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Essays from ^ The Guardian '
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ESSAYS
FROM
*THE GUARDIAN'
WALTER') PATER
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
1918
a. a
COPYRIGHT
First published (^Edition dc Luxe) August 1901
Reprinted September igoi
Reprinted {Extra Crown ?,vo) 1903, 1906
Library Edition 1910
Eeprinted 19141 1918
NOTE
The nine papers contained in the following
volume originally appeared anonymously in
The Guardian newspaper.
CONTENTS
1. ENGLISH LITERATURE
2. AMIEL'S "JOURNAL INTIME "
3. BROWNING ....
4. "ROBERT ELSMERE"
5. THEIR MAJESTIES' SERVANTS .
6. WORDSWORTH
7. MR. GOSSE'S POEMS .
8. FERDINAND FABRE .
9. THE "CONTES" OF M. AUGUSTIN FILON
PAGE
I
17
39
53
71
89
105
119
135
k
J
I
ENGLISH LITERATURE
17TH February 1886
B
ENGLISH LITERATURE
Four Books for Students of
English Literature
The making of an anthology of English prose
is what must have occurred to many of its
students, by way of pleasure to themselves, or
of profit to other persons. Such an anthology,
the compass and variety of our prose literature
being considered, might well follow exclusively
some special line of interest in it ; exhibiting,
for instance, what is so obviously striking, its
imaginative power, or its (legitimately) poetic
beauty, or again, its philosophical capacity.
Mr. Saintsbury's well-considered Specimens of
English Prose Style^ from Malory to Macaulay
(Kegan Paul), a volume, as we think, which
bears fresh witness to the truth of the old
remark that it takes a scholar indeed to make a
3
*THE GUARDIAN* ESSAYS
good literary selection, has its motive sufficiently
indicated in the very original " introductory
essay," which might well stand, along with the
best of these extracts from a hundred or more
deceased masters of English, as itself a document
or standard, in the matter of prose style. The
essential difference between poetry and prose ā
" that other beauty of prose " ā in the words of
the motto he has chosen from Dryden, the first
master of the sort of prose he prefers : ā that is
Mr. Saintsbury's burden. It is a consideration,
undoubtedly, of great importance both for the
writer and the critic ; in England especially,
where, although (as Mr. Saintsbury rightly
points out, in correction of an imperfectly in-
formed French critic of our literature) the
radical distinction between poetry and prose has
ever been recognized by its students, yet the
imaginative impulse, which is perhaps the
richest of our purely intellectual gifts, has been
apt to invade the province of that tact and good
judgment, alike as to matter and manner, in
which we are not richer than other people.
Great poetry and great prose, it might be found,
have most of their qualities in common. But
4
ENGLISH LITERATURE
their indispensable qualities are different, or even
opposed ; and it is just the indispensable qualities
of prose and poetry respectively, w^hich it is so
necessary for those who have to do with either
to bear ever in mind. Order, precision, direct-
ness, are the radical merits of prose thought ;
and it is more than merely legitimate that they
should form the criterion of prose style, because
within the scope of those qualities, according to
Mr. Saintsbury, there is more than just the quiet,
unpretending usefulness of the bare sermo pedestris.
Acting on language, those qualities generate a
specific and unique beauty- ā " that other beauty
of prose " ā fitly illustrated by these specimens,
which the reader needs hardly be told, after
what has been now said, are far from being a
collection of " purple patches."
Whether or not he admits their practical
cogency, an attentive reader will not fail to be
interested in the attempt Mr. Saintsbury has
made to give technical rules of metre for the
production of the true prose rhythm. Any one
who cares to do so might test the validity of
those rules in the nearest possible way, by apply-
ing them to the varied examples in this wide
5
'THE GUARDIAN' ESSAYS
survey of what has been actually well done in
English prose, here exhibited on the side of
their strictly prosaic merit ā their conformity,
before all other aims, to laws of a structure
primarily reasonable. Not that that reasonable
prose structure, or architecture, as Mr. Saintsbury
conceives it, has been always, or even generally,
the ideal, even of those chosen writers here in
evidence. Elizabethan prose, all too chaotic in
the beauty and force which overflowed into it
from Elizabethan poetry, and incorrect with an
incorrectness which leaves it scarcely legitimate
prose at all : then, in reaction against that, the
correctness of Dryden, and his followers through
the eighteenth century, determining the standard
of a prose in the proper sense, not inferior to the
prose of the Augustan age in Latin, or of the
" great age in France " : and, again in reaction
against this, the wild mixture of poetry and
prose, in our wild nineteenth century, under the
influence of such writers as Dickens and Carlyle :
ā such are the three periods into which the
story of our prose literature divides itself. And
Mr. Saintsbury has his well-timed, practical
suggestions, upon a survey of them.
