ANDREW LANG.
IN Andrew Lang the world has lost a great man of letters in the old full sense of the word. Nowadays our writers are specialists, cultivating diligently their little gardens. In other times an Erasmus or a Dr. Johnson, having mastered his medium, took all letters for his pro- vince, and reached distinction in half-a-dozen very different fields. Andrew Lang thought he loved life better than literature, a delusion which Stevenson shared ; but in reality both to their innermost hearts were devotees of the printed word. His versatility would be perplexing if we did not remember its cause. He loved the things of the mind, the exercise of an accomplished intellect; and there were few domains of human interest in which he could not find this pleasure. Politics he detested ; his prejudices were too fundamental to be embodied in any one of our opportunist parties. Nor did he greatly care for metaphysics or physical science, his mind being too concrete for the one and too picturesque for the other. But almost everything else, from salmon to totems, came within the circle of his interest& He was an exact and learned classical scholar, and probably
the best translator of our day; a well-equipped anthropologist; a lover of odd corners in psychology; a painstaking and at times a brilliant historian ; a student of origins and religions; an unraveller of puzzles, with an unfailing scent for a mystery ; an acute, though occasionally a petulant, critic of literature. He was also poet, novelist, parodist, essayist, and weaver of fairy-tales. For more than forty years he pursued the most laborious of callings, that of "occasional" jour- nalist, and found leisure to prepare"at the same time many works of profound research. And with it all he never lost his freshness. He never wrote a paragraph into which he did not put something of himself, some touch of his curious grace and wit. It would be hard to find a parallel to such an amazing versatility.
Probably the poet was deepest in him. When he was at Balliol, Jowett foresaw in him a great poet, and though be never quite fulfilled the promise of his youth he did not lose his vision. Perhaps verse came too easily to him, and there- fore tended to take light and transient forms. Certainly no modern writer of casual lyrics has excelled him in delicacy and esprit. He was very susceptible to literary influences, and in his serious work was apt to echo the masters. But he has written several of the noblest sonnets of our day, such as that on the death of Colonel Burnaby, and some of his poems on Tweed and Yarrow have a certainty of immortality. His prose is instinct with poetry, though nothing was ever less like " poetic prose." It is a curious style, very simple and staccato, often akin to good talk. But in purity and grace it must stand very high, and it has its great moments, such as the passage on Flora Macdonald in his " Prince Charles Edward " and the noble close of his " Maid of France." The same poetic quality is shown in his fairy-tales, whether he is re-telling old ones or weaving new ones. "The Gold of Fairnilee " is surely the most beautiful of modern exercises in this art. This gift, too, made him a wonderful translator of poetry. His " Homer," in which his share is clear, is a model of how prose may reproduce a good poet, and his "Theocritus," with its dainty cadences, is the last word in the rendering of the literary pastoral.
His scholarship gave him a hatred of all cant and flam- boyance, and made him an excellent critic both of style and theory. He chose for his most serious work precisely those domains that are given over to wordy compilers and heavy-footed commentators. In his Homeric studies he fought for Homeric unity with the loyalty of a Jacobite to his king. Twenty years ago he was a voice crying in the wilderness ; now the wheel of fashion is bringing many scholars round to his side. In his most recent and best book on the subject," The World of Homer," he replies with much effect to the brilliant specu- lations of Professor Murray's " The Rise of the Greek Epic." Psychical research interested him greatly, and his humour is a welcome ally in its more dreary places. Few men felt more sincerely the spell of the unseen, but lie would not build his faith on any charlatanry or false sentiment. In anthropo- logy he was a laborious worker and a doughty controversialist, but he was always a little apt to forget the wood in the trees. His books were disproportioned, for he never looked at a science as a whole, and always preferred to cultivate in- tensively a corner rather than plough the field. Still these books have a permanent value, for they are never dull. He is provocative and perverse occasionally, but his freshness of style and wide range of knowledge make them curiously attractive—a "mass o' fine confused feeding." Form, which is so omnipresent in his essays, was apt to be slighted in his more learned works.
It is this defect which mars his history—the subject which was probably nearest his heart. He was intensely conscious of the past, and had the gift not only of re-creating it imaginatively, but of understanding its motives and its long- forgotten disputes. Hence he was peculiarly successful in historical portraiture. Where shall we find a more balanced and sympathetic study of personality than his " Prince Charles Edward," or such portraits as Montrose and the Old Pretender in his "History of Scotland " ? He was excellent, too, at fathoming puzzles, pursuing-a clue like a sleuth-hound among acres of manuscript. Take any one of his " Historical Mysteries," or his treatment of the Cowrie Conspiracy, or his many studies in the career of Mary of Scots. He provided brilliantly the raw material of great history, but he never quite wrote it. His mind tended to be episodic and staccato.
In his "History of Scotland," his chief work of erudition, this defect is clearly seen. It is probably the best history of Scotland extant, for it is a monument of industry and in- genuity, and, with certain small reservations, it is con- spicuously fair. But we never get from it the sweep of narrative and the view as from a high place which we get from the greater historians. Once, again, it is a case of the trees obscuring the wood. It is a collection of diligent researches, brilliant pictures, and illuminating comments, but they are not woven together. Perhaps this lack of sustained power is the price which human nature must pay for versa- tility. If a man touches life on many sides he is the more liable to distraction.
Andrew Lang was never a strong man, and he performed his multifarious tasks in spite of real bodily weakness. He was too often and too gravely tired, and as a result a casual observer was apt to"discover a superciliousness which was quite alien to his real nature. No man was more simple and kindly. To his lucid and cultivated mind humbug and fustian were repellent, and fools were apt to bring on themselves his ironic wit. But it was only summer lightning. The very man who detested literary chatter and a sham Bohemianisin was the first to help the unfortunate chatterer if he came to grief. As we have said, he did not rate the profession of letters very high, and reserved his admiration for the world of deeds—a pose, no doubt, but the proof of a sound philosophy. He was always ridiculously bumble about his own work, and had none of the self-centred vanity of the sedentary worker. Like Stevenson, too, he preserved amid ill-health and advancing age a boyishness of mind. As Johnson said of Boswell, he was " longer a boy than other people." The rawest tale of ad- venture delighted him, and his interest in games, at which be rejoiced to confess himself a duffer, never waned. Of outdoor sports fishing was his oldest love, and, though he was the most luckless of anglers, the riverside always kept its spell for him. He was proud to reckon a gipsy strain in his ancestry, and the Fates did not doom him wholly to pen and ink. Few scholars have kept more free from " the abhorr'd pedantic sanhedrin." This old instinct kept his point of view always wholesome and human. He knew and loved the best in life and literature, and he was loyal to his standard of pure taste and clear thinking in all that he did.
He was a true Scot—perfervid, we had almost written—in those national concerns which attracted him ; but his country- men were always a little uneasy about him. He had no enthusiasm for the Kirk, or the Covenant, or Gladstonianism, or theological disputations, though he had been a Gifford lecturer. His wit, too, seemed occasionally double-edged. The truth is that he represented very exactly one of the two great Scottish traditions. Sir Walter Scott was always to him the first of Scotsmen, and something of Sir Walter's mantle descended to his fellow-Borderer. He had much of Scott's sanity and kindliness, as he had much of his passion for old ways. He has caught for us the grace of those pastoral glens "where Ettrick and where Teviot flow," and of his poetry that, at any rate, must endure. He loved the Borders, and he wrote of them worthily—that is the epitaph which he would have most desired.
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