
 youth with no notion what the work was to 
 be, but possessed with a fixed idea that it was 
 to be a Great Work. And the Decline and 
 Fall of the Roman Empire is a great work ; 
 of that there can be no possible shadow of 
 doubt. 
 
 Then, again, there is Bacon. There is a 
 tradition that at sixteen, or thereabouts, 
 young Francis Bacon had already determined 
 to revolutionise the whole frame of human 
 thought. That is no uncommon determina- 
 tion to come to at the age of sixteen. What 
 is less common is that at sixty people should 
 be able to persuade even themselves that they 
 have done it. Least common of all is it for 
 them to be able to persuade anybody else of 
 that. Whether the story of Bacon be true or 
 apocryphal, at any rate at the age of thirty- 
 
 199
 
 THE GREAT WORK 
 
 one, which is not old as we count oldness 
 now, he wrote to his uncle, Lord Burleigh, 
 calmly informing him that he had taken all 
 knowledge to be his province. How Lord 
 Burleigh must have nodded ! Yet in due 
 course there did veritably come the Instauratio 
 Magna, the greatest birth of time ! 
 
 Or to come to our own less spacious times, 
 consider the magnificence of fixed resolve 
 with which Mr. Herbert Spencer announced 
 already in a prospectus of i860 the whole 
 mighty scheme of his System of Philosophy. 
 It was to be gradually unfolded in five great 
 treatises, each with its contents already 
 mapped out under multitudinous headings 
 and sub-headings. With unhasting, unresting 
 persistency he has kept labouring at his 
 monstrous programme ever since ! One of 
 the reasons he gave for printing that 
 prospectus was, that the outline of the 
 scheme should remain, in case he should 
 not live to complete the system. There you 
 have the true spirit of the devotee of the 
 Magnum Opus. 
 
 One needs be very sure of one's-self, and 
 sure of a steady independent income to boot, 
 
 J 00
 
 THE GREAT WORK 
 
 even with genius, to deliberately embark on 
 a Great Work. Gibbon was singularly sure 
 of himself and enjoyed a monetary com- 
 petency. Bacon was equally sure of himself, 
 and got money independently of his philo- 
 sophy in one way or the other, especially, it 
 has been said, the other. The worst of it is 
 that a man may be as sure of himself as 
 Gibbon or Bacon, and after all produce 
 instead of a Decline and Fall of the Roman 
 Empire or a Novum Organum, an abortive 
 Key to All Mythologies or a monumental 
 History of Europe to prove that Providence 
 is on the side of the Tories. 
 
 The late Mr. Buckle sacrified his health to 
 his historical labours. He travelled abroad 
 to regain strength for more work, caught a 
 fever at Damascus and died. Almost his 
 last conscious words were ' My book, my 
 book ! I shall never finish my book ! ' Is it 
 not pathetic to think of? 
 
 Providence, whether or not it is always on 
 the side of the big battalions, is by no means 
 always on the side of the big books. It is 
 a solemn thing to sacrifice one's life, the 
 only life of the sort one has, in manufactur- 
 
 20 1
 
 THE GREAT WORK 
 
 ing a book like Alison's History of Europe, 
 only to fill with its voluminous respectability 
 an undisturbed shelf in every second-hand 
 bookshop in the kingdom. Really, upon a 
 rational calculation of the chances, it seems 
 wiser for a young man just to rejoice in his 
 youth, than to use it up in preparing or pro- 
 jecting a monumental History or a System 
 of Synthetic Philosophy or a Key to all the 
 Mythologies, for all which things too, remem- 
 ber, God will bring him to judgment. 
 
 Well, perhaps, if we are to have world- 
 histories and philosophic systems, the risk- 
 must be faced. It may be as in love so in 
 literature, 
 
 ' He either fears his fate too much, 
 
 Or his deserts are small, 
 Who dares not put it to the touch 
 
 To gain or lose it all.' 
 
 It was in truth a gallant sight to see Free- 
 man at his age, and alas ! with enfeebled 
 health, attacking on so lordly a scale so large 
 a subject as the History of Sicily. It had 
 been his first historical love ; the Rosaline to 
 the Juliet he wedded first after all, that 
 finely-developed Juliet, The Norman Con- 
 
 202
 
 THE GREAT WORK 
 
 quest. More than once he dwelt lovingly on 
 the supreme interest and importance through- 
 out history (he would not let us talk of 
 ancient and modern history), of this mid- 
 Mediterranean island, this old battlefield of 
 decisive race-struggles. And when Juliet 
 was on the shelf, he turned once more to woo 
 Rosaline. The first two volumes on the 
 magnificent scale of the Clarendon Press 
 brought that history only to the eve of the 
 struggle in the Peloponnesian War. Let the 
 clever young man who dashes off his 
 essay or his epigram detween tea and dinner, 
 pause to consider the nature of the task 
 Freeman was undertaking and take off his 
 hat to this dauntless spirit. Nay, let him 
 take off his hat, not to the veteran leader only, 
 but — for research is a thing needful — to the 
 rank and file, whether they are marching to 
 the glory of Gibbon or the grave of Alison. 
 The body of the most muddleheaded may 
 fill a trench over which some day an historian 
 of genius may pass to victory. 
 
 And yet, and yet the irresponsible young 
 man is sometimes tempted to hint that to- 
 day it is not so much the magnum as the 
 
 203
 
 THE GREAT WORK 
 
 maximum opus that our industrious workers 
 seem bent upon producing. Macaulay's his- 
 torical essays, some learned men say, are 
 wofully inaccurate. So conscious was Mac- 
 aulay himself of the imperfection of his essays 
 that he pleaded that his hand had been forced 
 by unauthorised American publication or he 
 would never have republished them. Yet 
 these essays are at least as full of life as ever, 
 while many an historical Magnum Opus is 
 stone-dead. One ventures to hope and be- 
 lieve that when the novelty of laying open 
 valuable historical sources has passed, 
 when the mass of new material has been not 
 only displayed but digested, the historian, 
 without sacrifice of science, will once more have 
 some conscience for form. Great histories, 
 great beyond all cavilling, have been written, 
 which can be comfortably packed into a 
 Tauchnitz pocket-volume or two. 
 
 When Victor Cousin, willing like Hercules 
 — as Heine cruelly remarked — to wear the 
 lion's skin as well as to ply the distaff, asked 
 Hegel for a succinct account of his system, 
 he got severely snubbed. These things, the 
 German philosopher drily replied, were not 
 
 204
 
 THE GREAT WORK 
 
 to be said succinctly, particularly in French. 
 Yet the longest of the Platonic dialogues is 
 not longer than a shilling story book ; and 
 Descartes's Discourse can be read almost at a 
 sitting. And if Hegel himself and Aristotle 
 bulk large, it should be borne in mind that 
 most of the volumes are but made up from 
 notes of lectures. 
 