6
ENGLISH LITERATURE
If the invasion of the legitimate sphere of
prose in England by the spirit of poetry, weaker
or stronger, has been something far deeper than
is indicated by that tendency to write unconscious
blank verse, which has made it feasible to tran-
scribe about one-half of Dickens's otherwise so
admirable Barnaby Rudge in blank-verse lines, a
tendency (outdoing our old friend M. Jourdain)
commoner than Mr. Saintsbury admits, such
lines being frequent in his favourite Dryden ;
yet, on the other hand, it might be maintained,
and would be maintained by its French critics,
that our English poetry has been too apt to dis-
pense with those prose qualities, which, though
not the indispensable qualities of poetry, go,
nevertheless, to the making of all first-rate
poetry ā the qualities, namely, of orderly struc-
ture, and such qualities generally as depend upon
second thoughts. A collection of specimens of
English poetry, for the purpose of exhibiting the
achievement of prose excellences by it (in their
legitimate measure) is a desideratum we commend
to Mr. Saintsbury. It is the assertion, the
development, the product of those very different
indispensable qualities of poetry, in the presence
7
'THE GUARDIAN' ESSAYS
of which the English is equal or superior to all
other modern literature ā the native, sublime,
and beautiful, but often wild and irregular,
imaginative power in English poetry from
Chaucer to Shakespeare, with which Professor
Minto deals, in his Characteristics of English
Poets (Blackwood), lately reprinted. That his
book should have found many readers we can
well understand, in the light of the excellent
qualities which, in high degree, have gone to
the making of it : a tasteful learning, never
deserted by that hold upon contemporary litera-
ture which is so animating an influence in the
study of what belongs to the past. Beginning
with an elaborate notice of Chaucer, full of
the minute scholarship of our day, he never
forgets that his subject is, after all, poetry. The
followers of Chaucer, and the precursors of
Shakespeare, are alike real persons to him ā old
Langland reminding him of Carlyle's " Gospel of
Labour." The product of a large store of reading
has been here secreted anew for the reader who
desires to see, in bird's-eye view, the light and
shade of a long and varied period of poetic
literature, by way of preparation for Shakespeare,
8
ENGLISH LITERATURE
(with a full essay upon whom the volume closes,)
explaining Shakespeare, so far as he can be
explained by literary antecedents.
That powerful poetry was twin-brother to a
prose, of more varied, but certainly of wilder
and more irregular power than the admirable,
the typical, prose of Dryden. In Dryden, and
his followers through the eighteenth century,
we see the reaction against the exuberance and
irregularity of that prose, no longer justified by
power, but cognizable rather as bad taste. But
such reaction was effective only because an age
had come ā the age of a negative, or agnostic
philosophy ā in which men's minds must needs
be limited to the superficialities of things, with
a kind of narrowness amounting to a positive gift.
What that mental attitude was capable of, in
the way of an elegant, yet plain-spoken, and life-
like delineation of men's moods and manners, as
also in the way of determining those moods
and manners themselves to all that was lively,
unaffected, and harmonious, can be seen no-
where better than in Mr. Austin Dobson's Selections
from Steele (Clarendon Press) prefaced by his
careful "Life." The well-known qualities of
9
'THE GUARDIAN' ESSAYS
Mr. Dobson's own original work are a sufficient
guarantee of the taste and discrimination we may
look for in a collection like this, in which the
random lightnings of the first of the essayists
are grouped under certain heads ā " Character
Sketches," " Tales and Incidents," " Manners and
Fashions," and the like ā so as to diminish, for
the general reader, the scattered effect of short
essays on a hundred various subjects, and give a
connected, book-like character to the specimens.
