tell for at least a modest eternity, and something
more, if that be possible for if a ' Fortnight is eter-
nity' upon the Stock Exchange, a literary eternity
is, perhaps, forty years.

Of course the short story, like all other fiction to
be read, does not share the other difficulties of the
acted drama above all, the disadvantage which
drags the acted drama down the disadvantage of
appealing to, at all events of having to give sops to,
at one and the same moment, gallery and stalls : an
audience so incongruous that it lies outside the
power of Literature to weld it really together. In
the contemporary theatre, in some of the very clever-
est of our acted dramas, the characters are frequently
doing, not what the man of intuition, and the man
who remembers life, knows that they would do, but
that which they must do to conciliate the dress
circle, to entertain the pit, to defer not too long the
gentle chuckle with which the ' average sensual man '
receives the assurance that it is a delusion to suppose
our world contains any soul, even a woman's soul,
that is higher and purer than his. To such temp-
tations the writer of the short story is not even
exposed, if he be willing to conceive of his art upon



THE SHORT STORY 19

exalted lines, to offer carefully the best of his reflec-
tion, in a form of durable and chosen grace, or, by
a less conscious, perhaps, but not less fruitful, hus-
banding of his resources, to give us, sooner or later
some first-hand study of human emotion, ' gotten,' as
William Watson says, ' of the immediate soul.' But
again, contrasting his fortunes with those of his
brother, the dramatist, the writer of short stories
must, even at the best, know himself denied the
dramatist's crowning advantage which is the thrill of
actual human presence.

I have not presumed, except incidentally and by
way of illustration, to sit in rapid judgment, and
award impertinently blame or praise to the most or
the least prominent of those who are writing short
stories to-day. Even an occasional grappler with the
difficulties of a task is not generally its best critic.
He will criticise from the inside, now and then, and
so, although you ought to have from him, now and
again, at least what I know, nevertheless, that 7
may not have given illuminating commentary
you cannot have final judgment. Of the art of
Painting, where skill of hand and sense of colour
count for much more than intellect, this is especi-
ally true. It is true, more or less, of Music in spite
of exceptions as notable as Schumann and Berlioz :



20 ON BOOKS AND ARTS

almost perfect critics of the very art that they pro-
duced. It is true though in a less degree of
creative Literature. We leave this point, to write
down, before stopping, one word about tendencies.

Among the better writers, one tendency of the
day is to devote a greater care to the art of expres-
sion to an unbroken continuity of excellent style.
The short story, much more than the long one,
makes this thing possible to men who may not
claim to be geniuses, but who, if we are to respect
them at all, must claim to be artists. And yet, in
face of the indifference of so much of our public here
to anything we can call Style in face, actually, of a
strange insensibility to it the attempt, wherever
made, is a courageous one. This insensibility how
does it come about ?

It comes about, in honest truth, partly because that
instrument of Art, our English tongue, in which the
verse of Gray was written, and the prose of Landor
and Sterne, is likewise the necessary vehicle in which,
every morning of our lives, we ask for something at
breakfast. If we all of us had to demand breakfast
by making a rude drawing of a coffee-pot, we should
understand, before long the quickness of the French
intelligence on that matter being unfortunately denied
us the man in the street would understand that



THE SHORT STORY 21

Writing, as much as Painting, is an art to be acquired,
and an art in whose technical processes one is bound
to take pleasure. And, perhaps, another reason is
the immense diffusion nowadays of superficial educa-
tion ; so that the election of a book to the honours
of quick popularity is decided by those, precisely,
whose minds are least trained for the exercise of
that suffrage. What is elected is too often the work
which presents at a first reading everything that it
presents at all. I remember Mr. Browning once
saying, apropos of such a matter, ' What has a cow to
do with nutmegs ? ' He explained, it was a German
proverb. Is it ? Or is it German only in the
way of ' Sonnets from the Portuguese ' ? Anyhow,
things being as they are, all the more honour to
those younger people who, in the face of indifference,
remember that their instrument of English language
is a quite unequalled instrument of Art.

