LITERARY HISTORY AND LITERARY BIOGRAPHY.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1037, 28 January 1911, Page 9

LITERARY HISTORY AND LITERARY BIOGRAPHY.

"It is the 'writer's convictiou,". says Professor Schelling, of the University of Pennsylvania, in a new book, "that until the history of literature cuts loose from the tyranny of biography, a3 history at largo has long since cut loose, ] little progress can bo made toward the realisation of the higher aims of literary study." Now I want to know how many people wish, to "realiso the higher aims of literary study," whatever these aims may bo. . The • highest aim of literary study, I think, is to enjoy, the best literature, to take pleasure- in it, to have it, as they say, at one's finger ends. How far this is from being a widely-felt want. Tho public has little use for dead authors. But there is also a great deal of pleasuro (and tho whole affair of literature is. to give pleasuro) in knowing about the lives of" the men and women who wrote the good books. They were interesting people. 1 do not want to peer over the wall of private life. The rows between tho amiablo historian of Frederick tho Great and his angelic wife; the letters of tho dying Keats to Hiss Prances Brawue; the bequest of only the second best bed to Mrs. Shakespearo (nee Hathaway. or Whateley);. tho lovo letters of the-Brownings,- aro examples of what wo can do without. But it is highly interesting to know how a great author lived and thought;-what sort of man he was. among other men; what sort of boy ho was; what sort of. sportsman he was;, what books ho liked; and all about tho making of hiin. If it wero riot interesting, why should so many men of genius havo told us so much about themselves? Not to montion Rousseau (who told us what we by no means want to know, and s'eo little rea- . eon for believing), not to mention St. Augustine (and I wish ho had told us much more;, Thackeray is always delightful when he confesses; so is R. L ; Stevenson; so is Scottj who only began his autobiography; and it is much to be regretted that, if Homer ever wroto his autobiography, it is lost. Of courso ho never did; nobody knows anything about his life and adventures. The Memoirs . which Shakespearo'did. not write would ■. have been worth moro than several of his early plays. Tho Lives of Dr. JohuBon, Scott, and Macaulay are monuments of the best literature in tho world. The great in tlio "Lives of the Poets") (biography again!), never wrote anything, worth a hundred pages of Bozzy's immortal biography. Nobody reads any of tho Doctor's works, except tho aforesaid "Lives of tlio Poets, "Rasselas," and "The Vanity of • Human Wishes." Tho Life of Dickens, though rather disenchanting, is an invaluable, commentary on his works, and is worth a wilderness of "Little DorTits." We can read Izaak Walton's Lives of men whose works we aro usually content to skip. A thoroughly wellinformed Lifo of Swift cannot ho written; so much tho better, but his autobiographical fragment; "Tho Journal to Stella, outweighs a number of •"Conducts of tho Allies," which, I think, Dr. havo written. I do not pine for an autobiography of William Wordsworth; we have quite.enough of that in blank verse. No Lifo of Shelley could ho true, because Shelley, himself did'not know the facts—nobody knew them; and thero will never be an authentic Life of Byron. But what wrote about Shelley is a possession for ever; a veridical record of tho.Eternal Undergraduate. A true biography of tho author of "Piers Plowman" would be very like a true biography of Mr. Carlylc: tho history of liieraturo wants and cannot get it; Professor Mauley believes in ; I think, five Piers Plowmen. I admit that any man who "abandons his mind to it"' could continue Piers, but I with Monsieur Jussorand that tlioro was only one author of "Piers Plowman." because I cannot think it likely that four sano, persons did abandon "their minds to imitating tho great apocalyptic original. He pretended to love tho country, which he liked as much as Mr. Carlyle liked Craigcnputtock, and he wont.about Loudon with a scowl, hating the rich and not thinking well of the poor.

