Views and Reviews, by William Ernest Henley

Transcribed from the 1892 David Nutt edition by David Price, email [email protected]

VIEWS AND REVIEWS

ESSAYS
IN APPRECIATION

By W. E. HENLEY

LITERATURE

LONDON
Published by DAVID NUTT
in the Strand
1892

* * * * *

FIRST EDITION

Printing begun 28th October 1889, ended 13th May 1890

Ordinary Issue—
1000 copies

Finest Japanese—
20 copies

SECOND EDITION

Printing begun May 25th, ended June 18, 1892

1000 copies

Edinburgh: T. & A. CONSTABLE, Printers to Her Majesty

TO THE MEN OF
‘THE SCOTS OBSERVER’

PREFATORY

Suggested by one friend and selected and compiled by another, this volume is less a book than a mosaic of scraps and shreds recovered from the shot rubbish of some fourteen years of journalism.  Thus, the notes on Longfellow, Balzac, Sidney, Tourneur, ‘Arabian Nights Entertainments,’ Borrow, George Eliot, and Mr. Frederick Locker are extracted from originals in ‘London’—a print still remembered with affection by those concerned in it; those on Labiche, Champfleury, Richardson, Fielding, Byron, Gay, Congreve, Boswell, ‘Essays and Essayists,’ Jefferies, Hood, Matthew Arnold, Lever, Thackeray, Dickens, M. Théodore de Banville, Mr. Austin Dobson, and Mr. George Meredith from articles contributed to ‘The Athenæum’; those on Dumas, Count Tolstoï’s novels, and the verse of Dr. Hake from ‘The Saturday Review’; those on Walton, Landor, and Heine from ‘The Scots Observer,’ ‘The Academy,’ and ‘Vanity Fair’ respectively; while the ‘Disraeli’ has been pieced together from ‘London,’ ‘Vanity Fair,’ and ‘The Athenæum’; the ‘Berlioz’ from ‘The Scots Observer’ and

‘The Saturday Review’; the ‘Tennyson’ from ‘The Scots Observer’ and ‘The Magazine of Art’; the ‘Homer and Theocritus’ from ‘Vanity Fair’ and the defunct ‘Teacher’; the ‘Hugo’ from ‘The Athenæum,’ ‘The Magazine of Art,’ and an unpublished fragment written for ‘The Scottish Church.’  In all cases permission to reprint is hereby gratefully acknowledged; but the reprinted matter has been subjected to such a process of revision and reconstitution that much of it is practically new, while little or none remains as it was.  I venture, then, to hope that the result, for all its scrappiness, will be found to have that unity which comes of method and an honest regard for letters.

W. E. H.

Edin^r. 8th May 1890

DICKENS

A ‘Frightful Minus’

Mr. Andrew Lang is delightfully severe on those who ‘cannot read Dickens,’ but in truth it is only by accident that he is not himself of that unhappy persuasion.  For Dickens the humourist he has a most uncompromising enthusiasm; for Dickens the artist in drama and romance he has as little sympathy as the most practical.  Of the prose of David Copperfield and Our Mutual Friend, the Tale of Two Cities and The Mystery of Edwin Drood, he disdains to speak.  He is almost fierce (for him) in his denunciation of Little Nell and Paul Dombey; he protests that Monks and Ralph Nickleby are ‘too steep,’ as indeed they are.  But of Bradley Headstone and Sydney Carton he says not a word; while of Martin Chuzzlewit—but here he shall speak for himself, the italics being a present to him.  ‘I have read in that book a score of times,’ says he; ‘I never see

it but I revel in it—in Pecksniff and Mrs. Gamp and the Americans.  But what the plot is all about, what Jonas did, what Montague Tigg had to make in the matter, what all the pictures with plenty of shading illustrate, I have never been able to comprehend.’  This is almost as bad as the reflection (in a magazine) that Jonas Chuzzlewit is ‘the most shadowy murderer in fiction.’  Yet it is impossible to be angry.  In his own way and within his own limits Mr. Lang is such a thoroughgoing admirer of Dickens that you are moved to compassion when you think of the much he loses by ‘being constitutionally incapable’ of perfect apprehension.  ‘How poor,’ he cries, with generous enthusiasm, ‘the world of fancy would be, “how dispeopled of her dreams,” if, in some ruin of the social system, the books of Dickens were lost; and if The Dodger, and Charley Bates, and Mr. Crinkle and Miss Squeers and Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp, and Dick Swiveller were to perish, or to vanish with Menander’s men and women!  We cannot think of our world without them; and, children of dreams as they are, they seem more essential than great statesmen, artists, soldiers, who have actually worn flesh and blood, ribbons and orders, gowns and uniforms.’  Nor is this all.  He is almost prepared to welcome ‘free education,’ since ‘every Englishman who can read, unless he be an Ass, is a reader the more’ for Dickens.  Does it not give one pause to reflect that the writer

of this charming eulogy can only read the half of Dickens, and is half the ideal of his own denunciation.

His Method.

Dickens’s imagination was diligent from the outset; with him conception was not less deliberate and careful than development; and so much he confesses when he describes himself as ‘in the first stage of a new book, which consists in going round and round the idea, as you see a bird in his cage go about and about his sugar before he touches it.’  ‘I have no means,’ he writes to a person wanting advice, ‘of knowing whether you are patient in the pursuit of this art; but I am inclined to think that you are not, and that you do not discipline yourself enough.  When one is impelled to write this or that, one has still to consider: “How much of this will tell for what I mean?  How much of it is my own wild emotion and superfluous energy—how much remains that is truly belonging to this ideal character and these ideal circumstances?”  It is in the laborious struggle to make this distinction, and in the determination to try for it, that the road to the correction of faults lies.  [Perhaps I may remark, in support of the sincerity with which I write this, that I am an impatient and impulsive