Without Prejudice

stand in one's own light, but of sheer fatuities, tweakings-of-the-nose to our reverend mother-tongue, as either might have expressed it. But what I am most concerned to suggest here is that the distinction between prose and poetry (using prose to mean artistically wrought language) will not survive investigation. The popular instinct has long ago seen that the vital thing is the matter-that it is profanity to call that 'poetry' which is only verse; it remains to be recognised that even the distinction of form rests only on the non-recognition of the rhythm of 'prose,'-a rhythm that is not metre in so far as metre has the sense of regular measure, but may for all that have laws of its own, which await the discoverer and the systematiser.

The affinity of prose-rhythms is, I have hinted, with the higher developments of music, which, compared with the simple tunes of the street, are as apparently lawless and unlicensed as is prose compared to verse. And as it is not poets who follow laws, but precede them-as trochee and iambic, alcaic and hexameter, are the inventions of grammarians following on the trail of genius-so it behoves the Aristotle who would discover the laws of the rhythm of prose to study the masters of the art, masters by instinct and a faultless ear and the grace of God, and endeavour by patient induction to wrest from their sentences the secrets of their harmonies. Who will write the prosody of prose?

It is sad to have to declare that the bulk of contemporary writers lie outside all these classifications. They are artists neither in prose nor verse, and though they may have 'soul,' they cannot make it visible. For 'soul' may be expressed equally through painting and sculpture and music and acting, audits dimly discerned presence can scarcely convert slipshod writing into literature. No one would accept as art a picture in which a gleam of imagination struggled against the draughtsmanship of the schoolboy to whom arms are toasting-forks, or applaud an actor who might be brimming over with sensibility but could command neither his voice nor his face. No one has any business to come before the public who has not studied the medium through which he proposes to exhibit his 'soul': unfortunately this is the age and England is the country of the amateur, and in every department we are deluged with the crude. The fault lies less with the amateur than with the public before which he presents himself, and which, incompetent to distinguish art from amateurishness, is as likely to bless the one as the other. Of all forms of art literature suffers most; for the pity is, and pity'tis't is true, everybody learns to talk and write at an early age. This makes the transition to literature so fatally easy. Facilis descensus Averni! To paint, one must at least know how to mix colours and handle a brush; to compose, one must be familiar with the meaning of strayed spiders' legs on curious parallel bars, and there are strange disconcerting rumours of 'orchestration.' But to produce literature you have simply to dip pen in ink or open your mouth and see what God will give you. Hence particularly the flood of novels, hence the low position of the novel; although, as Theodore Watts has pointed out, it is practically the modern Epic. I have met distinguished students of Greek texts who have never conceived of the novel as a work of art, or as anything beyond the amusement of an idle hour-something for the women and the children. One such told me he would not read 'The Mill on the Floss' because it ended unhappily. I must conclude he has only read Aeschylus for his examinations. Acting stands next to literature in its seductiveness. The actor's instrument is his body, and everybody has a body. If, in addition to a 'body,' the creature conceives himself to possess a 'soul,' the odds are there will be laughter for the 'gods.' I tremble for the time when the popular educationist shall have had his way and every child be seised of the rudiments of drawing. We shall see sights then. At present, despite the horrors of the galleries and the widespread ignorance of art, painting cannot compete with literature as a misunderstood art. For the public-which is the only critic that counts in the long run-does not demand grammar, much less style; and the novel of the season may bristle with passages that could be set for correction at examinations in English. It is a little thing, but it seems to me significant, that the announcement of terms of the local branch of Mudie's, in the little town at which I am writing these lines, runs thus:

The subscription for one set entitles the subscriber to one complete work at a time, whether in one, two, or three volumes, and can be exchanged as often as desired.

