Letters to Dead Authors Part 5

Of yourself you observed, in a Report on contemporary literature, that your 'courage and sincerity never allowed you to tolerate work not absolutely good.' And yet you regarded 'La Pucelle with some complacency.

On the 'Pucelle you were occupied during a generation of mortal men.

I marvel not at the length of your labours, as you received a yearly pension till the Epic was finished, but your Muse was no Alcmena, and no Hercules was the result of that prolonged night of creations. First you gravely wrote out (it was the task of five years) all the compositions in prose. Ah, why did you not leave it in that commonplace but appropriate medium? What says the Precieuse about you in Boileau's satire?

In Chapelain, for all his foes have said, She finds but one defect, he can't be read; Yet thinks the world might taste his maiden's woes, If only he would turn his verse to prose!

The verse had been prose, and prose, perhaps, it should have remained.

Yet for this precious 'Pucelle,' in the age when 'Paradise Lost' was sold for five pounds, you are believed to have received about four thousand. Horace was wrong, mediocre poets may exist (now and then), and he was a wise man who first spoke of _aurea mediocritas_. At length the great work was achieved, a work thrice blessed in its theme, that divine Maiden to whom France owes all, and whom you and Voltaire have recompensed so strangely. In folio, in italics, with a score of portraits and engravings, and _culs de lampe_, the great work was given to the world, and had a success. Six editions in eighteen months are figures which fill the poetic heart with envy and admiration. And then, alas! the bubble burst. A great lady, Madame de Longveille, hearing the 'Pucelle read aloud, murmured that it was 'perfect indeed, but perfectly wearisome.' Then the satires began, and the satirists never left you till your poetic reputation was a rag, till the mildest Abbe at Menages had his cheap sneer for Chapelain.

I make no doubt, Sir, that envy and jealousy had much to do with the onslaught on your 'Pucelle.' These qualities, alas! are not strange to literary minds; does not even Hesiod tell us 'potter hates potter, and poet hates poet'? But contemporary spites do not harm true genius. Who suffered more than Moliere from cabals? Yet neither the court nor the town ever deserted him, and he is still the joy of the world. I admit that his adversaries were weaker than yours. What were Boursault and Le Boulanger, and Thomas Corneille and De Vise, what were they all compared to your enemy, Boileau? Brossette tells a story which really makes a man pity you. There was a M. de Puimorin who, to be in the fashion, laughed at your once popular Epic. 'It is all very well for a man to laugh who cannot even read.' Whereon M. de Puimorin replied: 'Qu'il n'avoit que trop su' lire, depuis que Chapelain s'etoit avise de faire imprimer.'

A new horror had been added to the accomplishment of reading since Chapelain had published. This repartee was applauded, and M. de Puimorin tried to turn it into an epigram. He did complete the last couplet,

Helas! pour mes peches, je n'ai su' que trop lire Depuis que tu fais imprimer.

But by no labour would M. de Puimorin achieve the first two lines of his epigram. Then you remember what great allies came to his a.s.sistance. I almost blush to think that M. Despreaux, M. Racine, and M. de Moliere, the three most renowned wits of the time, conspired to complete the poor jest, and madden you. Well, bubble as your poetry was, you may be proud that it needed all these sharpest of pens to p.r.i.c.k the bubble. Other poets, as popular as you, have been annihilated by an article. Macaulay puts forth his hand, and 'Satan Montgomery' was no more. It did not need a Macaulay, the laughter of a mob of little critics was enough to blow into s.p.a.ce; but you probably have met Montgomery, and of contemporary failures or successes I do not speak.

I wonder, sometimes, whether the consensus of criticism ever made you doubt for a moment whether, after all, you were not a false child of Apollo? Was your complacency tortured, as the complacency of true poets has occasionally been, by doubts? Did you expect posterity to reverse the verdict of the satirists, and to do you justice? You answered your earliest a.s.sailant, Liniere, and, by a few changes of words, turned his epigrams into flattery. But I fancy, on the whole, you remained calm, unmoved, wrapped up in admiration of yourself. According to M. de Marivaux, who reviewed, as I am doing, the spirits of the mighty dead, you 'conceived, on the strength of your reputation, a great and serious veneration for yourself and your genius.' Probably you were protected by this invulnerable armour of an honest vanity, probably you declared that mere jealousy dictates the lines of Boileau, and that Chapelain's real fault was his popularity, and his pecuniary success, Qu'il soit le mieux rente de tous les beaux-esprits.

