Letters on Literature , livre ebook

Pub One Info - Andrew Lang

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

68 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

pubOne.info present you this new edition. 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?

Sujets

Histoire

Informations

Publié par	Pub One Info
Date de parution	06 novembre 2010
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9782819932000
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0100€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

DEDICATION
Dear Mr. Way,
After so many letters to people who neverexisted, 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 manykindnesses? Perhaps you will add another to these by accepting theDedication of a little work, of a sort experimental in English, andin prose, though Horace— in Latin and in verse— was successful withit 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 occurredto 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 ownwork, and yet it seemed that the form of Letters might be attemptedagain. The Lettres à Emilie sur la Mythologie are awell-known model, but Emilie was not an imaginary correspondent.The persons addressed here, on the other hand, are all people offancy— the name of Lady Violet Lebas is an invention of Mr.Thackeray’s: gifted Hopkins is the minor poet in Dr. Oliver WendellHolmes’s “Guardian Angel. ” The author’s object has been to discussa few literary topics with more freedom and personal bias thanmight be permitted in a graver kind of essay. The Letter on SamuelRichardson is by a lady more frequently the author’s critic thanhis collaborator.
INTRODUCTORY: OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY
To Mr. Arthur Wincott, Topeka, Kansas .
Dear Wincott, — You write to me, from your “brighthome in the setting sun, ” with the flattering information that youhave read my poor “Letters to Dead Authors. ” You are kind enoughto 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 hasalready remarked that the great men of the past would not care formy shadowy epistles— if they could read them. Possibly not; but,like Prior, “I may write till they can spell”— an exercise of whichghosts are probably as incapable as was Matt’s little Mistress ofQuality. But Living Authors are very different people, and it wouldbe perilous, as well as impertinent, to direct one’s comments onthem literally, in the French phrase, “to their address. ” Yetthere is no reason why a critic should not adopt the epistolaryform.
Our old English essays, the papers in the Tatler and Spectator , were originally nothing butletters. The vehicle permits a touch of personal taste, perhaps ofpersonal prejudice. So I shall write my “Letters on Literature, ”of the present and of the past, English, American, ancient, ormodern, to you , in your distant Kansas, or to such othercorrespondents as are kind enough to read these notes.
Poetry has always the precedence in thesediscussions. Poor Poetry! She is an ancient maiden of good family,and is led out first at banquets, though many would prefer to sitnext some livelier and younger Muse, the lady of fiction, or eventhe chattering soubrette of journalism. Seniorespriores : Poetry, if no longer very popular, is a dame of theworthiest lineage, and can boast a long train of gallant admirers,dead and gone. She has been much in courts. The old Greek tyrantsloved her; great Rhamses seated her at his right hand; every princehad his singers. Now we dwell in an age of democracy, and Poetrywins but a feigned respect, more out of courtesy, and for oldfriendship’s sake, than for liking. Though so many write verse, asin Juvenal’s time, I doubt if many read it. “None but minstrelslist of sonneting. ” The purchasing public, for poetry, must nowconsist chiefly of poets, and they are usually poor.
Can anything speak more clearly of the decadence ofthe art than the birth of so many poetical “societies”? We have theBrowning Society, the Shelley Society, the Shakespeare Society, theWordsworth Society— lately dead. They all demonstrate that peoplehave not the courage to study verse in solitude, and for theirproper 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 andhis 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 havingseveral undeniable poets, and very little new poetry worthy of thename. The chief singers have outlived, if not their genius, at allevents its flowering time. Hard it is to estimate poetry, so apt weare, by our very nature, to prefer “the newest songs, ” as Odysseussays men did even during the war of Troy. Or, following anotherancient example, we say, like the rich niggards who neglectedTheocritus, “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 thename of Tennyson in the golden book of English poetry. I cannotthink that he will ever fall to a lower place, or be among thosewhom only curious students pore over, like Gower, Drayton, Donne,and the rest. Lovers of poetry will always read him as they willread Wordsworth, Keats, Milton, Coleridge, and Chaucer. Look hisdefects in the face, throw them into the balance, and how theydisappear before his merits! He is the last and youngest of themighty race, born, as it were, out of due time, late, and into afeebler generation.
Let it be admitted that the gold is not withoutalloy, that he has a touch of voluntary affectation, of obscurity,even an occasional perversity, a mannerism, a set of favouriteepithets (“windy” and “happy”). There is a momentary echo of Donne,of Crashaw, nay, in his earliest pieces, even a touch of LeighHunt. You detect it in pieces like “Lilian” and “Eleanore, ” andthe others of that kind and of that date.
Let it be admitted that “In Memoriam” has certainlapses in all that meed of melodious tears; that there aretrivialities which might deserve (here is an example) “to line abox, ” or to curl some maiden’s locks, that there are weaknesses ofthought, that the poet now speaks of himself as a linnet, singing“because it must, ” now dares to approach questions insoluble, andagain declines their solution. What is all this but the changefulmood of grief? The singing linnet, like the bird in the old Englishheathen apologue, dashes its light wings painfully against thewalls of the chamber into which it has flown out of the blind nightthat shall again receive it.
I do not care to dwell on the imperfections in thatimmortal strain of sympathy and consolation, that enchanted book ofconsecrated regrets. It is an easier if not more grateful task tonote a certain peevish egotism of tone in the heroes of “LocksleyHall, ” of “Maud, ” of “Lady Clara Vere de Vere. ” “You can’t thinkhow poor a figure you make when you tell that story, sir, ” saidDr. Johnson to some unlucky gentleman whose “figure” must certainlyhave been more respectable than that which is cut by these whiningand 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 witha 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 alonely and flawless fragment, as noble as Homer, as polished asSophocles. But then we must have missed, with many other admirablethings, the “Last Battle in the West. ”
People who come after us will be more impressed thanwe are by the Laureate’s versatility. He has touched so manystrings, from “Will Waterproof’s Monologue, ” so far above Praed,to the agony of “Rizpah, ” the invincible energy of “Ulysses, ” thelanguor and the fairy music of the “Lotus Eaters, ” the grace as ofa 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 thestraw, ” as Homer says, “what the grain has been. ”
There are many who make it a kind of religion toregard Mr. Browning as the greatest of living English poets. Forhim, too, one is thankful as for a veritable great poet; but can webelieve that impartial posterity will rate him with the Laureate,or that so large a proportion of his work will endure? The charm ofan enigma now attracts students who feel proud of being able tounderstand what others find obscure. But this attraction mustinevitably become a stumbling-block.
Why Mr. Browning is obscure is a long question;probably the answer is that he often could not help himself. Hisdarkest poems may be made out by a person of average intelligencewho will read them as hard as, for example, he would find itnecessary to read the “Logic” of Hegel. There is a story of twoclever girls who set out to peruse “Sordello, ” and correspondedwith each other about their progress. “Somebody is dead in‘Sordello, ’” one of them wrote to her friend. “I don’t quite know who it is, but it must make things a little clearer in thelong run. ” Alas! a copious use of the guillotine would scarcelyclear the stage of “Sordello. ” It is hardly to be hoped that“Sordello, ” or “Red Cotton Night Cap Country, ” or “Fifine, ” willcontinue to be struggled with by posterity. But the mass of “Menand Women, ” that unexampled gallery of portraits of the inmosthearts and secret minds of priests, prigs, princes, girls, lovers,poets, painters, must survive immortally, while civilization andliterature last, while men care to know what is in men.
No perversity of humour, no voluntary or involuntaryharshness of style, can destroy the merit of these poems, whichhave nothing like them in the letters of the past, and must remainwithout successful imitators in the future. They will last all thebetter for a cert