Steele, for one, had certainly succeeded in
putting himself, and his way of taking the world
ā for this pioneer of an everybody's literature
had his subjectivities ā into books. What a
survival of one long -past day, for instance, in
" A Ramble from Richmond to London " !
What truth to the surface of common things, to
their direct claim on our interest ! yet with what
originality of effect in that truthfulness, when he
writes, for instance :
" I went to my lodgings, led by a light,
whom I put into the discourse of his private
economy, and made him give me an account of
the charge, hazard, profit, and loss of a family
that depended upon a link."
lO
ENGLISH LITERATURE
It was one of his peculiarities, he tells us, to
live by the eye far more than by any other sense
(a peculiarity, perhaps, in an Englishman), and
this is what he sees at the early daily service
then common in some City churches. Among
those who were come only to see or be seen,
" there were indeed a few in whose looks there
appeared a heavenly joy and gladness upon the
entrance of a new day, as if they had gone to
sleep with expectation of it."
The industrious reader, indeed, might select
out of these specimens from Steele, a picture,
in minute detail, of the characteristic manners
of that time. Still, beside, or only a little way
beneath, such a picture of passing fashion, what
Steele and his fellows really deal with is the
least transitory aspects of life, though still
merely aspects ā those points in which all
human nature, great or little, finds what it has
in common, and directly shows itself up. The
natural strength of such literature will, of course,
be in the line of its tendencies ; in transparency,
variety, and directness. To the unembarrassing
matter, the unembarrassed style ! Steele is,
perhaps, the most impulsive writer of the school
1 1
'THE GUARDIAN' ESSAYS
to which he belongs ; he abounds In felicities of
impulse. Yet who can help feeling that his
style is regular because the matter he deals with
is the somewhat uncontentious, even, limited
soul, of an age not imaginative, and unambitious
in its speculative flight ? Even in Steele him-
self we may observe with what sureness of
instinct the men of that age turned aside at the
contact of anything likely to make them, in any
sense, forget themselves.
No one Indicates better than Charles Lamb,
to whose memory Mr. Alfred Ainger has done
such good service, the great and peculiar change
which was begun at the end of the last century,
and dominates our own ; that sudden increase of
the width, the depth, the complexity of intel-
lectual interest, which has many times torn and
distorted literary style, even with those best
able to comprehend its laws. In Mrs. Leicester s
School, with other Writings in Prose and Verse
(Macmillan), Mr. Ainger has collected and anno-
tated certain remains of Charles and Mary Lamb,
too good to lie unknown to the present gener-
ation, in forgotten periodicals or inaccessible
reprints. The story of the Odyssey, abbreviated
12
ENGLISH LITERATURE
in very simple prose, for children ā of all ages ā
will speak for itself. But the garland of grace-
ful stories which gives name to the volume,
told by a party of girls on the evening of their
assembling at school, are in the highest degree
characteristic of the brother and sister who were
ever so successful in imparting to others their
own enjoyment of books and people. The
tragic circumstance which strengthened and
consecrated their natural community of interest
had, one might think, something to do with
the far-reaching pensiveness even of their most
humorous writing, touching often the deepest
springs of pity and awe, as the way of the
highest humour is ā a way, however, very
different from that of the humorists of the
eighteenth century. But one cannot forget also
that Lamb was early an enthusiastic admirer of
Wordsworth : of Wordsworth, the first character-
istic power of the nineteenth century, his essay
on whom, in the Quarterly Review^ Mr. Ainger
here reprints. Would that he could have
reprinted it as originally composed, and un-
garbled by GifFord, the editor ! Lamb, like
Wordsworth, still kept the charm of a serenity,
13
*THE GUARDIAN' ESSAYS
a precision, unsurpassed by the quietest essayist
of the preceding age. But it might have been
foreseen that the rising tide of thought and
feehng, on the strength of which they too
are borne upward, would sometimes overflow
barriers. And so it happens that these simple
stories are touched, much as Wordsworth's verse-
stories were, with tragic power. Dealing with
the beginnings of imagination in the minds of
children, they record, with the reality which a
very delicate touch preserves from anything
lugubrious, not those merely preventible miseries
of childhood over which some writers have
been apt to gloat, but the contact of childhood
with the great and inevitable sorrows of life,
into which children can enter with depth, with
dignity, and sometimes with a kind of simple,
pathetic greatness, to the discipline of the heart.
