MR. LESLIE STEPHEN'S ADVICE TO READERS.
MR. LESLIE STEPHEN'S lecture at Toynbee Hall last Saturday was much more successful in giving his own personal reminiscences of books, than in explaining why the old do not return as often as they might, to the literature which delighted their youth ; and in his advice to ordinary readers. He spoke of the habits of literary men themselves, and said that they seemed often to leave the masterpieces of literature untouched on the dusty shelves while they contended for the last Punch or the last French novel ; and he suggested that this might be because they had in the course of years suffered so many real troubles that they had lost their appetite for imaginary ones. But if so, why contend for the last French novel, in which they would certainly find as many imaginary troubles as in any of the favourites of their youth ? The reason suggested is surely not the true one. Men do not go to books, either in youth or in age, that they may enter into the joys and troubles of imaginary persons. So far as the troubles of imaginary persons are made too like the troubles of real friends and intimates, they rather repel than attract us. Mr. Leslie Stephen must, in his editorial work, have often received contributions which made him shrink from the very obvious accent of really lacerated hearts ; but that accent, we suspect, whatever the force, did not induce him to accept them. There is nothing of bare pain, nor even of bare joy, in the masterpieces of literature. There is always some finer atmos- phere of imagination which softens the bare pain, or mellows the bare joy, of real life, till it produces a different effect and passes straight into the imagination, as morphia injected into the blood and not administered by the mouth, goes straight into the life of the sufferer without passing through all the pre- liminary stages which give him the sense of slow and dragging experience. Does Mr. Stephen suppose that if the reading of Hamlet or Macbeth really subjected us personally to all those alternating moods of horror, vacillation, spasmodic temptation, and hopeless remorse, of which these plays give us the vivid pictures, we should ever of our own desire read or watch them ? Of course not. The more we study Shakespeare, even in his most impressive tragedies, the more we enjoy him. But we should not enjoy at all finding ourselves plotting Duncan's murder, or even receiving the confidences of those who did plot it. We should not enjoy at all meeting the royal ghost or even receiving the confession of Marcellus or overhearing the agonies of the remorseful king. There is a difference between the atmosphere of imagination and the atmosphere of real experience which transfigures the raw pain of bleeding hearts and suffering nerves into the fine material of the artist's magic. A great artist delights us with all the sense of power that accompanies a new experience without inflicting on us any of that actual torture from which the real victim suffers. When Cleopatra exclaims, on Antony's death, that "there is nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting moon," do we feel as we should in watching the agony of a despairing heart ? Of course not. We are rather caught up into a sort of passion of triumphant love which exalts instead of transfixing the heart of the hearer. When Lady Macbeth says that if she had hungered for the throne of Scotland as Macbeth had hungered for it, sooner than stop short at the last step she would have snatched her breast from the boneless gums of her baby and dashed its brains out, are we taken possession of by that ghastly fiend of remorseless purpose ? Certainly not. We only feel a new and almost inspiring sense of the vastness and the depth of human passion, and a new insight into the possibilities of human wilfulness and guilt. Even in the case of imaginations like Defoe's, where a great part of the magic consists in keeping at arm's-length all the traces of an exalted imagination, and moving slowly and methodically in the deep ruts of the most ordinary human experience, there is something besides, which betrays the working of that laborious imagination, and keeps at a distance the jagged edge of miserable experience. There is all the difference in the world between the pangs of the heart which comes upon the traces of living woe, and the spiritualised and imaginative traces of that transformed suffering with which the great writers of literature provide us in place of any actual contact with misery. It is certainly not a surfeit of the personal experience of pain which makes us shrink from the imaginative sufferings with which our youth delighted itself.
We do not doubt that what really sends literary men to the last society novel, or the last efforts of a comic paper to turn the age into ridicule, rather than return to the master- pieces which captivated their youth, is not a too great experience of sufferings of their own, but a craving to share the interests, however comparatively insignificant, of the society actually around them. The masterpieces of literature
show what attracted a former and a greater age, and what the men of that age thought and suffered ; but the old, even more than the young, desire to know, and have in some ways much lees opportunity than the young of actually knowing, what attracts and excites and troubles the people amongst whom they live. Those of whom the old already know most, are those of whom they wish to know more, and they have much more craving to see reflected in the mirror of the literature of the day the jokes and thoughts and troubles, however trivial, of which they have already some experience, than they have to improve their acquaintance with ages of which they know little, and perhaps have learnt to distrust the accuracy of the little which they thought they knew. The young are more adventurous. They are not the least afraid of plunging into a new field, and they probably think they know their own age and generation vastly better than they really do. But doubtless the chief reason why the old do not go back to the masterpieces which delighted their youth so often as would seem to be natural, is that they get lazy, and that it always takes something of an effort to spring from the earth into that higher air of imaginative feeling in which all true literature is conceived. That is just the kind of effort in which the young delight; and you may judge of a man's or a woman's mental spring and elasticity by his or her power of making this spring.
Mr. Leslie Stephen gives very good advice to those of his audience who have really individual tastes and gifts of their own, when he tells them not to take counsel at all as to the character of the books in which they shall steep themselves, but to trust to the natural promptings of their own nature. But it is good advice only for those who have already some- thing of eager literary impulse in them, and very far from good advice for those who are really in the condition of pure beginners, without chart or compass by which to guide their amusements or their studies. How could such a beginner, who had heard Wordsworth quoted only by those "bold, bad men," as Matthew Arnold humorously called them, who spout his didactic verse on the platforms of meetings for furthering the cause of peace, or the cause of education, or the cause of liberty, guess that in such poems as the "Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle," or "the Daffodils," or the stanzas "At the Grave of Burns," or in the three poems on "The Yarrow," he should find more of the pure wine of life than any philanthro- pist whom the world has produced might have swallowed with- out ever knowing that he was tasting what should be the most intoxicating of all human delights ? How is such a one to know that Gibbon's autobiography is twice as interesting,—for any but a genuine student of history,—as the whole "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" How is a mere beginner to be warned against Dickens's balder- dash, and yet taught to appreciate the infinite splendour of his humour ? Mr. Leslie Stephen credits an average audience with far too much literary instinct when he tells them to take no counsel as to their reading, but to trust to their own inclinations. The ways of literature are far too much beset by thorns and briars for such counsel as that to suit pure beginners. There would be infinite time wasted in trying to appreciate what is not worth appreciation, and attempting to overcome a disgust which was not entirely without just ground and cause. Such criticisms and introductions as Matthew Arnold's to the various poets on whom he com- mented, or Mr. Dennis's on the age of Pope, or Mr. Bagehot's on Wordsworth and Shelley and Brougham and Macaulay, would be invaluable to any one whose taste for literature lay in the direction of any of these authors. Otherwise, a man might very easily turn away from "The Excursion" in justifiable fatigue, without guessing that he had left behind him one of the greatest poets in the literature of the world.
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