Joseph Jacobs

“ The light touch, the full feeling, the deep thought, the gay and gallant aspect, make the books as bright as youth itself. He could creep into a child's mind; but the thoughts and feelings of these books were those of a man who was ever young at heart, and so they are fitted to be for ever the vade-mecum of the young man. Who has entered into the motives for a young man's laziness like Stevenson? Who has expressed so well the haunting sense of inutility which besets almost all men on entering life? ”

“ It is a pang to me to witness the suffering of a fellow-being, and I feel his suffering the more acutely because he is mortal—because his life is so short, and I would have it, if possible, filled with happiness and not misery. Through my union and fellowship with the men and women I have seen, I feel a like, though a fainter, sympathy with those I have not seen; and I am able so to live in imagination with the generations to come that their good is not alien to me, and is a stimulus to me to labour for ends which may not benefit myself, but will benefit them. ”

“ No English poet has felt like Browning the pathos of the battle of life. Yet keenly as he felt it, he did not despair nor bid the world despair. 'We bid ye be of good hope' was his message to the seeming failures in life, a class of ever-growing importance in this self-conscious age. His philosophy of life was eminently manly, and has brought cheer to many a despairing soul. ”

“ It was this gay, gallant, fresh philosophy of life that lent their chief charm to his first efforts, An Inland Voyage and Travels with a Donkey. He moralised every step of the way. Not a character appears that is not ethically valued in the scheme of life—this one for his courtesy, that for his silence, another for his courage, she for gaiety, he for his grumpiness—all are judged ethically as well as artistically. Yet Stevenson was singularly deficient in capacity for catching characteristic traits of physiognomy. He rarely, if ever, pictures men by his pen. ”

“ But these items of interest are few and far between, and the book as a whole might more easily be the record of a savant than of a literary artist. In every way the total impression is sad and sombre. And so we lay down these volumes with the impression of a life disfigured by one great lapse that overshadowed it to the end, but ennobled by high gifts devoted with self-denying thoroughness to a lofty conception of the function of the depicter of human life. The novelist's art has never been made so sacramental as by George Eliot. ”

“ The changes in taste, in feeling, in the general attitude towards the fundamental problems of religion, of society, and of politics, have been enormous, and in all of them, except, perhaps, the last, Matthew Arnold has been an abiding influence. We shall never, perhaps, fully appreciate the way in which he softened the asperities of the conflicts which raged round him by his imperturbable good humour, and even by the mannerisms which diverted the stress of feeling. The solvent of his criticism was diluted to the exact strength where it could effect its purpose while giving least pain. ”

“ We want to be taught to feel, not for the heroic artisan or the sentimental peasant, but for the peasant in all his coarse apathy, and the artisan in all his suspicious selfishness. We have one great novelist who is gifted with the utmost power of rendering the external traits of our town population; and if he could give us their psychological character—their conceptions of life, and their emotions—with the same truth as their idiom and manners, his books would be the greatest contribution Art has ever made to the awakening of social sympathies. ”

“ But a great artist owes duties to the world as much as deserves gratitude from it. When one who has it in her power to add to the world's wealth of beauty turns aside from the arduous conception of a great work to execute preparatory sketches not worthy of mention by the side of her other works, it is impossible to refrain from deploring the loss to the world. Let others take upon themselves to compare these 'characters' with similar literary productions; for us none but herself can be her parallel. ”

“ They are as clear cut as crystal, and as cold. One feels no rush of impetuous emotion behind the words, no uncontrollable outburst of imaginative force. Yet it is this that gives us the sense of a great poet, a vision of unknown vistas of the poet-soul flashing through the verse. Tennyson in his first period knows exactly what he wants to say, and says it in the best way. ”

“ Her father was a land surveyor, and she thus came in contact with all classes of provincial society, so that her pictures are far more complete than either Dickens's or Thackeray's accounts of London life. Both George Eliot and George Sand had learned that provincial life is more intense, if more monotonous and simple, than the busy life of towns. Amid the turmoil of cities, existence passes through a series of shallows, as it were; whereas in the country the emotions are collected into one deep pool, which pours forth tumultuously if once disturbed. ”

