This last catastrophe, however, is not mentioned in these biographies, the subjects of which are held up as patterns of wisdom and prudence for the rising generation. I shall have left the Midway Inn, thank Heaven, for a residence of smaller dimensions, before it has grown up. Conceive an England inhabited by self-made men!
Has it ever struck you how gloomy is the poetry of the present day? This is not perhaps of very much consequence, since everybody has a great deal too much to do to permit them to read it; but how full of sighs, and groans, and passionate bewailings it is! And also how deuced difficult! It is almost as inarticulate as an Æolian harp, and quite as melancholy. There are one or two exceptions, of course, as in the case of Mr. Calverley and Mr. Locker; but even the latter is careful to insist upon the fact that, like those who have gone before us, we must all quit Piccadilly. 'At present,' as dear Charles Lamb writes, 'we have the advantage of them;' but there is no one to remind us of that now, nor is it, as I have said, the general opinion that it is an advantage.
It is this prevailing gloom, I think, which accounts for the enormous and increasing popularity of fiction. Observe how story-telling creeps into the very newspapers (along with their professional fibbing); and, even in the magazines, how it lies down side by side with 'burning questions,' like the weaned child putting its hand into the cockatrice's den. For your sake, my good fellow, who write stories [here my friend glowered at me compassionately], I am glad of it; but the fact is of melancholy significance. It means that people are glad to find themselves 'anywhere, anywhere, out of the world,' and (I must be allowed to add) they are generally gratified, for anything less like real life than what some novelists portray it is difficult to imagine.
[Here he stared at me so exceedingly hard, that anyone with a less heavenly temper, or who had no material reasons for putting up with it, would have taken his remark as personal, and gone away.
Another cause of the absence of good fellowship amongst us (he went on) is the growth of education. It sticks like a fungus to everybody, and though, it is fair to say, mostly outside, does a great deal of mischief. The scholastic interest has become so powerful that nobody dares speak a word against it; but the fact is, men are educated far beyond their wits. You can't fill any cup beyond what it will hold, and the little cups are exceedingly numerous. Boys are now crammed (with information) like turkeys (but unfortunately not killed at Christmas), and when they grow up there is absolutely no room in them for a joke. The prigs that frequent my Midway Inn are as the sands in its hour-glass, only with no chance, alas! of their running out. The wisdom of our ancestors limited education, and very wisely, to the three R's; that is all that is necessary for the great mass of mankind: whereas the pick of them, with those clamping irons well stuck to their heels, will win their way to the topmost peaks of knowledge.
At the very best—that is to say when it produces anything—what does the most costly education in this country produce in ordinary minds but the deplorable habit of classical quotation? If it could teach them to think—but that is a subject, my dear friend, into which you will scarcly follow me.
[I could have knocked his head off if he had not been so exceptionally stout and strong, and as it was, I took up my hat to go, when a thought struck me.]
'Among your valuable remarks upon the ideas entertained by society at present, you have said nothing, my dear sir, about the ladies.'
'I never speak of anything,' he replied with dignity, 'which I do not thoroughly understand. Man I do know—down to his boots; but woman'—here he sighed and hesitated—'no; I don't know nearly so much of her.'
Decoration
Decoration
THE CRITIC ON THE HEARTH.
It has often struck me that the relation of two important members of the social body to one another has never been sufficiently considered, or treated of, so far as I know, either by the philosopher or the poet. I allude to that which exists between the omnibus driver and his conductor. Cultivating literature as I do upon a little oatmeal, and driving, when in a position to be driven at all, in that humble vehicle, the 'bus, I have had, perhaps, exceptional opportunities for observing their mutual position and behaviour; and it is very peculiar. When the 'bus is empty, these persons are sympathetic and friendly to one another, almost to tenderness; but when there is much traffic, a tone of severity is observable upon the side of the conductor. 'What are yer a-driving on for just as a party's getting in? Will nothing suit but to break a party's neck?' 'Wake up, will yer? or do yer want that ere Bayswater to pass us?' are inquiries he will make in the most peremptory manner. Or he will concentrate contempt in the laconic but withering observation: 'Now then, stoopid!'
When we consider that the driver is after all the driver—that the 'bus is under his guidance and management, and may be said pro tem, to be his own—indeed, in case of collision or other serious extremity, he calls it so: 'What the infernal regions are yer banging into my 'bus for?' etc., etc.—I say, this being his exalted position, the injurious language of the man on the step is, to say the least of it, disrespectful.
On the other hand, it is the conductor who fills the 'bus, and even entices into it, by lures and wiles, persons who are not voluntarily going his way at all. It is he who advertises its presence to the passers-by, and spares neither lung nor limb in attracting passengers. If the driver is lord and king, yet the conductor has a good deal to do with the administration: just as the Mikado of Japan, who sits above the thunder and is almost divine, is understood to be assisted and even 'conducted' by the Tycoon. The connection between those potentates is perhaps the most exact reproduction of that between the 'bus driver and his cad; but even in England there is a pretty close parallel to it in the mutual relation of the author and the professional critic.
While the former is in his spring-time, the analogy is indeed almost complete. For example, however much he may have plagiarised, the book does belong to the author: he calls it, with pardonable pride (and especially if anyone runs it down), 'my book.' He has written it, and probably paid pretty handsomely for getting it published. Even the right of translation, if you will look at the bottom of the title-page, is somewhat superfluously reserved to him. Yet nothing can exceed the patronage which he suffers at the hands of the critic, and is compelled to submit to in sullen silence. When the book-trade is slack—that is, in the summer season—the pair get on together pretty amicably. 'This book,' says the critic, 'may be taken down to the seaside, and lounged over not unprofitably;' or, 'Readers may do worse than peruse this unpretending little volume of fugitive verse;' or even, 'We hail this new aspirant to the laurels of Apollo.' But in the thick of the publishing season, and when books pour into the reviewer by the cartful, nothing can exceed the violence, and indeed sometimes the virulence, of his language. That 'Now then, stoopid!' of the 'bus conductor pales beside the lightnings of his scorn.
'Among the lovers of sensation, it is possible that some persons may be found with tastes so utterly vitiated as to derive pleasure from this monstrous production.' I cull these flowers of speech from a wreath placed by a critic of the Slasher on my own early brow. Ye gods, how I hated him! How I pursued him with more than Corsican vengeance; traduced him in public and private; and only when I had thrust my knife (metaphorically) into his detested carcase, discovered I had been attacking the wrong man. It is a lesson I have never forgotten; and I pray you, my younger brothers of the pen, to lay it to heart. Believe rather that your unfriendly critic, like the bee who is fabled to sting and die, has perished after his attempt on your reputation; and let the tomb be his asylum. For even supposing you get