27 JANUARY 1894, Page 3

BOOKS.

MR. ESPINASSE'S REMINISCENCES.*

IN the course of a long and active life devoted almost en. tirely to literary journalism, it has been the good fortune of Mr. Espinasse to come into contact, more or less intimate, with a great many of the ablest writers of his time, and, being gifted with a good memory and a pleasant style, he has turned his opportunities to excellent account in the volume before us. And it speaks well for his modesty that he should have only incidentally adopted the autobiographical method, preferring, in the main, to write of others than of himself. But as the maxim, " Noscitur ex sociis," is generally a pretty safe guide, the impression left on the reader after the perusal of these pages is decidedly favourable to the narrator.

Mr. Espinasse, who was born and educated in Edinburgh, was cautioned, while still a lad, both by Lord Jeffrey and Wordsworth, to have nothing to do with literature. They both recommended him to study medicine. But the warnings of the great editor and the great poet were of no avail. Already, as a student at Edinburgh, he had conceived an enthusiastic ad- miration for the writings of Carlyle, had corresponded with him on the mystery of life, and had endeavoured, with other kindred spirits, to persuade Carlyle to allow himself to be nominated for the Chair of History in that University. And thus it came about that, on his migration to London early in the forties, he was speedily admitted to the Carlyle circle, his memories of which form the most important part of this -volume. Mr. Espinasse's earliest official employment was that of an assistant in the British Museum, where he was able to render Carlyle useful help in his historical researches; and he devotes an interesting chapter to the organisation of that institution under the autocratic rule of Panizzi, whose career, character, and protgggs are described in unsparing terms. Panizzi, according to Mr. Espinasse, was energetic and able ; but he was a jobber, a pedant, and a tyrant. Fifty years ago, the superintendent of the Reading-room was an ex-pugilist ; and Mr. Espinasse winds up this chapter by con- gratulating the public on the wonderful change for the better in the efficiency and courteousness of the staff. The pith of the chapter on the " Organisation of Literature," reprinted from Macmillan's Magazine, is contained in the suggestion for remodelling the Board of Trustees of the British Museum, which Mr. Espinasse thought, and still thinks, might serve some of the purposes of the French Academy.

Turning to the chapters on Carlyle and his circle, we are glad to be reminded in their opening pages that two of the most appreciative contemporary notices of the French Revolu- tion were written by J. S. Mill and Thackeray, passages from which are quoted in a note on p. 56. When Mr. Espinasse first visited the house in Cheyne Walk, he saw one of the copies of Sartor Resartus, "which, when every London publisher of note refused to be at the cost of reprinting it from Fraser, had been formed by detaching from the magazine the sheets containing the successive instalments of the now famous book, and stitching them into volume form." Carlyle suffered greatly from his residence in London, but he appreciated its advantages. "Literature written out of London," he once said to Mr. Espinasse, " has always a provincial look." After the Oromwelliad, from the atmosphere of which Mrs. Carlyle was glad to be delivered, Mr. Espinasse makes it pretty clear that Carlyle had intentions on William the Conqueror, and not already on Frederick the Great, basing his conclusion on contemporary conversations with Carlyle as well as on the latter's visit to the Museum to examine the reproduction of the Bayeux tapestry. Other en- gagements, however, diverted him from his intention. In his chapter on "the Ashburtons," Mr. Espinasse sup- plements Lord Houghton's sketch in his Monographs with some valuable illustrations of the generosity and kindliness of that high-minded Peer and his brilliant wife, of whom the Princess Lieven said, " Qu'il vaudrait bien s'abonner pour entendre causer cette femme," and whose de- Literary Recollections and Sketches. By Francis Espinasse. London, Hodder and Stoughton. ference to intellect, as Mr. Espinasse justly remarks, was her most agreeable characteristic. But the most curious fact which is brought to light in this connection is one of the

many what-might-have-beeps in Carlyle's career. Carlyle, as is well known, ended by having a cordial admiration for Peel; and at this juncture he made no concealment of his aspiration to serve his country. As Mr. Espinasse writes :—

" If Peel had set up that permanent establishment in this country' which Carlyle fondly hoped for, or even if he had remained in office for a year or two more, it is possible that, with such influential friends as the Barings—especially when they became Lord and Lady Ashburton—Carlyle might have been enabled to servo his country as doer,' and not merely as a speaker." Goethe,' he once said to me,' was the most successful speaker of the century, but I would have been better pleased if he had done something.' And to 'do something,' to do almost anything that was useful and honourable, rather than spend his days in painfully writing books which he felt too keenly to be an inadequate expression of himself, was so strong a desire of Car- lyle's that, in the middle of his literary career, ho actually though tof abandoning literature, and becoming—a civil engineer ! "

