by Oscar Wilde
Here and there, of course, there are exceptions, but as a class they are either dull, dowdy or dyspeptic. It is only fair to the rising generation of America to state that they are not to blame for this. Indeed, they spare no pains at all to bring up their parents properly and give them a suitable, if somewhat late, education. From its earliest years every American child spends most of its time correcting the faults of its father and mother; and no one who has had the opportunity of watching an American family on the deck of an Atlantic steamer, or in the refined seclusion of a New York boarding-house, can fail to have been struck by this characteristic of their civilisation. In America the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience. A boy of only eleven or twelve years of age will firmly but kindly point out to his father his defects of manner or temper; will never weary of warning him against extravagance, idleness, late hours, unpunctuality, and the other temptations to which the aged are so particularly exposed; and sometimes, should he fancy that he is monopolising too much of the conversation at dinner, will remind him, across the table, of the new child’s adage, ‘Parents should be seen, not heard.’ Nor does any mistaken idea of kindness prevent the little American girl from censuring her mother whenever it is necessary. Often, indeed, feeling that a rebuke conveyed in the presence of others is more truly efficacious than one merely whispered in the quiet of the nursery, she will call the attention of perfect strangers to her mother’s general untidiness, her want of intellectual Boston conversation, immoderate love of iced water and green corn, stinginess in the matter of candy, ignorance of the uses of the best Baltimore society, bodily ailments and the like. In fact, it may be truly said that no American child is ever blind to the deficiencies of its parents, no matter how much it may love them.
Yet, somehow, this educational system has not been so successful as it deserved. In many cases, no doubt, the material with which the children had to deal was crude and incapable of real development; but the fact remains that the American mother is a tedious person. The American father is better, for he is never seen in London. He passes his life entirely in Wall Street and communicates with his family once a month by means of a telegram in cipher. The mother, however, is always with us, and, lacking the quick imitative faculty of the younger generation, remains uninteresting and provincial to the last. In spite of her, however, the American girl is always welcome. She brightens our dull dinner-parties for us and makes life go pleasantly by for a season. In the race for coronets she often carries off the prize; but, once she has gained the victory, she is generous and forgives her English rivals everything, even their beauty.
Warned by the example of her mother that American women do not grow old gracefully, she tries not to grow old at all and often succeeds. She has exquisite feet and hands, is always bien chaussée et bien gantée and can talk brilliantly upon any subject, provided that she knows nothing about it.
Her sense of humour keeps her from the tragedy of a grande passion, and, as there is neither romance nor humility in her love, she makes an excellent wife. What her ultimate influence on English life will be it is difficult to estimate at present; but there can be no doubt that, of all the factors that have contributed to the social revolution of London, there are few more important, and none more delightful, than the American Invasion.
TWO BIOGRAPHIES OF KEATS
Pall Mall Gazette, 27 September 1887
A poet, said Keats once, ‘is the most unpoetical of all God’s creatures’, and whether the aphorism be universally true of not, this is certainly the impression produced by the two last biographies that have appeared of Keats himself. It cannot be said that either Mr Colvin or Mr William Rossetti makes us love Keats more or understand him better. In both these books there is much that is like ‘chaff in the mouth’, and in Mr Rossetti’s there is not a little that is like ‘brass on the palate’. To a certain degree this is, no doubt, inevitable nowadays. Everybody pays a penalty for peeping through keyholes, and the keyhole and the backstairs are essential parts of the method of the modern biographers. It is only fair, however, to state at the outset that Mr Colvin has done his work much better than Mr Rossetti. The account Mr Colvin gives of Keats’s boyhood, for instance, is very pleasing, and so is the sketch of Keats’s circle of friends, both Leigh Hunt and Haydon being admirably drawn. Here and there, trivial family details are introduced without much regard to proportion, and the posthumous panegyrics of devoted friends are not really of so much value, in helping us to form any true estimate of Keats’s actual character, as Mr Colvin seems to imagine. We have no doubt that when Bailey wrote to Lord Houghton that common sense and gentleness were Keats’s two special characteristics the worthy Archdeacon meant extremely well, but we prefer the real Keats, with his passionate wilfulness, his fantastic moods and his fine inconsistence. Part of Keats’s charm as a man is his fascinating incompleteness. We do not want him reduced to a sand-paper smoothness or made perfect by the addition of popular virtues. Still, if Mr Colvin has not given us a very true picture of Keats’s character, he has certainly told the story of his life in a pleasant and readable manner. He may not write with the ease and grace of a man of letters, but he is never pretentious and not often pedantic.
Mr Rossetti’s book is a great failure. To begin with, Mr Rossetti commits the great mistake of separating the man from the artist. The facts of Keats’s life are interesting only when they are shown in their relation to his creative activity. The moment they are isolated they are either uninteresting or painful. Mr Rossetti complains that the early part of Keats’s life is uneventful and the latter part depressing, but the fault lies with the biographer, not with the subject.