 The literary temper dislikes and distrusts 
 bulk and big pretensions, abhors system- 
 mongering. Montaigne could not away with 
 ' Cicero's prefaces, definitions, divisions, which 
 surcharged and confounded with long and 
 far-fetched preambles whatsoever quick, 
 wittie and pithie conceit was in him.' Those 
 logical and Aristotelian ordinances were not, 
 he said, ' availfull ' for him. He loved like 
 Bacon to ' toss ' his thought. This phrase of 
 Bacon greatly took Edward Fitzgerald's 
 fancy, likewise a typical specimen of the 
 literary temper. So Matthew Arnold gibed 
 at the ' system of philosophy with principles 
 coherent, independent, subordinate and deri- 
 vative ' of Mr. Frederic Hawison's ' French 
 pedant' So Mr. Pater has lately protested 
 he cannot help hearing the rattle of the dry 
 
 205
 
 THE GREAT WORK 
 
 bones in the dogmatic systems of Aristotle, 
 Aquinas, and Spinoza. ' Distinguished Ger- 
 man philosophers,' wrote Heine, 'who may 
 accidently cast a glance over these pages ' — 
 the pages in question were his Religion and 
 Philosophy in Germany, Heine's attempt 
 to expound to Frenchmen what the German 
 philosophers were driving at — ' will supercili- 
 ously shrug their shoulders at the meagreness 
 and incompleteness of all which I here offer. 
 But they will be kind enough to bear in 
 mind that the little which I say is expressed 
 clearly and intelligibly, whereas their own 
 works, although very profound — unfathom- 
 ably profound — very deep — stupendously, 
 deep — are in the same degree unintelligible. 
 Of what benefit to the people is the grain 
 locked away in great granaries, to which they 
 have no key ? The masses are famishing for 
 knowledge, and will thank me for the portion 
 of intellectual bread, small though it be, 
 which I honestly share with them ... I am 
 not one of the seven hundred wise men of 
 Germany. I stand with the great masses at 
 the portals of their wisdom. And if a truth 
 slips through, and if this truth falls in my way, 
 
 206
 
 THE GREAT WORK 
 
 then I write it with pretty letters on paper, 
 and give it to the compositor, who sets it in 
 leaden type and gives it to the printer ; the 
 printer prints it, and then it belongs to the 
 whole world.' 
 
 Even in the case of so English a philosopher 
 as Lord Bacon, we remember that James I. 
 who, if a fool, was at least acknowledged to 
 be the wisest fool in Christendom, compared 
 the Novum Organum to the peace which 
 passeth understanding. Not James nor any- 
 body else, wise or foolish, ever said anything 
 of that kind about the Essays, those wonder- 
 ful short Essays. As Bacon said of them in 
 his own day, so have they been ever since, 
 ' of all his other works, the most current, for 
 that it seems, they come home to men's 
 business and bosoms.' 
 
 It is not, however, in the sphere of philo- 
 sophy or history or science, but in the sphere 
 of literature proper, that the theory of the 
 Magnum Opus and the exhortations and 
 protests founded thereon are so absurd, fly 
 so directly, as it seems to me, in the face of 
 the facts of literary history. With one or 
 two rare and remarkable exceptions, it has 
 
 207
 
 THE GREAT WORK 
 
 not been by saying, 'Go to, we will write a 
 Magnum Opus' that in this sphere the most 
 enduring books have been written. Flaubert — 
 and I give the adherents of the theory I depre- 
 cate the full benefit of his name as I pass — 
 Flaubert marvelled that Sainte-Beuve should 
 be content to go on writing for the newspapers, 
 when he was not in want of food and might 
 write books. Yet books, big books, have 
 been written, and printed too, of less endur- 
 ing value than the Causeries. Heine just 
 wrote off a description of a walking-tour, and 
 the Reisebilder 'are immortal. In writing The 
 Compleat Angler, Walton said he did but 
 make ' a recreation of a recreation.' Addison 
 and Steele wrote papers to amuse the town, 
 and Sir Roger de Coverley has outlived Cato. 
 Mat Prior has considerably more life in him 
 than Robert Montgomery, the efficient elixir 
 of Macaulay notwithstanding ; and it is not 
 by his Solomon, a Poem in Three Books, that 
 Mat Prior lives. Montaigne carries his years 
 at least as well as Montesquieu. And certain 
 stray papers written out of office-hours for a 
 magazine by a clerk of the India House have 
 outlived the more ambitious works of two 
 
 208
 
 THE GREAT WORK 
 
 other distinguished servants of John Com- 
 pany, the Mills, father and son, with their 
 Analyses of the Phenomena of the Human 
 Mind and their Systems of Logic Ratiocina- 
 tive and Inductive. 
 
 What could be more unpremeditated than 
 the way in which that almost nameless throng 
 of singers poured forth their songs, who made 
 of Elizabethan England a nest of singing 
 birds? In those brave days their fashion 
 was to throw off, or affect to throw off, their 
 tuneful trifles without a thought of publica- 
 tion. For publication they meditated, or 
 affected to meditate, some Magnum Opus to 
 come later to justify them. But they would 
 show these trifles to their friends ; and these 
 friends would persuade them to publish, or, 
 bold bad men, would take the bull by the 
 horns and send the poems to the printer 
 themselves. 
 
 ' Courteous reader,' writes W. Percy by way 
 of preface to his Cycle of Sonnets to the Fairest 
 Cselia, 'whereas I was fully determined to 
 have concealed my Sonnets as things privy 
 to myself, yet, of courtesy having lent them 
 to some they were secretly committed to the 
 
 O 209
 
 THE GREAT WORK 
 
 Press and almost finished before it came to 
 my knowledge. Wherefore, making as they 
 say, Virtue of Necessity, I did deem it most 
 convenient to propose my epistle, only to 
 beseech you to account of them as of toys 
 and amorous devices ; and ere long, I will 
 impart unto the World another Poem, which 
 shall be both more fruitful and ponderous. 
 In the meanwhile I commit these as a 
 pledge to your indifferent censure. W. Percy. 
 London 1 594.' You see the indiscreet friend 
 served the bashful Elizabethan the same turn 
 that the American pirate served the bashful 
 Macaulay. These Elizabethan toys and 
 amorous devices are as fresh to-day as three 
 centuries ago, and thanks to Dr. Grosart, Mr. 
 Arber, and Mr. Arthur Bullen, are still 
 ministering to our exceeding great enjoy- 
 ment. Whether W. Percy ever imparted to 
 the world his more fruitful and ponderous 
 poem I am not Elizabethan scholar enough 
 to say. At least I never heard of it. If he 
 did, I dare swear it is not without reasons 
 that the Sonnets to Caslia, which are not by 
 any means the happiest example of Eliza- 
 bethan sonneteering, are still afloat, while 
 
 210
 
 THE GREAT WORK 
 
 the ponderous poem has gone to the 
 bottom. 
 
 Lest such promises of a Magnum Opus to 
 follow should be accounted the mere cox- 
 combry of conventional mock-modesty, let 
 me remind you, that in just such wise did 
 Prior excuse himself for dedicating his light 
 occasional verse to his Maecenas Lord Dor- 
 set. ' I humbly hope that as I may hereafter 
 bind up my fuller sheaf and lay some pieces 
 of a very different Nature (the product of 
 my severer Studies) at your Lordship's Feet, 
 I shall engage your more serious reflec- 
 tion,' etc. Now Prior kept this promise. He 
 achieved his Magnum Opus, the product of 
 his severer studies, a piece of a very different 
 nature from Paulo Purganti and Hans Carvel. 
 It was Solomon, a Poem in Three Books. We 
 hope it engaged his lordship's more serious 
 reflections. At least it seems worthy to 
 engage our serious reflection in connection 
 with the present discussion. 
 