This, you would avow, was your offence, and perhaps you were not altogether mistaken. Yet posterity declines to read a line of yours, and, as we think of you, we are again set face to face with that eternal problem, how far is popularity a test of poetry? Burns was a poet, and popular. Byron was a popular poet, and the world agrees in the verdict of their own generation. But Montgomery, though he sold so well, was no poet, nor, Sir, I fear, was your verse made of the stuff of immortality.

Criticism cannot hurt what is truly great; the Cardinal and the Academy left Chimene as fair as ever, and as adorable. It is only pinchbeck that perishes under the acids of satire: gold defies them. Yet I sometimes ask myself, does the existence of popularity like yours justify the malignity of satire, which blesses neither him who gives, nor him who takes? Are poisoned arrows fair against a bad poet? I doubt it, Sir, holding that, even unp.r.i.c.ked, a poetic bubble must soon burst by its own nature. Yet satire will a.s.suredly be written so long as bad poets are successful, and bad poets will a.s.suredly reflect that their a.s.sailants are merely envious, and, while their vogue lasts, that Prime Ministers and the purchasing public are the only judges.

Monsieur, Votre tres humble serviteur, Andrew Lang.

XI. To Sir John Manndeville, Kt.

(Of the Ways Into Ynde.)

Sir John,--wit you well that men holden you but light, and some clepen you a Liar. And they say that you never were born in Englond, in the town of Seynt Albones, nor have seen and gone through manye diverse Londes. And there goeth an old knight at arms, and one that connes Latyn, and hath been beyond the sea, and hath seen Prester John's country. And he hath been in an Yle that men clepen Burmah, and there bin women bearded. Now men call him Colonel Henry Yule, and he hath writ of thee in his great booke, Sir John, and he holds thee but lightly. For he saith that ye did pill your tales out of Odoric his book, and that ye never saw snails with sh.e.l.ls as big as houses, nor never met no Devyls, but part of that ye say, ye took it out of William of Boldensele his book, yet ye took not his wisdom, withal, but put in thine own foolishness. Nevertheless, Sir John, for the frailty of Mankynde, ye are held a good fellow, and a merry; so now, come, I shall tell you of the new ways into Ynde.

In that Lond they have a Queen that governeth all the Lond, and all they ben obeyssant to her. And she is the Queen of Englond; for Englishmen have taken all the Lond of Ynde. For they were right good werryoures of old, and wyse, n.o.ble, and worthy. But of late hath risen a new sort of Englishman very puny and fearful, and these men clepen Radicals. And they go ever in fear, and they scream on high for dread in the streets and the houses, and they fain would flee away from all that their fathers gat them with the sword. And this sort men call Scuttleres, but the mean folk and certain of the womenkind hear them gladly, and they say ever that Englishmen should flee out of Ynde. Fro England men gon to Ynde by many dyverse Contreyes. For Englishmen ben very stirring and nymble. For they ben in the seventh climate, that is of the Moon. And the Moon (ye have said it yourself, Sir John, natheless, is it true) is of lightly moving, for to go diverse ways, and see strange things, and other diversities of the Worlde. Wherefore Englishmen be lightly moving, and far wandering. And they gon to Ynde by the great Sea Ocean. First come they to Gibraltar, that was the point of Spain, and builded upon a rock; and there ben apes, and it is so strong that no man may take it.

Natheless did Englishmen take it fro the Spanyard, and all to hold the way to Ynde. For ye may sail all about Africa, and past the Cape men clepen of Good Hope, but that way unto Ynde is long and the sea is weary. Wherefore men rather go by the Midland sea, and Englishmen have taken many Yles in that sea.

For first they have taken an Yle that is clept Malta; and therein built they great castles, to hold it against them of Fraunce, and Italy, and of Spain. And from this Ile of Malta Men gon to Cipre. And Cipre is right a good Yle, and a fair, and a great, and it hath 4 princ.i.p.al Cytees within him. And at Famagost is one of the princ.i.p.al Havens of the sea that is in the world, and Englishmen have but a lytel while gone won that Yle from the Sarazynes. Yet say that sort of Englishmen where of I told you, that is puny and sore adread, that the Lond is poisonous and barren and of no avail, for that Lond is much more hotter than it is here. Yet the Englishmen that ben werryoures dwell there in tents, and the skill is that they may ben the more fresh.

