Augustine Birrell

“ Men still continue to hold aloof from Hazlitt; his shaggy head and fierce scowling temper still seem to terrorize; and his very books, telling us though they do about all things most delightful—poems, pictures, and the cheerful playhouse—frown upon us from their upper shelf. From this it appears that would a genius ensure for himself immortality, he must brush his hair and keep his temper; but, alas! how seldom can he be persuaded to do either. Charles Lamb did both; and the years as they roll do but swell the rich revenues of his praise. Lamb’s popularity shows no sign of waning. ”

“ Arnold, are the most valuable prose contributions to English literature of the century; his letters to Mr. Carlyle carried into all our homes the charm of a most delightful personality; the quaint melody of his poems abides in many ears. He would, indeed, be a churl who grudged Emerson his fame.
But when we are considering a writer so full of intelligence as Emerson—one so remote and detached from the world’s bluster and brag—it is especially incumbent upon us to charge our own language with intelligence, and to make sure that what we say is at least truth for us. ”

“ Of that indescribable something, that ‘greatness’ which causes Dryden to uplift a lofty head from the deep pit of his corruption, neither Pope’s character nor his style bears any trace. But still, both as a poet and a man we must give place, and even high place, to Pope. About the poetry there can be no question. A man with his wit, and faculty of expression, and infinite painstaking, is not to be evicted from his ancient homestead in the affections and memories of his people by a rabble of critics, or even a posse of poets. As for the man, he was ever eager and interested in life. ”

“ It is not a question of the general public, but of the lover of letters. Do Mr. Browning, Mr. Arnold, Mr. Lowell, Mr. Trevelyan, Mr. Stephen, Mr. Morley, know their Johnson? ‘To doubt would be disloyalty.’ And what these big men know in their big way hundreds of little men know in their little way. We have no writer with a more genuine literary flavour about him than the great Cham of literature. No man of letters loved letters better than he. He knew literature in all its branches—he had read books, he had written books, he had sold books, he had bought books, and he had borrowed them. ”

“ We should never confuse functions or apply wrong tests. What can books do for us? Dr. Johnson, the least pedantic of men, put the whole matter into a nutshell (a cocoanut shell, if you will—Heaven forbid that I should seek to compress the great Doctor within any narrower limits than my metaphor requires!) , when he wrote that a book should teach us either to enjoy life or endure it. ‘Give us enjoyment!’ ‘Teach us endurance!’ Hearken to the ceaseless demand and the perpetual prayer of an ever unsatisfied and always suffering humanity! ”

“ A poet indeed once came into residence at University College, whose single name—for, after all, poets must be weighed and not counted—would have gone far to right the balance, but is Oxford bold enough to claim Shelley as her own? She sent him down, not for riotous living, for no purer soul than his ever haunted her courts, but for wanting to discuss with those whose business it was to teach him questions of high philosophy. Had Shelley only gone to Trinity in 1810, I feel sure wise and witty old Dr. Mansel would never have sent him down. Spenser, Milton, and Shelley! ”

“ He takes you (seemingly) into his confidence, perhaps pretends to consult you as to the best route, but at all events points out to you the road, lying far ahead, which you are to travel in his company. How carefully does a really great writer, like Dr. Newman or M. Rénan, explain to you what he is going to do and how he is going to do it! His humour, wit, and fancy, however abundant they may be, spring up like wayside flowers, and do but adorn and render more attractive the path along which it is his object to conduct you. ”

“ Was he not already endowed—with a pension, which, with his customary indifference to attack, he wished were twice as large, in order that his enemies might make twice as much fuss over it? None the less—nay, perhaps all the more—for being written with so little effort, the Lives of the Poets are delightful reading, and Pope’s is one of the very best of them. [59] None knew the infirmities of ordinary human nature better than Johnson. They neither angered him nor amused him; he neither storms, sneers, nor chuckles, as he records man’s vanity, insincerity, jealousy, and pretence. ”

“ We are (are we not?) in these days in no little danger of being philosophy-ridden, and of losing our love for facts simply as facts. So long as Carlyle lived the concrete had a representative, the strength of whose epithets sufficed, if not to keep the philosophers in awe, at least to supply their opponents with stones. But now it is different. Carlyle is no more a model historian than is Shakspeare a model dramatist. The merest tyro can count the faults of either on his clumsy fingers. ”

