Sir
Roger—What have we here?
Giles—There is everything under the sun set down
with some show of reason; they run atilt at the world,
and treat men and manners as familiar as an old hat.
Sir Roger—Think you they protest too much? I like
a matter disposed bravely, but—
Giles—Methinks they have a genial tongue. Will
you hear them?
Sir Roger—Well, an’ it be not too long I’ll
have some sack, and you read on.
—
Old Play.
MY
DEAR FRANCESCA,—My mind has the full impression
of a new book; I have just laid it down, and, in a reader’s
existence, this is the moment of the fullest, the most
perfect delight. The book is finished and he lays it
aside. All the excitement, of whatever kind, is past;
he has now no such active interest in the characters
or arguments or opinions as he had a few moments before.
Now he has the scope of the whole work before him, borne
in upon him vividly and comprehensively and he is in
full possession of the new province he has conquered.
Before an hour has passed the change will have commenced,
until, like a landscape veiled gradually by the night,
he has only the great points of emotion or argument
left, like mountains against the sky. I know you, too,
would have been delighted with this book, and I choose
to prepare you for the pleasure you will have when Aspasia
consents to release it and when I send it you. I have
heard you express a curiosity to read some of the criticism
of that writer whose name is somehow linked with that
of Arnold and Amiel; and now Mr. George Saintsbury has
given us the essays on English literature of Edmond
Scherer, that just and discerning critic, whose work
we have before viewed with a potential admiration. Much
of this book is taken up with your favorite novelist,
George Eliot, and your favourite poets, Matthew Arnold
and Wordsworth; and I call the powers of that great
public school system, in whose mill you are ground daily,
to witness to the taste and moral force of one of the
human wheels in its insatiable machine, as denoted by
these preferences. To George Eliot M. Scherer assigns
a very high place and deservedly so; and although Mr.
George Saintsbury has written in his pleasant preface
that we must not accept the first paper as the final
and nicely balanced criticism of the author of “Adam
Bede,” I fancy you will dwell with most eagerness
upon this very section of the book. It is in the essay
on “Daniel Deronda” that M. Scherer pronounces
this just and forcible sentence; one which I cannot
refrain from copying for you:—“For art lives
not by ideas, but by sentiments. I had almost said by
sensations; it is instinctive, it is naïf, and
it is by direct and unconsidered expression that it
communicates with reality. Among all the contradictions
of which life is made up, there is none more constant
than this—that there is no great art without philosophy,
and yet there is no more dangerous enemy of art that
reflection.”
But to me
the most valuable and at the same time the most interesting
essay is the one on “Wordsworth and Modern Poetry.”
It contains amongst other appreciative words a tribute
to the distinct and individual position held by Matthew
Arnold in the literature of his country. He says of
him as a poet:—“In every style he has an
absolutely personal accent and note of distinction”;
as a critic, “The liveliest, the most delicate,
the most elegant of critics, the critic who has given
out most ideas, has conferred upon them the most ideas,
has conferred upon them the most piquant expression,
and has most thoroughly shocked the sluggishness of
British thought by wholesome audacities.” How
apt, how forcible are these words! I have quoted them
to prepare you for others equal in power and penetration
which succeed one another as this great essay unfolds
itself. I must take leave of you; let us again dedicate
ourselves to great things; let us again resolve to live
with the sweet and beautiful things of earth; let us
pass more often into the province of purer thought,
of profounder contemplation.
S.
A
writer in “Shakespeariana” refers to the
present decadence of Browning societies as an instance
of that poet’s lack of true greatness. It might
be answered that fads are not the true tests of genius.
A man’s injudicious disciples may be in a sense
his worst enemies. As in religion God is more truly
felt than He can be described, and theologians are not
necessarily the best interpreters of religion, so Browning
societies and Shakespearian and Ibsen crazes are not
the measures of the several geniuses they claim to represent.