From Cypre, Men gon to the Lond of Egypte, and in a Day and a Night he that hath a good wind may come to the Haven of Alessandrie. Now the Lond of Egypt longeth to the Soudan, yet the Soudan longeth not to the Lond of Egypt. And when I say this, I do j.a.pe with words, and may hap ye understond me not. Now Englishmen went in shippes to Alessandrie, and brent it, and over ran the Lond, and their soudyours warred agen the Bedoynes, and all to hold the way to Ynde. For it is not long past since Frenchmen let dig a d.y.k.e, through the narrow spit of lond, from the Midland sea to the Red sea, wherein was Pharaoh drowned. So this is the shortest way to Ynde there may be, to sail through that d.y.k.e, if men gon by sea.

But all the Lond of Egypt is clepen the Vale enchaunted; for no man may do his business well that goes thither, but always fares he evil, and therefore clepen they Egypt the Vale perilous, and the sepulchre of reputations. And men say there that is one of the entrees of h.e.l.le. In that Vale is plentiful lack of Gold and Silver, for many misbelieving men, and many Christian men also, have gone often time for to take of the Thresoure that there was of old, and have pilled the Thresoure, wherefore there is none left. And Englishmen have let carry thither great store of our Thresoure, 9,000,000 of Pounds sterling, and whether they will see it agen I mis...o...b.. me. For that Vale is alle fulle of Develes and Fiendes that men clepen Bondholderes, for that Egypt from of olde is the Lond of Bondage. And whatsoever Thresoure cometh into the Lond, these Devyls of Bondholders grabben the same. Natheless by that Vale do Englishmen go unto Ynde, and they gon by Aden, even to Kurrachee, at the mouth of the Flood of Ynde. Thereby they send their souldyours, when they are adread of them of Muscovy.

For, look you, there is another way into Ynde, and thereby the men of Muscovy are fain to come, if the Englishmen let them not. That way cometh by Desert and Wildernesse, from the sea that is clept Caspian, even to Khiva, and so to Merv; and then come ye to Zulfikar and Penjdeh, and anon to Herat, that is called the Key of the Gates of Ynde. Then ye win the lond of the Emir of the Afghauns, a great prince and a rich, and he hath in his Thresoure more crosses, and stars, and coats that captains wearen, than any other man on earth.

For all they of Muscovy, and all Englishmen maken him gifts, and he keepeth the gifts, and he keepeth his own counsel. For his lond lieth between Ynde and the folk of Muscovy, wherefore both Englishmen and men of Muscovy would fain have him friendly, yea, and independent. Wherefore they of both parties give him clocks, and watches, and stars, and crosses, and culverins, and now and again they let cut the throats of his men some deal, and pill his country. Thereby they both set up their rest that the Emir will be independent, yea, and friendly. But his men love him not, neither love they the English nor the Muscovy folk, for they are worshippers of Mahound, and endure not Christian men. And they love not them that cut their throats, and burn their country.

Now they of Muscovy ben Devyls, und they ben subtle for to make a thing seme otherwise than it is, for to deceive mankind. Wherefore Englishmen putten no trust in them of Muscovy, save only the Englishmen ciept Radicals, for they make as if they loved these Develes, out of the fear and dread of war wherein they go, and would be slaves sooner than fight.

But the folk of Ynde know not what shall befall, nor whether they of Muscovy will take the Lond, or Englishmen shall keep it, so that their hearts may not enduren for drede. And methinks that soon shall Englishmen and Muscovy folk put their bodies in adventure, and war one with another, and all for the way to Ynde.

But St. George for Englond, I say, and so enough; and may the Seyntes hele thee, Sir John, of thy Gowtes Artetykes, that thee tormenten. But to thy Boke I list not to give no credence.

XII. To Alexandre Dumas.

Sir,--There are moments when the wheels of life, even of such a life as yours, run slow, and when mistrust and doubt overshadow even the most intrepid disposition. In such a moment, towards the ending of your days, you said to your son, M. Alexandre Dumas, 'I seem to see myself set on a pedestal which trembles as if it were founded on the sands.' These sands, your uncounted volumes, are all of gold, and make a foundation more solid than the rock. As well might the singer of Odysseus, or the authors of the 'Arabian Nights', or the first inventors of the stories of Boccaccio, believe that their works were perishable (their names, indeed, have perished), as the creator of 'Les Trois Mousquetaires'

alarm himself with the thought that the world could ever forget Alexandre Dumas.

