“I do not for a moment admit that I am the leading critic.  To say the truth, I am often amused, and often vexed, at the grotesque misconception that seems to be afloat as to my relation to criticism.  Years ago, Russell Lowell told me that all over the United States I was identified with every paragraph of a certain critical journal in which I sometimes write; and, judging from the droll attacks that are so often made upon me by outside paragraph writers, the same misconception seems to be spreading in England—attacks which the smiling and knowing public well understands to spring from writing men who have not been happy in their relations with the reviewers.”

“It has been remarked that you never answer any attack in the newspapers, howsoever unjust or absurd.”

“I do not believe in answering attacks.  The public, as I say, knows that there is a mysterious and inscrutable yearning in the slow-worm to bite with the fangs of the adder, and every attack upon a writer does him more good than praise would do.  But, as a matter of fact, I have no connexion whatever with any journal save that of a student of letters who finds it convenient on occasion to throw his meditations upon literary art and the laws that govern it in the form of a review.  It is a bad method, no doubt, of giving expression to one’s excogitations, and although I do certainly contrive to put careful criticisms into my articles, I cannot imagine more unbusinesslike reviewing than mine.  Yet it has one good quality, I think—it is never unkindly.  I never will take a book for review unless I can say something in its favour, and a good deal in its favour.”

“And what about our contemporary novelists?  Perhaps you do not give attention to fiction?”

“Give attention to novels!  Why, if I did not, I should not give attention to literature at all.  In a true and deep sense all pure literature is fiction—to use an extremely inadequate and misleading word as a substitute for the right phrase, ‘imaginative representation.’  ‘The Iliad,’ ‘The Odyssey,’ ‘The Æneid,’ ‘The Divina Commedia,’ are fundamentally novels, though in verse, as certainly novels as is the latest story by the most popular of our writers.  The greatest of all writers of the novelette is the old Burmese parable writer, who gave us the story of the girl-mother and the mustard-seed.  A time which has given birth to such novelists as many of ours of the present day is a great, and a very great, time for the English novel.  Criticism will have to recognize, and at once, that the novel, now-a-days, stands plump in the front rank of the ‘literature of power,’ and if criticism does not so recognize it, so much the worse for criticism, I think.  That the novel will grow in importance is, I say, quite certain.  In such a time as ours (as I have said in print), poetry is like the knickerbockers of a growing boy—it has become too small somehow; it is not quite large enough for the growing limbs of life.  The novel is more flexible; it can be stretched to fit the muscles as they swell.”

“Well, there I am a ‘galled jade’ that must needs ‘wince’ a little.  No doubt I write anonymously myself, but that is because I have not yet mastered that dislike of publicity which has kept me back, and my writing seems to lose its elasticity with its anonymity.  The chief argument against anonymous criticism I take to be this: That any scribbler who can get upon an important journal is at once clothed with the journal’s own authority—and the same applies, of course, to the dishonest critic; and this is surely very serious.  With regard to dishonest criticism it is impossible for the most wary editor to be always on his guard against it.  An editor cannot read all the books, nor can he know the innumerable ramifications of the literary world.  When Jones asks him for Brown’s book for review, the editor cannot know that Jones has determined to praise it or to cut it up irrespective of its merits; and then, when the puff or attack comes in, it is at once clothed with the authority, not of Jones’s name, but that of the journal.

In the literary arena itself the truth of the case may be known, but not in the world outside, and it must not be supposed but that great injustice may flow from this.  I myself have more than once heard a good book spoken of with contempt in London Society, and heard quoted the very words of some hostile review which I have known to be the work of a spiteful foe of the writer of the book, or of some paltry fellow who was quite incompetent to review anything.”

Skerryvore, Bournemouth.

Dear Mr. Watts,—The sight of the last ‘Athenæum’ reminds me of you, and of my debt now too long due.  I wish to thank you for your notice of ‘Kidnapped’; and that not because it was kind, though for that also I valued it; but in the same sense as I have thanked you before now for a hundred articles on a hundred different writers.  A critic like you is one who fights the good fight, contending with stupidity, and I would fain hope not all in vain; in my own case, for instance, surely not in vain.

And now to the more genial business of defence.  You attack my fight on board the ‘Covenant,’ I think it literal.  David and Alan had every advantage on their side, position, arms, training, a good conscience; a handful of merchant sailors, not well led in the first attack, not led at all in the second, could only by an accident have taken the roundhouse by attack; and since the defenders had firearms and food, it is even doubtful if they could have been starved out.  The only doubtful point with me is whether the seamen would have ever ventured on the second onslaught; I half believe they would not; still the illusion of numbers and the authority of Hoseason would perhaps stretch far enough to justify the extremity.—I am, dear Mr. Watts, your very sincere admirer,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

“Take the little story ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,’ the laudatory criticism upon which is in bulk, as regards the story itself, like the comet’s tail in relation to the comet.  On its appearance as a story, a ‘shilling shocker’ for the railway bookstalls, the critic’s attention was directed to its vividness of narrative and kindred qualities, and though perfectly conscious of its worthlessness in the world of literary art, he might well be justified in comparing it to its advantage with other stories of its class and literary standing.  But when it is offered as a classic—and this is really how it is offered—it has to be judged by critical canons of a very different kind.  It has then to be compared and contrasted with stories having a like motive—stories that deal with an idea as old as the oldest literature—as old, no doubt, as those primeval days when man awoke to the consciousness that he is a moral and a responsible being—stories whose temper has always been up to now of the loftiest kind.

