





Transcribed from the 1892 Longmans, Green, & Co. edition by David Price,
email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk





LETTERS ON LITERATURE
by Andrew Lang


Contents:

Introductory: Of Modern English Poetry
Of Modern English Poetry
Fielding
Longfellow
A Friend of Keats
On Virgil
Aucassin and Nicolette
Plotinus (A.D. 200-262)
Lucretius
To a Young American Book-Hunter
Rochefoucauld
Of Vers de Societe
On Vers de Societe
Richardson
Gerard de Nerval
On Books About Red Men
Appendix I
Appendix II




DEDICATION


Dear Mr. Way,

_After so many letters to people who never existed, may I venture a short
one, to a person very real to me, though I have never seen him, and only
know him by his many kindnesses?  Perhaps you will add another to these
by accepting the Dedication of a little work, of a sort experimental in
English, and in prose, though Horace--in Latin and in verse--was
successful with it long ago_?

_Very sincerely yours_,

_A. LANG_.

_To W. J. Way_, _Esq_.
_Topeka_, _Kansas_.




PREFACE


These Letters were originally published in the _Independent_ of New York.
The idea of writing them occurred to the author after he had produced
"Letters to Dead Authors."  That kind of Epistle was open to the
objection that nobody _would_ write so frankly to a correspondent about
his own work, and yet it seemed that the form of Letters might be
attempted again.  The _Lettres a Emilie sur la Mythologie_ are a well-
known model, but Emilie was not an imaginary correspondent.  The persons
addressed here, on the other hand, are all people of fancy--the name of
Lady Violet Lebas is an invention of Mr. Thackeray's: gifted Hopkins is
the minor poet in Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes's "Guardian Angel."  The
author's object has been to discuss a few literary topics with more
freedom and personal bias than might be permitted in a graver kind of
essay.  The Letter on Samuel Richardson is by a lady more frequently the
author's critic than his collaborator.




INTRODUCTORY: OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY


_To Mr. Arthur Wincott, Topeka, Kansas_.

Dear Wincott,--You write to me, from your "bright home in the setting
sun," with the flattering information that you have read my poor "Letters
to Dead Authors."  You are kind enough to say that you wish I would write
some "Letters to Living Authors;" but that, I fear, is out of the
question,--for me.

A thoughtful critic in the _Spectator_ has already remarked that the
great men of the past would not care for my shadowy epistles--if they
could read them.  Possibly not; but, like Prior, "I may write till they
can spell"--an exercise of which ghosts are probably as incapable as was
Matt's little Mistress of Quality.  But Living Authors are very different
people, and it would be perilous, as well as impertinent, to direct one's
comments on them literally, in the French phrase, "to their address."  Yet
there is no reason why a critic should not adopt the epistolary form.

Our old English essays, the papers in the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_, were
originally nothing but letters.  The vehicle permits a touch of personal
taste, perhaps of personal prejudice.  So I shall write my "Letters on
Literature," of the present and of the past, English, American, ancient,
or modern, to _you_, in your distant Kansas, or to such other
correspondents as are kind enough to read these notes.

Poetry has always the precedence in these discussions.  Poor Poetry!  She
is an ancient maiden of good family, and is led out first at banquets,
though many would prefer to sit next some livelier and younger Muse, the
lady of fiction, or even the chattering _soubrette_ of journalism.
_Seniores priores_: Poetry, if no longer very popular, is a dame of the
worthiest lineage, and can boast a long train of gallant admirers, dead
and gone.  She has been much in courts.  The old Greek tyrants loved her;
great Rhamses seated her at his right hand; every prince had his singers.
Now we dwell in an age of democracy, and Poetry wins but a feigned
respect, more out of courtesy, and for old friendship's sake, than for
liking.  Though so many write verse, as in Juvenal's time, I doubt if
many read it.  "None but minstrels list of sonneting."  The purchasing
public, for poetry, must now consist chiefly of poets, and _they_ are
usually poor.