Than yours there has been no greater nor more kindly and beneficent force in modern letters. To Scott, indeed, you owed the first impulse of your genius; but, once set in motion, what miracles could it not accomplish? Our dear Porthos was overcome, at last, by a superhuman burden; but your imaginative strength never found a task too great for it. What an extraordinary vigour, what health, what an overflow of force was yours! It is good, in a day of small and laborious ingenuities, to breathe the free air of your books, and dwell in the company of Dumas's men--so gallant, so frank, so indomitable, such swordsmen, and such trenchermen. Like M. de Rochefort in 'Vingt Ans Apres,' like that prisoner of the Bastille, your genius 'n'est que d'un parti, c'est du parti du grand air.'

There seems to radiate from you a still persistent energy and enjoyment; in that current of strength not only your characters live, frolic, kindly, and sane, but even your very collaborators were animated by the virtue which went out of you. How else can we explain it, the dreary charge which feeble and envious tongues have brought against you, in England and at home? They say you employed in your novels and dramas that vicarious aid which, in the slang of the studio, the 'sculptor's ghost' is fabled to afford.

Well, let it be so; these ghosts, when uninspired by you, were faint and impotent as 'the strengthless tribes of the dead' in Homer's Hades, before Odysseus had poured forth the blood that gave them a momentary valour. It was from you and your inexhaustible vitality that these collaborating spectres drew what life they possessed; and when they parted from you they shuddered back into their nothingness. Where are the plays, where the romances which Maquet and the rest wrote in their own strength? They are forgotten with last year's snows; they have pa.s.sed into the wide waste-paper basket of the world. You say of D'Artagnan, when severed from his three friends--from Porthos, Athos, and Aramis--'he felt that he could do nothing, save on the condition that each of these companions yielded to him, if one may so speak, a share of that electric fluid which was his gift from heaven.'

No man of letters ever had so great a measure of that gift as you; none gave of it more freely to all who came--to the chance a.s.sociate of the hour, as to the characters, all so burly and full-blooded, who flocked from your brain. Thus it was that you failed when you approached the supernatural. Your ghosts had too much flesh and blood, more than the living persons of feebler fancies. A writer so fertile, so rapid, so masterly in the ease with which he worked, could not escape the reproaches of barren envy. Because you overflowed with wit, you could not be 'serious;' Because you created with a word, you were said to scamp your work; because you were never dull, never pedantic, incapable of greed, you were to be censured as desultory, inaccurate, and prodigal.

A generation suffering from mental and physical anaemia--a generation devoted to the 'chiselled phrase,' to acc.u.mulated 'doc.u.ments,' to microscopic porings over human baseness, to minute and disgustful records of what in humanity is least human--may readily bring these unregarded and railing accusations. Like one of the great and good-humoured Giants of Rabelais, you may hear the murmurs from afar, and smile with disdain. To you, who can amuse the world--to you who offer it the fresh air of the highway, the battle-field, and the sea--the world must always return, escaping gladly from the boudoirs and the _bouges_, from the surgeries and hospitals, and dead rooms, of M.

Daudet and M. Zola and of the wearisome De Goncourt.

With all your frankness, and with that queer morality of the Camp which, if it swallows a camel now and again, never strains at a gnat, how healthy and wholesome, and even pure, are your romances! You never gloat over sin, nor dabble with an ugly curiosity in the corruptions of sense.

The pa.s.sions in your tales are honourable and brave, the motives are clearly human. Honour, Love, Friendship make the threefold cord, the clue your knights and dames follow through how delightful a labyrinth of adventures! Your greatest books, I take the liberty to maintain, are the Cycle of the Valois ('La Reine Margot, 'La Dame de Montsoreau,' 'Les Quarante-cinq'), and the Cycle of Louis Treize and Louis Quatorze ('Les Trois Mousquetaires,' 'Vingt Ans Apres,' 'Le Vicomte de Bragelonne); and, beside these two trilogies--a lonely monument, like the sphinx hard by the three pyramids--'Monte Cristo.'

In these romances how easy it would have been for you to burn incense to that great G.o.ddess, Lubricity, whom our critic says your people worship.

You had Branto'me, you had Tallemant, you had Retif, and a dozen others, to furnish materials for scenes of voluptuousness and of blood that would have outdone even the present _naturalistes_. From these alcoves of 'Les Dames Galantes,' and from the torture chambers (M. Zola would not have spared us one starting sinew of brave La Mole on the rack) you turned, as Scott would have turned, without a thought of their profitable literary uses. You had other metal to work on: you gave us that superst.i.tious and tragical true love of La Moles, that devotion--how tender and how pure!--of Bussy for the Dame de Montsoreau.