“ No one willingly fights in handcuffs or wrestles to music. For a man with novel truths to promulgate, or grave moral laws to expound, to postpone doing so until he had hitched them into rhyme would be to insult his mission. Pope’s gifts were his wit, his swift-working mind, added to all the cunning of the craft and mystery of composition. He could say things better than other men, and hence it comes that, be he a great poet or a small one, he is a great writer, an English classic. What is it that constitutes a great writer? ”

“ Burke may be called the High Priest of Order—a lover of settled ways, of justice, peace, and security. His writings are a storehouse of wisdom, not the cheap shrewdness of the mere man of the world, but the noble, animating wisdom of one who has the poet’s heart as well as the statesman’s brain. Nobody is fit to govern this country who has not drunk deep at the springs of Burke. ”

“ To keep the past alive for us is the pious function of the historian. Our curiosity is endless, his the task of gratifying it. We want to know what happened long ago. Performance of this task is only proximately possible; but none the less it must be attempted, for the demand for it is born afresh with every infant’s cry. History is a pageant, and not a philosophy.
Poets, no less than professors, occasionally say good things even in prose, and the following oracular utterance of Shelley is not pure nonsense:—‘History is the cyclic poem written by Time upon the memories of men. ”

“ The task of the historian, as here explained, is not merely to tell us the story of the past, and thus gratify our curiosity, but, pursuing a practical object, to seek to modify our views of the present and help us in our forecasts of the future, and this the historian is to do, not unconsciously and incidentally, but deliberately and of set purpose. One can well understand how history, so written, will usually begin with a maxim, and invariably end with a moral. ”

“ Of Milton’s pamphlet it is everyone’s duty to speak with profound respect. It is a noble and passionate cry for a high ideal of married life, which, so he argued, had by inflexible laws been changed into a drooping and disconsolate household captivity, without refuge or redemption. He shuddered at the thought of a man and woman being condemned, for a mistake of judgment, to be bound together to their unspeakable wearisomeness and despair, for, he says, not to be beloved and yet retained is the greatest injury to a gentle spirit. ”

“ But if ever, amidst what Burns called ‘social noise,’ you so far forget yourself as to get drunk, think not to plead a spotless life spent with those for whom you have laboured and saved; talk not of the love of friends or of help given to the needy; least of all make reference to a noble self-sacrifice passing the love of women, for all will avail you nothing. You get drunk—and the heartless and the selfish and the lewd crave the privilege of pitying you, and receiving your name with an odious smile. ”

“ Science is not the only, or the chief source of knowledge. The Iliad, Shakspeare’s plays, have taught the world more than the Politics of Aristotle or the Novum Organum of Bacon.
Facts are not the dross of history, but the true metal, and the historian is a worker in that metal. He has nothing to do with abstract truth, or with practical politics, or with forecasts of the future. A worker in metal he is, and has certainly plenty of what Lord Bacon used to call ‘stuff’ to work upon ”

“ The natural definition of history, therefore, surely is the story of man upon earth, and the historian is he who tells us any chapter or fragment of that story. All things that on earth do dwell have, no doubt, their history as well as man; but when a member, however humble, of the human race speaks of history without any explanatory context, he may be presumed to be alluding to his own family records, to the story of humanity during its passage across the earth’s surface. ”

“ After all, man is not a reasoning animal, he is a seeing, feeling, contemplating, actual animal.’
Burke is fond of telling us that he is no lawyer, no antiquarian, but a plain, practical man; and the Cardinal, in like manner, is ever insisting that he is no theologian—he leaves everything of that sort to the schools, whatever they may be, and simply deals with religion on its practical side as a benefit to mankind.
If either of these great men has been guilty of intellectual excesses, those of Burke may be attributed to his dread of anarchy, those of Newman to his dread of atheism. ”

“ What is called a picturesque style is generally a great trial. Who was it who called Professor Masson’s style Carlyle on wooden legs? What can be drearier than when a plain matter-of-fact writer attempts to be animated, and tries to make his characters live by the easy but futile expedient of writing about them in the present tense? What is wanted is a passion for facts; the style may be left to take care of itself. ”