Scientific professors of tho History of Literature wish to provido a supply of literary history without biography whero there is no demand except among other professors, and a few young persons who desire professorial chairs. Johnson said that Tom Davies could Notoriously the general public cares inlinitoly less for literature than for information about tho makers of literature. People who never read Shakespeare's Sonnets are,all agog when they hear that ho once lodged at the house of a rowdy French Huguenot wigmaker. I learn on excellent authority that this same wig-maker, though a sad, good Protestant at heart, and an exile for the sake of his religion, was ex-communicated from his tabernaclo because ho was a night-rake, an outlier, not a consistent walker, but rather a staggerer. Tho prohlcm at onco flashes on tho mind: Did tho society of Shakespeare corrupt the once austere French "perruquicr" and Puritan, his landlord? Or did Shakespeare sedulously but vainly beseech him to forswear, sack? "Tho people havo a right to know," but "premit nox alta." If the demand for personal details is not gratified, then even persons of culturo much prefer to reacl new books or essays about old hooks than to read tho old books themselves. They would rather havo heard La Fontaine talk about Barueh; whom he "discovered," thanstudy Baruch himself. Who has not read Thackeray). Leigh Hunt, Lamb, and Macaulay, about tho comic playwrights, of 1665-1700; and who reads tho plays of tho playwrights? In Thackeray's lecture on Congrevo he says: "1 have read two or three'_ of Cangrerc's plays over before ( speaking of him." What a concession to research! Ho does not say: "I have read them over again." Having read them over, two or three of them, Thackeray did not desire to pursuo his studies —manifestly ho was bored to desolation, "it's a weary feast that banquet of wit whero no love is. It palls very soon." It does indeed; and as for the wit; is it really so witty? Monsieur Jules Lemaitrc, I think, in his capacity as a dramatic critic, said of a new play that .it was like "un beau page d'algebre"; a pretty page out of. Colonso Algebra.: A gentle-, man in tho stalls arose, and, pressing his hands on his fevered brow, cried aloud: "I don't understand a single word of it!" Such are Mr. Congrevo's plots. Leigh Hunt candidly says: "Speaking for ourselves,, we can never attend sufficiently to tho plots of Congrevo. , They soon puzzle-us and we cease to think of them." If the'plays are witty they are "Wit in a Mist." Thackeray began by informing: the most literary audience in.Lqndon. that "it is of the men and their lives, rather thaii of their books, that I ask permission to speak to you." It would havo been useless to speak of-the books; it was enough to speak in tho style of angels about tho venerable chestnuts sueli as Mrs. Bracegirdlo's legacy of £200 from William Congrevo; the .Duchess of Marlborough's diamond necklace .(£7000) from the same august and gouty hand. I am able to add a detail from an unpublished letter of Lady Louisa Stuart's. A later daugh-

tor of tho Churchills- asked the innocent, question: "Why is tho necklacemarked with the initials W.C. ?'.' So Lady Louisa wrote to Walter Scott. Hero is an addition to literary- biography! ■ .'..._'

Professor Schclling answers in his own way tho question about "tho higher aims of literary study." Tho. aims aro "tho recognition" of those unseen, influences, literary and other, by which oven the greatest man becomes tho, product of his age." But how can you detect. the influences unseen without tho biography? Tho Dark Lady of the Sonnets is thought bjvs t oino. i.ypnture'somo critics to havei been'"the'makiiig of Shakespeare. Without her there, would, it scems;-"rr& - nff-'*tho'~p!ttys ''no' dark ladies, Cleopatras and Cressidas; that is, if Cressida wore dark: she was probably of .an' Aryan stock, who-camo through Thrace to Asia. - In any case, thcro would bo no such dark and' demoralising enslavers in the plays but for tho Dark Lady. Therefore wo must, if we would "recognise tho unseen in-

fluences," pursue tho biographical track and hunt for the Dark Lady. Can she have been the wife of tho rowdy Puritan, tho French wig-mater? Mr. Schilling avers that History has divorced Biography. "History now chronicles the common man." Not shol Human history is not tho history of the growth of a. coral island, built up by the minute.industry of'innumerable and indistinguishable little beasts. History is the work of distinguishable persons of character. Even the bceshavo had a .boo of genius,.who hit on tho right way of constructing honeycombs. There was a flash of genius, who was tho first to blow water at a floating fly, drown it, observo it, and eat it. Trout can blow a thing out of their mouths with amazing force, but no

trout of genius has arisen, to drown a floating fly and then ascertain whether it is tho genuine article or tho product of human industry with a hook in it. No; history cannot get away from the biographies of Hannibal and I'hemistocles, Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte, Mary Stuart and John Krios; and literary history, let the Professors say. what they will, is indissoluble' united to literary biography.—Andrew Lang,:in tho "Morning Post."