Can anything speak more clearly of the decadence of the art than the
birth of so many poetical "societies"?  We have the Browning Society, the
Shelley Society, the Shakespeare Society, the Wordsworth Society--lately
dead.  They all demonstrate that people have not the courage to study
verse in solitude, and for their proper pleasure; men and women need
confederates in this adventure.  There is safety in numbers, and, by dint
of tea-parties, recitations, discussions, quarrels and the like, Dr.
Furnivall and his friends keep blowing the faint embers on the altar of
Apollo.  They cannot raise a flame!

In England we are in the odd position of having several undeniable poets,
and very little new poetry worthy of the name.  The chief singers have
outlived, if not their genius, at all events its flowering time.  Hard it
is to estimate poetry, so apt we are, by our very nature, to prefer "the
newest songs," as Odysseus says men did even during the war of Troy.  Or,
following another ancient example, we say, like the rich niggards who
neglected Theocritus, "Homer is enough for all."

Let us attempt to get rid of every bias, and, thinking as dispassionately
as we can, we still seem to read the name of Tennyson in the golden book
of English poetry.  I cannot think that he will ever fall to a lower
place, or be among those whom only curious students pore over, like
Gower, Drayton, Donne, and the rest.  Lovers of poetry will always read
him as they will read Wordsworth, Keats, Milton, Coleridge, and Chaucer.
Look his defects in the face, throw them into the balance, and how they
disappear before his merits!  He is the last and youngest of the mighty
race, born, as it were, out of due time, late, and into a feebler
generation.

Let it be admitted that the gold is not without alloy, that he has a
touch of voluntary affectation, of obscurity, even an occasional
perversity, a mannerism, a set of favourite epithets ("windy" and
"happy").  There is a momentary echo of Donne, of Crashaw, nay, in his
earliest pieces, even a touch of Leigh Hunt.  You detect it in pieces
like "Lilian" and "Eleanore," and the others of that kind and of that
date.

Let it be admitted that "In Memoriam" has certain lapses in all that meed
of melodious tears; that there are trivialities which might deserve (here
is an example) "to line a box," or to curl some maiden's locks, that
there are weaknesses of thought, that the poet now speaks of himself as a
linnet, singing "because it must," now dares to approach questions
insoluble, and again declines their solution.  What is all this but the
changeful mood of grief?  The singing linnet, like the bird in the old
English heathen apologue, dashes its light wings painfully against the
walls of the chamber into which it has flown out of the blind night that
shall again receive it.

I do not care to dwell on the imperfections in that immortal strain of
sympathy and consolation, that enchanted book of consecrated regrets.  It
is an easier if not more grateful task to note a certain peevish egotism
of tone in the heroes of "Locksley Hall," of "Maud," of "Lady Clara Vere
de Vere."  "You can't think how poor a figure you make when you tell that
story, sir," said Dr. Johnson to some unlucky gentleman whose "figure"
must certainly have been more respectable than that which is cut by these
whining and peevish lovers of Maud and Cousin Amy.

Let it be admitted, too, that King Arthur, of the "Idylls," is like an
Albert in blank verse, an Albert cursed with a Guinevere for a wife, and
a Lancelot for friend.  The "Idylls," with all their beauties, are full
of a Victorian respectability, and love of talking with Vivien about what
is not so respectable.  One wishes, at times, that the "Morte d'Arthur"
had remained a lonely and flawless fragment, as noble as Homer, as
polished as Sophocles.  But then we must have missed, with many other
admirable things, the "Last Battle in the West."

People who come after us will be more impressed than we are by the
Laureate's versatility.  He has touched so many strings, from "Will
Waterproof's Monologue," so far above Praed, to the agony of "Rizpah,"
the invincible energy of "Ulysses," the languor and the fairy music of
the "Lotus Eaters," the grace as of a Greek epigram which inspires the
lines to Catullus and to Virgil.  He is with Milton for learning, with
Keats for magic and vision, with Virgil for graceful recasting of ancient
golden lines, and, even in the latest volume of his long life, "we may
tell from the straw," as Homer says, "what the grain has been."

There are many who make it a kind of religion to regard Mr. Browning as
the greatest of living English poets.  For him, too, one is thankful as
for a veritable great poet; but can we believe that impartial posterity
will rate him