'Settled Hoti's business--let it be -
Properly based Oun -
Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De,
Dead from the waist down.'


Nowadays it is quite different.  Our pedantry wants even the saving
clause of Enthusiasm.  The election is now matter of necessity and
not of choice.  Knowledge is now too broad a field for your Jack-
of-all-Trades; and, from beautifully utilitarian reasons, he makes
his choice, draws his pen through a dozen branches of study, and
behold--John the Specialist.  That this is the way to be wealthy we
shall not deny; but we hold that it is NOT the way to be healthy or
wise.  The whole mind becomes narrowed and circumscribed to one
'punctual spot' of knowledge.  A rank unhealthy soil breeds a
harvest of prejudices.  Feeling himself above others in his one
little branch--in the classification of toadstools, or Carthaginian
history--he waxes great in his own eyes and looks down on others.
Having all his sympathies educated in one way, they die out in
every other; and he is apt to remain a peevish, narrow, and
intolerant bigot.  Dilettante is now a term of reproach; but there
is a certain form of dilettantism to which no one can object.  It
is this that we want among our students.  We wish them to abandon
no subject until they have seen and felt its merit--to act under a
general interest in all branches of knowledge, not a commercial
eagerness to excel in one.

In both these directions our sympathies are constipated.  We are
apostles of our own caste and our own subject of study, instead of
being, as we should, true men and LOVING students.  Of course both
of these could be corrected by the students themselves; but this is
nothing to the purpose:  it is more important to ask whether the
Senatus or the body of alumni could do nothing towards the growth
of better feeling and wider sentiments.  Perhaps in another paper
we may say something upon this head.

One other word, however, before we have done.  What shall we be
when we grow really old?  Of yore, a man was thought to lay on
restrictions and acquire new deadweight of mournful experience with
every year, till he looked back on his youth as the very summer of
impulse and freedom.  We please ourselves with thinking that it
cannot be so with us.  We would fain hope that, as we have begun in
one way, we may end in another; and that when we are in fact the
octogenarians that we SEEM at present, there shall be no merrier
men on earth.  It is pleasant to picture us, sunning ourselves in
Princes Street of a morning, or chirping over our evening cups,
with all the merriment that we wanted in youth.



CHAPTER III--DEBATING SOCIETIES



A debating society is at first somewhat of a disappointment.  You
do not often find the youthful Demosthenes chewing his pebbles in
the same room with you; or, even if you do, you will probably think
the performance little to be admired.  As a general rule, the
members speak shamefully ill.  The subjects of debate are heavy;
and so are the fines.  The Ballot Question--oldest of dialectic
nightmares--is often found astride of a somnolent sederunt.  The
Greeks and Romans, too, are reserved as sort of GENERAL-UTILITY
men, to do all the dirty work of illustration; and they fill as
many functions as the famous waterfall scene at the 'Princess's,'
which I found doing duty on one evening as a gorge in Peru, a haunt
of German robbers, and a peaceful vale in the Scottish borders.
There is a sad absence of striking argument or real lively
discussion.  Indeed, you feel a growing contempt for your fellow-
members; and it is not until you rise yourself to hawk and hesitate
and sit shamefully down again, amid eleemosynary applause, that you
begin to find your level and value others rightly.  Even then, even
when failure has damped your critical ardour, you will see many
things to be laughed at in the deportment of your rivals.

Most laughable, perhaps, are your indefatigable strivers after
eloquence.  They are of those who 'pursue with eagerness the
phantoms of hope,' and who, since they expect that 'the
deficiencies of last sentence will be supplied by the next,' have
been recommended by Dr. Samuel Johnson to 'attend to the History of
Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia.'  They are characterised by a hectic
hopefulness.  Nothing damps them.  They rise from the ruins of one
abortive sentence, to launch forth into another with unabated
vigour.  They have all the manner of an orator.  From the tone of
their voice, you would expect a splendid period--and lo! a string
of broken-backed, disjointed clauses, eked out with stammerings and
throat-clearings.  They possess the art (learned from the pulpit)
of rounding an uneuphonious sentence by dwelling on a single
syllable--of striking a balance in a top-heavy period by
lengthening out a word into a melancholy quaver.  Withal, they
never cease to hope.  Even at last, even when they have exhausted
all their ideas, even after the would-be peroration has finally
refused to perorate, they remain upon their feet with their mouths
open, waiting for some further inspiration, like Chaucer's widow's
son in the dung-hole, after


'His throat was kit unto the nekke bone,'


in vain expectation of that seed that was to be laid upon his
tongue, and give him renewed and clearer utterance.

These men may have something to say, if they could only say it--
indeed they generally have; but the next class are people who,
having nothing to say, are cursed with a facility and an unhappy
command of words, that makes them the prime nuisances of the
society they affect.  They try to cover their absence of matter by
an unwholesome vitality of delivery.  They look triumphantly round
the room, as if courting applause, after a torrent of diluted
truism.  They talk in a circle, harping on the same dull round of
argument, and returning again and again to the same remark with the
same sprightliness, the same irritating appearance of novelty.

