The two
English masters of the style, Macaulay and Carlyle, largely exemplify
its dangers. Carlyle, indeed, had so much more depth and knowledge of
the heart, his portraits of mankind are felt and rendered with so much
more poetic comprehension, and he, like his favourite Ram Dass, had a
fire in his belly so much more hotly burning than the patent reading
lamp by which Macaulay studied, that it seems at first sight hardly fair
to bracket them together. But the "point of view" was imposed by Carlyle
on the men he judged of in his writings with an austerity not only cruel
but almost stupid. They are too often broken outright on the Procrustean
bed; they are probably always disfigured. The rhetorical artifice of
Macaulay is easily spied; it will take longer to appreciate the moral
bias of Carlyle. So with all writers who insist on forcing some
significance from all that comes before them; and the writer of short
studies is bound, by the necessity of the case, to write entirely in
that spirit. What he cannot vivify he should omit. Had it been possible to rewrite some of these papers I hope I should
have had the courage to attempt it. But it is not possible. Short
studies are, or should be, things woven like a carpet, from which it is
impossible to detach a strand. What is perverted has its place there for
ever, as a part of the technical means by which what is right has been
presented. It is only possible to write another study, and then, with a
new "point of view," would follow new perversions and perhaps a fresh
caricature. Hence, it will be, at least, honest to offer a few grains of
salt to be taken with the text; and as some words of apology, addition,
correction, or amplification fall to be said on almost every study in
the volume, it will be most simple to run them over in their order. But
this must not be taken as a propitiatory offering to the gods of
shipwreck; I trust my cargo unreservedly to the chances of the sea; and
do not, by criticising myself, seek to disarm the wrath of other and
less partial critics. HUGO'S ROMANCES. This is an instance of the "point of view." The five
romances studied with a different purpose might have given different
results, even with a critic so warmly interested in their favour. The
great contemporary master of workmanship, and indeed of all literary
arts and technicalities, had not unnaturally dazzled a beginner. But it
is best to dwell on merits, for it is these that are most often
overlooked. BURNS. I have left the introductory sentences on Principal Shairp,
partly to explain my own paper, which was merely supplemental to his
amiable but imperfect book, partly because that book appears to me truly
misleading both as to the character and the genius of Burns. This seems
ungracious, but Mr. Shairp has himself to blame; so good a Wordsworthian
was out of character upon that stage. This half-apology apart, nothing more falls to be said except upon a
remark called forth by my study in the columns of a literary Review. The
exact terms in which that sheet disposed of Burns I cannot now recall;
but they were to this effect--that Burns was a bad man, the impure
vehicle of fine verses; and that this was the view to which all
criticism tended. Now I knew, for my own part, that it was with the
profoundest pity, but with a growing esteem, that I studied the man's
desperate efforts to do right; and the more I reflected, the stranger it
appeared to me that any thinking being should feel otherwise. The
complete letters shed, indeed, a light on the depths to which Burns had
sunk in his character of Don Juan, but they enhance in the same
proportion the hopeless nobility of his marrying Jean. That I ought to
have stated this more noisily I now see; but that any one should fail to
see it for himself is to me a thing both incomprehensible and worthy of
open scorn. If Burns, on the facts dealt with in this study, is to be
called a bad man, I question very much whether I or the writer in the
Review have ever encountered what it would be fair to call a good one. All have some fault. The fault of each grinds down the hearts of those
about him, and--let us not blink the truth--hurries both him and them
into the grave. And when we find a man persevering indeed, in his fault,
as all of us do, and openly overtaken, as not all of us are, by its
consequences, to gloss the matter over, with too polite biographers, is
to do the work of the wrecker disfiguring beacons on a perilous
seaboard; but to call him bad, with a self-righteous chuckle, is to be
talking in one's sleep with Heedless and Too-bold in the arbour. Yet it is undeniable that much anger and distress is raised in many
quarters by the least attempt to state plainly what every one well
knows, of Burns's profligacy, and of the fatal consequences of his
marriage. And for this there are perhaps two subsidiary reasons. For,
first, there is, in our drunken land, a certain privilege extended to
drunkenness. In Scotland, in particular, it is almost respectable, above
all when compared with any "irregularity between the sexes." The
selfishness of the one, so much more gross in essence, is so much less
immediately conspicuous in its results, that our demiurgeous Mrs. Grundy
smiles apologetically on its victims. It is often said--I have heard it
with these ears--that drunkenness "may lead to vice." Now I did not
think it at all proved that Burns was what is called a drunkard; and I
was obliged to dwell very plainly on the irregularity and the too
frequent vanity and meanness of his relations to women. Hence, in the
eyes of many, my study was a step towards the demonstration of Burns's
radical badness. But, second, there is a certain class, professors of that low morality
so greatly more distressing than the better sort of vice, to whom you
must never represent an act that was virtuous in itself as attended by
any other consequences than a large family and fortune. To hint that
Burns's marriage had an evil influence is, with this class, to deny the
moral law. Yet such is the fact. It was bravely done; but he had
presumed too far on his strength. One after another the lights of his
life went out, and he fell from circle to circle to the dishonoured
sickbed of the end. And surely, for any one that has a thing to call a
soul, he shines out tenfold more nobly in the failure of that frantic
effort to do right, than if he had turned on his heel with Worldly
Wiseman, married a congenial spouse, and lived orderly and died
reputably an old man. It is his chief title that he refrained from "the
wrong that amendeth wrong." But the common, trashy mind of our
generation is still aghast, like the Jews of old, at any word of an
unsuccessful virtue.