Let the reader begin with the " Sea Voyage,"
which is by Charles Lamb ; and, what Mr.
Ainger especially recommends, the " Father's
Wedding-Day," by his sister Mary.
The ever -increasing intellectual burden of
our age is hardly likely to adapt itself to the
exquisite, but perhaps too delicate and limited,
14
ENGLISH LITERATURE
literary instruments of the age of Queen Anne.
Yet Mr. Saintsbury is certainly right in thinking
that, as regards style, English literature has
much to do. Well, the good quality of an age,
the defect of which lies in the direction of
intellectual anarchy and confusion, may well be
eclecticism : in style, as in other things, it is
well always to aim at the combination of as
many excellences as possible ā opposite excel-
lences, it may be ā those other beauties of prose.
A busy age will hardly educate its writers in
correctness. Let its writers make time to write
English more as a learned language ; and com-
pleting that correction of style which had only
gone a certain way in the last century, raise the
general level of language towards their own. If
there be a weakness in Mr. Saintsbury's view, it
is perhaps in a tendency to regard style a little
too independently of matter. And there are still
some who think that, after all, the style is the
man ; justified, in very great varieties, by the
simple consideration of what he himself has to
say, quite independently of any real or supposed
connection with this or that literary age or
school. Let us close with the words of a most
15
*THE GUARDIAN' ESSAYS
versatile master of English ā happily not yet
included in Mr. Saintsbury's book ā a writer
who has dealt with all the perturbing influences
of our century in a manner as classical, as
idiomatic, as easy and elegant, as Steele's :
" I wish you to observe," says Cardinal
Newman, " that the mere dealer in words cares
little or nothing for the subject which he is
embellishing, but can paint and gild anything
whatever to order ; whereas the artist, whom I
am acknowledging, has his great or rich visions
before him, and his only aim is to bring out
what he thinks or what he feels in a way
adequate to the thing spoken of, and appropriate
to the speaker."
i6
II
AMIEL'S "JOURNAL INTIME"
17TH March 1886
17
AMIEL'S "JOURNAL INTIME"
AmieTs journal. The 'Journal Intime of Henri-
Frederic Amiel. Translated, with an In-
troduction and Notes, by Mrs. Humphry
Ward. Two vols. Macmillans.
Certain influential expressions of opinion have
attracted much curiosity to Amiel's 'Journal
Intime^ both in France, where the book has
already made its mark, and in England, where
Mrs. Humphry Ward's translation is likely to
make it widely known among all serious lovers
of good literature. Easy, idiomatic, correct,
this English version reads like an excellent
original English work, and gives fresh proof
that the work of translation, if it is to be done
with effect, must be done by those who, possess-
ing, like Mrs. Ward, original literary gifts, are
willing to make a long act of self-denial or self-
19
*THE GUARDIAN* ESSAYS
effacement for the benefit of the public. In this
case, indeed, the work is not wholly one of- self-
effacement, for the accomplished translator has
prefaced AmieTs yournai by an able and interest-
ing essay of seventy pages on Amiel's life and
intellectual position. And certainly there is
much in the book, thus effectively presented to
the English reader, to attract those who interest
themselves in the study of the finer types of
human nature, of literary expression, of meta-
physical and practical philosophy ; to attract,
above all, those interested in such philosophy, at
points where it touches upon questions of religion,
and especially at the present day.
Henri-Frederic Amiel was born at Geneva in
1 82 1. Orphaned of both his parents at the age
of twelve, his youth was necessarily " a little bare
and forlorn," and a deep interest in religion be-
came fixed in him early. His student days com-
ing to an end, the years which followed, from
1842 to 1848 ā Wanderjahre^ in which he visited
Holland, Italy, Sicily, and the principal towns
of Germany ā seem to have been the happiest
of his life. In 1849 ^^ became a Professor at
Geneva, and there is little more to tell of him in
20
AMIEL'S 'JOURNAL INTIME'
the way of outward events. He published some
volumes of verse ; to the last apparently still only
feeling after his true literary metier. Those last
seven years were a long struggle against the dis-
ease which ended his life, consumption, at the
age of fifty-three. The first entry in his Journal
is in 1848. From that date to his death, a
period of over twenty -five years, this 'Journal
was the real object of all the energies of his
richly -endowed nature : and from its volumi-
nous sheets his literary executors have selected
the deeply interesting volumes now presented
in English.