Against this happy tendency, one has to set in
regard at least to some of them tendencies less
admirable. For, whilst the only kind of work that
has a chance of engaging the attention of Sainte-
Beuve's ' severe To-morrow ' is work that is original,
individual, sincere, is it not a pity, because of
another's sudden success, to be unremittingly occupied
with the exploitation of one particular world to



22 ON BOOKS AND ARTS

paint for ever, say, in violent and garish hue, or in
deep shades through which no light can struggle, the
life of the gutter? to paint it, too, with that dis-
torted ' realism ' which witnesses upon the part of its
practitioners to one thing only, a profound conviction
of the ugly ! I talk, of course, not of the short stories
of the penetrating observer, but of those of the
dyspeptic pessimist, whose pessimism, where it is not
the pose of the contortionist adopted with an eye
to a sensational success of journalism, to a com-
mercial effect is hysteria, an imitative malady, a
malady of the mind. The profession of the literary
pessimist is already overcrowded ; and if I name
two writers who, though in different degrees, have
avoided the temptation to join it if I name one
who knows familiarly the cheery as well as the more
sombre side of Cockney character and life, Mr. Henry
Nevinson, the author of the remarkable short -stories,
Neighbours of Qurs, and then again a more accepted
student of a sordid existence Mr. George Gissing,
in Human Odds and Ends especially I name them
but as such instances as I am privileged to know, of
observant and unbiassed treatment of the subjects
with which they have elected to deal.

In France, in the short story, we may easily
notice, the uglier forms of ' Realism ' are wearing



THE SHORT STORY 23

themselves out. ' Le soleil de France,' said Gluck
to Marie Antoinette, ' le soleil de France donne du
ge"nie.' And the genius that it gives cannot long be
hopeless and sombre. It leaves the obscure wood and
tangled bypath ; it makes for the open road : ' la route
claire et droite ' the phrase belongs to M. Leygues
' la route claire et droite ou marche le genie frangais.'
Straight and clear was the road followed nay, some-
times actually cut by the unresting talent of Guy
de Maupassant, the writer of a hundred short stories,
which, for the world of his day at least, went far
beyond Charles Nodier's earlier delicacy and Champ-
fleury's wit. But, somehow, upon De Maupassant's
nature and temperament the curse of pessimism lay.
To deviate into cheeriness he must deal with the
virtues of the declasstes undoubtedly an interesting
theme he must deal with them as in the famous
Maison Tellier, an ebullition of scarcely cynical
comedy, fuller much of real humanity than De
Goncourt's sordid document, La Fille Elisa. But
that was an exception. De Maupassant was pessi-
mist generally, because, master of an amazing talent,
he refreshed himself never in any rarefied air. The
vista of the Spirit was denied him. His reputation
he may keep ; but his school the school in which a
few even of our own imitative writers prattle the



24 ON BOOKS AND ARTS

accents of a hopeless materialism his school, I
fancy, will be crowded no more. For, with an
observation keen and judicial, M. Rene" Bazin treats
to-day themes, we need not say more 'legitimate'
since much may be legitimate but at least more
acceptable. And then again, with a style of which
De Maupassant, direct as was his own, must have
envied even the clarity and the subtler charm, a
master draughtsman of ecclesiastic and bookworm,
of the neglected genius of the provincial town (some
poor devil of a small professor), and of the soldier,
and the shopkeeper, and the Sous-PreTet's wife
I hope I am describing M. Anatole France looks
out on the contemporary world with a vision humane
and genial, sane and wide. Pessimism, it seems to
me, can only be excusable in those who are still
bowed down by the immense responsibility of youth.
It was a great poet, who, writing of one of his peers
a man of mature life declared of him, not 'he
mopes picturesquely,' but ' he knows the world, firm,
quiet, and gay.' To such a writer only to such a
writer is possible a happy comedy ; and possible,
besides, a true and an august vision of profounder
things ! And that is the spirit to which the Short
Story, at its best, will certainly return.

(Nineteenth Century, March 1898.)



MY RARE BOOK

I WISH I could say it was my diligence that dis-
covered it, and that I hunted it out of some fifth-
rate bookstall of Goswell Street or of the New Road
'all this lot at 6d. apiece.' But no, it has no
romantic story as far as I am concerned. Given
perhaps, eighty years ago, by friend to friend, or
lover to sweetheart, in days when our great-grand-
mothers were beautiful and our great-grandfathers
devoted, it got to be neglected, it got to be sold
somebody ceased to care for it, or somebody wanted
the few shillings it then would bring somehow it
tossed about the world, till a keen bookseller or keen
bookbuyer rescued it, and took it to a binder of note,
and then it was' arrayed in seemly dress, and safer
for the future. Afterwards but not for very long,
I think it was a rich man's possession : one thing,
and quite a little thing, in a great library of English
classics, from Defoe and Sterne to Dickens and
Tennyson. Then it came to be sold, along with

25



26 ON BOOKS AND ARTS

most or all of its important companions, and so I
got it, in prosaic fashion. I bought it under the
hammer at Sotheby's or rather, Mr.F. S. Ellis bought
it there on my behalf on the 3rd of March, in this
present year of grace. And now it takes up its
position on insignificant shelves, by the side of the
Rogers with the Turner illustrations ; by the side
of a few things but the collector knows them
not.

