LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS.*

WE feel some surprise that so experienced a literary man as the editor of the St. James's Gazette should have suggested the form of this book, and still more that so able a writer and skilful a critic as Mr. Andrew Lang should have accepted the form suggested. It is essentially a spurious and unnatural form, and it is evident enough that Mr. Lang has so found it, for while some of these letters are imitative studies in the style of the author addressed,—like the very ingenious letter to Herodotus, —and others are elaborate criticisms, either wholly favourable or in part unfavourable, on the authors themselves or on their supposed modern rivals, like the letters to Thackeray, to Dickens, and to Miss Austen, there is something un- natural about the form in every case alike, Thus, Mr. Lang writes to Herodotus —" Through the whole of this island, from the west even to the east, there flows a river called Thames : a great river and a laborious, but not to be likened to the River of Egypt. The mouth of this river, where 1 stepped out from my ship, is exceedingly foul and of an evil savour by reason of the city on the banks. Now this city is several hundred parasangs in circumference. Yet a man that needed not to breathe the air might go round it in one hour, in chariots that run under the earth ; and these chariots are drawn by creatures that breathe smoke and sulphur, such as Orpheus mentions in his Argonantica,' if it be uy Orpheus." Herodotus, if he could read this, would be the first to admit that his manner was very well taken off ; but we think he would add Why parody me in a letter addressed to myself ? It makes me uncomfortable to receive such a letter, and it ought to make you uncomfortable to write it. There is a harshness in addressing such a jen d'esprit to the author imitated, that diminishes the effect of the parody instead of enhancing it.' And so, again, in relation to the purely laudatory criticisms. How uncomfortable Thackeray would have felt, if he could have read in a letter addressed to himself :— " Thus fiction in your hands was not simply a profession, like another, but a constant reflection of the whole surface of life a repeated echo of its laughter and its complaint. Others have written, and not written badly, with the stolid professional regularity of the clerk at his desk ; you, like the Scholar-Gipsy, might have said that it needs Heaven-sent moments for this skill." Would not Thackeray have replied ?= You are very complimentary, but I don't particularly like formal compli- ments at the expense of my friend Trollope, and really I • Letters to Dead Authors. By Andrew Lang. London : Longmans, Green, and Co.

am quite incompetent to estimate how far I deserve them. Why do you launch such remarks at my head ?' Again, how embarrassed Miss Austen would have been to be assured— "How fine, nay, how noble, is your art in its delicate reserve, never insisting, never forcing the note, never pushing the sketch into the caricature !" Would she not have replied ?— You are kind, but all this applause addressed to me makes me feel very awkward, and looks to me a little too like flattery. Is there any favour you want to get out of me by way of return ?' In a word, it seems to ns that the subtlest and best of these essays,—and some of them contain very true and subtle criticisms, while almost all are occasionally brilliant,—are injured by the extremely unfortunate form. This form puts everything out of its natural perspective, and distorts it much as Nature is distorted in a Chinese screen. How discordant in its effect is such an address as this to Robert Burns :—" So in the best company we leave you, who were the life and soul of so much company, good and bad. No poet, since the Psalmist of Israel, ever gave the world more assurance of a man ; none lived a life more strenuous, engaged in an eternal conflict of the passions, and by them overcome,—' mighty and mightily fallen.' When we think of you, Byron seems, as Plato would have said, remote by one degree from actual truth, and Musset by a degree more remote than Byron." Is not that a little stilted, and stilted chiefly because it is addressed to Burns ? If written in a quiet criticism on Barns, though we might have taken some exception to the judgment, and especially to the word " strenuous," no one would have thought it btilted. That which if spoken of a great writer would be discriminating enough, becomes strained, artificial, and unpleasantly eloquent, if it is thrown into the form of an address to him.