“ Poetic truth does not consist in displaying the facets of truth disconnectedly: the poet sees life singly and sees it whole, and should enable us so to see it. But if the experiment of trying to give the totality of truth by presenting its dislocated parts in small doses is a failure, what gigantic powers are displayed in the failure! ”

“ The extent of his achievements is the most striking quality. Seventeen volumes represent the poet's legacy to his countrymen. And what volumes! Crammed with thought, suffused with imagination, crowded with figures with life more real than half the people we meet, filled with suggestion, historic, ethical, artistic, and contemporary, they represent at least fifty volumes, if their full meaning were drawn out and displayed. Nor has this huge bulk been attained by harping on a limited set of themes. ”

“ These bright books, full of the most ebullient life, were written by a man gazing steadfastly into the eyes of Death. Perhaps it was the insistent need for getting rid of morbid thoughts that led Stevenson to dwell on the active life in the open air. But what a dauntless courage that could disregard the perpetual menace of his grisly visitant and play so well the part of the young man into whose calculations Death enters not! ”

“ Direct didacticism is likely at all times to lead to priggishness. The teaching of the true poet is indirect—a sort of induction of the poetic temper and attitude, far more subtle and penetrating in its effects than all your direct teaching. The pictures of still and cleanly English life in the earlier idylls, of sturdy heroism in the ballads, even the somewhat namby-pamby chivalry of the epical Idylls—these were the teachings of Tennyson, so far as he was a teacher. ”

“ Standing by his open grave, we give the last thought to the man we have lost as well as the poet. His warm geniality made him a universal favourite in society. If to some it seems incongruous to think of the vates sacer at the five o'clock tea-table, it must be remembered that the spiritual influence of such a nature would radiate through the very class that needs idealising. ”

“ He was not an epic poet, he was not a dramatic poet; yet he devoted his forces at their highest capacity to epic, to drama. An epic is the presentation of a national myth regarded as sacred: the Paradise Lost answers to this description, the Idylls of the King do not. Arthur has never been a national hero: he is mainly the outcome of a long series of literary creation; the Idylls could at best claim only to be a literary epic, not a national one. But the temper required for the literary epic is the romantic, not the classical spirit. ”

“ Profound a poet should be, but hardly subtle. All art is at root selective; the poet's art consists in selecting out of the mass of thoughts and feelings which a poetic subject arouses in his soul those streams of thought and emotion that are essential to the subject. But Browning too often did not select, but gave, or attempted to give, the whole mass. ”

“ On the other hand, Auerbach and George Eliot show that wide culture is no necessary bar to sympathetic delineation of the life furthest removed from culture. In so far as culture is real and has become instinctive and unconscious, it undoubtedly tends to give a wider background to the artistic picture and to affect us at more various points of contact. But observation, psychology, and culture can only increase the artistic value of the novel in so far as they are unconsciously applied and subordinated to the interest of character and incident. ”

“ No English poet impresses one with such a sense of continuous improvement in the technique of his vocation. At first the echoes resound: a phrase of Keats, a sentiment of Wordsworth, a rhythm of Byron, a lilt of Shelley or of Coleridge, experiments in metrical quantity—everywhere we find the poet testing all things poetical, and holding fast that which was good. ”

“ The business of the true dramatist is with action—with character too, but character formed, and only so far as action brings out the character that is already there. The conditions of Shakespeare's art prevented him from dealing with character formation, modification, elevation, development, or degradation, to the extent that Browning deals with them. Here, too, is the secret of Browning's failure as a dramatist, for failure it was for a man of Browning's calibre not to excel pre-eminently. ”

“ Love does not say, "I ought to love"–it loves. Pity does not say, "It is right to be pitiful"—it pities. Justice does not say, "I am bound to be just"—it feels justly. It is only where moral emotion is comparatively weak that the contemplation of a rule or theory habitually mingles with its action ”