You gave us the valour of D'Artagnan, the strength of Porthos, the melancholy n.o.bility of Athos: Honour, Chivalry, and Friendship. I declare your characters are real people to me and old friends. I cannot bear to read the end of 'Bragelonne,' and to part with them for ever.

'Suppose Perthos, Athos, and Aramis should enter with a noiseless swagger, curling their moustaches.' How we would welcome them, forgiving D'Artagnan even his hateful _fourberie_ in the case of Milady. The brilliance of your dialogue has never been approached: there is wit everywhere; repartees glitter and ring like the flash and clink of small-swords. Then what duels are yours! and what inimitable battle-pieces! I know four good fights of one against a mult.i.tude, in literature. These are the Death of Gretir the Strong, the Death of Gunnar of Lithend, the Death of Hereward the Wake, the Death of Bussy d'Amboise. We can compare the strokes of the heroic fighting-times with those described in later days; and, upon my word, I do not know that the short sword of Gretir, or the bill of Skarphedin, or the bow of Gunnar was better wielded than the rapier of your Bussy or the sword and shield of Kingsley's Hereward.

They say your fencing is unhistorical; no doubt it is so, and you knew it. La Mole could not have lunged on Coconnas 'after deceiving circle;'

for the parry was not invented except by your immortal Chicot, a genius in advance of his time. Even so Hamlet and Laertes would have fought with shields and axes, not with small swords. But what matters this pedantry? In your works we hear the Homeric Muse again, rejoicing in the clash of steel; and even, at times, your very phrases are unconsciously Homeric.

Look at these men of murder, on the Eve of St. Bartholomew, who flee in terror from the Queen's chamber, and 'find the door too narrow for their flight:' the very words were antic.i.p.ated in a line of the 'Odyssey'

concerning the ma.s.sacre of the Wooers. And the picture of Catherine de Medicis, prowling 'like a wolf among the bodies and the blood,' in a pa.s.sage of the Louvre--the picture is taken unwittingly from the 'Iliad.' There was in you that reserve of primitive force, that epic grandeur and simplicity of diction. This is the force that animates 'Monte Cristo,' the earlier chapters, the prison, and the escape. In later volumes of that romance, methinks, you stoop your wing. Of your dramas I have little room, and less skill, to speak. 'Antony,' they tell me, was 'the greatest literary event of its time,' was a restoration of the stage. 'While Victor Hugo needs the cast-off clothes of history, the wardrobe and costume, the sepulchre of Charlemagne, the ghost of Barbarossa, the coffins of Lucretia Borgia, Alexandre Dumas requires no more than a room in an inn, where people meet in riding cloaks, to move the soul with the last degree of terror and of pity.'

The reproach of being amusing has somewhat dimmed your fame--for a moment. The shadow of this tyranny will soon be overpast; and when 'La Curee and 'Pot-Bouille are more forgotten than 'Le Grand Cyrus,' men and women--and, above all, boys--will laugh and weep over the page of Alexandre Dumas. Like Scott himself, you take us captive in our childhood. I remember a very idle little boy who was busy with the 'Three Musketeers' when he should have been occupied with 'Wilkins's Latin Prose.' 'Twenty years after' (alas and more) he is still constant to that gallant company; and, at this very moment, is breathlessly wondering whether Grimand will steal M. de Beaufort out of the Cardinal's prison.

XIII. To Theocritus

'Sweet, methinks, is the whispering sound of yonder pine-tree,' so, Theocritus, with that sweet word _ade_*, didst thou begin and strike the keynote of thy songs. 'Sweet,' and didst thou find aught of sweet, when thou, like thy Daphnis, didst 'go down the stream, when the whirling wave closed over the man the Muses loved, the man not hated of the Nymphs?' Perchance below those waters of death thou didst find, like thine own Hylas, the lovely Nereids waiting thee, Eunice, and Malis, and Nycheia with her April eyes. In the House of Hades, Theocritus, doth there dwell aught that is fair, and can the low light on the fields of asphodel make thee forget thy Sicily? Nay, methinks thou hast not forgotten, and perchance for poets dead there is prepared a place more beautiful than their dreams. It was well for the later minstrels of another day, it was well for Ronsard and Du Bellay to desire a dim Elysium of their own, where the sunlight comes faintly through the shadow of the earth, where the poplars are duskier, and the waters more pale than in the meadows of Anjou.

* Transliterated.

There, in that restful twilight, far remote from war and plot, from sword and fire, and from religions that sharpened the steel and lit the torch, there these learned singers would fain have wandered with their learned ladies, satiated with life and in love with an unearthly quiet.