Thomas B. Reed

[Speech of Andrew Lang at the annual banquet of the Royal Academy, London, May 6, 1894. This speech on some of the aspects of modern fiction was delivered by Mr. Lang in response to the toast "The Interests of Literature," regularly proposed on these occasions. The President of the Academy, Sir Frederic Leighton, said in introducing Mr. Lang: "Your Royal Highness, My Lords and Gentlemen: Let us drink to the honor of science and of letters. If of the latter it may be affirmed without fear that few things are more often misapprehended than their true relation to art, it is not less certain that no body of men are more than artists responsive to their stimulating force. How closely science, which is knowledge, is interwoven on many sides with art, it is needless here to say. In the name of letters I have to call upon one of the most versatile of their votaries, a man whose nimble intellect plays with luminous ease round many and various subjects; delicate as a poet, acute and picturesque as a critic, a sparkling journalist, no one has pursued with more earnest and more fruitful zeal the graver study of the birth and evolution of natural myths than Mr. Andrew Lang, to whom I turn for response."]

Your Royal Highness, Mr. President, My Lords And Gentlemen:—He to whom it falls or rather on whom falls the task of replying for English literature may well feel ground to dust by the ponderous honor. Who can be the representative of such a Parnassian constituency of divine poets, philosophers, romancers, historians, from Beowulf to the last new novel? The consciousness is crushing. The momentary representative feels himself to be like Mr. Chevy Slyme "the most littery fellow in the world," who is over-borne like the bride of the Lord of Burleigh—

"By the burden of an honor
Unto which she was not born."

Naturally he flies to thoughts which whisper of humility. He finds them easily. In the first place literature is but a very insignificant flake on the foam of the wave of the world. As Mr. Pepys reminds us, most people please themselves "with easy delights of the world, eating, drinking, dancing, hunting, fencing," and not with book learning. Easy he calls them! I wish they were:—

"I cannot eat but little meat,
My stomach is not good."

Still less can I dance or hunt. Yet to the general public these things come easier than reading; and their good-humored contempt keeps us poor "littery gents" in our proper place and frame of mind. I have lately read somewhere about a man of letters who conceived himself to be the idol of the great and good-natured American people. They sent him the kindest letters, they invited him to lecture, but ah! when his publishers' accounts came in, he found there "To American sales: six and twopence!" [Laughter.] Here is matter for mortification!

Again, one is not so much to speak for English literature as to speak about it; one is not a representative but a reporter; we critics are but the cagots or despised pariah class in the world of letters. If we ever give in to the belief that we might attempt something creative, we, like the insects celebrated by the poet, "have lesser" critics upon our backs to bite us [laughter] and to remind us of our limitations. Our function in the game is like that of the scorers and umpires at Lords or the Oval; men of accurate intellectual habit, and incorruptible integrity from whom not much is to be expected with bat or ball. We are not to do anything "off our own bats." For these reasons I only talk humbly of literature as an interested professional observer. When the philosopher Square spoke of religion, he meant the true religion, and when he said the true religion he indicated the Protestant religion, and by the Protestant religion he meant the religion of the Church of England. In the same way if I venture a few remarks on English literature I mean modern English literature, and by modern English literature I mean modern English novels.

We are indeed quite destitute of poets. As Henry V is said by a French chronicler to have ennobled all his army on the eve of Agincourt, so perhaps it might be well to make all our poets poets-laureate [laughter]—there must be a sip for each of them in the butt of malmsey or sack. But when the general public says "literature" the general public means fiction.

Now, though I have some optimistic remarks to end with, it does appear to myself that the British novel suffers from diverse banes or curses. The first is the spread of elementary education. Too many naturally non-literary people of all ranks are now goaded into acquiring a knowledge of the invention of Cadmus. When nobody could read, except people whose own literary nature impelled them to learn, better books were written, because the public, if relatively few, was absolutely fit. Secondly, these new educated people insist on our national cursed "actuality." They live solely in the distracted moment, whereas true literature lives in the absolute; in the past that perhaps never was present, and that is eternal; "lives in fantasy."

Shakespeare did not write plays about contemporary problems. The Greek dramatists deliberately chose their topics in the tales of Troy and Thebes and Atreus's line. The very Fijians, as Mr. Paisley Thomson informs us, "will tell of gods and giants and canoes greater than mountains and of women fairer than the women of these days, and of doings so strange that the jaws of the listeners fall apart." They do not deal with "problems" about the propriety of cannibalism or the casuistry of polygamy [Laughter.] The Athenians fined for his modernitÉ the author of a play on the fall of Miletus because he reminded them of their misfortunes. But many of our novelists do nothing but remind us of our misfortunes. Novels are becoming tracts on parish councils, free love and other inflammatory topics [laughter], and the reason of this ruin is that the vast and the naturally non-literary majority can now read, and of course can only read about the actual, about the noisy wrangling moment. This is the bane of the actual.

Of course I do not maintain that contemporary life is tabooed against novelists, but if novels of contemporary life are to be literature, are to be permanent, that life must either be treated in the spirit of romance and fantasy as by Balzac and the colossally fantastic Zola; or in the spirit of humor as by Charles de Bernard, Fielding, Thackeray, Dickens. The thrifty plan of giving us sermons, politics, fiction, all in one stodgy sandwich [laughter] produces no permanent literature, produces but temporary "Tracts for the Times."

Fortunately we have among us many novelists—young ones luckily—who are true to the primitive and eternal Fijian canons of fiction. [Laughter.] We have Oriental romance from the author of "Plain Tales from the Hills." We have the humor and tenderness—certainly not Fijian I admit—which produced the masterpiece, "A Window in Thrums." We have the adventurous fancy that gives us "A Gentleman of France," "The Master of Ballantrae," "Micah Clarke," "The Raiders," "The Prisoner of Zenda," and the truly primeval or troglodyte imagination which, as we read of a fight between a knob-nosed Kaffir dwarf and a sacred crocodile, brings us in touch with the first hearers of Heracles's or Beowulf's or Grettir's deeds, "so strange that the jaws of the listeners fall apart." Thus we possess outlets for escape from ourselves and from to-day. We can still dwell now and then in the same air of pleasure as our fathers have breathed since the days of Homer.

Such are the rather intolerant ideas of a bookworm who by no means grudges the pleasure which other readers receive from what does not please him to enthusiasm. And pleasure, not edification, is the end of all art. We are all pleased when we write; the public of one enthusiast every author enjoys, and the literary men who depreciate the joys of their own art or profession may not be consciously uncandid, but they are decidedly perverse. [Laughter and applause.]