“ Resistance to 'Liberalism' in its inroads on the Church is a more prominent motive, it would seem, than any distinct conception of the ideals which they desired to realise. Even in Newman there is too much immersion in detail, and there is far too little of humanism in his letters to make them interesting. It is the 'Movement,' the 'Movement,' and still again the 'Movement.' Of life, of art, except stray references to music, of letters, there is scarcely anything throughout these thousand pages. ”

“ The function of criticism is to classify and analyse much more than to judge. Its artistic limitations are obvious: with the whole field of life before it, the Tendenz-roman has to confine itself to its Tendenz. Its artistic value is dependent in large measure on its philosophic truth. The temptation to philosophise formally has its dangers, as George Eliot recognised when she wrote to Mr. Blackwood that she is in danger of refining where novel-readers only think of skipping. ”

“ It is useless to note that the character of Henry II., or of Mary, is according to the Records: dramas are not histories. Tennyson may have conceived his characters aright according to Stubbs or to Froude; he has not presented them dramatically. Here, again, as in the epic series, one felt the absence of the creative rush, the sense of a personality behind the artistic work, and greater than it. The great poet is himself greater than his work; the sense of easy mastery of their materials is given by men like Shakespeare or Homer. ”

“ Truth has its triumphs no less than Fancy, and of these were Seeley's. The votaries of Veracity need, above all things, restraint and repression; Imagination must be their servant, not their master. Throughout Seeley's work, so original in so many directions, one feels that he never brought out all that was in him. Of Gray—another Cambridge man, and Seeley's predecessor in his chair—it was said that he never spoke out. May we not say of Seeley that he never let himself go? Yet in this restraint and repression Seeley was English of the English. I have called his a Cambridge mind. ”

“ Not that a poet need be a fool or dense. But the things of the intellect must be subordinate to the purposes of his art, not objects of independent interest. The intellect analyses and abstracts, poetry synthesises and concretes. In consequence of Browning's interest in the gambollings of the human intellect, and especially of his own intellect, much of his work reads like so many exercises in forensic dialectics. 'What a grand Q.C. the world has lost!' is our thought, but that is not a thought that a great poet should arouse. ”

“ The claims of the whole being, body and spirit, are admitted to the utmost, and as a consequence those of the former die away in the serener glow of the spiritual passion. As Browning regarding the struggle of life the contest of soul with soul or against all souls is eminently a man, so in his depicting of love the union of soul with soul he is preeminently the gentleman. Refinement is of the very soul of him, and that without, as so often happens, any loss of virile strength. ”

“ This is only one example of the law by which human lives are linked together: another example of what we complain of when we point to our pauperism, to the brutal ignorance of multitudes among our fellow-countrymen, to the weight of taxation laid on us by blameable wars, to the wasteful channels made for the public money, to the expense and trouble of getting justice, and call these the effects of bad rule. ”

“ What strikes one in his criticisms of life even more than their penetration is their sanity and completeness. Many a controversial victory he has won in discussions about letters or life, or sometimes even in politics, by attending to the one question, What are the actual and complete facts of the case? He takes human nature all round, and sees how far a proposed remedy answers to all its needs. ”

“ Under the inrush of the emotive impulse the poet remains master of his passion, directing it into artistic channels. Browning had this power to the highest, and misused it. He attempted the impossible task of setting forth in verse the totality of impressions, emotional, æsthetic, and intellectual, which his object made upon him. When one reflects on what the totality of impressions on such a nature as Browning's must mean, one recognises the impossibility of the task. ”

“ He thought, he wrote, that he might influence the actions of men. He did influence their actions, but, as a consequence, most of what he wrote has in reality died away with its practical effect, and of his forty volumes but a few sermons, 'Lead, kindly Light'—the one hymn of our language—the Apologia, and perhaps The Idea of a University, will form permanent additions to English literature. His histories are unhistorical, his criticism uncritical, and much of his theology is founded on his history and his criticism. ”