After this set, any one is tolerable; so we shall merely hint at a
few other varieties.  There is your man who is pre-eminently
conscientious, whose face beams with sincerity as he opens on the
negative, and who votes on the affirmative at the end, looking
round the room with an air of chastened pride.  There is also the
irrelevant speaker, who rises, emits a joke or two, and then sits
down again, without ever attempting to tackle the subject of
debate.  Again, we have men who ride pick-a-back on their family
reputation, or, if their family have none, identify themselves with
some well-known statesman, use his opinions, and lend him their
patronage on all occasions.  This is a dangerous plan, and serves
oftener, I am afraid, to point a difference than to adorn a speech.

But alas! a striking failure may be reached without tempting
Providence by any of these ambitious tricks.  Our own stature will
be found high enough for shame.  The success of three simple
sentences lures us into a fatal parenthesis in the fourth, from
whose shut brackets we may never disentangle the thread of our
discourse.  A momentary flush tempts us into a quotation; and we
may be left helpless in the middle of one of Pope's couplets, a
white film gathering before our eyes, and our kind friends
charitably trying to cover our disgrace by a feeble round of
applause.  Amis lecteurs, this is a painful topic.  It is possible
that we too, we, the 'potent, grave, and reverend' editor, may have
suffered these things, and drunk as deep as any of the cup of
shameful failure.  Let us dwell no longer on so delicate a subject.

In spite, however, of these disagreeables, I should recommend any
student to suffer them with Spartan courage, as the benefits he
receives should repay him an hundredfold for them all.  The life of
the debating society is a handy antidote to the life of the
classroom and quadrangle.  Nothing could be conceived more
excellent as a weapon against many of those PECCANT HUMOURS that we
have been railing against in the jeremiad of our last 'College
Paper'--particularly in the field of intellect.  It is a sad sight
to see our heather-scented students, our boys of seventeen, coming
up to College with determined views--roues in speculation--having
gauged the vanity of philosophy or learned to shun it as the
middle-man of heresy--a company of determined, deliberate
opinionists, not to be moved by all the sleights of logic.  What
have such men to do with study?  If their minds are made up
irrevocably, why burn the 'studious lamp' in search of further
confirmation?  Every set opinion I hear a student deliver I feel a
certain lowering of my regard.  He who studies, he who is yet
employed in groping for his premises, should keep his mind fluent
and sensitive, keen to mark flaws, and willing to surrender
untenable positions.  He should keep himself teachable, or cease
the expensive farce of being taught.  It is to further this docile
spirit that we desire to press the claims of debating societies.
It is as a means of melting down this museum of premature
petrifactions into living and impressionable soul that we insist on
their utility.  If we could once prevail on our students to feel no
shame in avowing an uncertain attitude towards any subject, if we
could teach them that it was unnecessary for every lad to have his
opinionette on every topic, we should have gone a far way towards
bracing the intellectual tone of the coming race of thinkers; and
this it is which debating societies are so well fitted to perform.

We there meet people of every shade of opinion, and make friends
with them.  We are taught to rail against a man the whole session
through, and then hob-a-nob with him at the concluding
entertainment.  We find men of talent far exceeding our own, whose
conclusions are widely different from ours; and we are thus taught
to distrust ourselves.  But the best means of all towards
catholicity is that wholesome rule which some folk are most
inclined to condemn--I mean the law of OBLIGED SPEECHES.  Your
senior member commands; and you must take the affirmative or the
negative, just as suits his best convenience.  This tends to the
most perfect liberality.  It is no good hearing the arguments of an
opponent, for in good verity you rarely follow them; and even if
you do take the trouble to listen, it is merely in a captious
search for weaknesses.  This is proved, I fear, in every debate;
when you hear each speaker arguing out his own prepared specialite
(he never intended speaking, of course, until some remarks of,
etc.), arguing out, I say, his own COACHED-UP subject without the
least attention to what has gone before, as utterly at sea about
the drift of his adversary's speech as Panurge when he argued with
Thaumaste, and merely linking his own prelection to the last by a
few flippant criticisms.  Now, as the rule stands, you are saddled
with the side you disapprove, and so you are forced, by regard for
your own fame, to argue out, to feel with, to elaborate completely,
the case as it stands against yourself; and what a fund of wisdom
do you not turn up in this idle digging of the vineyard!  How many
new difficulties take form before your eyes? how many superannuated
arguments cripple finally into limbo, under the glance of your
enforced eclecticism!

Nor is this the only merit of Debating Societies.  They tend also
to foster taste, and to promote friendship between University men.
This last, as we have had occasion before to say, is the great
requirement of our student life; and it will therefore be no waste
of time if we devote a paragraph to this subject in its connection
with Debating Societies.  At present they partake too much of the
nature of a clique.  Friends propose friends, and mutual friends
second them, until the society degenerates into a sort of family
party.  You may confirm old acquaintances, but you can rarely make
new ones.  You find yourself in the atmosphere of your own daily
intercourse.  Now, this is an unfortunate circumstance, which it
seems to me might readily be rectified.  Our Principal has shown
himself so friendly towards all College improvements that I cherish
the hope of seeing shortly realised a certain suggestion, which is
not a new one with me, and which must often have been proposed and
canvassed heretofore--I mean, a real University Debating Society,
patronised by the Senatus, presided over by the Professors, to
which every one might gain ready admittance on sight of his
matriculation ticket, where it would be a favour and not a
necessity to speak, and where the obscure student might have
another object for attendance besides the mere desire to save his
fines:  to wit, the chance of drawing on himself the favourable
consideration of his teachers.  This would be merely following in
the good tendency, which has been so noticeable during all this
session, to increase and multiply student societies and clubs of
every sort.  Nor would it be a matter of much difficulty.  The
united societies would form a nucleus:  one of the class-rooms at
first, and perhaps afterwards the great hall above the library,
might be the place of meeting.  There would be no want of
attendance or enthusiasm, I am sure; for it is a very different
thing to speak under the bushel of a private club on the one hand,
and, on the other, in a public place, where a happy period or a
subtle argument may do the speaker permanent service in after life.
Such a club might end, perhaps, by rivalling the 'Union' at
Cambridge or the 'Union' at Oxford.