A propos of Mazzini, Mr. Espinasse reminds us of Carlyle's spirited protest published in the Times against the opening at the General Post Office of Mazzini's letters, in the interest of the Austrian Government, and recalls how Carlyle described Sir James Graham, then Peel's Home Secretary, as a " border- reiver disguised as Minister of State." "Years afterwards," adds Mr. Espinasse, "I heard Carlyle say, 'When I first met Mazzini, I thought him the most beautiful creature I had ever seen—but entirely unpractical;' Mrs. Carlyle, by this time a little dis- enchanted, quietly adding, He twaddled.' " If in the case of Mazzini, Carlyle's enthusiasm gradually cooled, in other instances, initial dislike gave place to cordial esteem. This, for example, was true of John Forster, whose foibles and mannerisms were, in Mr. Espinasse's opinion, far outweighed by his many good qualities. The Carlyles began by alluding to him as " Fra."—the short for Fuzbuz, under which title he had been lampooned in Lady Bulwer's notorious novel, Cheveley ; or, The Man of Honour—but dropped the con- temptuous designation after a while. Forster was of real service to Carlyle in business matters, and proved his loyalty so thoroughly that, in spite of certain antagonisms, Carlyle grew to hold him in warm and even affectionate regard. Their correspondence, covering a period of some forty years, was bequeathed by Forster to the South Kensington Museum, and though these letters of Carlyle's were neglected by Mr. Fronde, Mr. Espinasse, who has read them, assures us that they vie in interest with anything in the Reminiscences, that they often throw light on points left elsewhere obscure, and that, finally, they are seldom tinged with the bitterness which so often disfigures his other personal writings. As instances of the varied subjects of which they treat, Mr. Espinasse mentions sketches of Ruskin at home, of Browning's possible poetic future, of Mr. Justice Stephen as a walking companion, of a visit in old age to Kirkcaldy, where in youth he had been a schoolmaster, and—mirabi/e dictu—a eulogy of the second Lord Lytton. The chapter on Robertson, another able jour- nalistic friend of Carlyle's, calls for no special comment, beyond that it contains some of Carlyle's warnings, specially addressed to Mr. Espinasse in the character of a literary aspirant,—viz., " In literature a man can do nothing worth doing until he has killed his vanity :" " Avoid hypochondria,

pride, and gloom ; they are a waste of faculty : " " A man is an indestructible fragment of the universe ; but, if he wishes to

live, he must not be nice : " and, last and best of all, " The heart that remained true to itself never yet found this big universe finally faithless to it." In his Manchester memories, Mr. Espinasse has a good deal to say about Geraldine Jews- bury, of whose earliest novel, Zoe, he remarks, not without substantial reason, that it was the precursor not only of Mr. Froude's Nemesis of Faith, but of Robert Elsmere, and the theological romance of to-day.

Carlyle's visit to Manchester, in the autumn of 1847, fur- nishes Mr. Espinasse with the materials for an interesting

chapter. Fresh from a visit to W. E. Forster and a pilgrimage to Cromford, Carlyle was full of Arkwright and the industrial heroes of Lancashire. He visited Whitworth's works, and made an excursion to " Brightdom," as he called Rochdale, where Mr. Espinasse was present at a vehement controversy between Carlyle and John Bright, on the question of Negro slavery, and seems to have enjoyed himself thoroughly. When pressed to stay a little longer in Manchester, Carlyle " settled the matter in a way usual with him in such eases, tossing up a penny so as to leave the question of stay or de- parture to the arbitrament of heads and tails ; " and the result of the toss decided him to depart. Missing the first train by which he intended to travel northward, he was bitterly self- reproachful, and one could not help laughing inwardly to hear his plaintive exclamation, If my wife had been here, this would not have happened ! '" The chapter on Emerson in England is good reading, if only for Mr. Espinasse's unearth- ing of a curious memorial of Carlyle's intimacy with Emerson in the shape of a paper in praise of " Indian Meal " as an article of general consumption, which appeared in Fraser, in May, 1849. Emerson had sent Carlyle a barrel, on which Lord Ashburton experimented for Carlyle's benefit. The result was this article, rejected in the first instance by the Times, and afterwards published in Fraser.

Mr. Espinasse also traces Carlyle's few contributions to the

columns of the Examiner and Spectator—then edited by Rin- told—contributions which commended themselves neither to editors nor readers, least of all to the Government, whose attitude in regard to Ireland Carlyle denounced in passionate terms. Rebuffed by the Press, Carlyle took refuge in his Latter-Day Pamphlets, and Mr. Espinasse makes good an omission in Mr. Fronde's biography, by a careful analysis of Carlyle's scheme of social regeneration by a system of indus- trial regiments, in which all paupers were to be compulsorily enlisted and governed by martial law. The budget of Car- lyliana—delivered orally—which Mr. Espinasse has collected under the head of "Polities, Religion, and Education," is curious rather than edifying, nearly every saying being steeped in sorsa indignatio. In friendly intercourse he shone most conspicuously when indulging in his unequalled talent for narration. In criticising himself, while not affecting to be ignorant of at least the relative value of what he wrote, he spoke modestly of its absolute merit, and once remarked to Mr. Espinasse that he regarded his books " as contemptible performances compared with the idea that inspired them." As a critic of others, he certainly was not over-sympathetic, and Mr. Espinasse shows good cause for asserting that " great as was Carlyle'e intellectual integrity, his estimates of his contemporaries, literary and unliterary, were often, in a perceptible degree, coloured by personal feel- ing." He spoke with impatience of Tennyson, whom he per-

sonally liked, " cobbling his odes," dismissed Jane Austen's novels as " dish-washings," Hallam as " dryasdust," Goldsmith as an "Irish blackguard," and so on. In short, Carlyle's criticisms on other writers, nineteen times out of twenty, were grotesquely unfair, and only memorable for their picturesqueness. Perhaps the best of all the hard sayings recorded by Mr. Espinasse is that about the writers of leading- articles : " What are these fellows doing? They only serve to cancel one another."