 Pass to the supreme name not only in 
 Elizabethan but in all literature. Shake- 
 speare simply did with all his might the 
 theatrical work which came to his hand. 
 
 211
 
 THE GREAT WORK 
 
 Glorious as the work is, it was work done as 
 a hack-playwright. All the little evidence 
 we have points to that, all except Mr. 
 Donnelly's : his position at the theatre ; the 
 sneers of the University wits ; the traces of 
 his manner of work, first his furbishing up 
 of stock pieces, then his gradually transform- 
 ing them by his genius, as occasion offered 
 and as he felt his genius firm under him ; 
 and finally, for crowning proof, his placid 
 early retirement, leaving a body of actors to 
 complete the famous first folio without his 
 assistance or direction. Not, mind you, that 
 Shakespeare was not keenly and fully alive 
 to the omnipotence of his genius ; you have 
 but to turn to the Sonnets to recognise serene 
 pride of genius and a sense of triumphant 
 achievement. But the set production of 
 Magna Opera was, it would seem, the very 
 last of his thoughts. 
 
 Certainly it was the very last of Scott's 
 thoughts, when he poured forth the Waverley 
 Novels in anonymous profusion. The famous 
 collected edition of the novels is always 
 referred to in Scott's Journal as the Opus 
 Magnum ; but if ever there was a man free 
 
 212
 
 THE GREAT WORK 
 
 from all tinge of the superstition of the 
 Magnum Opus that man was Walter Scott. 
 Unless we had the convincing evidence of 
 Lockhart's book and Scott's own letters and 
 prefaces to prove it, it would be unimaginable 
 that this Wizard of Romance should have 
 flung forth his wonders with so unpre- 
 meditated prodigality and held by them and 
 the fame of them so lightly. To remember 
 the frank, unaffected, manly modesty of this 
 man, who justly enjoyed in his lifetime 
 unrivalled literary prestige ; to think of the 
 nonchalance of this giant, of the simplicity of 
 spirit in which he poured out his immortal 
 tales ; and then to think of the punctilios 
 and pretensions and professions and protesta- 
 tions of the novelists of the hour is matter 
 for tears and laughter. 
 
 Scott with characteristic modesty had con- 
 sulted James Ballantyne as to his hopes of 
 him as a novelist. James's hopes were not 
 high. Scott saw it at a glance ; but all he 
 said was that he did not see why he should 
 not succeed as well as other people, — that is, 
 remember, as well as ' Monk ' Lewis and 
 Mrs. Radcliffe and Jane Porter. 'The 
 
 213
 
 THE GREAT WORK 
 
 Edinbro' faith now is,' wrote Scott to Mr. 
 Morritt, one of the very few to whom from 
 the first he entrusted the secret of the author- 
 ship, ' that Waverley is written by Jeffrey, 
 having been composed to lighten the tedium 
 of his late Transatlantic voyage. So you see 
 the unknown infant is like to come to prefer- 
 ment. In truth I am not sure it would be 
 considered quite decorous for me, as a Clerk of 
 Session, to write novels. Judges being monks, 
 clerks are a sort of lay brethren from whom 
 some solemnity of walk and conduct may be 
 expected. So whatever I may do of this 
 kind, I shall whistle down the wind to prey on 
 fortune.' And the preface to the third edition 
 of Waverley was in just the same strain of 
 unaffected modesty. And if this was before 
 the new success or in the early days of it, 
 you may see how lasting his mood was by 
 reading the prefaces in the collected edition 
 of 1829-30, long after his literary empire, all 
 unsolicited, had been universally acknow- 
 ledged. Read, for example, the preface to 
 Ivanlioe, the novel which had been received 
 with a perfect acclaim of applause. Never 
 was there less blowing of the trumpet in 
 
 214
 
 THE G R E A T . W O R K 
 
 the new moon to accompany the birth of 
 masterpieces. Scott was simply filled full to 
 the lips with romance, and when his hour 
 came he just let himself go. You remember 
 the anecdote in Lockhart, of the hand cease- 
 lessly writing which so bothered Menzies in 
 his cups ? ' I have been watching it, — it 
 fascinates my eye — it never stops, — page 
 after page is finished and thrown on a heap 
 of MS., and still it goes on unwearied ; and 
 so it will be till candles are brought in, and 
 God knows how long after that. It is the 
 same every night, — I can't stand the sight of 
 it, when I am not at my books.' ' Some 
 stupid, dogged, engrossing clerk, probably,' 
 exclaimed some giddy youth in the company. 
 ' No, boys,' answered their host ; ' I well know 
 what hand it is — 'tis Walter Scott's.' And 
 when it came to still more rapid dictation, 
 Scott preferred John Ballantyne as an 
 amanuensis to Willie Laidlaw, because his 
 pen was the faster and also because he kept 
 it to the paper without interruption, though 
 with many an arch twinkle in his eyes and 
 now and then an audible smack of his lips. 
 Whereas Laidlaw entered with such keen 
 
 215
 
 THE GREAT WORK 
 
 zest into the interest of the story as it flowed 
 from the author's lips, that he could not 
 forbear interrupting with his, ' Gude keep us 
 a' ! the like o' that — eh, sirs, eh, sirs ! ' Thus 
 was composed no less a work than the Bride 
 of Lammermoor in the midst of intense 
 physical suffering, the affectionate Laidlaw 
 beseeching Scott to stop dictating, when his 
 audible suffering filled every pause. ' Nay, 
 Willie,' was the answer, ' only see the doors 
 are fast. I would fain keep all the cry as 
 well as all the wool to ourselves.' 
 
 While we are among these kingly names, 
 let me be candid and make a present of one 
 to the enemy. For one, and one of the 
 mightiest, of the lords of English poetic 
 literature the set production of a Magnum 
 Opus was the first and the last thought. 
 Milton's was a life dedicated from the 
 beginning. By the age of twenty-three, as 
 appears from a letter to a Cambridge friend 
 enclosing the second sonnet, he was 
 cherishing a long formed resolve to devote 
 his life to some great work. This was his 
 apology for standing aloof from the ordinary 
 money-getting pursuits of early manhood. 
 
 216
 
 THE GREAT WORK 
 
 This was his excuse for his late spring, 
 which still no bud nor blossom showed, as 
 the sonnet phrased it. With this aspiration 
 he encouraged himself, when he became 
 ' something suspicious of himself and did 
 take notice of a certain belatedness in him.' 
 His deliberate aim was self-cultivation and 
 self-devotion to the accomplishment of some 
 great thing. Very early he found and took 
 poetry to be his vocation. At twenty-eight 
 he wrote the famous letter to his friend 
 Diodati. 'What am I thinking of? Why, 
 with God's help, of immortality ! Forgive 
 the word, I only whisper it in your ear ! 
 Yes, I am pluming my wings for a flight.' 
 He wrote so at the end of the Horton 
 period, when the minor poems had already 
 been given to the world, and he had already 
 done enough, you might have thought, for 
 one life's fame. The following year we find 
 him casting his thoughts, as so many of our 
 greatest poets have done, on the legend of 
 Arthur for the subject of his great poem. 
 Then in 164.1, being thirty-two years of age, 
 he publicly uttered his apologia and con- 
 fessed his aspirations. 
 