CHAPTER IV--THE PHILOSOPHY OF UMBRELLAS {7}



It is wonderful to think what a turn has been given to our whole
Society by the fact that we live under the sign of Aquarius--that
our climate is essentially wet.  A mere arbitrary distinction, like
the walking-swords of yore, might have remained the symbol of
foresight and respectability, had not the raw mists and dropping
showers of our island pointed the inclination of Society to another
exponent of those virtues.  A ribbon of the Legion of Honour or a
string of medals may prove a person's courage; a title may prove
his birth; a professorial chair his study and acquirement; but it
is the habitual carriage of the umbrella that is the stamp of
Respectability.  The umbrella has become the acknowledged index of
social position.

Robinson Crusoe presents us with a touching instance of the
hankering after them inherent in the civilised and educated mind.
To the superficial, the hot suns of Juan Fernandez may sufficiently
account for his quaint choice of a luxury; but surely one who had
borne the hard labour of a seaman under the tropics for all these
years could have supported an excursion after goats or a peaceful
CONSTITUTIONAL arm in arm with the nude Friday.  No, it was not
this:  the memory of a vanished respectability called for some
outward manifestation, and the result was--an umbrella.  A pious
castaway might have rigged up a belfry and solaced his Sunday
mornings with the mimicry of church-bells; but Crusoe was rather a
moralist than a pietist, and his leaf-umbrella is as fine an
example of the civilised mind striving to express itself under
adverse circumstances as we have ever met with.

It is not for nothing, either, that the umbrella has become the
very foremost badge of modern civilisation--the Urim and Thummim of
respectability.  Its pregnant symbolism has taken its rise in the
most natural manner.  Consider, for a moment, when umbrellas were
first introduced into this country, what manner of men would use
them, and what class would adhere to the useless but ornamental
cane.  The first, without doubt, would be the hypochondriacal, out
of solicitude for their health, or the frugal, out of care for
their raiment; the second, it is equally plain, would include the
fop, the fool, and the Bobadil.  Any one acquainted with the growth
of Society, and knowing out of what small seeds of cause are
produced great revolutions, and wholly new conditions of
intercourse, sees from this simple thought how the carriage of an
umbrella came to indicate frugality, judicious regard for bodily
welfare, and scorn for mere outward adornment, and, in one word,
all those homely and solid virtues implied in the term
RESPECTABILITY.  Not that the umbrella's costliness has nothing to
do with its great influence.  Its possession, besides symbolising
(as we have already indicated) the change from wild Esau to plain
Jacob dwelling in tents, implies a certain comfortable provision of
fortune.  It is not every one that can expose twenty-six shillings'
worth of property to so many chances of loss and theft.  So
strongly do we feel on this point, indeed, that we are almost
inclined to consider all who possess really well-conditioned
umbrellas as worthy of the Franchise.  They have a qualification
standing in their lobbies; they carry a sufficient stake in the
common-weal below their arm.  One who bears with him an umbrella--
such a complicated structure of whalebone, of silk, and of cane,
that it becomes a very microcosm of modern industry--is necessarily
a man of peace.  A half-crown cane may be applied to an offender's
head on a very moderate provocation; but a six-and-twenty shilling
silk is a possession too precious to be adventured in the shock of
war.

These are but a few glances at how umbrellas (in the general) came
to their present high estate.  But the true Umbrella-Philosopher
meets with far stranger applications as he goes about the streets.

Umbrellas, like faces, acquire a certain sympathy with the
individual who carries them:  indeed, they are far more capable of
betraying his trust; for whereas a face is given to us so far ready
made, and all our power over it is in frowning, and laughing, and
grimacing, during the first three or four decades of life, each
umbrella is selected from a whole shopful, as being most consonant
to the purchaser's disposition.  An undoubted power of diagnosis
rests with the practised Umbrella-Philosopher.  O you who lisp, and
amble, and change the fashion of your countenances--you who conceal
all these, how little do you think that you left a proof of your
weakness in our umbrella-stand--that even now, as you shake out the
folds to meet the thickening snow, we read in its ivory handle the
outward and visible sign of your snobbery, or from the exposed
gingham of its cover detect, through coat and waistcoat, the hidden
hypocrisy of the 'DICKEY'!  But alas! even the umbrella is no
certain criterion.  The falsity and the folly of the human race
have degraded that graceful symbol to the ends of dishonesty; and
while some umbrellas, from carelessness in selection, are not
strikingly characteristic (for it is only in what a man loves that
he displays his real nature), others, from certain prudential
motives, are chosen directly opposite to the person's disposition.
A mendacious umbrella is a sign of great moral degradation.
Hypocrisy naturally shelters itself below a silk; while the fast
youth goes to visit his religious friends armed with the decent and
reputable gingham.  May it not be said of the bearers of these
inappropriate umbrellas that they go about the streets 'with a lie
in their right hand'?