XXIV. THE INFLUENCE OF NAMES

Far-fetched as the idea seems that names and JL characters have any interconnection, yet no great writer but has felt that one name, and one alone, would suit each particular creation. The tortures and travels that Balzac went through till he found 'Z. Marcas' are well known. So is the agony of Flaubert on hearing that Zola was anticipating him in the name of Bouvard, which it had cost Flaubert six years' search to find. Zola's magnanimity in parting with it deserves a fauteuil. Somebody in the provinces told me that his minister had preached upon the subject of names, laying it down that in every name lurked a subtle virtue,-or vice; the former the bearer of the name was in duty bound to cultivate, the latter to root out. Fantastic as this speculation be, even for a minister, no one doubts that people's names may have an influence upon their lives; and, in the case of the Christian name at least, children ought to be protected by the State against the bad taste and the cruelty of their parents. More certainly than the stars our names control our destinies, for they are no meaningless collocation of syllables, but have deep-rooted relations with the history and manner of life of our ancestors. The Smiths were once smiths, the Browns dark in complexion; and so, if we could only trace it, every name would reveal some inner significance, from Adam (red earth) downwards. Why do publishers tend to 'n' in their names'? Some of the chief London publishers run to a final 'n'-Macmillan, Longman, Chapman; Hodder Stoughton; Hutchinson Co.; Sampson Low, Marston Co.; Lawrence Bullen; Fisher Unwin; Heinemann. The last, indeed, is nothing but 'n' sounds; such a name could not escape taking to publishing. I find also in the publishers' lists T. Nelson Co.; Eden, Remington Co.; Henry Sotheran; John Lane; Effingham Wilson; Innes Co. (as fatal as Heinemann); George Allen Co.; Osgood, McIlvaine Co.; Gardner, Darton Co. Sometimes the 'n' is prominent at the beginning or in the middle, as in Henry Co.; Ward Downey; Constable Co.; Digby, Long Co.; Arnold; G. P. Putnam's Sons; Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner Co. (wherein each partner boasts his separate 'n'); Oliphant, Anderson Ferrier (wherein there are at least three 'n's); John C. Nimmo; Edward Stanford; Gibbings Co.; Chatto Windus; Nisbet Co. When the 'n' is not in the surname, at least the Christian contains the indispensable letter, as John Murray, Elkin Matthew.

Even when it can find refuge nowhere else the 'n' creeps into the 'and' of the firm or into the 'Sons.' The very Clarendon Press has the trademark. Who is the stock publisher of the eighteenth century? Tonson! Who were the first publishers of Shakespeare? Condell Heminge.

And while publishers run mysteriously to 'n,' authors run with equal persistency to 'r'-in their surnames for the most part, but at least somehow or somewhere.

Who are our professors of fiction to-day? Hardy, Meredith, Blackmore, Barrie, Rudyard Kipling, Walter Besant (and James Rice), George Moore, Frankfort Moore, Olive Schreiner, George Fleming, Henry James, Hamlin Garland, Henry B. Fuller, Harold Frederic, Frank Harris, Marion Crawford, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rider Haggard, Miss Braddon, Sarah Grand, Mrs. Parr, George Egerton, Rhoda Broughton, H. D. Traill, Jerome K. Jerome, Barry Pain, W. E. Norris, Crockett, Ian Maclaren, Robert Barr, Ashby Sterry, Morley Roberts, Mabel Eobinson, F. W. Eobinson, John Strange Winter, Du Maurier (late but not least to follow Ms lucky 'r'), Helen Mathers, Henry Seton Merriman, etc., etc.

Who were the giants of the last generation? Thackeray, Charles Dickens, Charles Reade, George Eliot, Bulwer Lytton, Charlotte Bronte, Trollope, Disraeli.

Who are our prophets and thinkers? Carlyle, Euskin, Emerson, Darwin, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Froude, Freeman.

Who are the poets of the Victorian era? Eobert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Algernon Charles Swinburne ('r'-ed throughout), D. Gabriel Eossetti, Christina Eossetti, Matthew Arnold, William Morris, Eobert Buchanan, Andrew Lang, Eobert Bridges, Lewis Morris, Edwin Arnold, Alfred Austin, Norman Gale, Eich-ard Le Gallienne, Philip Bourke Marston, Mary F. Eobinson, Theodore Watts, etc., etc.

Who are the dramatists of to-day? Grundy, Pinero, Henry Arthur Jones, W. S. Gilbert, Haddon Chambers, Comyns Carr, Carton, Ealeigh, George E. Sims (mark the virtue of that long-mysterious 'r').

And who in the past have done anything for our prose dramatic literature? Sheridan and Oliver Goldsmith, and, earlier still, Congreve, Wycherley, Farquhar, and Vanbrugh. Nay, which are the mighty names in our literature? Chaucer, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Herrick, Dry den, Alexander Pope, Butler, Sterne, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Walter Scott, Eobert Burns.

You may even look at the greatest names in the world's literature. Homer, Virgil (Maro), Horace, Firdusi, Omar Khayyam, Cervantes, Calderon, Petrarch, Eabelais, Dante Alighieri, Schiller, Voltaire, Eousseau, Moliere, Corneille, Eacine, Honore de Balzac, Flaubert, Victor Hugo, Verlaine, Heinrich Heine.

Of course there are not a few minus the 'r,' as Milton, Keats, Goethe, Swift, etc., etc.