 217
 
 THE GREAT WORK 
 
 ' None hath by more studious ways en- 
 deavoured, and with more unwearied spirit 
 none shall — that I dare almost aver of 
 myself, as far as life and full licence will 
 extend. Neither do I think it shame to 
 covenant with any knowing reader that for 
 some few years yet I may go on trust with 
 him toward the payment of what I am now 
 indebted, as being a work not to be raised 
 from the heat of youth, or the vapours of 
 wine, like that which flows at waste from 
 the pen of some vulgar amorist, or the 
 trencher fury of a rhyming parasite, nor to 
 be obtained by the invocation of Dame 
 Memory and her siren daughters, but by 
 devout prayer to that Eternal Spirit, who 
 can enrich with all utterance and know- 
 ledge, and sends out his seraphim with the 
 hallowed fire of his altar to touch and 
 purify the life of whom he pleases. To this 
 must be added industrious, select reading, 
 steady observation, insight into all seemly 
 and generous acts and affairs. Till 
 which in some measure be compassed, at 
 mine own peril and cost, I refuse not to 
 sustain this expectation, from as many as 
 
 218
 
 THE GREAT WORK 
 
 are not loth to hazard so much credulity 
 upon the best pledges that I can give them.' 
 
 And again in that famous and often 
 quoted passage : 
 
 ' Perceiving that some trifles which I had 
 in memory, composed at under twenty or 
 thereabouts, met with acceptance ... I 
 began to assent to them (my Italian friends) 
 and divers of my friends here at home, and 
 not less to an inward prompting, which 
 now grows daily upon me, that by labour 
 and intent study, which I take to be my 
 portion in this life, joined with the strong 
 propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave 
 something so written to aftertimes as they 
 should not willingly let it die.' 
 
 And the accomplishment of this noble 
 vow, the end of this nobly dedicated life, 
 was the sublime Puritan Epic, Paradise Lost. 
 
 There, I hope that I have given away a 
 handsome enough present in Milton. Yet 
 really I am making no concession at all. 
 Milton did say to himself, 'Go to, I will 
 write a Great Work,' but therein he only 
 followed 'the strong propensity of nature.' 
 He did precisely what he had it in him to 
 
 219
 
 THE GREAT WORK 
 
 do. He, if ever any man, had the call from 
 within. Such call when vouchsafed let all 
 men follow. All my protest is against the 
 call from without. Conceive, if you can, 
 Milton turned aside from his high and 
 almost holy purpose by the allurements of 
 journalism or the needs of the passing hour. 
 Why, a civil war failed to turn him aside, 
 and, a closer affliction still, his own total 
 blindness. Neither the Protectorate and 
 political employment, nor the Restoration 
 and political disgrace, could make him for- 
 get his call. It is a flattering but mistaken 
 and misleading notion, that the gentlemen 
 who do political squibs and literary causerie 
 for the newspapers could, by simply taking 
 thought, add several thousand cubits to 
 their stature and write a Paradise Lost. 
 Take, by the way of example, the man who 
 has sometimes been regarded, who regarded 
 himself, as a victim sacrificed to journalistic 
 task-work, the man whose life suggested the 
 remarks in the Daily News with which I 
 started, Theophile Gautier. What are the 
 odds, if Gautier had been free from the 
 obligation to turn out a weekly dramatic 
 
 220
 
 THE GREAT WORK 
 
 feuilleton, that he would have given the 
 world any better poetry than Emaux et 
 Camees} Are not the chances rather that, 
 without the pressure of daily needs, we 
 should have had to go without many of the 
 very delightful volumes we now have from 
 his pen, and have got nothing whatever in 
 their place ? Anyway, the story goes, and 
 it is an odd story when you come to think 
 of it, that the young Theo in early manhood 
 had to be shut up in his bedroom by his 
 mother, to write Mademoiselle de Man pin ! 
 
 Some bold spirits have not feared even in 
 Milton's own case to take their stand against 
 the superstition of the Magnum Opus. They 
 would that he had dwelt all his life amid 
 the glades of Horton and gone on giving 
 them the magic of the minor poems. They 
 lament the sacrifice of the poet of Conns 
 and Lycidas to the poet of the Paradise Lost. 
 They regret that many priceless trinkets 
 and much matchless filigree work, which 
 would have lent adornment and pleasant- 
 ness to their daily living, must have been 
 melted down to make that cold colossal 
 statue. It is a fact at least, no doubt, that 
 
 221
 
 THE GREAT WORK 
 
 dozens have Lycidas by heart, for every 
 reader who gets beyond the first book of 
 the great Epic. The readers indeed of the 
 twelve books of Paradise Lost are probably 
 as select a band as the readers of the twelve 
 cantos of the Faerie Queene, another of the 
 Magna Opera of our poetic literature. 
 Edgar Poe, who of course dearly loved a 
 paradox, and who had besides a theory of 
 his own about poetry to support, went so far 
 as to maintain that Paradise Lost was only 
 to be enjoyed by being regarded as a series 
 of minor poems ! 
 
 Finally, let not the advocates of the 
 Magnum Opus pretend that, at worst, these 
 admonitions of theirs have a bracing effect 
 and can do no harm. They may do a great 
 deal of harm. There are instances to cite 
 where the harm has been done. If Milton 
 is the saint of the true religion of the Mag- 
 num Opus, the superstition does not want 
 for martyrs. If I am not mistaken, the 
 late Mr. Cotter Morison was a man of great 
 ability sterilised by too high ideals. Mark 
 Pattison was another martyr to the theory. 
 Not content to put forth just what he had 
 
 222
 
 THE GREAT WORK 
 
 to put forth, he was ever gathering, pruning, 
 preparing for something big to come — 
 which never came. The result was that his 
 temper seemed to have been soured, his life 
 was largely a wasted life, and the world 
 never reaped adequate advantage from his 
 unquestioned ability and erudition. 
 
 Mark Pattison made Isaac Casaubon a text 
 for a sermon on the creed of the Magnum 
 Opus, and for a denunciation of the modern 
 world of letters that knew nothing of 
 the self-denial, the unremitting effort, the 
 incessant mental tension, the devotion of a 
 life, which was the scholar's portion. But is 
 not Casaubon, like Pattison, a warning rather 
 than encouraging example of the theory ? 
 What I say of Pattison, Pattison has to 
 admit of Casaubon — his Magnum Opus 
 never came after all. It was put off and 
 put off for more reading and ever more 
 reading and note-taking. The excuse is a 
 lofty ideal and the interruptions of the 
 world. Casaubon's Diary like Pattison's 
 Memoirs is full of moaning and groaning 
 over the shortness of the time and the 
 obstacles to stud}-. But Pattison confesses 
 
 223
 
 THE GREAT WORK 
 
 that Casaubon had (as he himself had) as 
 much leisure as is possible to mortal man. 
 He confesses that for Casaubon's aims, no 
 amount of leisure would have sufficed. It is 
 a reductio ad absurdum of his theory. And 
 one cannot avoid a suspicion that these too 
 lofty ideals are apt to be but a cloak for a 
 highly respectable species of mental indo- 
 lence, the flattering unction laid to the 
 secretly dissatisfied soul. Both Casaubon 
 and Pattison, one shrewdly suspects, liked 
 reading and disliked writing. They went 
 on accumulating notes to postpone the pain- 
 ful effort necessary to set their accumulated 
 materials in order and to build therewith the 
 great work itself. This is not mental 
 tension, but mental indolence. The faults 
 of Will Ladislaw and Mr. Casaubon in 
 Middlemarch were more akin than they 
 suspected. 
 