The kings of Siam, as we read, besides having a graduated social
scale of umbrellas (which was a good thing), prevented the great
bulk of their subjects from having any at all, which was certainly
a bad thing.  We should be sorry to believe that this Eastern
legislator was a fool--the idea of an aristocracy of umbrellas is
too philosophic to have originated in a nobody--and we have
accordingly taken exceeding pains to find out the reason of this
harsh restriction.  We think we have succeeded; but, while admiring
the principle at which he aimed, and while cordially recognising in
the Siamese potentate the only man before ourselves who had taken a
real grasp of the umbrella, we must be allowed to point out how
unphilosophically the great man acted in this particular.  His
object, plainly, was to prevent any unworthy persons from bearing
the sacred symbol of domestic virtues.  We cannot excuse his
limiting these virtues to the circle of his court.  We must only
remember that such was the feeling of the age in which he lived.
Liberalism had not yet raised the war-cry of the working classes.
But here was his mistake:  it was a needless regulation.  Except in
a very few cases of hypocrisy joined to a powerful intellect, men,
not by nature UMBRELLARIANS, have tried again and again to become
so by art, and yet have failed--have expended their patrimony in
the purchase of umbrella after umbrella, and yet have
systematically lost them, and have finally, with contrite spirits
and shrunken purses, given up their vain struggle, and relied on
theft and borrowing for the remainder of their lives.  This is the
most remarkable fact that we have had occasion to notice; and yet
we challenge the candid reader to call it in question.  Now, as
there cannot be any MORAL SELECTION in a mere dead piece of
furniture--as the umbrella cannot be supposed to have an affinity
for individual men equal and reciprocal to that which men certainly
feel toward individual umbrellas--we took the trouble of consulting
a scientific friend as to whether there was any possible physical
explanation of the phenomenon.  He was unable to supply a plausible
theory, or even hypothesis; but we extract from his letter the
following interesting passage relative to the physical
peculiarities of umbrellas:  'Not the least important, and by far
the most curious property of the umbrella, is the energy which it
displays in affecting the atmospheric strata.  There is no fact in
meteorology better established--indeed, it is almost the only one
on which meteorologists are agreed--than that the carriage of an
umbrella produces desiccation of the air; while if it be left at
home, aqueous vapour is largely produced, and is soon deposited in
the form of rain.  No theory,' my friend continues, 'competent to
explain this hygrometric law has been given (as far as I am aware)
by Herschel, Dove, Glaisher, Tait, Buchan, or any other writer; nor
do I pretend to supply the defect.  I venture, however, to throw
out the conjecture that it will be ultimately found to belong to
the same class of natural laws as that agreeable to which a slice
of toast always descends with the buttered surface downwards.'

But it is time to draw to a close.  We could expatiate much longer
upon this topic, but want of space constrains us to leave
unfinished these few desultory remarks--slender contributions
towards a subject which has fallen sadly backward, and which, we
grieve to say, was better understood by the king of Siam in 1686
than by all the philosophers of to-day.  If, however, we have
awakened in any rational mind an interest in the symbolism of
umbrellas--in any generous heart a more complete sympathy with the
dumb companion of his daily walk--or in any grasping spirit a pure
notion of respectability strong enough to make him expend his six-
and-twenty shillings--we shall have deserved well of the world, to
say nothing of the many industrious persons employed in the
manufacture of the article.



CHAPTER V--THE PHILOSOPHY OF NOMENCLATURE



'How many Caesars and Pompeys, by mere inspirations of the names,
have been rendered worthy of them?  And how many are there, who
might have done exceeding well in the world, had not their
characters and spirits been totally depressed and Nicodemus'd into
nothing?'--Tristram Shandy, vol. I. chap xix.


Such were the views of the late Walter Shandy, Esq., Turkey
merchant.  To the best of my belief, Mr. Shandy is the first who
fairly pointed out the incalculable influence of nomenclature upon
the whole life--who seems first to have recognised the one child,
happy in an heroic appellation, soaring upwards on the wings of
fortune, and the other, like the dead sailor in his shotted
hammock, haled down by sheer weight of name into the abysses of
social failure.  Solomon possibly had his eye on some such theory
when he said that 'a good name is better than precious ointment';
and perhaps we may trace a similar spirit in the compilers of the
English Catechism, and the affectionate interest with which they
linger round the catechumen's name at the very threshold of their
work.  But, be these as they may, I think no one can censure me for
appending, in pursuance of the expressed wish of his son, the
Turkey merchant's name to his system, and pronouncing, without
further preface, a short epitome of the 'Shandean Philosophy of
Nomenclature.'

To begin, then:  the influence of our name makes itself felt from
the very cradle.  As a schoolboy I remember the pride with which I
hailed Robin Hood, Robert Bruce, and Robert le Diable as my name-
fellows; and the feeling of sore disappointment that fell on my
heart when I found a freebooter or a general who did not share with
me a single one of my numerous praenomina.  Look at the delight
with which two children find they have the same name.  They are
friends from that moment forth; they have a bond of union stronger
than exchange of nuts and sweetmeats.  This feeling, I own, wears
off in later life.  Our names lose their freshness and interest,
become trite and indifferent.  But this, dear reader, is merely one
of the sad effects of those 'shades of the prison-house' which come
gradually betwixt us and nature with advancing years; it affords no
weapon against the philosophy of names.