For the rest, we have little fault to find. The effect of straining after something brilliant which we often feel, is, we believe, the same fault over again, or at least is mainly due to the awkwardness of the form itself. Mr. Andrew Lang is a shrewd and bright critic, with a little too much taste for sneering, and a little too ready to believe that a sneer adds brightness to a sentence, which, without some other quality than that which the sneer gives it, it certainly does not. This is as good a short criticism as one could have on Sir Walter Scott, and if only it were not in form addressed to Sir Walter, would be admirable :-

" Were the word genial' not so much profaned, were it not mis- used in easy good-nature, to extenuate lettered and sensual indolence, that worn old term might be applied, above all men, to the Shirrn.' Bat perhaps we scarcely need a word (it would be seldom in use) for a character so rare, or rather so lonely, in its nobility and charm as that of Walter Scott. Here, in the heart of your own country, among your own grey round-shouldered hills (each so like the other that the shadow of one falling on its neighbour exactly outlines that neighbour's shape), it is of you and of your works that a native of the Forest is most frequently brought in mind. All the spirits of the river and the bill, all the dying refrains of ballad and the fading echoes of story, all the memory of the wild past, each legend of barn and loch, seem to have combined to inform your spirit, and to secure themselves an immortal life in your song. It is through you that we remember them ; and in recalling them, as in treading each hill-side in this land, we again remember you and bless you. It is not Sixty Years Since' the echo of Tweed among his pebbles fell for the last time on your ear; not sixty years since, and how much is altered! Bat two generations have passed ; the lad who used to ride from

Edinburgh to Abbotsford, carrying new books for you, and old, is

still vending, in George Street, old books and new. Of politics I have not the heart to speak. Little joy would you have had in most that has befallen since the Reform Bill was passed, to the chivalrous

cry of barke Sir Walter.' We are still very Radical in the Forest,

and you were taken away from many evils to come. How would the cheek of Walter Scott, or of Leyden, have blushed at the names of Majnba, the Soudan, Maiwand, and many others that recall political cowardice or military incapacity ! On the other hand, who but you

could have sung the dirge of Gordon, or wedded with immortal verse the names of Hamilton (who fell with Cavognari), of the two Stewarts, of many another clansman, brave among the bravest ! Only he who told how

The stubborn spearmen still mule good Their dark impenetrable wood'

could have fitly rhymed a score of feats of arms in which, as at M'Neill's Zareba and at Abu Klee, ' Groom fought like noble, squire like knight,

As fearlessly and ell.'

Ah, Sir, the hearts of the rulers may wax faint, and the voting classes may forget that they are Britons; but when it comes to blows our fighting men might cry, with Leyden,

'My acme is little Jock Ellie, And wha danr meddle wi' me!'

Ma211 is changed, in the conntry-side as well as in the country ; but ranch remains. The little towns of your time are populous and excessively black with the smoke of factories—not, I fear, at present very flourishing. In Galashiels you still see the little change-house and the cluster of cottages round the Laird's lodge, like the clachan

of Tully Veolan. But these plain remnants of the old Scotch towns are almost buried in a multitude of 'smoky dwarf houses '—a living poet, Mr. Matthew Arnold, has found the fitting phrase for these dwellings, once for all. All over the Forest the waters are dirty and poisoned : I think they are filthiest below Hawick ; but this may be mere local prejudice in a Selkirk man. To keep them clean costs money ; and, though improvements are often promised, I cannot see much change for the better. Abbotsford, luckily, is above Galashiels, and only receives the dirt and dyes of Selkirk, Peebles, Walkerhurn, and Innerleithen. On the other hand, your ill-omened later dwelling, the unhappy palace of your race,' is overlooked by villas that prick a cockney oar among their larches, hotels of the future."

