ANECDOTAGE.*
THE editor of this book understands Englishmen, or at least that section of them which buys cheap literature at railway bookstalls. There is nothing whatever in the book to amuse or instruct, or per- form any other single function for which books are supposed to be written. The stories are stupid, simply, the writer has no sufficient knowledge of English, and his notion of historic accuracy is of the faintest order. One half of his book is made up of little historiettes about great personages, generally of no conceivable interest, and always requiring the authentication at least of the personal knowledge which the writer does not apparently profess. The other half is composed of little anecdotes of Englishmen, neighbours of the writer, which are so personal that they might be interesting if the reader had ever chanced to hear of the personages before. But what is the use of attempting to be amused with this kind of thing ?
"In consequence of the interchange of some epistolary remarks between us, Countess C. B. evinced some antagonistic disposition towards us. She would neither recognize, nor bow to us; this affected us so much, as to turn the current of our thoughts occasionally in the direction of suicide. Once however, to our great surprise, at a large and fashionable party in London, she traversed the lofty room with graceful, albeit portly and majestic, steps, and, stopping before us, offered us in the kindest manner her friendly hand, at full length. " Of such a public conquest of female vanity, of such a rare display of female generosity, we could not remain an indifferent spectator. We shook hands cordially with each other; we would have unfolded fairly all the beauties of the lake at the top of our head, surrounded by a kind of premature Siberia on its sides, and would have bowed to the Countess's left knee, and embraced it with pleasure, too, had such a proceeding on our part not been so contrary to British usages, as to have brought us in all likelihood under the control and lash of the merciless Punch."
We should not have noticed the rubbish but that the book is the reductio ad absurdum of a kind of literature Englishmen, and English- men only, are tempted to admire. We may call it the literature of anecdote, though the phrase is degraded by its application. Real anecdote, the short story which illustrates a character,or crystallizes a bon snot, is often the salt which keeps historic writing from putre- faction. As an aid to biography in particular, anecdote is invaluable. Even when the stories are unfounded, they are illustrative ; display- ing, if not the words the personage described did actually repeat, at least the words contemporaries thought natural in his mouth.
• Private Anecdotes of the late and present Emperors of Russia, the Xing of Prussia, and the Sultan. With Miscellanies. By Count H. KrasinakL London : Piper, Ste. phenson, and Spence. Nothing, for example, can be more certain than the brilliant sentence of Louts XVIII. as he entered Paris, " I am but one Frenchman the more," was not the thought or composition of the speaker. It was made for him by Talleyrand, the man who of all others best under- stood the power of sentences in France. Yet the reader who took his idea of the monarch from this story alone would probably form a more accurate conception of his character than if he had read an ordinary biography. No language could better describe the mixture of suave grace with theatrical affectation which made up the character of the king. Talleyrand did not say "This is the eighteenth," as he swore his final oath of perpetual loyalty, but nothing he could have said would have better lighted up the sardonic side of a very tolerant character. Of course, the stories, if accurate, are doubly valuable ; but even when false, if they do but leave a true impression, the mania for reading and repeating them is excusable. When, again, the anecdote is genuinely "good," an addition to the current wit of the world, it carries with it its own justification. What does it matter who really said, " You can do anything with bayonets, ex- cept sit on them," a remark of which Prince Schwarzeuburg has the credit, but which was never made by a German, when the sen- tence itself is the residuum, the precipitate as it were, of all modern political facts. Talleyrand never uttered one-tenth of the sayings fastened on a man whose real wit was little but exquisite common sense expressed in a form which was once the conversational style of France. But what then? Nobody ever attributed a bad repartee to Talleyrand, and a good one is always an addition to the intellectual wealth of the community. There are whole books of anecdotes, which, accurate or unauthenticated, have all the value, and twice the dramatic power of carefully digested histories. Mr. Knight, and men like him, may expend years in trying to depict the state of Eng- lish society during the reign of George the Second ; yet they will never leave so mordant an impression as Horace Walpole's malicious tales. Walpole's stories are most of them lies, and Mr. Knight's descriptions are " twice-screened" facts ; but all that writing can convey in such a case is a general impression of the truth, and Wal- pole secures that end better than Mr. Knight. Vehse's anecdotes of the Austrian Court afford even a better illustration. Most of them are trivial to the last degree ; many of them belonging to the class which in ordinary society are confined to servants gossipping to servants of "master's" queer ways and disagreeable habits. We for- get how many pages Velme devotes to stories of Kaunitz, which Kaunitz's valet would have been ashamed to retail. But then there is not a line of Vehse's book which does not bear directly upon his oc- cult design, which is