Literary Lives

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Title:     Literary Lives
Author: Robert Cortes Holliday [More Titles by Holliday]

"My God!" exclaimed the old lady in the railway carriage to Mr. Le Gallienne, "Tennyson is dead!"

Have not many of us as we have turned the daily papers these last several years frequently experienced the sensations of this dear old lady? Whistler, Swinburne, Meredith, Henry James, Howells. They are dead. Walt Whitman (wasn't it?), when he heard that Carlyle was dead, went out, and looked up at the stars, and said he didn't believe it.

We have been stirred to these emotional reflections by chancing to come early this afternoon in the Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library upon what would commonly be called a well-known book of reference. We had no intention of doing more than peer into it. Night found us there--the book still open before us.

The excellent Solomon Eagle (otherwise known as J. C. Squire), in one of his delightfully gossipy, though erudite, papers contributed to The New Statesman of London (collected, many of them, into a volume, bearing the title "Books in General"), remarks of works of reference that they "are extremely useful; but they resemble Virgil's Hell in that they are easy things to get into and very difficult to escape from." He continues:

Take the Encyclopædia. I imagine that my experience with it is universal. I have only to dip my toe into this tempting morass and down I am sucked, limbs, trunk and all, to remain embedded until sleep or a visitor comes to haul me out. A man will read things in the Encyclopædia that he would never dream of looking at elsewhere--things in which normally he does not take the faintest interest....

"Who's Who" takes me in the same way. Ordinarily I have no particular thirst for it. I should not dream of carrying it about in my waistcoat pocket for perusal on the Underground Railway. But once I have allowed myself to open it, I am a slave to it for hours. This has just happened to me with the new volume, upon which I have wasted a valuable afternoon. I began by looking up a man's address; I then read the compressed life-story of the gentleman next above him (a major-general), wondering, somewhat idly, whether they read of each other's performances and whether either of them resented the possession by the other of a similar, and unusual, surname. Then I was in the thick of it.

Even so. But an afternoon spent in reading, straight along, the work of reference we have in mind could not be called wasted. Indeed, quite the contrary; such an afternoon could be nothing less than one of those spiritual experiences which suddenly give a measure of growth to the soul.

The work which we came upon, in the circumstances indicated, was "The Dictionary of National Biography"; and the volumes which, by chance, we took down were Volumes II. and III. of the Second Supplement of the Dictionary. They contain, these volumes, memoirs of 1,135 noteworthy English persons dying between January 22, 1901, and December 31, 1911. The alphabet extends from John Faed, artist, to George, Lord Young, Scottish Judge. The contributors number 357; the list of these names is a roll of the most distinguished, in all departments, in the English Nation of our day. This publication, we should say, is the most interesting to English-speaking people, as in all probability it is the most important, generally, issued within at any rate the year of its publication. And though we cannot rid ourselves of a melancholy feeling in contemplating this survey of the great stream of brilliant life ended, we feel there is more good reading for the money in these pages than in any other book one is likely to come across at random.

The toll these ten years have taken! The chronicle is here of some born to greatness, like Queen Victoria; of those, like Cecil Rhodes, who have achieved it. And the stories are told of some whom the world's fame found but within the last hour, then dead: John Millington Synge (contributed by John Masefield), and Francis Thompson (by Everard Meynell).

The proportion of biographies of men of letters predominates in considerable measure. Science follows in the list, then art. The least but one, sport, is the law. Among the names of women, forty-six in number, are Florence Nightingale, Kate Greenaway, Charlotte Mary Yonge, and Mrs. Craigie (John Oliver Hobbes).

Three illustrious lives entered the twentieth century in England as full of years as of honors. Meredith, Whistler, and Swinburne were born in the Spring of the nineteenth century, in 1828, 1834, and 1837 respectively, and the bloom of their days was with the giants, now legends, of the Victorian reign. The Kings in the history of art and letters have been--have they not?--gallant men. We suspect that it takes a gallant man to be a King in these callings. Of these three--two wished to be soldiers--the most gallant spirit was the great-grandson of a rather grand tailor.

He won what men can and he bore what men must, is some ancient line.

The most extensive article in these volumes is the "Meredith," by Thomas Seccombe. It is the richest. Twelve pages is its compass. As a biography we are disposed to rank it with--let's see?---Froude's "Carlyle" (4 vols. 8vo.). Perhaps, on the whole, it is better. To go into any detail in our notice of the appearance of these books, and maintain any perspective, would carry us to a vast length. The bibliographer is deeply impressed with the character of Meredith, as a man, throughout his life, of noble aspect. His critical verdict reduced to one word is: "Thoroughly tonic in quality, his writings are [as Lamb said of Shakespeare] essentially manly." This is one of the pictures which most brightly sticks in our head:

On the terrace in front of the chalet, whence he descended to meals, he was often to be heard carrying on dialogues with his characters, and singing with unrestrained voice. Whimsical and sometimes Rabelaisian fabrications accompanied the process of quickening the blood by a spin [a favorite word with him] over Surrey hills. Then he wrote his master works, ... and welcomed his friends, often reading aloud to them in magnificent recitative, unpublished prose or verse.