In after life, although we fail to trace its working, that name
which careless godfathers lightly applied to your unconscious
infancy will have been moulding your character, and influencing
with irresistible power the whole course of your earthly fortunes.
But the last name, overlooked by Mr. Shandy, is no whit less
important as a condition of success.  Family names, we must
recollect, are but inherited nicknames; and if the sobriquet were
applicable to the ancestor, it is most likely applicable to the
descendant also.  You would not expect to find Mr. M'Phun acting as
a mute, or Mr. M'Lumpha excelling as a professor of dancing.
Therefore, in what follows, we shall consider names, independent of
whether they are first or last.  And to begin with, look what a
pull Cromwell had over Pym--the one name full of a resonant
imperialism, the other, mean, pettifogging, and unheroic to a
degree.  Who would expect eloquence from Pym--who would read poems
by Pym--who would bow to the opinion of Pym?  He might have been a
dentist, but he should never have aspired to be a statesman.  I can
only wonder that he succeeded as he did.  Pym and Habakkuk stand
first upon the roll of men who have triumphed, by sheer force of
genius, over the most unfavourable appellations.  But even these
have suffered; and, had they been more fitly named, the one might
have been Lord Protector, and the other have shared the laurels
with Isaiah.  In this matter we must not forget that all our great
poets have borne great names.  Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare,
Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Shelley--what a constellation of lordly
words!  Not a single common-place name among them--not a Brown, not
a Jones, not a Robinson; they are all names that one would stop and
look at on a door-plate.  Now, imagine if Pepys had tried to
clamber somehow into the enclosure of poetry, what a blot would
that word have made upon the list!  The thing was impossible.  In
the first place a certain natural consciousness that men would have
held him down to the level of his name, would have prevented him
from rising above the Pepsine standard, and so haply withheld him
altogether from attempting verse.  Next, the booksellers would
refuse to publish, and the world to read them, on the mere evidence
of the fatal appellation.  And now, before I close this section, I
must say one word as to PUNNABLE names, names that stand alone,
that have a significance and life apart from him that bears them.
These are the bitterest of all.  One friend of mine goes bowed and
humbled through life under the weight of this misfortune; for it is
an awful thing when a man's name is a joke, when he cannot be
mentioned without exciting merriment, and when even the intimation
of his death bids fair to carry laughter into many a home.

So much for people who are badly named.  Now for people who are TOO
well named, who go top-heavy from the font, who are baptized into a
false position, and find themselves beginning life eclipsed under
the fame of some of the great ones of the past.  A man, for
instance, called William Shakespeare could never dare to write
plays.  He is thrown into too humbling an apposition with the
author of Hamlet.  Its own name coming after is such an anti-
climax.  'The plays of William Shakespeare'? says the reader--'O
no!  The plays of William Shakespeare Cockerill,' and he throws the
book aside.  In wise pursuance of such views, Mr. John Milton
Hengler, who not long since delighted us in this favoured town, has
never attempted to write an epic, but has chosen a new path, and
has excelled upon the tight-rope.  A marked example of triumph over
this is the case of Mr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti.  On the face of the
matter, I should have advised him to imitate the pleasing modesty
of the last-named gentleman, and confine his ambition to the
sawdust.  But Mr. Rossetti has triumphed.  He has even dared to
translate from his mighty name-father; and the voice of fame
supports him in his boldness.

Dear readers, one might write a year upon this matter.  A lifetime
of comparison and research could scarce suffice for its
elucidation.  So here, if it please you, we shall let it rest.
Slight as these notes have been, I would that the great founder of
the system had been alive to see them.  How he had warmed and
brightened, how his persuasive eloquence would have fallen on the
ears of Toby; and what a letter of praise and sympathy would not
the editor have received before the month was out!  Alas, the thing
was not to be.  Walter Shandy died and was duly buried, while yet
his theory lay forgotten and neglected by his fellow-countrymen.
But, reader, the day will come, I hope, when a paternal government
will stamp out, as seeds of national weakness, all depressing
patronymics, and when godfathers and godmothers will soberly and
earnestly debate the interest of the nameless one, and not rush
blindfold to the christening.  In these days there shall be written
a 'Godfather's Assistant,' in shape of a dictionary of names, with
their concomitant virtues and vices; and this book shall be
scattered broadcast through the land, and shall be on the table of
every one eligible for godfathership, until such a thing as a
vicious or untoward appellation shall have ceased from off the face
of the earth.




CRITICISMS



CHAPTER I--LORD LYTTON'S 'FABLES IN SONG'



It seems as if Lord Lytton, in this new book of his, had found the
form most natural to his talent.  In some ways, indeed, it may be
held inferior to Chronicles and Characters; we look in vain for
anything like the terrible intensity of the night-scene in Irene,
or for any such passages of massive and memorable writing as
appeared, here and there, in the earlier work, and made it not
altogether unworthy of its model, Hugo's Legend of the Ages.  But
it becomes evident, on the most hasty retrospect, that this earlier
work was a step on the way towards the later.  It seems as if the
author had been feeling about for his definite medium, and was
already, in the language of the child's game, growing hot.  There
are many pieces in Chronicles and Characters that might be detached
from their original setting, and embodied, as they stand, among the
Fables in Song.

