A Critic in Pall Mall Part 14

A young writer can gain more from the study of a literary poet than from the study of a lyrist.

I have seen many audiences more interesting than the actors, and have often heard better dialogue in the _foyer_ than I have on the stage.

The Dramatic College might take up the education of spectators as well as that of players, and teach people that there is a proper moment for the throwing of flowers as well as a proper method.

Life remains eternally unchanged; it is art which, by presenting it to us under various forms, enables us to realize its many-sided mysteries, and to catch the quality of its most fiery-coloured moments. The originality, I mean, which we ask from the artist, is originality of treatment, not of subject. It is only the unimaginative who ever invents. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes, and he annexes everything.

If I ventured on a bit of advice, which I feel most reluctant to do, it would be to the effect that while one should always study the method of a great artist, one should never imitate his manner. The manner of an artist is essentially individual, the method of an artist is absolutely universal. The first is personality, which no one should copy; the second is perfection, which all should aim at.

A critic who posed as an authority on field sports a.s.sured me that no one ever went out hunting when roses were in full bloom. Personally, that is exactly the season I would select for the chase, but then I know more about flowers than I do about foxes, and like them much better.

The nineteenth century may be a prosaic age, but we fear that, if we are to judge by the general run of novels, it is not an age of prose.

Perhaps in this century we are too altruistic to be really artistic.

I am led to hope that the University will some day have a theatre of its own, and that proficiency in scene-painting will be regarded as a necessary qualification for the Slade Professors.h.i.+p. On the stage, literature returns to life and archaeology becomes art. A fine theatre is a temple where all the muses may meet, a second Parna.s.sus.

It would be sad indeed if the many volumes of poems that are every year published in London found no readers but the authors themselves and the authors' relations; and the real philanthropist should recognize it as part of his duties to buy every new book of verse that appears.

A fifteen-line sonnet is as bad a monstrosity as a sonnet in dialogue.

Antiquarian books, as a rule, are extremely dull reading. They give us facts without form, science without style, and learning without life.

The Roman patron, in fact, kept the Roman poet alive, and we fancy that many of our modern bards rather regret the old system. Better, surely, the humiliation of the _sportula_ than the indignity of a bill for printing! Better to accept a country-house as a gift than to be in debt to one's landlady! On the whole, the patron was an excellent inst.i.tution, if not for poetry at least for the poets; . . . every poet longs for a Maecenas.

The two things the Greeks valued most in actors were grace of gesture and music of voice. Indeed, to gain these virtues their actors used to subject themselves to a regular course of gymnastics and a particular regime of diet, health being to the Greeks not merely a quality of art, but a condition of its production.

One should not be too severe on English novels: they are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed.

Most modern novels are more remarkable for their crime than for their culture.

Not that a tramp's mode of life is at all unsuited to the development of the poetic faculty. Far from it! He, if any one, should possess that freedom of mood which is so essential to the artist, for he has no taxes to pay and no relations to worry him. The man who possesses a permanent address, and whose name is to be found in the Directory, is necessarily limited and localized. Only the tramp has absolute liberty of living.

Was not Homer himself a vagrant, and did not Thespis go about in a caravan?

In art as in life the law of heredity holds good. _On est toujours fils de quelqu'un_.

He has succeeded in studying a fine poet without stealing from him-a very difficult thing to do.

Morocco is a sort of paradox among countries, for though it lies westward of Piccadilly, yet it is purely Oriental in character, and though it is but three hours' sail from Europe, yet it makes you feel (to use the forcible expression of an American writer) as if you had been taken up by the scruff of the neck and set down in the Old Testament.

As children themselves are the perfect flowers of life, so a collection of the best poems written on children should be the most perfect of all anthologies.

No English poet has written of children with more love and grace and delicacy [than Herrick]. His _Ode on the Birth of Our Saviour_, his poem _To His Saviour_, _A Child_: _A Present by a Child_, his _Graces for Children_, and his many lovely epitaphs on children are all of them exquisite works of art, simple, sweet and sincere.

