The Press. WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 1896. FICKLENESS IN LITERATURE.

Press, Volume LIII, Issue 9344, 19 February 1896, Page 4

The Press. WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 1896. FICKLENESS IN LITERATURE.

Is it a feature peculiar to a " decadent " age that we are so fickle in our literary tastes —or is this a characteristic of all times and ages ? We do not remember that Max Nordau in his minute diagnosis of the symptoms of •• Degeneration " notes it; but literary fickleness certainly seems a particularly striking feature of the last decade or so. We are not content to accord a popular reception to a book that strikes us as good; we rave about it; we rashly dub it " the book of the year " ; we go into hysterics over it in the magazines and reviews ; we call it emphatically, in large capitals, an epoch-making book—and forget its very name in six months. Possibly the explanation of a good deal of this is to be found in the elaborate ■-puffing" conspiracy the publishers are engaged in. But this cannot altogether account for the periodical craze that infects the English world about a book or an author. For every year of the last decade we have had at least one book that the critics confidently declared was to endure for all time, or at least one author whom the reviews unanimously enrolled among the classics. And where are they now ? It taxes the memory seriously to recall the names even of half-a-dozen of these ■* epoch-making" literary wonders. Their authors are still plodding on; they have a sort of public secured for them in the circulating libraries; they get a perfunctory notice in the reviews, and one or two of them have been knighted ; but they are no longer "epoch-makers." You pick up a trashy love story, " Joan Haste," on about the same literary level as Family HeraU fiction. You see on the title page it is written by a man called Haggard, and you muse for a moment " Haggard, Haggard." Ah ! yes. You re-member a man who wrote " The novel of the century"—a romance called '** She." And then you remember how some few years ago we ail went into hysterics about " She," and were none of us satisfied , till we had...begged, borrowed, or bought copies of this melodramatic tour de force—and yet ■" She "as a piece of literature is as dead as a mummy. _!he " epoch "it created lasted about six months. And then one recollects that about the same time there was another melodramatic" production " Called Back." Everybody read *- Called Back." It wasn't called " The book of the century." But it got so far as to give its name to the latest fashions in bonnets, neckties and cigarettes. Stray pages of " Called Back " are now used to line the inside of bandboxes. And the " Mystery of a Hansom Cab "—that too was a rage for a season—on and off the boards; and Fergus Hume is an affluent littSrateiir, occasionally "interviewed " —but his name is not on the roll of fame.

Fickleness here, it will be said, was not unnatural; for these books were mere melodramatic trash; and couldn't survive a year. True; but there was a mania about them once, for all that. And books on a higher plane share the same fate. " Robert Elsmere," for example,, with the hall-mark; of Mr. Gladstone's approval stamped upon it, created for the time being a " school." No one now reads it, or finds it interesting to talk about; and Mrs. Humphry Ward is already in the third or fourth -grade of popularity as a novelist. In fact, no author "nowadays appears able to survive one good book; possibly they only write one, and then live on their reputation; but it is quite certain that -' one man one book" seems likely to become as fixed a principle as one man one vote. The authors of " Dodo," and ■- The Yellow Aster " for example will in all probability never -* boom " again. Even seems only yesterday that the reviewers heralded, him as •• a stronger Dickens ;" they told us his battle scenes were like Homer or Sir Walter Scott. The Daily Telegraph confidently asserted that his " Soldiers Three " had obtained almost the reputation of " The. Three Musketeers," while Blackwood clamoured impatiently for a Star of India for the Heaven - soaring genius. And now ? Kipling wears better than most of them ; he has a rough brevity of language ; a dash of originality, and a certain bold and fascinating cynicism that makes him still * readable. ' But pick up •- Soldiers Three " now, and you marvel to think of the reviewers of three years ago writing monographs upon him as though he were a classic, treating his style with as much seriousness as if it was Cablylese, and magnifying him into a greater Dumas, "a stronger Dickens." His "Ballads" will long remain popular; but Rudy ard Kipling's name is not destined after ail "Tofill the speaking trump of future fame."

And we have been as fickle in our hysterical adoration of foreign geniuses. There was a year when England took to Ibsen ; every magazine was filled with critical essays on his mind and art, and by praise and abuse alternately, both equally exaggerated, he became the man of a year. He is as completely forgotten as—say as Fergus Hume. Then his countryman Bjosxsen had an innings; he, too, shone with a lustre of the i-rst water —for one season— and then grew dim as a farthing rnshlight in the popular esteem. And as to Zola—it is only four or five year 3 since pious England cried out upon him. sent hia trans-

lator and London publisher to gaol; two years ago he visited London, and was lionised ; noAY he is probably forgotten. Does nothing last in literature any longer, or are we so " degenerate " that in ten years we have not produced a single book that can live—unless it be a novel or two of George Meredith's that need to be " interpreted " like Browning'B poems —on the co-operative principle ? Have we really grown careless about the good things of literature, that we only rave about them like the belle of one short season, and then put them on the shelf ? Or is there, after all, nothing to rave about ? Do wa grow hysterical about ephemeral trash—led by the nose by rival reviewers ? We won't attempt to answer this interesting query; we doubt if anyone can quite answer it or give a reliable account of public taste in literature, unless, perhaps, it be Mr. Mudie—and he won't tell.