MR. ANDREW LANG'S "ESSAYS IN LITTLE."* THERE are few guides
in the field of Literature whom it is more pleasant to follow than Mr. Andrew Lang. He goes neither too fast nor too far for his followers ; he loves to linger in pleasant places, and to deck with new garlands old and well-beloved shrines; and, above all, he never bows the knee in worship of the new and hideous deities that a hysterical generation has erected, the repulsive monsters that are fashioned out of sin and disease. Wide and catholic as his taste is, it is also eminently healthy and wholesome. His is the higher critical faculty that is more quick to see what is good than what is faulty, and which never fails to seize upon the touch of Nature in an author which makes him akin with all the world; and when this critical faculty is combined, as it is in his case, with a genuine sense of humour, a real gift of gentle and good-natured raillery, • and a literary power of expression such as is possessed by few, one may be excused from rating Mr. Lang the critic even more highly than one would rate Mr. Lang the author, though the latter has long ago won a high and well-deserved place in the public estima- tion.
Of the sixteen short essays that Mr. Lang has collected into this little volume, five only appear for the first time, the rest being composed of old contributions to different periodicals. They range over a very wide field, from Homer to Thomas Haynes Bayly, from John Banyan to the last fashionable novel. Quite the best of them, to our mind, is the one upon "Homer and the Study of Greek." At the present moment, when such a determined attempt is being made to oust the study of Greek from our schools and Universities, Mr. Lang's defence of that ancient learning is particularly well timed. There is much truth in his contention, that apart from the great reward that comes to those who have time and inclination to pursue that study in their more mature age, there is a virtue in the study itself. " To have mastered Greek," be says, "even if you forget it, is not to have wasted time. It really is an educational and mental discipline." As a means of training the mind to exact thought, we should think it at least as useful and as severe as a study of the higher mathe- matics, which not one man out of a hundred can have an opportunity of turning to account in after-life. Of Homer himself Mr. Lang is a most appreciative student and worshipper. To him, the Iliad and Odyssey are not mere collections of archroological problems to be unravelled by the ingenuity of • Essays in Little. By Andrew Lang. London : Henry and Co. a commentator : they are the old-world songs of the strength, the beauty, and the courage of man, that are as true of to-day as they were of yesterday ; the songs that are sung by the life-giving wind of the sea, whose hexameters are the rise and fall of the thundering waves. We doubt whether Mr. Lang would be greatly interested in discovering the exact position of Artemis in the Homeric theology. Next to his essay on Homer, we would place in point of excellence those on Dickens and Thaekeray. He has nothing very new or original to say on the subject of either of these authors—so much has been said already, that it world be difficult to find anything new—but there are few people who could have put into so few words such a just and able judgment of their widely differing merits. Surely, though, it is hardly necessary to-day to defend Thaekeray against the charge of cynicism. We should have thought that that preposterous charge must have long ago died the natural death of all vain and false accusations, even without the aid of the publication of his letters. It gives one an unpleasant idea of the wilful and pm-blind want of in- telligence which some readers bring to bear upon a book which offends their prejudices, when one hears that charge repeated. That Thackeray, whose passionate heart, with its fierce indignation against all cruelty and meanness, and its even fiercer craving for love and affection, is laid bare in almost every page of his writing, should be called a cynic, suggests a curious reflection as to the nature of most human sympathies and antipathies. It is characteristic of Mr. Lang that his warm admiration for Thackeray as a novelist does not in the least blind him to the very different excellence of his great rival. For Dickens he professes an enthusiastic regard, which is happily free from the extravagance that some of his admirers indulge in. One criticism he makes which is very just, as to the overstrained pathos of some of his situations and descrip- tions. The death-bed scenes of Little Nell and Paul Dorabey leave us not only dry-eyed, hut suffering from a lively sense of irritation against the unreality and the cheap, mechanical nature of the sentiment in which we are invited to join. It is the kind of sentiment that is sold by an under- taker, with so many yards of crape at so much a yard. And yet Dickens could show a real and genuine power of pathos,— witness the early wanderings of little David Copperfield, or the returned convict in Great Expectations. It may be pleaded on his behalf that artificial sentiment was rather the fashion of his time, even as a kind of artificial brutality is the fashion of to-day. The great charm of Mr. Lang's writings on Thaekeray, Dickens, and on Scott, is the rare combination of acute common-sense—common-sense such as a Philistine might rejoice in—and a delicate and appreciative sympathy with the nicer and finer beauties that escape the Philistine altogether. And the same may be said of his treatment of Charles Lever and Charles Kingsley.