The book opens with a detailed account of Keats’s life, in which he spares us nothing, from what he calls the ‘sexual misadventure at Oxford’ down to the six weeks’ dissipation after the appearance of the Blackwood article and the hysterical and morbid ravings of the dying man. No doubt, most if not all of the things Mr Rossetti tells us are facts; but there is neither tact shown in the selection that is made of the facts nor sympathy in the use to which they are put. When Mr Rossetti writes of the man he forgets the poet, and when he criticises the poet he shows that he does not understand the man. His first error, as we have said, is isolating the life from the work; his second error is his treatment of the work itself. Take, for instance, his criticism of that wonderful ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, with all its marvellous magic of music, colour and form. He begins by saying that ‘the first point of weakness’ in the poem is the ‘surfeit of mythological allusions’, a statement which is absolutely untrue, as out of the eight stanzas of the poem only three contain any mythological allusions at all, and of these not one is either forced or remote. Then coming to the second verse,
Oh for a draught of vintage, that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country-green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
Mr Rossetti exclaims in a fine fit of ‘Blue Ribbon’ enthusiasm: ‘Surely nobody wants wine as a preparation for enjoying a nightingale’s music, whether in a literal or in a fanciful relation’! ‘To call wine “the true, the blushful Hippocrene”…seems’ to him ‘both stilted and repulsive’; ‘the phrase “with beaded bubbles winking at the brim” is (though picturesque) trivial’; ‘the succeeding image, “Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards”’ is ‘far worse’; while such an expression as ‘light-winged Dryad of the trees’ is an obvious pleonasm, for Dryad really means Oak-nymph! As for that superb burst of passion,
Thou wast not born, for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down:
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Mr Rossetti tells us that it is a palpable, or rather ‘palpaple (sic) fact that this address…is a logical solecism’, as men live longer than nightin
gales. As Mr Colvin makes very much the same criticism, talking of ‘a breach of logic which is also…a flaw in the poetry’, it may be worth while to point out to these two last critics of Keats’s work that what Keats meant to convey was the contrast between the permanence of beauty and the change and decay of human life, an idea which receives its fullest expression in the ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’. Nor do the other poems fare much better at Mr Rossetti’s hands. The fine invocation in ‘Isabella’ –
Moan hither, all ye syllables of woe,
From the deep throat of sad Melpomene!
Through bronzed lyre in tragic order go,
And touch the strings into a mystery.
seems to him ‘a fadeur’; the Indian Bacchante of the fourth book of Endymion he calls a ‘sentimental and beguiling wine-bibber’, and, as for Endymion himself, he declares that he cannot understand ‘how his human organism, with respirative and digestive processes, continues to exist’, and gives us his own idea of how Keats should have treated the subject. An eminent French critic once exclaimed in despair, ‘Je trouve des physiologistes partout!‘; but it has been reserved for Mr Rossetti to speculate on Endymion’s digestion, and we readily accord to him all the distinction of the position. Even where Mr Rossetti seeks to praise, he spoils what he praises. To speak of Hyperion as ‘a monument of Cyclopean architecture in verse’ is bad enough, but to call it ‘a Stonehenge of reverberance’ is absolutely detestable; nor do we learn much about ‘The Eve of St Mark’ by being told that its ‘simplicity is full-blooded as well as quaint’. What is the meaning, also, of stating that Keats’s ‘Notes on Shakespeare’ are ‘somewhat strained and bloated’? And is there nothing better to be said of Madeline in ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ than that ‘she is made a very charming and loveable figure, although she does nothing very particular except to undress without looking behind her, and to elope’} There is no necessity to follow Mr Rossetti any further as he flounders about through the quagmire that he has made for his own feet. A critic who can say that ‘not many of Keats’s poems are highly admirable’ need not be too seriously treated. Mr Rossetti is an industrious man and a painstaking writer, but he entirely lacks the temper necessary for the interpretation of such poetry as was written by John Keats.
It is pleasant to turn again to Mr Colvin, who criticises always with modesty and often with acumen. We do not agree with him when he accepts Mrs Owens’s theory of a symbolic and allegoric meaning underlying Endymion, his final judgment on Keats as ‘the most Shaksperean spirit that has lived since Shakspere’ is not very fortunate, and we are surprised to find him suggesting, on the evidence of a rather silly story of Severn’s, that Sir Walter Scott was privy to the Blackwood article. There is nothing, however, about his estimate of the poet’s work that is harsh, irritating or uncouth. The true Marcellus of English song has not yet found his Virgil, but Mr Colvin makes a tolerable Statius.
Keats. By Sidney Colvin. ‘English Men of Letters’ Series. (Macmillan and Co.)
Life of John Keats. By William Michael Rossetti. ‘Great Writers’ Series. (Walter Scott.)