This is how it figures in the auctioneer's cata-
logue : ' Wordsworth (W.) Lyrical Ballads, with a
few other Poems (including Rime of the Ancyent
Marinere by Coleridge), FIRST EDITION, green
morocco extra g. e. by Riviere, 1798.' The 'g. e.'
means nothing more mysterious than 'gilt edges/
The morocco is of a rich and sunny green the
' good ' green of modern artistic speech, which rightly
enough, I suppose, endows colour and line with
moral qualities. I am thankful to the rich man for
having saved me both money and trouble, in bind-
ing, completely to my taste, it happens, my rare
book.

And few things, perhaps, deserve more careful
guardianship. The Lyrical Ballads, as the world
now knows, were a starting-point in the new English
Literature, which addressed itself to study in the field



MY RARE BOOK 27

of Nature more than in academies, and which taught
us the beauty and interest of common life and of
everyday incident ; and it is a delight to me to see
the pages of these simple lyrics and pastorals as
Wordsworth's own eye was content with them when
Cottle, the Bristol bookseller, passed them through
the press, and printed them, as well as might be, on
pleasantly toned paper, bearing here and there on
its water-mark the date of its making, ' 1795.' On
the whole, it is a well-printed book ; two hundred
and ten pages, tastefully arranged, and of errata
there are but five. Those were days when centralisa-
tion had not brought the best work all to London,
and even concentrated it in certain quarters of
London ; and of what is sometimes called provincial,
but of what there is better reason to define as subur-
ban, clumsiness for nothing is done so ill in the
world as what is done in London suburbs there is
only a trace in the gross inequality of the size of the
figures in the table of contents : they are taken, it
appears, from different founts. But generally the
book is printed with smoothness and precision,
and, even apart from the high literature which it
enshrines, is worthy of its good green coat, joyful of
hue, pleasant of smell, and grateful of touch to the
fingers that pass over it. And nothing that comes



28 ON BOOKS AND ARTS

now, even from the Chiswick Press, or from Jouaust
or whoever may be the fashionable printing man to-
day in Paris, can be much neater than its title-page ;
the mention of which brings me to a point of interest
to the bibliophile.

The book has two title-pages; or, rather, like
many of the books of its day, there belong two
title-pages to the same edition of it the custom
having been for a second bookseller, who bought
what the first bookseller was minded to get rid of,
to print his own title-page. This is the course that
the thing followed in the matter of Lyrical Ballads.
The book was printed, as we shall see in detail
presently, by Cottle, in Bristol, in the year 1798.
Five hundred copies were printed, but they did not
sell. ' As a curious literary fact,' says Cottle, in his
' Recollections,' ' I might mention that the sale of
the First Edition of the Lyrical Ballads was so
slow, and the severity of most of the reviews so
great, that its progress to oblivion seemed ordained
to be as rapid as it was certain.' ' I had given,'
he adds, ' thirty guineas for the copyright ; but
the heavy sale induced me to part with the largest
proportion of the impression of 500, at a loss, to Mr.
Arch, a London bookseller.' Mr. Arch printed his
own title-page. My copy has his title-page, ' London,



MY RARE BOOK 29

printed for J. & A. Arch, Gracechurch Street' ; and so,
I think, had the copy sold at Mr. Dew Smith's sale,
about four years ago. The date, of course, remains
the same, 1798, and all else remains the same. The
British Museum copy it was Southey's copy has
the Bristol title-page, and the Museum may possibly
acquire a copy with Mr. Arch's when opportunity
occurs. In the only copy of the First Edition which
they have at present, the words are, ' Bristol, printed
by Biggs and Cottle, for T. N. Longman, Paternoster
Row, London' Thus the First Edition of five
hundred was divided say two hundred for Mr.
Cottle, say three hundred for Mr. Arch when the
Bristolian found the sale was 'slow' and 'heavy.'
Where have they all gone to ? It was only eighty-
four years ago. But where have all the copies of
the big edition of the Christmas Carol gone to ?
That was hardly forty years ago.

