Brander Matthews

“ Longfellow declared that "many readers judge of the power of a book by the shock it gives their feelings, as some savage tribes determine the power of muskets by their recoil; that being considered the best which fairly prostrates the purchaser." Mr. Lang's taste is too refined for this saying to be justly applicable to him; but he does not think the worse of a book because it tells a tale of daring-do. ”

“ The most lifelike photograph of a friend is no more than a reminder of what we have seen for ourselves, since the camera has neither insight nor imagination; a portrait by a true artist may bring out qualities but doubtfully glimpsed before, or it may even reveal depths of character hitherto unsuspected. ”

“ Lang is a romanticist to the bitter end. Broad as his sympathy is, it is not broad enough to comprehend realism. He is restive when realism is lauded. Unconsciously, no doubt, he resents it a little, and he does not quite understand it. Mr. Lang can enjoy Rabelais, and praise him for the qualities which make him great in spite of his wilful foulness ”

“ Lang proffers an explanation derived from a study of the history of man and founded on the methods of comparative anthropology. He turns to account the evolution of humanity from savagery to civilization, and he examines the irrational beliefs and absurd customs which survived in Greece even in the days of Pericles by the aid of a study of the beliefs and customs of savage tribes still in the condition in which the ancient Greeks had once been. ”

“ Lang is unfordable, and there is no hope of a bridge. There is no common standing-ground anywhere for those who hold fiction to be primarily an amusement and those who believe that it ought to be chiefly a criticism of life, as Matthew Arnold said all literature should be. The romanticist considers fiction as an art, and as an art only ”

“ Of necessity every man has the defects of his qualities, and the very success of Mr. Lang's briefer essays tends to prevent his attempting longer labors. He gets most out of a subject which may be treated on the instalment plan, when every portion is complete in itself and yet unites with the others to form a complete whole. ”

“ Lang's attitude toward the authors he translates. To him Homer, and Theocritus, and the old man who sang of "Aucassin and Nicolette," are still living, and their works are alive. Scholar as he is, his interest is never grammatical or philological, but always literary and human. He never regards these writings as verse to scan, or as prose to parse, but poetry to be enjoyed. ”

“ They have both attempted fiction, and both belong to the romantic school. In differing degrees each is a poet, and each is master of a prose than which no better is written in our language nowadays. Mr. Lang's style has not the tortured felicity of Mr. Stevenson's; its happiness is easier and less wilful. The author of "Letters to Dead Authors" is not an artificer of cunning phrase like the author of "Memories and Portraits"; his style is not hand-made nor the result of taking thought; it grows more of its own accord. ”

“ Lang has given battle to those who maintain that the descriptions of the elemental processes of nature developed into myths, and who accept a personification of fire, storm, cloud, or lightning as the origin of Apollo and his chariot, Thor and his hammer, Cinderella and her slipper, and Brer Rabbit and the tar-baby. ”

“ In one of the London exhibitions during the season of 1885, amid many a "portrait of a gentleman," there was at least one portrait of a man—nervous, significant, vital. At a glance it was obvious that the man here depicted was a gentleman and a scholar, although the picture hid none of the prim propriety of the ordinary academic portrait. ”

“ We may guess that it has been his fate to serve as art-critic, toiling in the galleries yearly; but we can discover no signs of any real understanding of art, either pictorial or plastic, nor of any aptitude for it. ”

“ Lang has attempted no long translations in verse, but some of his briefer metrical attempts are almost as happy as Longfellow's, than which there can hardly be higher praise. No doubt the carrying over of a lyric from one language to another is an easier task than the transferring of an epic, but nevertheless it is a feat many a minor poet has failed to accomplish. ”

“ What could be better in its way than the "Great Gladstone Myth"? wherein the grand old man is resolved into his elements in the fashion familiar to students of sun-myths. Equally amusing, and quite as pregnant in suggestion, is the description of the poor souls who found themselves each "In the Wrong Paradise"—the scalped Scotchman dwelling with the Apaches in their happy hunting-grounds, and the wretched cockney esthete desperately out of place in the Fortunate Islands of the Greeks. ”

“ He seeks to show that in savagery we have "an historical condition of the human intellect to which the element in myths, regarded by us as irrational," seems rational enough. Further, he urges that as savagery is a stage through which all civilized races have passed, the universality of the mythopeic mental condition will explain not only the origin, but also the diffusion throughout the world, of myths strangely alike one to another. ”

“ If an author once lets his readers suspect that he is only "making believe," instantly he loses his grip on their attention, and may as well put away the puppets, since few spectators will care to wait till the fall of the curtain.
The one fault that Mr. James found with Trollope—that "he took a suicidal satisfaction in reminding the reader that the story he was telling was only, after all, a make-believe"—Mr. ”

“ Alexander Pope," a marvel of parody with many lines as good as the one which tells the poet that "Dunces edit him whom dunces feared!"—the letter to "Monsieur de Molière, Valet-de-Chambre du Roi," with its delicious suggestion that if the great and sad French humorist were alive to-day, he might write a new comedy on les Molièristes ”