 If Mr. Casaubon in Middlemarch had con- 
 tented himself with something short of a 
 Key to all Mythologies, had contributed, let 
 us say, pithy paragraphs to T/ie Guardian, 
 he would have been a more profitable writer 
 as well as a tetter husband. 
 
 224
 
 THE GREAT WORK 
 
 The typical martyr was the unhappy 
 Amiel. Had not his friends insisted upon 
 his regarding himself as a genius, he might 
 have lived a prosperous life as a Swiss 
 gentleman and father of a family, doing his 
 duty in that state of life in which it had 
 pleased God to call him as a lecturer to 
 ladies. But once he got into his head that 
 he was a genius from whom great things 
 were expected, his life thenceforth was the 
 life of the impotent man, longing, yet power- 
 less, to struggle down into the troubled 
 waters of literary production into which 
 others continually plunged before his eyes. 
 So he maundered in a Journal Intime. 
 When people talk of the slavery of journal- 
 ism, at least let it be confessed that it is 
 better to be the slave of any respectable 
 public journal than the slave of a Journal 
 Intime. 
 
 225
 
 Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty, 
 at the Edinburgh University Press.
 
 List of Books 
 
 in 
 
 Relies Jettres 
 
 fi Mik 
 
 &(kirfflaifitvf 
 &3bfin/?ant: 
 
 andDmdoryf 
 
 Editions in 
 MfTtsfttt/t?. 
 
 1894 
 
 ALL BOOKS IN THIS CATALOGUE 
 ARE PUBLISHED AT NET PRICES 
 
 Telegraphic Address — 
 1 Bodleian, London '
 
 A WORD must be said for the manner in which the publishers 
 have produced the volume (i.e. "The Earth Fiend"), a 
 sumptuous folio, printed by Constable, the etchings on Japanese 
 paper by Mr. Goulding. The volume should add not only to 
 Mr. Strang's fame but to that of Messrs. Elkin Mathews and 
 John Lane, who are rapidly gaining distinction for their beautiful 
 editions of belles-lettres.' — Daily Chronicle, Sept. 24, 1892. 
 
 Referring to Mr. Le Gallienne's 'English Poems' and 
 ' Silhouettes ' by Mr. Arthur Symons : — ' We only refer to them 
 now to note a fact which they illustrate, and which we have been 
 observing of late, namely, the recovery to a certain extent of good 
 taste in the matter of printing and binding books. These two 
 books, which are turned out by Messrs. Elkin Mathews and 
 John Lane, are models of artistic publishing, and yet they are 
 simplicity itself. The books with their excellent printing and their 
 very simplicity make a harmony which is satisfying to the artistic 
 sense.' — Sunday Sun, Oct. 2, 1892. 
 
 ' Mr. Le Gallienne is a fortunate young gentleman. I don't 
 know by what legerdemain he and his publishers work, but here, 
 in an age as stony to poetry as the ages of Chatterton and Richard 
 Savage, we find the full edition of his book sold before publication. 
 How is it done, Messrs. Elkin Mathews and John Lane? 
 for, without depreciating Mr. Le Gallienne's sweetness and 
 charm, I doubt that the marvel would have been wrought under 
 another publisher. These publishers, indeed, produce books so de- 
 lightfully that it must give an added pleasure to the hoarding of first 
 editions.' — Katharine Tynan in The Irish Daily Independent. 
 
 'To Messrs. Elkin Mathews and John Lane almost more 
 than to any other, we take it, are the thanks of the grateful singer 
 especially due; for it is they who have managed, by means of 
 limited editions and charming workmanship, to impress book- 
 buyers with the belief that a volume may have an aesthetic and 
 commercial value. They have made it possible to speculate in (he 
 latest discovered poet, as in a new company — with the difference 
 that an operation in the former can be done with three half-crowns.' 
 
 St. James's Gazette.
 
 January 1894. 
 
 List of Books 
 
 IN 
 
 BELLES LETT RES 
 
 {Including some Transfers) 
 PUBLISHED BY 
 
 Elkin Mathews and John Lane 
 
 VIGO STREET, LONDON, W. 
 
 .V. B. — The A uthors and Publishers reserve the right of reprinting 
 any book in this list if a second edition is called for, except in cases 
 where a stipulation has been made to the contrary, and of printing 
 a separate edition, of any of the books for America irrespective of the 
 numbers to which the English editions are limited. The numbers 
 mentioned do not include the copies sent for review or to the public 
 libraries. 
 
 ADAMS (FRANCIS). 
 
 Essays in Modernity. Cr. Svo. 5s.net. [In preparation. 
 
 ALLEN (GRANT). 
 
 The Lower Slopes : A Volume of Verse. 600 copies. 
 Cr. Svo. 5s. net. [Immediately. 
 
 ANTAEUS. 
 
 The Backslider and other Poems. 100 only. 
 Small 4to. 7s.6d.net. [Very few remain. 
 
 BEECHING (H. C), J. W. MACK AIL, & 
 J. B. B. NICHOLS. 
 Love in Idleness. With Vignette by W. B. Scott. 
 Fcap. 8vo, half vellum. 12s. net. [ Very few remain. 
 Transferred by the Authors to the present Publishers.
 
 THE PUBLICATIONS OF 
 
 BENSON (ARTHUR CHRISTOPHER). 
 
 Poems. 550 copies. Fcap. 8vo. 5s. net. 
 
 [ Very few remain. 
 BENSON (EUGENE). 
 
 From the Asolan Hills : A Poem. 300 copies. Imp. 
 i6mo. 5s.net. [Very few remain. 
 
 BINYON (LAURENCE). 
 
 Poems. i6mo. 5s. net. [In preparation. 
 
 BOURDILLON (F. W.). 
 
 A Lost God : A Poem. With Illustrations by H. J. Ford. 
 500 copies. 8vo. 6s. net. [ Very few remain. 
 
 BOURDILLON (F. W.). 
 
 Ailes d'Alouette. Poems printed at the private press 
 of Rev. H. Daniel, Oxford. 100 only. iomo. 
 £l, ios. net. [Not published. 
 
 BRIDGES (ROBERT). 
 
 The Growth of Love. Printed in Fell's old English 
 type at the private press of Rev. H. Daniel, Oxford. 
 100 only. Fcap. 4to. £2, 12s. 6d. net. 
 
 [Not published. 
 
 COLERIDGE (HON. STEPHEN). 
 