To recall a little the origin of the book the cir-
cumstances under which Wordsworth and Coleridge
planned and produced it. It was in the Nether
Stowey and Alfoxden time, when the men were
neighbours, three miles of green Somerset country
dividing the home of Coleridge from the home of
Wordsworth. I saw the place that is, the neigh-
bourhood, and Coleridge's home a few years since,



30 ON BOOKS AND ARTS

much in that summer weather which tempted their
own more prolonged wanderings, which followed
them in that excursion to ' Linton and the Valley
of Stones,' which was the first cause, Wordsworth
says, of the issue of Lyrical Ballads. Plain living
and high thinking they practised then, and from
necessity as much as from choice. A yeoman of
Somerset would hardly have lived at that time and
certainly he would not live to-day in the cottage
which was Coleridge's. Straight from the country
road you step to its door : in an instant you are in
the small square parlour, with large kitchen-like fire-
place, with one, or, I think, two small windows, and a
window-seat from which, on days of evil weather, the
stay-at-home commanded the prospect of the passing
rustic as he walked abroad perhaps of the occa-
sional traveller on his way to the village inn. But
generally, fair weather or foul, the spectacle was
scanty time was marked by shifting light and
changes in the colour of the sky, or by the move-
ments of beasts at milking-time, or at hours of rest
and of labour. Never, I should say, was one hour
merely frittered away by either the poet who lived
or the poet who visited in that humble cottage.
Never a call of ceremony: an interview that bears
no fruit a social necessity, the continual plague of



MY RARE BOOK 31

cities. Never an hour that did not tell in some way,
by active work, or by ' wise passiveness,' upon the
mind that was to be cultivated and the character that
was to be developed. Such a life, led not in actual
isolation, but in narrowed and selected companion-
ship, was perhaps about the best preparation men
could make for work of the concentrated and the
self-possessed power of the ' Ancient Mariner,' and of
the serene profundity of the lines connected with
Tintern Abbey. This was the place, and these were
the conditions, for the quietude of life and thought
felt as the greatest necessity of existence by Words-
worth, ' a worshipper of Nature,' ' unwearied in that
service.'

In 1797 came the first thought of the book.
Wordsworth's account of it may already be familiar.
Prefixed in later editions to the poem of ' We are
Seven,' which was printed for the first time in Lyrical
Ballads, is a note which says : ' In reference to this
poem I will here mention one of the most noticeable
facts in my own poetic history, and that of Mr. Cole-
ridge.' And then he tells the story : ' In the autumn of
1797, he, my sister, and myself started from Alfoxden
pretty late in the afternoon, with a view to visit
Linton and the Valley of Stones near to it ; and, as
our united funds were very small, we agreed to defray



32 ON BOOKS AND ARTS

the expense of the tour by writing a poem, to be sent
to the New Monthly Magazine, set up by Phillips, the
bookseller, and edited by Dr. Aikin. Accordingly,
we set off, and proceeded along the Quantock Hills
towards Watchet ; and in the course of this walk was
planned the poem of the " Ancient Mariner," founded
on a dream, as Coleridge said, of his friend Mr.
Cruikshank.' And then Wordsworth adds some
details which are characteristic. ' Much the greatest
part of the story was Mr. Coleridge's invention,' he
says ; ' but certain parts I suggested.'

Now, what were those parts ? They were parts
which yield to no other in importance, and which
do very much to throw over the work the glamour
of noble imagination, the sudden magical charm
which was Wordsworth's own, and with which he
was accustomed to illumine the commoner themes
of his habitual choice. It was Wordsworth's sug-
gestion that the Ancient Mariner should be repre-
sented as having killed the Albatross, and that ' the
tutelary spirits of these regions ' the regions of the
South Sea ' should take upon them to avenge the
crime.' ' I also suggested the navigation of the ship
by the dead men, but do not recollect that I had any-
thing more to do with the scheme of the poem.' A
detail, however, he had to do with. ' I furnished



MY RARE BOOK 33

two or three lines at the beginning of the poem, in
particular

" And listened like a three years' child :
The Mariner had his will."