to leave the impression that the thirty-five mil- lions of Austrian subjects have always been governed by solemn fools, an object in which he perfectly succeeds. Michel's book on the same subject, the " Secret History of Austria," is, perhaps, the most awful record of successful crime ever presented to the world. We doubt if any foreigner ever read it without a permanent feeling of hate towards the royal House it brands. But Michel leaves an impression, utterly untrue, that the empire was ruled by able though evil men. It is Vehse who conveys the real fact that these rulers were, with an exception or two, triflers, men who in a free country would only have been tolerated because their antics were too puerile to give serious of- fence. Carlyle writes a grave and very massive history of the House of Hohenzollern, and executes his task as no man living but himself could have succeeded in doing. But the object being to present a lifelike picture of the race, he has not succeeded half so well as Vehse, whose servant-girl rubbish not only brings the individual men before our eyes, but the tone which ran through a great race. Yet we dare say a careful investigation would prove one-third of Vehse's stories un- founded, and another third so over coloured as to be really inven- tions. The impression remains nevertheless, and is accurate; and this sort of anecdotage is therefore a positive addition to our historic materiel. Its portability gives it a circulation which grave narrative will never acquire among men who will not read ; and the larger class who, though readers, are still incapable of fashioning the thoughts their reading should produce. It is stories, not books, which keep the tradition of a man's life tolerably fresh and accurate. Most Eng- lishmen, for instance, know nothing of William Rufus except half a dozen anecdotes, yet the gravest research has failed to modify in any degree whatever the accurate tradition of his character these stories have produced.
But there is a kind of anecdote much in favour with the public of a widely different character from this, a kind which has no one claim to be considered anecdote, except that it is colloquial and short. Count Krasinski's little book is the worst example we have seen, but many recent memoirs contain specimens nearly as bad. They are atones chiefly about great people, illustrating nothing, totally with- out wit, point, or flavour, yet purchased simply because they are
anecdotes and therefore must be interesting. Miss Knight's book, for other reasons a book of real interest and value, is padded -with
poor stories, little novelettes about nothing particular which hap-
pened to somebody quite unknown to fame, and which would be barely tolerable at a country tea-table. The Duke of Buckingham,
in his last volume of family papers, has really shovelled out anecdotes of this description, little bits of gossip which the mind cannot retain for five minutes, and is bored with the mere effort to read. Mr.
Raikes's Memoirs, though they contain admirable illustrations of the kind of opinions current. in his day and among his class, are full of chatter, which people profess to like because the pages are fall of quotation marks, and blanks, and little notes which seem to mean something, but which cannot convey to any mind of any cast one single definite thought. The book excites such a feeling of surprise at the difference between the ideas of its writer and those of
the world we live in, that the badness of much of its padding escapes attention. But let any reader just take any chapter at random, read it, and then read another in the most perfect book of anecdotes perhaps ever composed, Lady Holland's Biography of Sydney Smith. He will find that he recollects ten words in the Life for one in the Memoirs. Doubtless Sydney Smith's humour bites his sayings into the memory, but the fact will not account for all the difference the experiment will display. The stories in one book are just as short as in the other, just as well told, and just as nearly connected with the facts and feelings of to-day. The only difference is that Lady Holland really understands what a good story means, and Mr. Raikes's editor either does not, or does not think proper to use his discrimination. It would be unfair to take this book as an illustration of the argu- ment, but we really are tempted to believe that many editors consider an anecdote a good thing in se, without reference to its lesson or its point. Like some recent travellers, they think, because an incident happened or a saying was said, it therefore deserves to be recorded. Dr. Barth in his big book gives us about five hundred entries like the following : " 12th Oct. Felt feverish, but travelled twelve miles, crossed a little stream, and halted under a tree." That is a fact, doubtless, and the incident happened on the road, but it has no more business in a book of travels than a record of the number of times he found it convenient to cat his breakfast. It is pure surplusage, a waste of publishers' money, and readers' time, but not more so than the following anecdote by Miss Knight :
"Daring the time the affair of the Jesuits was in agitation, whenever Cardinal Marefoschi went to visit Cardinal de Bernis, a valet-de-chambre in the house of the latter, and who was also a spy, used to hang a white handkerchief out at the top of &chimney, to mark the commencement and termination of the visit, as a signal to the Jesuits at the Roman College, who looked out from the top of their church for it."
If literature in the present day has a dangerous enemy, it will be found in its own mass, and nothing increases that mass like this con- fusion of real anecdote with colourless and flavourless anecdotage.
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