 The Sanctity of Confession : A Romance. Second 
 Edition. Crown Svo. 3s.net. [A feiv remain. 
 
 CRANE (WALTER). 
 
 Renascence : A Book of Verse. Frontispiece and 38 
 designs by the Author. 
 
 [Small paper edition out of print. 
 
 There remain a few large paper copies, fcap. 4to. £i, is. net. 
 And a few fcap. 4to, Japanese vellum. £1, 15s. net. 
 
 CROSSING (WM.). 
 
 The Ancient Crosses of Dartmoor. With n plates. 
 Svo, cloth. 4s. 6d. net. [ Very few remain.
 
 ELKIN MATHEWS &> JOHN LANE 
 
 DAVIDSON (JOHN). 
 
 Plays : An Unhistorical Pastoral ; A Romantic Farce ; 
 Bruce, a Chronicle Play ; Smith, a Tragic Farce ; 
 Scaramouch in Naxos, a Pantomime, with a Frontis- 
 piece, Title-page, and Cover Design by Aubrey 
 Beardsley. 500 copies. Small 4to. 7s. 6d. net. 
 
 [Immediately. 
 DAVIDSON (JOHN). 
 
 Fleet Street Eclogues. Second Edition. Fcap. Svo, 
 buckram. 5s. net. 
 
 DAVIDSON (JOHN). 
 
 A Random Itinerary: Prose Sketches, with a Ballad. 
 Frontispiece, Title-page, and Cover Design by Laur- 
 ence Housman. Fcap. Svo. Uniform with ' Fleet 
 Street Eclogues.' 5s. net. 
 
 DAVIDSON (JOHN). 
 
 The North Wall. Fcap. Svo. 2s. 6d. net. 
 
 The few remaining copies transferred by the Author 
 to the present Publishers. 
 
 DE GRUCHY (AUGUSTA). 
 
 Under the Hawthorn, and other Verses. Frontis- 
 piece by Walter Crane. 300 copies. Crown 8vo. 
 jjs. net. [ Very few remain. 
 
 Also 30 copies on Japanese vellum. 15s. net. 
 
 DE TABLEY (LORD). 
 
 Poems, Dramatic and Lyrical. By John Leicester 
 Warren (Lord De Tabley). Illustrations and Cover 
 Design by C. S. Ricketts. Second Edition. 
 Crown Svo. 7s. 6d. net. 
 
 DIAL (THE). 
 
 No. 1 of the Second Series. Illustrations by Ricketts, 
 Shannon, Pissarro. 200 only. 410. £1, is. net. 
 
 [ Very few remain. 
 The present series will be continued at irregular internals.
 
 THE PUBLICATIONS OF 
 
 EGERTON (GEORGE). 
 
 Keynotes : Short Stories. With Title-page by Aubrey 
 Beardsley. Second Edition. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. 
 net. 
 
 FIELD (MICHAEL). 
 
 Sight and Song. (Poems on Pictures.) 400 copies. 
 Fcap. 8vo. 5s. net. [ Very frM remain. 
 
 FIELD (MICHAEL). 
 
 Stephania: A Trialogue in Three Acts. 250 copies. 
 Pott 4to. 6s. net. [ Very few remain. 
 
 GALE (NORMAN). 
 
 Orchard Songs. Fcap. 8vo. With Title-page and 
 Cover Design by J. Illingworth Kay. 5s. net. 
 
 Also a Special Edition limited in number on hand-made paper 
 bound in English vellum. £1, is. net. 
 
 GARNETT (RICHARD). 
 
 A Volume of Poems. 350 copies. Crown 8vo. With 
 Title-page designed by J. Illingworth Kay. 5s. net. 
 
 GOSSE (EDMUND). 
 
 The Letters of Thomas Lovell Beddoes. Now 
 first edited. Pott 8vo. 5s. net. 
 
 {Immediately. 
 
 GRAHAME (KENNETH). 
 
 Pagan Papers : A Volume of Essays. Fcap. 8vo. 
 5s. net. 
 
 GREENE (G. A.). 
 
 Italian Lyrists of To-day. Translations in the 
 original metres from about thirty-five living Italian 
 poets, with bibliographical and biographical notes. 
 Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
 
 ELKIN MATHEWS &> JOHN LANE 
 
 HAKE (DR. T. GORDON). 
 
 A Selection from his Poems. Edited by Mrs. 
 Meyneli.. With a Portrait after D. G. Rossetti. 
 Crown 8vo. 5s. net. {Immediately. 
 
 HALLAM (ARTHUR HENRY). 
 
 The Poems, together with his essay ' On Some of the 
 Characteristics of Modern Poetry and on the Lyrical 
 Poems of Alfred Tennyson.' Edited, with an 
 Introduction, by Richard Le Gallienne. 550 
 copies. Fcap. Svo. 5s. net. [ Very few re?nain. 
 
 HAMILTON (COL. IAN). 
 
 The Ballad of Hadji and other Poems. Etched 
 Frontispiece by Wm. Strang. 50 copies. Fcap. Svo. 
 3s. net. 
 Transferred by the Author to the present Publishers. 
 
 HAYES (ALFRED). 
 
 The Vale of Arden and Other Poems. With Title- 
 page and Cover Design by Laurence Housman. 
 Fcap. 8vo. 5s. net. [In preparation. 
 
 HICKEY (EMILY H.). 
 
 Verse Tales, Lyrics and Translations. 300 copies. 
 Imp. i6mo. 5s. net. 
 
 HORNE (HERBERT P.). 
 
 Diversi Colores : Poems. With ornaments by the 
 Author. 250 copies. i6mo. 5s. net. 
 
 IMAGE (SELWYN). 
 
 Carols and Poems. With decorations by H. P. Horne. 
 250 copies. i6mo. 5s.net. {In preparation. 
 
 JAMES (W. P.). 
 
 Romantic Professions : A Volume of Essays, with Title- 
 page by J. Illingworth Kay. Crown Svo. 5s.net. 
 
 [Immediately.
 
 THE PUBLICATIONS OF 
 
 JOHNSON (EFFIE). 
 
 In the Fire and Other Fancies. Frontispiece by 
 Walter Crane. 500 copies. Imp. i6mo. 3s. 6d. 
 net. 
 
 JOHNSON (LIONEL). 
 
 The Art of Thomas Hardy : Six Essays. With 
 Etched Portrait by Wm. Strang, and Bibliography 
 by John Lane. Crown 8vo. 5s. 6d. net. 
 
 Also 150 copies, large paper, with proofs of the portrait. £1, is. 
 net. [Very shortly. 
 
 JOHNSON (LIONEL). 
 
 A Volume of Poems. Fcap. Svo. 5s. net. 
 
 [In preparation. 
 KEATS (JOHN). 
 
 Three Essays, now issued in book form for the first time. 
 Edited by H. Buxton Forman. With Life-mask 
 by Haydon. Fcap. 4to. 10s. 6d. net. 
 
 [ Very few remain. 
 LEATHER (R. K.). 
 
 Verses. 250 copies. Fcap. Svo. 3s. net. 
 
 Transferred by the Author to the present Publishers. 
 
 LEATHER (R. K.), & RICHARD LE GALLIENNE. 
 The Student and the Body-Snatcher and Other 
 Trifles. [Small paper edition out of print. 
 