If there is anything upon which an article could be "based" not included in Mr. Seccombe's list of sources, it's a queer thing.

The "Swinburne" is furnished by Edmund Gosse, whose adequate equipment for the task includes "personal recollections extending over more than forty years." Passages of his portrait of the radiant poet are the most colorful in these volumes of the Dictionary. By way of critical discussion the writer says: "It is a very remarkable circumstance, which must be omitted in no outline of his intellectual life, that his opinions, on politics, on literature, on art, on life itself, were formed in boyhood, and that though he expanded he scarcely advanced in any single direction after he was twenty. If growth had continued as it began, he must have been the prodigy of the world. Even his art was at its height when he was five and twenty." The Whistler article is by Sir Walter Armstrong (who writes also on Holman Hunt) and is, one feels, the most judicial summary that has appeared on the most controversial subject, one can readily recall, of the epoch closed. A very clear statement of a principle of the art of painting is this: "For years his work bore much the same relation to Japanese art as all fine painting does to nature. He took from Japanese ideals the beauties he admired, and re-created them as expressions of his own personality."

There is one delightful anecdote, in E. V. Lucas's sketch of Phil May. His Punch editor, Sir Francis Burnand, tells a story to the effect that on being asked at a club for a loan of fifty pounds, May produced all he had--half that amount--and then abstained from the club for some time for fear of meeting the borrower, because he felt that "he still owed him twenty-five pounds."

Sensible persons will read with satisfaction the just article by T. F. Henderson on that fine figure Henley, "one of the main supports," said Meredith, "of good literature in our time." Many good folks will like to look up Leslie Stephen, the first editor of this Dictionary, "who enjoyed the affectionate admiration of his most enlightened contemporaries." The article is by the present editor, Sir Sidney Lee. Æsthetically minded persons may read about William Sharpe. Among the painters are Watts (biographer, Sir Sidney Colvin) and Orchardson. The "Seymour Haden" is furnished by A. M. Hind. Memoirs of Sir Henry Irving, Sir Theodore Martin, and Herbert Spencer come in this supplement. And so on. A piece of American history is related here, too, in the account of Edward Lawrence Godkin, founder of The Nation.

A subject of emotional literary controversy at the present moment is treated by Thomas Seccombe in his article on George Gissing. The general qualities of the Dictionary may be clearly observed in this notice. When the first volume of this second supplement--A to Evans--was issued not long ago rumors reached us of some agitation occasioned in England by the unepitaphical character of the memoirs of Edward VII. Well, discrimination was not made against a King. The frankness of this high tribunal in its calm recital of facts is striking.

After some steady reading of the great Dictionary we wonder if printed forms had been sent to the contributors, upon which they composed, in answer to the questions there, their articles: the order of progress of all the memoirs is, in effect, so uniform. Each says at (it appeared) about the same point: His appearance was this. Each seems to conclude with a list of the portraits.

And this idea recalled to us a story. A foreigner entering our country's gates, upon being asked to fill out papers setting forth his nationality, age, color, and so on, wrote beside the query, "Business?"--"Rotten." In this intelligent interpretation of the question, the "business" of many whose lives are recorded in honor here was "rotten" for many a long year.

The story of literature has not ceased to be a sorry story; still, as was said on a time, comparable to the annals of Newgate. A tale it continues, in a large measure, of outcast experience, of destitution, "seeking a few pence by selling matches or newspapers," or development through suffering, of hospital sojourns, of contemplated suicide, of unfortunate "amorous propensities," of "ill-considered" marriage, of that immemorial "besetting weakness," of "a curious inability to do the sane, secure thing in the ordinary affairs of life," of "ordering his life with extreme carelessness in financial matters," of the weariness of reward for work of high character long deferred, of charitable legacies "from a great-aunt."

Mr. Wells speaks somewhere of the amazing persistency of the instinct for self-expression. Where it exists, one reflects in musing on these biographies, you can't kill it with a club.

Very imposing we felt the literary style of this Dictionary to be. It treats of a man much as if he were a word, say, in the Century Dictionary. This is the sort of biographical writing, we said, that a man with whiskers can read. It does sound something like a court calendar. Its tone is omniscient, indeed. But the Recording Angel here does not drop a tear upon the oath of any Uncle Toby and blot it out forever. No. He says, of one we tremble to name, "his language was often beyond the reach of apology." Fine is the dignity with which sordid things are related. "The return journey he was under the necessity of performing on foot." Almost grotesque is the neglect of the caressing touch of sentiment. "His own wish was to be a jockey." The treatment of the theme of love is entertaining. "At the age of nineteen he married."

August is the passivity in the presence of the Reaper who mows the golden grain. Without poetry, oh, Death, where is thy sting! In these volumes, of none is it sighed: At twilight his spirit fled. Had he but lived ...! It is: He died December 14, 1908. He left no issue. A fair portrait of him by Charles Ricketts is in the possession of Mr. Edmund Gosse.

We arose after several hours' reading with a sense of having perused for a space two recent volumes of the Book of Judgment. We were full of emotion. We felt the mystery of the destiny of man. How admirable he is and how pitiful! Throbbing, we went forth into the throbbing city.

[The end]
Robert Cortes Holliday's essay: Literary Lives

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