Nor could there be a better sum-up of Shelley than in the following lively passages :—

" Ab, not in the wastes of Speculation, nor the sterile din of Polities, were 'the haunts meet for thee.' Watching the yellow bees iu the ivy bloom, and the reflected pine forest iu the water- pools, watching the sunset as it faded, and the dawn as it fired, and weaving all fair and fleeting things into a tissue where light and music were at one, that was the task of Shelley ! ' To ask you for anything human,' you said, ' was like asking for a leg of mutton at a gin-shop.' Nay, rather, like asking Apollo and Ilebe, in the Olympian abodes, to give us beef for ambrosia, and port for nectar. Each poet gives what he has, and what he can offer; you spread before us fairy bread and enchanted wine, and shall we turn away, with a sneer, because, out of alt the multitudes of singers, one is spiritual and strange, one has seen Artemis unveiled ? One, like Anchises, has been beloved of the Goddess, and his eyes, when ho looks on the common world of common men, are, like the eyes of Anchises, blind with excess of light. Let Shelley sing of what he saw, what none saw but Shelley ! Notwithstanding the popularity of your poems (the most romantic of things didactic), our world is no better than t he world you knew. This will disappoint you, who had 'a passion for reforming it.' Rings and priests are very much where you left them. Trno, we have a poet who assails them, at large, frequently and fearlessly ; vet Mr. Swinburne has never, like 'kind Hunt,' been in prison, nor do we fear for him a charge of treason. Moreover, chemical science has discovered new and ingenious ways of destroying principalities and powers. You would be interested in the methods, but your peaceful Revolutionism, which disdained physical force, would regret their application. Our foreign affairs are not in a state which even you would consider satis- factory ; for we have just had to contend with a Revolt of Islam, and we still find in Russia exactly the qualities which you recognised and described. We have a great statesman whose methods and eloquence somewhat resemble those you attribute to Leon and Prince Atbanase. Alas ! he is a youth of more than seventy summers ; and not in his time will Prometheus retire to a cavern and pass a peaceful millen- nium in twining buds and beams. In domestic affairs most of the reforms you desired to see have been carried. Ireland has received emancipation, and almost everything else she can ask for. I regret to say that she is still unhappy ; her wounds uostanched, her wrongs unforgiven. At home we have enfranchised the paupers, and expect the most happy results. Paupers (as Mr. Gladstone says) are ' our own flesh and blood,' and, as we compel them to be vaccinated, so we should permit them to vote. Is it a dream that Mr. Jesse Collings (how you would have loved that man !) has a Bill for extending the priceless boon of the vote to inmates of Pauper Lunatic Asylums ? This may prove that last clement iu the Elixir of political happiness which we have long sought in vain. Atheists, you will regret to hear, are still unpopular ; but the new Parliament has done some- thing for Mr. Bradlaugh. You should have known our Charles while you were in the 'Queen Mab ' stage. I fear you wandered, later, from his robust condition of intellectual development For Humanity, of which you hoped such great things, Science predicts extinction in a night of Frost. The sun will grow cold, slowly—as slowly as doom came on Jupiter in your ' Prometheus,' but as surely. If this nightmare be fulfilled, perhaps the Last Man, in some fetid but on the ice-bound Equator, will read, by a fading lamp charged with the dregs of the oil in his cruse, the poetry of Shelley. So reading, he, the latest of his race, will not wholly be deprived of those sights which alone (says the nameless Greek) make life worth enduring. In your verse he will have sight of sky, and sea, and cloud, the gold of dawn and the gloom of earthquake and eclipse. He will be face to face, in fancy, with the great powers that are dead, sun, and ocean, and the illimitable azure of the heavens. In Shelley's poetry, while Man endures, all those will survive ; for your voice is as the voice of winds and tides,' and perhaps more deathless than all of these, and only perishable with the perishing of the human spirit."

On the whole, if these were not "letters to dead authors,"—if the blunder had not been made of trying to pour a little adventitious excitement into these criticisms by the use of an advertiser's trick,—they would have been thought singularly good (though occasionally flippant) essays. As it is, they need recasting in form before they can be read with the satisfaction, and sometimes the admiration, they deserve. We do not, however, think the address to Omar Khayyam at all up to Mr. Andrew Lang's usual mark.