 There remain a very few of the 50 large paper copies. 7s. 6d. net. 
 
 LE GALLIENNE (RICHARD). 
 
 Prose Fancies. With a Portrait of the Author. Cr. Svo. 
 5s. net. 
 Also a limited large paper edition. 12s. 6d. net. [In preparation. 
 
 LE GALLIENNE (RICHARD). 
 
 The Book Bills of Narcissus. An Account rendered 
 by Richard le Gallienne. Second Edition. 
 Crown 8vo, buckram. 3s. 6d. net.
 
 ELKIN MATHEWS &> JOHN LANE 
 
 LE GALLIENNE (RICHARD). 
 
 English Poems. Third Edition, cr. 8vo. 5s. net. 
 
 LE GALLIENNE (RICHARD). 
 
 George Meredith: Some Characteristics. With a Biblio- 
 graphy (much enlarged) by John Lane, portrait, etc. 
 Third Edition. Crown 8vo. 5s. 6d. net. 
 
 LE GALLIENNE (RICHARD). 
 
 The Religion of a Literary Man. Cr. 8vo. 3rd 
 thousand. 3s. 6d. net. 
 Also a special rubricated edition on hand-made paper. 8vo. 
 10s. 6d. net. 
 
 LETTERS TO LIVING ARTISTS. 
 
 500 copies. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net. [ Very few remain. 
 
 MARSTON (PHILIP BOURKE). 
 
 A Last Harvest : Lyrics and Sonnets from the 
 
 Book of Love. Edited by Louise Chandler 
 
 Moulton. 500 copies. Fcap. 8vo. 5s. net. 
 
 Also 50 copies on large paper, hand-made. ios. 6d. net. 
 
 [ Very few remain. 
 
 MARTIN (W. WILSEY). 
 
 Quatrains, Life's Mystery and other Poems. i6mo. 
 2s. 6d. net. [ Very few remain. 
 
 MARZIALS (THEO.). 
 
 The Gallery of Pigeons and Other Poems. Fcap. 
 8vo. 4s. 6d. net. [ Very few remain. 
 
 Transferred by the Author to the present Publishers. 
 
 MEYNELL (MRS.), (ALICE C. THOMPSON). 
 
 Poems. Second Edition. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net. A 
 few of the 50 large paper copies (First Edition) remain, 
 12s. 6d. net.
 
 THE PUBLICATIONS OF 
 
 MEYNELL (MRS.). 
 
 The Rhythm of Life, and other Essays. Second 
 Edition. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net. A few of the 50 
 large paper copies (First Edition) remain. 12s. 6d. net. 
 
 MURRAY (ALMA). 
 
 Portrait as Beatrice Cenci. With critical notice 
 containing four letters from Robert Browning. 
 8vo, wrapper. 2s. net. 
 
 NETTLESHIP (J. T.). 
 
 Robert Browning : Essays and Thoughts. Third 
 Edition. Crown 8vo. 5s.6d.net. Half a dozen of 
 the Whatman large paper copies (First Edition) 
 remain. £1, is. net. 
 
 NOBLE (JAS. ASHCROFT). 
 
 The Sonnet in England and Other Essays. Title- 
 page and Cover Design by Austin Young. 600 
 copies. Crown 8vo. 5s. net. 
 Also 50 copies large paper. 12s. 6d. net. 
 
 NOEL (HON. RODEN). 
 
 Poor People's Christmas. 250 copies. i6mo. is. net. 
 
 [ Very Jew remain. 
 OXFORD CHARACTERS. 
 
 A series of lithographed portraits by Will Rothenstein, 
 with text by F. York Powell and others. To be 
 issued monthly in term. Each number will contain 
 two portraits. Part I. contains portraits of Sir Henry 
 Acland and Mr. W. A. L. Fletcher, and Part II. 
 of Mr. Robinson K. Ellis, and Lord St. Cyres. 
 200 copies only, folio, wrapper, 5s. net per part ; 25 
 special copies containing proof impressions of the por- 
 traits signed by the artist, 10s. 6d. net per part. 
 
 PINKERTON (PERCY). 
 
 Galeazzo : A Venetian Episode and other Poems. 
 Etched Frontispiece. i6mo. 5s. net. 
 
 [ Very few remain. 
 Trans/erred by the Author to the present Publishers.
 
 ELKIN MATHEWS <&> JOHN LANE 
 
 RADFORD (DOLLIE). 
 
 Songs. A New Volume of Verse. \In preparation. 
 
 RADFORD (ERNEST). 
 
 Chambers Twain. Frontispiece by Walter Cranf. 
 250 copies. Imp. i6mo. 5 s - net - 
 Also 50 copies large paper. 10s.6d.net. [Very few remain. 
 
 RHYMERS' CLUB, THE BOOK OF THE. 
 
 A second series is in preparation. 
 
 SCHAFF (DR. P.). 
 
 Literature and Poetry : Papers on Dante, etc. 
 Portrait and Plates, 100 copies only. 8vo. 10s. net. 
 
 SCOTT (WM. BELL). 
 
 A Poet's Harvest Home : with an Aftermath. 
 300 copies. Fcap. 8vo. 5s. net. [ Very few remain. 
 *** Will not be reprinted. 
 SHAW (A. D. L.). 
 
 The Happy Wanderer. Poems. Fcap. Svo. 5s. net. 
 
 [In preparation. 
 STODDARD (R. H.). 
 
 The Lion's Cub ; with other Verse. Portrait. 
 100 copies only, bound in an illuminated Persian 
 design. Fcap. Svo. 5s. net. [ Very few remain. 
 
 SYMONDS (JOHN ADDINGTON). 
 
 In the Key of Blue, and other Prose Essays. 
 Cover designed by C. S. RlCKETTS. Second Edition. 
 Thick Crown Svo. 8s. 6d. net. 
 
 THOMPSON (FRANCIS). 
 
 A Volume of Poems. With Frontispiece, Title-page 
 and Cover Design by Laurence Housman. Second 
 Edition. Pott 4to. 5s. net. 
 
 TODHUNTER (JOHN). 
 
 A Sicilian Idyll. Frontispiece by Walter Crane. 
 250 copies. Imp. i6mo. 5s. net. 
 Also 50 copies large paper, fcap. 4to. 10s. 6d. net. 
 
 [ I 'ery/tiv remain.
 
 THE PUBLICATIONS OF 
 
 TOMSON (GRAHAM R.). 
 
 After Sunset. A Volume of Poems. With Title-page and 
 Cover Design by R. Anning Bell. Fcap. 8vo. 5s. 
 net. 
 Also a limited large paper edition. 12s. 6d. net. [hi preparation. 
 
 TREE (H. BEERBOHM). 
 
 The Imaginative Faculty : A Lecture delivered at the 
 Royal Institution. With portrait of Mr. Tree from 
 an unpublished drawing by the Marchioness of Granby. 
 Fcap. 8vo, boards. 2s. 6d. net. 
 
 TYNAN HINKSON (KATHARINE). 
 
 Cuckoo Songs. With Title-page and Cover Design by 
 Laurence Housman. 500 copies. Fcap. 8vo. 5s. 
 net. [/;/ preparation. 
 