For the term Fable is not very easy to define rigorously.  In the
most typical form some moral precept is set forth by means of a
conception purely fantastic, and usually somewhat trivial into the
bargain; there is something playful about it, that will not support
a very exacting criticism, and the lesson must be apprehended by
the fancy at half a hint.  Such is the great mass of the old
stories of wise animals or foolish men that have amused our
childhood.  But we should expect the fable, in company with other
and more important literary forms, to be more and more loosely, or
at least largely, comprehended as time went on, and so to
degenerate in conception from this original type.  That depended
for much of its piquancy on the very fact that it was fantastic:
the point of the thing lay in a sort of humorous inappropriateness;
and it is natural enough that pleasantry of this description should
become less common, as men learn to suspect some serious analogy
underneath.  Thus a comical story of an ape touches us quite
differently after the proposition of Mr. Darwin's theory.
Moreover, there lay, perhaps, at the bottom of this primitive sort
of fable, a humanity, a tenderness of rough truths; so that at the
end of some story, in which vice or folly had met with its destined
punishment, the fabulist might be able to assure his auditors, as
we have often to assure tearful children on the like occasions,
that they may dry their eyes, for none of it was true.

But this benefit of fiction becomes lost with more sophisticated
hearers and authors:  a man is no longer the dupe of his own
artifice, and cannot deal playfully with truths that are a matter
of bitter concern to him in his life.  And hence, in the
progressive centralisation of modern thought, we should expect the
old form of fable to fall gradually into desuetude, and be
gradually succeeded by another, which is a fable in all points
except that it is not altogether fabulous.  And this new form, such
as we should expect, and such as we do indeed find, still presents
the essential character of brevity; as in any other fable also,
there is, underlying and animating the brief action, a moral idea;
and as in any other fable, the object is to bring this home to the
reader through the intellect rather than through the feelings; so
that, without being very deeply moved or interested by the
characters of the piece, we should recognise vividly the hinges on
which the little plot revolves.  But the fabulist now seeks
analogies where before he merely sought humorous situations.  There
will be now a logical nexus between the moral expressed and the
machinery employed to express it.  The machinery, in fact, as this
change is developed, becomes less and less fabulous.  We find
ourselves in presence of quite a serious, if quite a miniature
division of creative literature; and sometimes we have the lesson
embodied in a sober, everyday narration, as in the parables of the
New Testament, and sometimes merely the statement or, at most, the
collocation of significant facts in life, the reader being left to
resolve for himself the vague, troublesome, and not yet definitely
moral sentiment which has been thus created.  And step by step with
the development of this change, yet another is developed:  the
moral tends to become more indeterminate and large.  It ceases to
be possible to append it, in a tag, to the bottom of the piece, as
one might write the name below a caricature; and the fable begins
to take rank with all other forms of creative literature, as
something too ambitious, in spite of its miniature dimensions, to
be resumed in any succinct formula without the loss of all that is
deepest and most suggestive in it.

Now it is in this widest sense that Lord Lytton understands the
term; there are examples in his two pleasant volumes of all the
forms already mentioned, and even of another which can only be
admitted among fables by the utmost possible leniency of
construction.  'Composure,' 'Et Caetera,' and several more, are
merely similes poetically elaborated.  So, too, is the pathetic
story of the grandfather and grandchild:  the child, having
treasured away an icicle and forgotten it for ten minutes, comes
back to find it already nearly melted, and no longer beautiful:  at
the same time, the grandfather has just remembered and taken out a
bundle of love-letters, which he too had stored away in years gone
by, and then long neglected; and, behold! the letters are as faded
and sorrowfully disappointing as the icicle.  This is merely a
simile poetically worked out; and yet it is in such as these, and
some others, to be mentioned further on, that the author seems at
his best.  Wherever he has really written after the old model,
there is something to be deprecated:  in spite of all the spirit
and freshness, in spite of his happy assumption of that cheerful
acceptation of things as they are, which, rightly or wrongly, we
come to attribute to the ideal fabulist, there is ever a sense as
of something a little out of place.  A form of literature so very
innocent and primitive looks a little over-written in Lord Lytton's
conscious and highly-coloured style.  It may be bad taste, but
sometimes we should prefer a few sentences of plain prose
narration, and a little Bewick by way of tail-piece.  So that it is
not among those fables that conform most nearly to the old model,
but one had nearly said among those that most widely differ from
it, that we find the most satisfactory examples of the author's
manner.

In the mere matter of ingenuity, the metaphysical fables are the
most remarkable; such as that of the windmill who imagined that it
was he who raised the wind; or that of the grocer's balance
('Cogito ergo sum') who considered himself endowed with free-will,
reason, and an infallible practical judgment; until, one fine day,
the police made a descent upon the shop, and find the weights false
and the scales unequal; and the whole thing is broken up for old
iron.  Capital fables, also, in the same ironical spirit, are
'Prometheus Unbound,' the tale of the vainglorying of a champagne-
cork, and 'Teleology,' where a nettle justifies the ways of God to
nettles while all goes well with it, and, upon a change of luck,
promptly changes its divinity.