Probably his opinion of two living writers, Mr. Stevenson and Mr. Rudyard Kipling, will have more interest to the general reader. The quality which he lays most stress upon in the case of Mr. Stevenson is that which he calls the "eternal child,"—the never-fading freshness of the boyish vision, the boyish love of adventure, and the boyish imagina- tion. We wonder whether it is so, and whether Mr. Stevenson could find the same pleasure to-day in the sheets—" a penny plain, and twopence coloured "—that his childhood delighted in. In one respect we would differ from Mr. Lang, and that is with regard to The Blade Arrow. Mr. Stevenson, in his dedica- tion of that story to the "Critic on the hearth," laments the inability of that most familiar critic even to read it, an inability in which Mr. Lang says that be shares. To our mind, the tale is as good a historical novel as we would wish to read ; not only did it impress us with a sense of its historical accuracy as a picture of the times of Lancaster and York, but it .compelled us to take a lively interest in the fortunes of Joan and Dick. If ever the "eternal child" was upper- most in Mr. Stevenson, it was when he described their flight and wanderings through the forest,—the adventure contains the very essence of a boy's romantic dreams. Very excellent, too, is the fighting, both on ship-board and on land. Evidently Mr. Lang's attitude towards Mr. Stevenson is still one of ex- pectation. The great work is not The Master of Ballantrae, admirable as that novel is, but is yet to come. But in what form may we expect it from a workman who has proved him- self so skilled in every form of literature P If " great ex- pectations" describe our attitude towards Mr. Stevenson, the future of Mr. Rudyard Kipling is still more a matter of con- jecture. With Mr. Lang's estimate of the work that has already been given us, we are thoroughly in accord, even to the extent of acquiescing in every particular with the order of merit in which he arranges it. Whatever the nature of Mr. Kipling's future work may be, we are not likely to forget that it was through him that we obtained our first real glimpse of India as it lives, or that he created Mulvaney for our delight and instruction,—Mulvaney, "grizzled, tender, and very wise -Ulysses."
In his notice of Thomas Haynes Bayly, Mr. Lang displays a regrettable frivolity. We fear that Mr. Lang has no reverence for the great god " Commonplace," of whom Mr. Bayly was at once high-priest and poet-laureate. To give utterance to the most obvious and commonplace sentiments in the most obvious and commonplace language, with a certain fluency of diction and jingle of rhyme,—that was the pleasing function of Mr. Bayly, and in the execution of it he was un- surpassed and unsurpassable. Mr. Lang carries his irreverence so far as to attempt to mimic the poet, and actually challenges his readers to discriminate between his work and that of Mr. Bayly. Mr. Lang flatters himself : he can no more write Mr.
Bayly's songs than he can sing them, and we have his own authority for asserting that he cannot do the latter. Amusing as. Mr. Lang's parodies are, they fall far short of the incom- parable Bayly ; they may provoke us to an equal mirth, but they do not fill us with the same awful wonder. The serious solemnity of Bayly cannot be parodied :- " Oh, no! we never mention her, Her name is never heard, My lips are now forbid to speak That once familiar word."
Does Mr. Lang seriously suppose that he could have invented that, or even approached it by any invention of his own P Why, those lines are the work of genius,—.of Bayly, the genius of Bathos. A much more plausible attempt is " The Last Fashionable Novel," which is a happy mixture of " Ouida " and others. Very excellent fooling is the fooling in which Mr. Lang sometimes indulges. A " Letter to a Young Journalist," however, hardly comes under that head. The matter is serious, —indeed, we have never before seen the author moved to such serious indignation, or allowing himself to hit so hard. His *words will find a responsive echo in the heart of every honest man ; but they will be quite useless. Not all the scorn and contempt of which the usually gentle Mr. Lang is capable would bring the slightest sense of shame to the objects of his
loathing. In the meantime, we like Mr. Lang all the better for the outburst, and we cordially xecommend .Essays in Little to the notice of any one who has any love for literature, past or present.
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