“ Keats remarks in one of his letters with great admiration upon what he christens Shakspeare’s ‘negative capability,’ meaning thereby Shakspeare’s habit of complaisant observation from outside of theory, and his keen enjoyment of the unexplained facts of life. He did not pour himself out in every strife. We have but little of this negative capability. The ruddy qualities of delightfulness, of pleasantness, are all ‘sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.’ The varied elements of life—the
‘Murmur of living,
Stir of existence,
Soul of the world!’
seem to be fading from literature. ”

“ Beautiful beyond praise, and just sufficiently conscious of it to be careful never to appear at a disadvantage, dignified in manners, versed in foreign tongues, yet full of the ancient learning—a gentleman, a scholar, a poet, a musician, and a Christian—he moved about in a leisurely manner from city to city, writing Latin verses for his hosts and Italian sonnets in their ladies’ albums, buying books and music, and creating, one cannot doubt, an all too flattering impression of an English Protestant. ”

“ The present writer will disclaim no such legacy, but hereby undertakes to accept it, however dusty. But good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one. Each volume then, however lightly a stranger’s eye may roam from shelf to shelf, has its own individuality, a history of its own. You remember where you got it, and how much you gave for it; and your word may safely be taken for the first of these facts, but not for the second.
The man who has a library of his own collection is able to contemplate himself objectively, and is justified in believing in his own existence. ”

“ History, when she has lost her Muse, will lose her dignity, her occupation, her character, her name. She will wander about the Agora; she will start, she will stop, she will look wild, she will look stupid, she will take languidly to her bosom doubts, queries, essays, dissertations, some of which ought to go before her, some to follow, and all to stand apart. The field of history should not merely be well tilled, but well peopled. ”

“ These are the only arguments by which you will be able to evince that you are not such persons as this fellow represents you, traitors, robbers, murderers, parricides, madmen, that you did not put your king to death out of any ambitious design—that it was not an act of fury or madness, but that it was wholly out of love to your liberty, your religion, to justice, virtue, and your country, that you punished a tyrant. ”

“ But I shall be satisfied with a mere de facto existence for the book, if only it prove a little interesting to men and women who, called upon to pursue, somewhat too rigorously for their liking, their daily duties, are glad, every now and again, when their feet are on the fender, and they are surrounded by such small luxuries as their theories of life will allow them to enjoy, to be reminded of things they once knew more familiarly than now, of books they once had by heart, and of authors they must ever love. ”

“ Though few things, even in what is called Literature, are more disgusting than to hear small critics, who earn their bite and sup by acting as the self-appointed showmen of the p. 2works of their betters, heaping terms of moral opprobrium upon those whose genius is, if not exactly a lamp unto our feet, at all events a joy to our hearts,—still, not even genius can repeal the Decalogue, or re-write the sentence of doom, ‘He which is filthy, let him be filthy still.’ It is therefore permissible to wish that some of our great authors had been better men. ”

“ Boldly to assert, as some are found to do, that the editor of a master of style has no choice but to reprint the scraps or notelets that a misdirected energy may succeed in disinterring from the grave the writer had dug for them, is to fail to grasp the distinction between a collector of curios and a lover of books. But this policy of exclusion is no doubt a perilous one. Like the Irish p. 212members, or Mark Antony’s wife—the ‘shrill-toned Fulvia’—the missing essays are ‘good, being gone.’ Surely, so we are inclined to grumble, the taste was severe that led Mr. Ainger to dismiss Juke Judkins. ”

“ A poet’s soul must contain the perfect shape of all things good, wise, and just. His body must be spotless and without blemish, his life pure, his thoughts high, his studies intense. ”

“ Pope had none of the grave purpose which makes us, at all events, partially sympathize with Ben Jonson in his quarrels with the poetasters of his day. It is a mere toss-up whose name you may find in the Dunciad—a miserable scribbler’s or a resplendent scholar’s; a tasteless critic’s or an immortal wit’s. A satirist who places Richard Bentley and Daniel Defoe amongst the Dunces must be content to abate his pretensions to be regarded as a social purge. ”