 VAN DYKE (HENRY). 
 
 The Poetry of Tennyson. Third Edition, enlarged. 
 
 Crown 8vo. 5s. 6d. net. 
 
 The late Laureate himself gave valuable aid in correcting 
 various details. 
 
 WATSON (WILLIAM). 
 
 The Eloping Angels : A Caprice. Second Edition. 
 Square i6mo, buckram. 3s. 6d. net. 
 
 WATSON (WILLIAM). 
 
 Excursions in Criticism : being some Prose Recrea- 
 tions of a Rhymer. Second Edition. Cr. 8vo. 5s.net. 
 
 WATSON (WILLIAM). 
 
 The Prince's Quest, and other Poems. With a 
 Bibliographical Note added. Second Edition. Fcap. 
 8vo. 4s. 6d. net. 
 
 WEDMORE (FREDERICK). 
 
 Pastorals of France — Renunciations. A volume of 
 
 Stories. Title-page by John Fulleylove, R.I. 
 
 Crown 8vo. 5s. net. 
 
 A few 0/ the large paper copies 0/ Renunciations (First Edition) 
 remain, las. 6d. net.
 
 ELKIN MATHEWS &* JOHN LANE 13 
 
 WICKSTEED (P. H.). 
 
 Dante. Six Sermons. Third Edition. Crown 8vo. 2s. net. 
 
 WILDE (OSCAR). 
 
 The Sphinx. A poem decorated throughout in line and 
 colour, and bound in a design by Charles Ricketts. 
 250 copies. £2, 2s. net. 25 copies large paper. 
 £5, 5s. net. [Very shortly. 
 
 WILDE (OSCAR). 
 
 The incomparable and ingenious history of Mr. W. H., 
 being the true secret of Shakespear's sonnets now for 
 the first time here fully set forth, with initial letters 
 and cover design by Charles Ricketts. 500 copies. 
 10s. 6d. net. 
 Also 50 copies large paper. 21s. net. [hi preparation. 
 
 WILDE (OSCAR). 
 
 Dramatic Works, now printed for the first time with a 
 specially designed Title-page and binding to each 
 volume, by Charles Shannon. 500 copies. Small 
 4to. 7s. 6d. net per vol. 
 Also 50 copies large paper. 15s. net per vol. 
 
 Vol. i. Lady Windermere's Fan : A Comedy in 
 Four Acts. \_Ready. 
 
 Vol. 11. A Woman of No Importance : A Comedy 
 in Four Acts. [Shortly. 
 
 Vol. in. The Duchess of Padua : A Blank Verse 
 Tragedy in Five Acts. [In preparation. 
 
 WILDE (OSCAR). 
 
 Salome : A Tragedy in one Act, done into English. 
 
 With 11 Illustrations, title-page, and Cover Design 
 
 by Aubrey Beardsley. 500 copies. Small 4to. 
 
 15s. net. 
 
 Also 100 copies, large paper. 30s. net. [Shortly. 
 
 WYNNE (FRANCES). 
 
 Whisper. A Volume of Verse. With a Memoir by 
 Katharine Tynan and a Portrait added. Fcap. 8vo. 
 
 2s. 6d. net. 
 
 Trans/erred by the Author to the present Publishers.
 
 i 4 PUBLICATIONS OF ELKIN MATHEWS &■> JOHN LANE 
 
 The Hobby Horse 
 
 A new series of this illustrated magazine will be published 
 quarterly by subscription, under the Editorship of Herbert 
 P. Home. Subscription £i per annum, post free, for the 
 four numbers. Quarto, printed on hand-made paper, and 
 issued in a limited edition to subscribers only. The 
 Magazine will contain articles upon Literature, Music, 
 Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, and the Decorative Arts ; 
 Poems ; Essays ; Fiction; original Designs; with reproduc- 
 tions of pictures and drawings by the old masters and 
 contemporary artists. There will be a new title- 
 page and ornaments designed by the Editor. 
 Among the contributors to the 
 Hobby Horse are : 
 
 The late Matthew Arnold. F. York Powell 
 
 Laurence Binyon. Christina G. Rossetti. 
 
 Wilfrid Blunt. W. M. Rossetti. 
 
 Ford Madox Brown 
 The late Arthur Burgkss. 
 E. Burne-Jones, A.R.A. 
 Austin Dobson. 
 Richard Garnett, LL.D. 
 A. J. Hipkins, F.S.A. 
 Selwyn Image. 
 Lionel Johnson 
 
 John Ruskin, D.C.L., LL.D. 
 Frederick Sandys. 
 The late W. Bell Scott. 
 Frederick J. Shields. 
 J. H. Shorthouse. 
 The late James Smetham. 
 Simeon Solomon. 
 A. Somervell. 
 
 Richard Le Gallienne. The late J. Addington Symonds. 
 
 Sir F. Leighton, Bart., P.R.A. Katharine Tynan. 
 
 T. Hope McLachlan. G. F. Watts, R.A. 
 
 May Morris. Frederick Wedmore. 
 
 C. Hubert H. Parry, Mus. Doc. Oscar Wilde. 
 
 A. W. Pollard. 
 
 Prospectuses on A ^plication. 
 
 THE BODLEY HEAD, VIGO STREET, LONDON, W.
 
 1 Nearly every book put out by Messrs. Elkin Mathews & 
 John Lane, at the Sign of the Bodley Head, is a satisfaction to 
 the special senses of the modern bookman for bindings, shapes, 
 types, and papers. They have surpassed themselves, and 
 registered a real achievement in English bookmaking by the 
 volume of ' ' Poems, Dramatic and Lyrical, " of Lord De Tabley. ' 
 
 Newcastle Daily Chronicle. 
 
 * A ray of hopefulness is stealing again into English poetry 
 after the twilight greys of Clough and Arnold and Tennyson. 
 Even unbelief wears braver colours. Despite the jeremiads, 
 which are the dirges of the elder gods, England is still a nest 
 of singing-birds {teste the Catalogue of Elkin Mathews and John 
 Lane),'— Mr. Zangwill in Pall Mall Magazine. 
 
 'All Messrs. Mathews & Lane's Books are so beautifully 
 printed and so tastefully issued, that it rejoices the heart of a 
 book-lover to handle them ; but they have shown their sound 
 judgment not less markedly in the literary quality of their 
 publications. The choiceness of form is not inappropriate to 
 the matter, which is always of something more than ephemeral 
 worth. This was a distinction on which the better publishers 
 at one time prided themselves ; they never lent their names to 
 trash ; but some names associated with worthy traditions have 
 proved more than once a delusion and a snare. The record of 
 Messrs. Elkin Mathews & John Lane is perfect in this respect, 
 and their imprint is a guarantee of the worth of what they 
 publish.' — Birmingham Daily Post, Nov. 6, 1893. 
 
 • One can nearly always be certain when one sees on the title- 
 page of any given book the name of Messrs Elkin Mathews & 
 John Lane as being the publishers thereof that there will be 
 something worth reading to be found between the boards.' — 
 World.
 
 Edinburgh : T. and A. Constable 
 Printers to Her Majesty
 
 •
 
 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 AA 000 337 267 9