With all its gifts and opportunities it was a
melancholy life ā melancholy with something not
altogether explained by the somewhat pessimistic
philosophy exposed in the Journal^ nor by the
consumptive tendency of Amiel's physical con-
stitution, causing him from a very early date to
be much preoccupied with the effort to reconcile
himself with the prospect of death, and rein-
forcing the far from sanguine temperament of
one intellectually also a poitrinaire.
You might think him at first sight only an
admirable specimen of a thoroughly well-educated
21
*THE GUARDIAN' ESSAYS
man, full, of course, of the modern spirit ; stimu-
lated and formed by the influences of the varied
intellectual world around him ; and competing,
in his turn, with many very various types of
contemporary ability. The use of his book to
cultivated people might lie in its affording a kind
of standard by which they might take measure
of the maturity and producible quality of their
own thoughts on a hundred important subjects.
He will write a page or two, giving evidence of
that accumulated power and attainment which,
with a more strenuous temperament, might have
sufficed for an eifective volume. Continually, in
the 'Journal^ we pause over things that would
rank for beauties among widely differing models
of the best French prose. He has said some
things in Pascal's vein not unworthy of Pascal.
He had a right to compose " Thoughts " : they
have the force in them which makes up for their
unavoidable want of continuity.
But if, as Amiel himself challenges us to do,
we look below the surface of a very equable and
even smoothly accomplished literary manner, we
discover, in high degree of development, that
perplexity or complexity of soul, the expression
2^
AMIEL'S 'JOURNAL INTIME'
of which, so it be with an adequate literary gift,
has its legitimate, because inevitable, interest for
the modern reader. Senancour and Maurice de
Guerin in one, seem to have been supplemented
here by a larger experience, a far greater educa-
tion, than either of them had attained to. So
multiplex is the result that minds of quite oppo-
site type might well discover in these pages their
own special thought or humour, happily ex-
pressed at last (they might think) in precisely
that just shade of language themselves had
searched for in vain. And with a writer so vivid
and impressive as Amiel, those varieties of tend-
ency are apt to present themselves as so many
contending persons. The perplexed experience
gets the apparent clearness, as it gets also the
animation, of a long dialogue ; only, the dis-
putants never part company, and there is no real
conclusion. " This nature," he observes, of one
of the many phases of character he has discovered
in himself, " is, as it were, only one of the men
which exist in me. It is one of my departments.
It is not the whole of my territory, the whole of
my inner kingdom " ; and again, " there are ten
men in me, according to time, place, surrounding,
23
'THE GUARDIAN' ESSAYS
and occasion ; and, in my restless diversity, I am
for ever escaping myself."
Yet, in truth, there are but two men in Amiel
ā tw^o sufficiently opposed personalities, w^hich
the attentive reader may define for himself ; com-
pare with, and try by each other ā as we think,
correct also by each other. There is the man,
in him and in these pages, who would be "the
man of disillusion," only that he has never really
been " the man of desires " ; and who seems,
therefore, to have a double weariness about him.
He is akin, of course, to Obermann, to Rene,
even to Werther, and, on our first introduction
to him, we might think that we had to do only
with one more of the vague " renunciants," who
in real life followed those creations of fiction,
and who, however delicate, interesting as a study,
and as it were picturesque on the stage of life,
are themselves, after all, essentially passive, un-
creative, and therefore necessarily not of first-rate
importance in literature. Taken for what it is
worth, the expression of this mood ā the culture
of ennui for its own sake ā is certainly carried to
its ideal of negation by Amiel. But the com-
pleter, the positive, soul, which will merely take
24
AMIEL'S 'JOURNAL INTIME'
that mood into its service (its proper service, as
we hold, is in counteraction to the vulgarity
of purely positive natures) is also certainly in
evidence in Amiel's "Thoughts" ā that other,
and far stronger person, in the long dialogue ;
the man, in short, possessed of gifts, not for the
renunciation, but for the reception and use, of all
that is puissant, goodly, and effective in life, and
for the varied and adequate literary reproduction
of it ; who, under favourable circumstances, or
even without them, will become critic, or poet,