As the cross-benches form a refuge for those who have no minds to make up, so those who cannot make up their minds always take to Homeric studies. Many of our leaders have sulked in their tents with Achilles after some violent political crisis and, enraged at the fickleness of fortune, more than one has given up to poetry what was obviously meant for party.

There are two ways of misunderstanding a poem. One is to misunderstand it and the other to praise it for qualities it does not possess.

Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that pa.s.ses is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event. It is true that such aphorisms as

Graves are a _mother's dimples_ When we complain,

or

The primrose wears a constant smile, And captive takes the heart,

can hardly be said to belong to the very highest order of poetry, still, they are preferable, on the whole, to the date of Hannah More's birth, or of the burning down of Exeter Change, or of the opening of the Great Exhibition; and though it would be dangerous to make calendars the basis of Culture, we should all be much improved if we began each day with a fine pa.s.sage of English poetry.

Even the most uninteresting poet cannot survive bad editing.

Prefixed to the Calendar is an introductory note . . . displaying that intimate acquaintance with Sappho's lost poems which is the privilege only of those who are not acquainted with Greek literature.

Mediocre critics are usually safe in their generalities; it is in their reasons and examples that they come so lamentably to grief.

All premature panegyrics bring their own punishment upon themselves.

No one survives being over-estimated.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was one of the first true men of letters America produced, and as such deserves a high place in any history of American civilization. To a land out of breath in its greed for gain he showed the example of a life devoted entirely to the study of literature; his lectures, though not by any means brilliant, were still productive of much good; he had a most charming and gracious personality, and he wrote some pretty poems. But his poems are not of the kind that call for intellectual a.n.a.lysis or for elaborate description or, indeed, for any serious discussion at all.

Though the _Psalm of Life_ be shouted from Maine to California, that would not make it true poetry.

Longfellow has no imitators, for of echoes themselves there are no echoes and it is only style that makes a school.

Poe's marvellous lines _To Helen_, a poem as beautiful as a Greek gem and as musical as Apollo's lute.

Good novelists are much rarer than good sons, and none of us would part readily with Micawber and Mrs. Nickleby. Still, the fact remains that a man who was affectionate and loving to his children, generous and warm-hearted to his friends, and whose books are the very baccha.n.a.lia of benevolence, pilloried his parents to make the groundlings laugh, and this fact every biographer of d.i.c.kens should face and, if possible, explain.

No age ever borrows the slang of its predecessor.

What we do not know about Shakespeare is a most fascinating subject, and one that would fill a volume, but what we do know about him is so meagre and inadequate that when it is collected together the result is rather depressing.

They show a want of knowledge that must be the result of years of study.

Rossetti's was a great personality, and personalities such as his do not easily survive s.h.i.+lling primers.

We are sorry to find an English dramatic critic misquoting Shakespeare, as we had always been of opinion that this was a privilege reserved specially for our English actors.

Biographies of this kind rob life of much of its dignity and its wonder, add to death itself a new terror, and make one wish that all art were anonymous.

A pillar of fire to the few who knew him, and of cloud to the many who knew him not, Dante Gabriel Rossetti lived apart from the gossip and t.i.ttle-tattle of a shallow age. He never trafficked with the merchants for his soul, nor brought his wares into the market-place for the idle to gape at. Pa.s.sionate and romantic though he was, yet there was in his nature something of high austerity. He loved seclusion, and hated notoriety, and would have shuddered at the idea that within a few years after his death he was to make his appearance in a series of popular biographies, sandwiched between the author of _Pickwick_ and the Great Lexicographer.

We sincerely hope that a few more novels like these will be published, as the public will then find out that a bad book is very dear at a s.h.i.+lling.

The only form of fiction in which real characters do not seem out of place is history. In novels they are detestable.

s.h.i.+lling literature is always making demands on our credulity without ever appealing to our imagination.

Pathology is rapidly becoming the basis of sensational literature, and in art, as in politics, there is a great future for monsters.