ARISTOTLE AT AFTERNOON TEA
Pall Mall Gazette, 16 December 1887
In Society, says Mr Mahaffy, every civilised man and woman ought to feel it their duty to say something, even when there is hardly anything to be said, and, in order to encourage this delightful art of brilliant chatter, he has published a social guide without which no debutante or dandy should ever dream of going out to dine. Not that Mr Mahaffy’s book can be said to be, in any sense of the word, popular. In discussing this important subject of conversation, he has not merely followed the scientific method of Aristotle which is, perhaps, excusable, but he has adopted the literary style of Aristotle for which no excuse is possible. There is, also, hardly a single anecdote, hardly a single illustration, and the reader is left to put the Professor’s abstract rules into practice, without either the examples or the warnings of history to encourage or to dissuade him in his reckless career. Still, the book can be warmly recommended to all who propose to substitute the vice of verbosity for the stupidity of silence. It fascinates in spite of its form and pleases in spite of its pedantry, and is the nearest approach, that we know of, in modern literature to meeting Aristotle at an afternoon tea.
As regards physical conditions, the only one that is considered by Mr Mahaffy as being absolutely essential to a good conversationalist, is the possession of a musical voice. Some learned writers have been of opinion that a slight stammer often gives peculiar zest to conversation, but Mr Mahaffy rejects this view and is extremely severe on every eccentricity from a native brogue to an artificial catchword. With his remarks on the latter point, the meaningless repetition of phrases, we entirely agree. Nothing can be more irritating than the scientific person who is always saying ‘Exactly so,’ or the common-place person who ends every sentence with ‘Don’t you know?’ or the pseudo-artistic person who murmurs ‘Charming, charming,’ on the smallest provocation. It is, however, with the mental and moral qualifications for conversation that Mr Mahaffy specially deals. Knowledge he, naturally, regards as an absolute essential, for, as he most justly observes, ‘an ignorant man is seldom agreeable, except as a butt’. Upon the other hand, strict accuracy should be avoided. ‘Even a consummate liar,’ says Mr Mahaffy, is a better ingredient in a company than ‘the scrupulously truthful man, who weighs every statement, questions every fact, and corrects every inaccuracy.’ The liar at any rate recognises that recreation, not instruction, is the aim of conversation, and is a far more civilised being than the blockhead who loudly expresses his disbelief in a story which is told simply for the amusement of the company. Mr Mahaffy, however, makes an exception in favour of the eminent specialist and tells us that intelligent questions addressed to an astronomer, or a pure mathematician, will elicit many curious facts which will pleasantly beguile the time. Here, in the interest of Society, we feel bound to enter a formal protest. Nobody, even in the provinces, should ever be allowed to ask an intelligent question about pure mathematics across a dinner-table. A question of this kind is quite as bad as enquiring suddenly about the state of a man’s soul, a sort of coup which, as Mr Mahaffy remarks elsewhere, ‘many pious people have actually thought a decent introduction to a conversation’.
As for the moral qualifications of a good talker, Mr Mahaffy, following the example of his great master, warns us against any disproportionate excess of virtue. Modesty, for instance, may easily become a social vice, and to be continually apologising for one’s ignorance or stupidity is a grave injury to conversation, for ‘what we want to learn from each member is his free opinion on the subject in hand, not his own estimate of the value of that opinion’. Simplicity, too, is not without its dangers. The enfant terrible, with his shameless love of truth, the raw country-bred girl who always says what she means, and the plain, blunt man who makes a point of speaking his mind on every possible occasion, without ever considering whether he has a mind at all, are the fatal examples of what simplicity leads to. Shyness may be a form of vanity, and reserve a development of pride, and as for sympathy, what can be more detestable than the man, or woman, who insists on agreeing with everybody, and so makes ‘a discussion, which implies differences in opinion’, absolutely impossible? Even the unselfish listener is apt to become a bore. ‘These silent people,’ says Mr Mahaffy, ‘not only take all they can get in Society for nothing, but they take it without the smallest gratitude, and have the audacity afterwards to censure those who have laboured for their amusement.’ Tact, which is an exquisite sense of the symmetry of things, is, according to Mr Mahaffy, the highest and best of all the moral conditions for conversation. The man of tact, he most wisely remarks, ‘will instinctively avoid jokes about Blue Beard’ in the company of a woman who is a man’s third wife; he will never be guilty of talking like a book, but will rather avoid too careful an attention to grammar and the rounding of periods; he will cultivate the art of graceful interruption, so as to prevent a subject being w
orn threadbare by the aged or the inexperienced; and should he be desirous of telling a story, he will look round and consider each member of the party, and if there be a single stranger present will forgo the pleasure of anecdotage rather than make the social mistake of hurting even one of the guests. As for prepared or premeditated art, Mr Mahaffy has a great contempt for it and tells us of a certain college don (let us hope not at Oxford or Cambridge) who always carried a jest-book in his pocket and had to refer to it when he wished to make a repartee. Great wits, too, are often very cruel, and great humorists often very vulgar, so it will be better to try and ‘make good conversation without any large help from these brilliant but dangerous gifts’.