In all these there is still plenty of the fabulous if you will,
although, even here, there may be two opinions possible; but there
is another group, of an order of merit perhaps still higher, where
we look in vain for any such playful liberties with Nature.  Thus
we have 'Conservation of Force'; where a musician, thinking of a
certain picture, improvises in the twilight; a poet, hearing the
music, goes home inspired, and writes a poem; and then a painter,
under the influence of this poem, paints another picture, thus
lineally descended from the first.  This is fiction, but not what
we have been used to call fable.  We miss the incredible element,
the point of audacity with which the fabulist was wont to mock at
his readers.  And still more so is this the case with others.  'The
Horse and the Fly' states one of the unanswerable problems of life
in quite a realistic and straightforward way.  A fly startles a
cab-horse, the coach is overset; a newly-married pair within and
the driver, a man with a wife and family, are all killed.  The
horse continues to gallop off in the loose traces, and ends the
tragedy by running over an only child; and there is some little
pathetic detail here introduced in the telling, that makes the
reader's indignation very white-hot against some one.  It remains
to be seen who that some one is to be:  the fly?  Nay, but on
closer inspection, it appears that the fly, actuated by maternal
instinct, was only seeking a place for her eggs:  is maternal
instinct, then, 'sole author of these mischiefs all'?  'Who's in
the Right?' one of the best fables in the book, is somewhat in the
same vein.  After a battle has been won, a group of officers
assemble inside a battery, and debate together who should have the
honour of the success; the Prince, the general staff, the cavalry,
the engineer who posted the battery in which they then stand
talking, are successively named:  the sergeant, who pointed the
guns, sneers to himself at the mention of the engineer; and, close
by, the gunner, who had applied the match, passes away with a smile
of triumph, since it was through his hand that the victorious blow
had been dealt.  Meanwhile, the cannon claims the honour over the
gunner; the cannon-ball, who actually goes forth on the dread
mission, claims it over the cannon, who remains idly behind; the
powder reminds the cannon-ball that, but for him, it would still be
lying on the arsenal floor; and the match caps the discussion;
powder, cannon-ball, and cannon would be all equally vain and
ineffectual without fire.  Just then there comes on a shower of
rain, which wets the powder and puts out the match, and completes
this lesson of dependence, by indicating the negative conditions
which are as necessary for any effect, in their absence, as is the
presence of this great fraternity of positive conditions, not any
one of which can claim priority over any other.  But the fable does
not end here, as perhaps, in all logical strictness, it should.  It
wanders off into a discussion as to which is the truer greatness,
that of the vanquished fire or that of the victorious rain.  And
the speech of the rain is charming:


'Lo, with my little drops I bless again
And beautify the fields which thou didst blast!
Rend, wither, waste, and ruin, what thou wilt,
But call not Greatness what the Gods call Guilt.
Blossoms and grass from blood in battle spilt,
And poppied corn, I bring.
'Mid mouldering Babels, to oblivion built,
My violets spring.
Little by little my small drops have strength
To deck with green delights the grateful earth.'


And so forth, not quite germane (it seems to me) to the matter in
hand, but welcome for its own sake.

Best of all are the fables that deal more immediately with the
emotions.  There is, for instance, that of 'The Two Travellers,'
which is profoundly moving in conception, although by no means as
well written as some others.  In this, one of the two, fearfully
frost-bitten, saves his life out of the snow at the cost of all
that was comely in his body; just as, long before, the other, who
has now quietly resigned himself to death, had violently freed
himself from Love at the cost of all that was finest and fairest in
his character.  Very graceful and sweet is the fable (if so it
should be called) in which the author sings the praises of that
'kindly perspective,' which lets a wheat-stalk near the eye cover
twenty leagues of distant country, and makes the humble circle
about a man's hearth more to him than all the possibilities of the
external world.  The companion fable to this is also excellent.  It
tells us of a man who had, all his life through, entertained a
passion for certain blue hills on the far horizon, and had promised
himself to travel thither ere he died, and become familiar with
these distant friends.  At last, in some political trouble, he is
banished to the very place of his dreams.  He arrives there
overnight, and, when he rises and goes forth in the morning, there
sure enough are the blue hills, only now they have changed places
with him, and smile across to him, distant as ever, from the old
home whence he has come.  Such a story might have been very
cynically treated; but it is not so done, the whole tone is kindly
and consolatory, and the disenchanted man submissively takes the
lesson, and understands that things far away are to be loved for
their own sake, and that the unattainable is not truly
unattainable, when we can make the beauty of it our own.  Indeed,
throughout all these two volumes, though there is much practical
scepticism, and much irony on abstract questions, this kindly and
consolatory spirit is never absent.  There is much that is cheerful
and, after a sedate, fireside fashion, hopeful.  No one will be
discouraged by reading the book; but the ground of all this
hopefulness and cheerfulness remains to the end somewhat vague.  It
does not seem to arise from any practical belief in the future
either of the individual or the race, but rather from the profound
personal contentment of the writer.  This is, I suppose, all we
must look for in the case.  It is as much as we can expect, if the
fabulist shall prove a shrewd and cheerful fellow-wayfarer, one
with whom the world does not seem to have gone much amiss, but who
has yet laughingly learned something of its evil.  It will depend
much, of course, upon our own character and circumstances, whether
the encounter will be agreeable and bracing to the spirits, or
offend us as an ill-timed mockery.  But where, as here, there is a
little tincture of bitterness along with the good-nature, where it
is plainly not the humour of a man cheerfully ignorant, but of one
who looks on, tolerant and superior and smilingly attentive, upon
the good and bad of our existence, it will go hardly if we do not
catch some reflection of the same spirit to help us on our way.
There is here no impertinent and lying proclamation of peace--none
of the cheap optimism of the well-to-do; what we find here is a
view of life that would be even grievous, were it not enlivened
with this abiding cheerfulness, and ever and anon redeemed by a
stroke of pathos.

