Reviews. Wilde Oscar

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СКАЧАТЬ great writers, whether they try to be like other people or try not to be like them (and sometimes in the first case most of all), succeed only in being themselves.

      7. If he had a slight overdose of Celtic blood and Celtic-peculiarity, it was more than made up by the readiness of literary expression which it gave him. He, if any one, bore an English heart, though, as there often has been, there was something perhaps more than English as well as less than it in his fashion of expression.

      8. His flashes of ethical reflection, which, though like all ethical reflections often one-sided.

      9. He certainly was an unfriend to Whiggery.

      10. That it contains a great deal of quaint and piquant writing is only to say that its writer wrote it.

      11. ‘Wild Wales,’ too, because of its easy and direct opportunity of comparing its description with the originals.

      12. The capital and full-length portraits.

      13. Whose attraction is one neither mainly nor in any very great degree one of pure form.

      14. Constantly right in general.

      These are merely a few examples of the style of Mr. Saintsbury, a writer who seems quite ignorant of the commonest laws both of grammar and of literary expression, who has apparently no idea of the difference between the pronouns ‘this’ and ‘that,’ and has as little hesitation in ending the clause of a sentence with a preposition, as he has in inserting a parenthesis between a preposition and its object, a mistake of which the most ordinary schoolboy would be ashamed. And why can not our magazine-writers use plain, simple English? Unfriend, quoted above, is a quite unnecessary archaism, and so is such a phrase as With this Borrow could not away, in the sense of ‘this Borrow could not endure.’ ‘Borrow’s abstraction from general society’ may, I suppose, pass muster. Pope talks somewhere of a hermit’s ‘abstraction,’ but what is the meaning of saying that the author of Lavengro quartered Castile and Leon ‘in the most interesting manner, riding everywhere with his servant’? And what defence can be made for such an expression as ‘Scott, and other black beasts of Borrow’s’? Black beast for bête noire is really abominable.

      The object of my letter, however, is not to point out the deficiencies of Mr. Saintsbury’s style, but to express my surprise that his article should have been admitted into the pages of a magazine like Macmillan’s. Surely it does not require much experience to know that such an article is a disgrace even to magazine literature.

      George Borrow. By George Saintsbury. (Macmillan’s Magazine, January 1886.)

      ONE OF MR. CONWAY’S REMAINDERS

      (Pall Mall Gazette, February 1, 1886.)

      Most people know that in the concoction of a modern novel crime is a more important ingredient than culture. Mr. Hugh Conway certainly knew it, and though for cleverness of invention and ingenuity of construction he cannot be compared to M. Gaboriau, that master of murder and its mysteries, still he fully recognised the artistic value of villainy. His last novel, A Cardinal Sin, opens very well. Mr. Philip Bourchier, M.P. for Westshire and owner of Redhills, is travelling home from London in a first-class railway carriage when, suddenly, through the window enters a rough-looking middle-aged man brandishing a long-lost marriage certificate, the effect of which is to deprive the right honourable member of his property and estate. However, Mr. Bourchier, M.P., is quite equal to the emergency. On the arrival of the train at its destination, he invites the unwelcome intruder to drive home with him and, reaching a lonely road, shoots him through the head and gives information to the nearest magistrate that he has rid society of a dangerous highwayman.

      Mr. Bourchier is brought to trial and triumphantly acquitted. So far, everything goes well with him. Unfortunately, however, the murdered man, with that superhuman strength which on the stage and in novels always accompanies the agony of death, had managed in falling from the dog-cart to throw the marriage certificate up a fir tree! There it is found by a worthy farmer who talks that conventional rustic dialect which, though unknown in the provinces, is such a popular element in every Adelphi melodrama; and it ultimately falls into the hands of an unscrupulous young man who succeeds in blackmailing Mr. Bourchier and in marrying his daughter. Mr. Bourchier suffers tortures from excess of chloral and of remorse; and there is psychology of a weird and wonderful kind, that kind which Mr. Conway may justly be said to have invented and the result of which is not to be underrated. For, if to raise a goose skin on the reader be the aim of art, Mr. Conway must be regarded as a real artist. So harrowing is his psychology that the ordinary methods of punctuation are quite inadequate to convey it. Agony and asterisks follow each other on every page and, as the murderer’s conscience sinks deeper into chaos, the chaos of commas increases.

      Finally, Mr. Bourchier dies, splendide mendax to the end. A confession, he rightly argued, would break up the harmony of the family circle, particularly as his eldest son had married the daughter of his luckless victim. Few criminals are so thoughtful for others as Mr. Bourchier is, and we are not without admiration for the unselfishness of one who can give up the luxury of a death-bed repentance.

      A Cardinal Sin, then, on the whole, may be regarded as a crude novel of a common melodramatic type. What is painful about it is its style, which is slipshod and careless. To describe a honeymoon as a rare occurrence in any one person’s life is rather amusing. There is an American story of a young couple who had to be married by telephone, as the bridegroom lived in Nebraska and the bride in New York, and they had to go on separate honeymoons; though, perhaps, this is not what Mr. Conway meant. But what can be said for a sentence like this? – ‘The established favourites in the musical world are never quite sure but the new comer may not be one among the many they have seen fail’; or this? – ‘As it is the fate of such a very small number of men to marry a prima donna, I shall be doing little harm, or be likely to change plans of life, by enumerating some of the disadvantages.’ The nineteenth century may be a prosaic age, but we fear that, if we are to judge by the general run of novels, it is not an age of prose.

      A Cardinal Sin. By Hugh Conway. (Remington and Co.)

      TO READ OR NOT TO READ

      (Pall Mall Gazette, February 8, 1886.)

      Books, I fancy, may be conveniently divided into three classes: —

      1. Books to read, such as Cicero’s Letters, Suetonius, Vasari’s Lives of the Painters, the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, Sir John Mandeville, Marco Polo, St. Simon’s Memoirs, Mommsen, and (till we get a better one) Grote’s History of Greece.

      2. Books to re-read, such as Plato and Keats: in the sphere of poetry, the masters not the minstrels; in the sphere of philosophy, the seers not the savants.

      3. Books not to read at all, such as Thomson’s Seasons, Rogers’s Italy, Paley’s Evidences, all the Fathers except St. Augustine, all John Stuart Mill except the essay on Liberty, all Voltaire’s plays without any exception, Butler’s Analogy, Grant’s Aristotle, Hume’s England, Lewes’s History of Philosophy, all argumentative books and all books that try to prove anything.

      The third class is by far the most important. To tell people what to read is, as a rule, either useless or harmful; for, the appreciation of literature is a question of temperament not of teaching; to Parnassus there is no primer and nothing that one can learn is ever worth learning. But to tell people what not to read is a very different matter, and I venture СКАЧАТЬ