These trifling contributions, all but one, which
Mr. C. has with unnecessary scrupulosity recorded,
slipped out of his mind, as they well might.'

If the contributions themselves were characteristic,
so certainly is the manner of speaking of them.
These men, and the men who were more or less
their associates, believed much in each other. In
no different spirit from Wordsworth's did Coleridge
himself write, in his introduction.to Poems on Various
Subjects, these words about Charles Lamb : ' The
effusions signed C. L. were written by Mr. Charles
Lamb, of the India House ; independently of the
signature, their superior merit would have sufficiently
distinguished them.' And in no different spirit did
Coleridge write of Wordsworth, years afterwards, in
the Biographia Literaria, when their ways had
parted. He could explain generously then 'what
Mr. Wordsworth really intended ' by the theories put
forward in that famous preface which was too much
for Coleridge.

But to return to the book or rather, for the
moment, to Wordsworth's account of it. As the

C



34 ON BOOKS AND ARTS

friends endeavoured to proceed conjointly in the con-
struction of the ' Ancient Mariner ' it was still that
same evening in which the poem was conceived their
respective manners proved so widely different that it
would have been, to Wordsworth's mind, ' quite pre-
sumptuous in me to do anything but separate from
an undertaking upon which I could only have been a
clog.' ' The " Ancient Mariner " grew and grew,' he
adds, ' till it became too important for our first object,
which was limited to our expectation of five pounds ;
and we began to think of a volume, which was to
consist, as Mr. Coleridge has told the world, of poems
chiefly on supernatural subjects taken from common
life, but looked at, as much as might be, through an
imaginative medium.' That 'imaginative medium'
was to distinguish these poems, we have been told
elsewhere, from the rhymed stories of Crabbe.
Poetic realism and prosaic realism, and what a world
between them !

In April 1798 Wordsworth wrote to his friend, the
Bristol bookseller : ' You will be pleased to hear that
I have gone on adding very rapidly to my stock of
poetry. Do come and let me read it to you under
the old trees in the park.' Definite proposals, too,
were to be made ; and it was written to Cottle this
time, I think, by Coleridge ' We deem that the



MY RARE BOOK 35

volumes offered to you are, to a certain degree, one
work in kind.' That same spring, but later on, Cottle
did visit Nether Stowey, and he writes of it in his
own book of interesting if sometimes illegitimate
gossip : ' At this interview it was determined that
the volume should be published under the title of
Lyrical Ballads, on the terms stipulated.' Thirty
guineas seems to have been Wordsworth's share.
And, furthermore, it was settled that it should not
contain the poem of ' Salisbury Plain,' but only an
extract from it Cottle himself, nevertheless, thought
that poem the finest Wordsworth had written ; that
it should not contain the poem of ' Peter Bell,' but
consist rather of shorter poems, and for the most
part of pieces more recently written. ' I had recom-
mended two volumes,' Cottle tells us, ' but one was
fixed on, and that to be published anonymously.'
All which speedily came about. Cottle further says,
' The volume of the Lyrical Ballads was published
about midsummer, 1798.' But it was not really till
some while after midsummer, for not only were the
Tintern Abbey lines, which close the little volume
with so august a calm, not written till the I3th of
July, but it is said expressly in Wordsworth's Life
that as late as September the I3th the book was
' printed, not published.' Some weeks before, Words-



36 ON BOOKS AND ARTS

worth and his sister took up temporary abode in
Bristol, that they might be near the printer. Then,
at length, in the early part of autumn, the Lyrical
Ballads appeared, and Wordsworth and his sister,
and Coleridge, left England for Germany.

To the first edition of Lyrical Ballads is prefixed
four pages of ' Advertisement,' or preface. About it
two or three points are noticeable. First, it gives no
hint that two poets have been engaged upon the
volume : ' the author,' who speaks of himself in the
third person, is responsible alike for the ' Ancient
Mariner ' and for ' Goody Blake and Harry Gill.'
Secondly, it is written in that familiar language
just our daily speech a little chastened and braced
which Wordsworth employed at the beginning, and
employed to the end. Again, it utters, thus early in
Wordsworth's life, that note of warning as to mis-
taken notions of what Poetry demands, which the
writer repeated afterwards with infinite elaboration.
' It is the honourable characteristic of Poetry that its
materials are to be found in every subject which can
interest the human mind' that is, by implication,
his first apology for the choice of humble theme.