Mr. Espinasse gives interesting sketches of several of Carlyle's most intimate friends, amongst others of John

Chorley, brother of the well-known H. P. Chorley, of the Athenxwm, a man of considerable scholarship and fastidious taste, and of Arthur Helps, of whose generosity and kindli- ness Mr. Espinasse gives a remarkable instance, justly adding that "a life and correspondence of Arthur Helps is among our biographical desiderata, since few men of his generation had -communed with so many distinguished persons." The curiously chequered journalistic career of Ballantyne, ori- ginally a weaver in Paisley, and in succession the editor of half-a-dozen papers, metropolitan and provincial, is next traced ; but of all these sketches none is more interesting than that of Maccall, an Ayrshire man, who enlisted in the Dragoons, and was for a time a Unitarian minister. Maccall, who was the author of an able, though for- gotten, work on the Elements of Individualism, was a man of considerable gifts and high integrity, but was unfortunately cursed with an invincible intellectual arro- gance which, once he took pen in hand, caused him to run amok at everything and everybody. Mr. Espinasse gives a couple of remarkably brilliant specimens of his use of the

tomahawk, and tells the following pathetic anecdote of his later years, when he was engaged in a perpetual and painful struggle with the direst poverty :—

" I remember attending one of his later lectures. His theme was Genius, under some aspect which I forget, and the hall in which he delivered it was well filled with an audience somewhat above the working class. It was the most painful lecture to which I ever listened. The biography of genius affords material for any number of lectures or of volumes. But this discourse was, though he never named himself or directly referred to him- self, a dismal version of the autobiography of William Maccall. It was little more than a catalogue of his own struggles, disap- pointments, failures, baffled aspirations, physical miseries, and spiritual agonies, all generalised so as to represent the sufferings of genius in the abstract. For one solitary listener to it, who understood the meaning of it all, it had a melancholy interest, but to the mass of his hearers it was so uninteresting and so un- intelligible that a most (to me) pathetic passage was interrupted by a voice from one of the audience, who shouted : Tell us about Chatterton, Mr. Maccall,' and the lecture was soon brought to an abrupt conclusion."

We have not allowed ourselves space to touch upon Mr. Espinasse's very readable chapters on G. H. Lewes—with regard to whom, as in the case of John Forster and others, Carlyle's original impressions underwent such material modi- fication—on James Hannay, and on several other brilliant but forgotten members of the honourable corporation of the goose-quill. These reminiscences certainly go a good way towards establishing the truth of the saying that journalism is the grave of literary ambition. In this connection we may note that Mr. Espinasse offers some very trenchant observa- tions on the recent invasion of periodical journalism by aristocratic amateurs. "In the old days," he remarks, "the ladies and gentlemen who now occupy, most undeservedly, foremost places even in the better class of periodicals, had their vanity innocently gratified by contributing to the now extinct annuals, the Keepsakes and Amulets, the Literary Souvenirs and Books of Beauty. Persons of quality had a literature of their own, written solely and read solely by them- selves. Its gradual extinction is, from one point of view, very much to be regretted, in the interest both of the reading public and of the promising young author." The concluding chapter contains some interesting reminiscences of Lord Beaconsfield, whose autobiographical notes, furnished to Mr. Espinasse for the memoir in the Dictionary of Universal Biography, supple- ment, where they do not clash with, the biography of Mr. Fronde. Mr. Espinasse tells us how, in the course of an interview, Mr. Disraeli, as he then was, spoke of Mr. Glad- stone, then Member for Oxford University, as a man of " splendid abilities, but hampered by his Church liaisons,"— a most characteristic remark. And he revives that delicious remark of Dr. Cogan, the Principal of Walthamstow School : " I don't like Disraeli ; I never could get him to understand the subjunctive."

Mr. Espinasse, in fine, has produced an exceedingly readable book, the attractions of whioh are enhanced by the fact that, for its size, it is one of the lightest books to hold that we have ever come across. In writing of the eminent or notable men and women with whom he came in contact, Mr. Espinasse displays a sympathy which is void of indiscriminate eulogy, while his criticism, though often severe, is seldom tinged with bitterness. An exception must, however, be made in the case of Panizzi,—though as an assistant in the British Museum and a friend of Carlyle's, Mr. Espinasse had doubtless good cause for complaint. And the references to G. H. Lewes's domestic relations might have been profitably omitted. But apart from these passages, and an allusion to the poetry of Matthew Arnold, very discreditable to Mr. Espinasse's literary insight, which characterises it as " melodious pule," there is little or nothing in the book that errs against the canons of good taste.