That there is much that is worthless and unmeaning in
Browning no true lover of literature will deny. On the
other hand he possesses a unique greatness of his own
that marks him out from all other writers. Such a short
drama as “In a Balcony” is an evidence of
dramatic greatness of a kind not even found in Shakespeare,
and met with no where else in any language. Even the
immortal William has perhaps been overestimated as to
perfection. Weakness is found in the greatest work.
This is an age of sifting the wheat from the chaff,
and when this is done no true genius will suffer, though
many injudicious admirers may be shocked to find that
their idol was not all gold but had its necessary admixture
of clay and sand.
C.
The
terrible Russian famine, besides calling forth the helpful
enthusiasm of many generous Americans, has brought again
before the world’s view in the sweetest and noblest
light the devoted figure of Count Tolstoi. To anyone
who has studied the writings of this wonderful man,
the greatest after Shakespeare in his vast and subtle
knowledge of the human heart, it seems perfectly natural
to hear that he has thrown himself with all the energy
of his intensely compassionate nature into the work
of healing and relief. An old man, between 60 and 70
years of age, he has gone forth dressed in the peasant’s
garb, and, as we are told by a newspaper correspondent,
“from morning till night he is on his legs, distributing
administering, organizing, as if endowed with youthful
vigor and an iron constitution. Hail, rain, snow, intense
cold and abominable roads are nothing to him. . . .
He is now in the Danskovsky District, moving about from
house to house, from village to village, from canton
to canton, gathering information about the needs of
each family and individual, feeding the hungry, tending
the sick, comforting those who have lost their breadwinners,
and utterly forgetful of himself.”
There are
some people who have spoken harshly of Count Tolstoi,
particularly in reference to some of his recent writings,
but I fear it is because they do not understand the
man, or, more probably, because they do not understand
Russia. The articles of Mr. E.B. Lanin in the English
reviews have thrown an awful light upon that subject.
L.
It
seems impossible for the majority of mankind to realize
that every species of affectation is a derogation from
dignity. Nothing is more provocative of the sarcastic
sense than the spectacle of a character or quality habitually
assumed and seriously paraded, and the people who have
talent enough to make an affectation pas for reality
are so few that one does not meet with more than half
a dozen of them in a lifetime. In most cases the fraud
is perfectly transparent, and there are always plenty
of people about us who are quite clever enough to penetrate
it. The assumption of an affectation, therefore, indicates
a deficiency in the knowledge of human nature. It indicates
also a lack of humanity and real goodness of heart,
for the good man desires to bring himself into the nearest
and readiest touch with the universal human soul, and
this he can only do by the most complete development
and revelation of his own individuality. He must be
himself most thoroughly before he can enter with real
sympathy into the hearts of others.
One of the
most offensive affectations is that of roughness and
brutality, assumed by some men who wish to acquire a
reputation for openness and candor. Another affectation,
odd and sometimes unamiable, is that of unkemptness
and squalor in personal appearance as a means of creating
the impression of mental abstraction and intense devotion
to thought. “I see your pride, oh Antisthenes,”
said Socrates to the famous Cynic, “peering through
the holes in your cloak.” All these things are
the mark of a more or less ludicrous vanity. The man
of fine feeling does not desire that the world shall
be forever pointing the finger at him; and, so far from
cultivating conspicuous peculiarities of outer habit,
he endeavors to the utmost of his power to efface those
which are naturally his.
In his incomparable
“journal” Sir Walter Scott relates two very
characteristic anecdotes of Byron. As I do not remember
to have read them elsewhere and as they give such a
perfect idea of the whimsicality and impulsiveness of
the man I re-tell them here. One evening when Byron
and Tom Moore were standing at the window of the former’s
palazzo in Venice viewing the sunset, Moore was led
(“naturally” Sir Walter says) to make some
observations on its beauty. Byron replied, in his usual
tone, “On! come, d—m ye, if ye had known
what two fellows you were staring at, you would have
taken a longer look at us.”
S.