It is natural enough, I suppose, that we should find wanting in
this book some of the intenser qualities of the author's work; and
their absence is made up for by much happy description after a
quieter fashion.  The burst of jubilation over the departure of the
snow, which forms the prelude to 'The Thistle,' is full of spirit
and of pleasant images.  The speech of the forest in 'Sans Souci'
is inspired by a beautiful sentiment for nature of the modern sort,
and pleases us more, I think, as poetry should please us, than
anything in Chronicles and Characters.  There are some admirable
felicities of expression here and there; as that of the hill, whose
summit


   'Did print
The azure air with pines.'


Moreover, I do not recollect in the author's former work any
symptom of that sympathetic treatment of still life, which is
noticeable now and again in the fables; and perhaps most
noticeably, when he sketches the burned letters as they hover along
the gusty flue, 'Thin, sable veils, wherein a restless spark Yet
trembled.'  But the description is at its best when the subjects
are unpleasant, or even grisly.  There are a few capital lines in
this key on the last spasm of the battle before alluded to.  Surely
nothing could be better, in its own way, than the fish in 'The Last
Cruise of the Arrogant,' 'the shadowy, side-faced, silent things,'
that come butting and staring with lidless eyes at the sunken
steam-engine.  And although, in yet another, we are told,
pleasantly enough, how the water went down into the valleys, where
it set itself gaily to saw wood, and on into the plains, where it
would soberly carry grain to town; yet the real strength of the
fable is when it dealt with the shut pool in which certain
unfortunate raindrops are imprisoned among slugs and snails, and in
the company of an old toad.  The sodden contentment of the fallen
acorn is strangely significant; and it is astonishing how
unpleasantly we are startled by the appearance of her horrible
lover, the maggot.

And now for a last word, about the style.  This is not easy to
criticise.  It is impossible to deny to it rapidity, spirit, and a
full sound; the lines are never lame, and the sense is carried
forward with an uninterrupted, impetuous rush.  But it is not
equal.  After passages of really admirable versification, the
author falls back upon a sort of loose, cavalry manner, not unlike
the style of some of Mr. Browning's minor pieces, and almost
inseparable from wordiness, and an easy acceptation of somewhat
cheap finish.  There is nothing here of that compression which is
the note of a really sovereign style.  It is unfair, perhaps, to
set a not remarkable passage from Lord Lytton side by side with one
of the signal masterpieces of another, and a very perfect poet; and
yet it is interesting, when we see how the portraiture of a dog,
detailed through thirty odd lines, is frittered down and finally
almost lost in the mere laxity of the style, to compare it with the
clear, simple, vigorous delineation that Burns, in four couplets,
has given us of the ploughman's collie.  It is interesting, at
first, and then it becomes a little irritating; for when we think
of other passages so much more finished and adroit, we cannot help
feeling, that with a little more ardour after perfection of form,
criticism would have found nothing left for her to censure.  A
similar mark of precipitate work is the number of adjectives
tumultuously heaped together, sometimes to help out the sense, and
sometimes (as one cannot but suspect) to help out the sound of the
verses.  I do not believe, for instance, that Lord Lytton himself
would defend the lines in which we are told how Laocoon 'Revealed
to Roman crowds, now Christian grown, That Pagan anguish which, in
Parian stone, The Rhodian artist,' and so on.  It is not only that
this is bad in itself; but that it is unworthy of the company in
which it is found; that such verses should not have appeared with
the name of a good versifier like Lord Lytton.  We must take
exception, also, in conclusion, to the excess of alliteration.
Alliteration is so liable to be abused that we can scarcely be too
sparing of it; and yet it is a trick that seems to grow upon the
author with years.  It is a pity to see fine verses, such as some
in 'Demos,' absolutely spoiled by the recurrence of one wearisome
consonant.



CHAPTER II--SALVINI'S MACBETH



Salvini closed his short visit to Edinburgh by a performance of
Macbeth.  It was, perhaps, from a sentiment of local colour that he
chose to play the Scottish usurper for the first time before
Scotsmen; and the audience were not insensible of the privilege.
Few things, indeed, can move a stronger interest than to see a
great creation taking shape for the first time.  If it is not
purely artistic, the sentiment is surely human.  And the thought
that you are before all the world, and have the start of so many
others as eager as yourself, at least keeps you in a more
unbearable suspense before the curtain rises, if it does not
enhance the delight with which you follow the performance and see
the actor 'bend up each corporal agent' to realise a masterpiece of
a few hours' duration.  With a player so variable as Salvini, who
trusts to the feelings of the moment for so much detail, and who,
night after night, does the same thing differently but always well,
it can never be safe to pass judgment after a single hearing.  And
this is more particularly true of last week's Macbeth; for the
whole third act was marred by a grievously humorous misadventure.
Several minutes too soon the ghost of Banquo joined the party, and
after having sat helpless a while at a table, was ignominiously
withdrawn.  Twice was this ghostly Jack-in-the-box obtruded on the
stage before his time; twice removed again; and yet he showed so
little hurry when he was really wanted, that, after an awkward
pause, Macbeth had to begin his apostrophe to empty air.  The
arrival of the belated spectre in the middle, with a jerk that made
him nod all over, was the last accident in the chapter, and
worthily topped the whole.  It may be imagined how lamely matters
went throughout these cross purposes.