How
utterly destitute of all light and charm are the intellectual
conditions of our people and the institutions of our
public life! How barren! How barbarous! It is true that
this is a new and struggling country, but one would
think that the simplest impulse of patriotism, if it
existed at all in our governing bodies, would suffice
to provoke some attempt at remedy.
To-day I spent
a little while in what is called the National Art Gallery
at Ottawa. Here, scattered about the walls of a poor
and average-looking room, are two or three paintings
by distinguished old country artists, half a dozen fair
specimens of our native product and a considerable number
of nondescript articles hardly to be considered or named.
Of what use is such a collection in its present condition?
What pleasure can it afford to anyone? What educational
stimulus?
If our public
men had any interest in the beauty, the honor, the real
well-being of this country they could as well as not
provide that a hundred thousand dollars or double that
amount be annually set apart by the Government for the
purpose of buying good pictures. A few fine foreign
paintings might be added to the collection every year,
and a fair sum might be expended in the purchase of
Canadian work of the highest merit. In this way our
native art would receive both culture and reward. The
best models would be provided for its study and the
benefit conferred upon it of encouragement and support
would be incalculable in its effect. One would think
that no sacrifice would be deemed too great, which might
tend to relieve in any respect the arid poverty of our
social and intellectual life.
L.
One
of the most interesting of studies for those who have
the leisure is that of mythology. Many persons associate
this branch of study with old Greek gods and goddesses.
But by far the most interesting branch is that pertaining
to the north European nations. The name mythology is
very deceiving, as it suggests something the opposite
of reality, and therefore of little interest to the
practical world of today. Of course it is a favourite
study with poets, but others also can gain much benefit
from what it reveals, for it reveals much. The fact
is, mythology is more nearly connected with our present
life than we have realized, and studied in connection
with ancient customs and beliefs will explain away in
a simple manner many strange superstitions and customs
that extend even to the present. In no age has the world
needed more common sense and real simple fact than it
needs to-day. The mind to do battle in this age needs
to be well balanced and practical, and the only way
to attain this is by good scientific training in facts
founded on solid reason. But we want something more
to really understand and to be able to judge the present,
we want to know the past as it really was. A man who
still holds on to a superstitious or false notion of
things pertaining to the past is not really competent
to build up the present so as to aid the future.
The Irish
peasant who will tell you that there are no fairies
in this country but that there are in Ireland is no
more befogged than the man who accepts as a natural
phenomena now what he regarded to be a miracle having
taken place 2,000 or 3,000 years ago. The Irishman is
freed from his superstition as far as this country is
concerned but is still bound to it by the influence
of his late environment. So the man who claims as a
miracle of old time what he recognises now as a natural
occurrence is the creation of a false conception of
the past. With the Irishman so soon as he comes to look
at the old as he sees the present, so soon will he be
freed from his false conception. For this reason mythology
is of great value to the casual student, it is really
the history of the infant world, when the mind of mankind
was the mind of the child or savage. It may not be generally
known that much of the so-called history of the past
is pure mythology. Much of the earlier part of the Old
Testament, such as the stories of the Garden of Eden,
The Flood, The Serpent, The story of the Cross itself
is one of the most remarkable myths in the history of
humanity. Connected with the old phallic worship of
some of our most remote ancestors. What more remarkable
instance of myth which was long mistaken for actual
history than the now well-proved myth of William Tell,
who never existed at all in real history. Probably the
greatest stumbling-block to real knowledge of the past
is the false religious prejudice which is hampering
modern society to a large extent in countries like Canada;
but even this is rapidly passing away in the more cultured
localities. It is a poor and tottering religion that
has to be bolstered up by ignorance. Mythology is a
beautiful and instructive study, and to beginners I
would recommend no better book than “Myths and
Myth-Makers,” by John Fiske, the celebrated Harvard
professor, who is one of the strongest and ablest thinkers
of the day. This book is to be found in every first-class
city or town public library. I will have more to say
on this subject later on.
C.
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