If the whole thing is meant as a horrible joke, in imitation of De Quincey’s ‘Murder considered as One of the Fine Arts,’ it tells poorly for Stevenson’s sense of humour.  If it is meant as a serious allegory, it is an outrage upon the grand allegories of the same motive with which most literatures have been enriched.  That a story so coarse should have met with the plaudits that ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ met with at the time of its publication—that it should now be quoted in leading articles of important papers every few days, while all the various and beautiful renderings of the motive are ignored—what does it mean?  Is it a sign that the ‘shrinkage of the world,’ the ‘solidarity of civilisation,’ making the record of each day’s doings too big for the day, has worked a great change in our public writers?  Is it that they not only have no time to think, but no time to read anything beyond the publications of the hour?  Is it that good work is unknown to them, and that bad work is forced upon them, and that in their busy ignorance they must needs accept it and turn to it for convenient illustration?  That Stevenson should have been impelled to write the story shows what the ‘Suicide Club’ had already shown, that underneath the apparent health which gives such a charm to ‘Treasure Island’ and ‘Kidnapped,’ there was that morbid strain which is so often associated with physical disease.

Save in such great mistakes as ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,’ and a few other stories, Stevenson acted upon Joubert’s excellent maxim.  But Scott, and Scott alone, is always right in this matter—right by instinct.  He alone is always a delight.  If all art is dedicated to joy, as Schiller declares, and if there is no higher and more serious problem than how to make men happy, then the ‘Waverley Novels’ are among the most precious things in the literature of the world.”

‘Slip away!’ I said, ‘to avoid Browning!  You don’t know him as well as I do, after all!  Now, let me tell you exactly what will occur if we stand here for a minute or two.  Miss Browning, whose eyes are looking busily over the room for people that Browning ought to speak to, in a moment will see you, and in another moment she will see me.  And then you will see her turn her head to Browning’s ear and tell him something.  And then Browning will come straight across to me and be more charming and cordial than he is in a general way, supposing that be possible.’

‘No, I don’t believe it.’

‘If you were not such a Boston Puritan,’ I said, ‘I would ask you what will you bet that I am wrong.’

‘Now,’ said he, ‘you’re not going to put me off with generalities any longer.  You promised to write and tell me when you could come to luncheon.  You have never done so—you will never do so, unless I fix you with a distinct day.  Will you come to-morrow?’

‘I shall be delighted,’ I said.  And he turned to Lowell and exchanged a few friendly words with him.

After these two adorable people left us, Lowell said: ‘Well, this is wonderful.  You would have won the bet.  How do you explain it?’

‘I explain it by Browning’s greatness of soul and heart.  His position is so great, and mine is so small, that an unappreciative review of a poem of his cannot in the least degree affect him.  But he knows that I am an honest man, as he has frequently told Tennyson, Jowett, and others.  He wishes to make it quite apparent that he feels no anger towards a man who says what he thinks about a poem.’”

Now do our English poets know what it is to write a parable poem?  It is to set self-conscious philosophy singing and dancing, like the young Gretry, to the tune of a waterfall.  Or rather, it is to imprison the soul of Dinah Morris in the lissome body of Esmeralda, and set the preacher strumming a gypsy’s tambourine.  Though in the pure parable the intellectual or ethical motive does not dominate so absolutely as in the case of the pure fable, the form that expresses it, yet it does, nevertheless, so far govern the form as to interfere with that entire abandon—that emotional freedom—which seems necessary to the very existence of song.  Indeed, if poetry must, like Wordsworth’s ideal John Bull, ‘be free or die’; if she must know no law but that of her own being (as the doctrine of ‘L’art pour l’art’ declares); if she must not even seem to know that (as the doctrine of bardic inspiration implies), but must bend to it apparently in tricksy sport alone—how can she—‘the singing maid with pictures in her eyes’—mount the pulpit, read the text, and deliver the sermon?

The earth, says the wise dervish Feridun, was once without flowers, and men dreamed of nothing more beautiful then than cabbages.  So the Angels of the Water Pot, watering the Tûba Tree (whose fruit becomes flavoured according to the wishes of the feeder), said one to another, ‘The eyes of those poor cabbage growers down there may well be horny and dim, having none of our beautiful things to gaze upon; for as to the earthly cabbage, though useful in earthly pot, it is in colour unlovely as ungrateful in perfume; and as to the stars, they are too far off to be very clearly mirrored in the eyes of folk so very intent upon cabbages.’  So the Angels of the Water Pot, who sit on the rainbow and brew the ambrosial rains, began fashioning flowers out of the paradisal gems, while Israfel sang to them; and the words of his song were the mottoes that adorn the bowers of heaven.  So bewitching, however, were the strains of the singer—for not only has Israfel a lute for viscera, but doth he not also, according to the poet—

Breathe a stream of otto and balm,
Which through a woof of living music blown
Floats, fused, a warbling rose that makes all senses one?

—so astonishing were the notes of a singer so furnished, that the angels at their jewel work could not help tracing his coloured and perfumed words upon the petals.  And this was how the Angels of the Water Pot made flowers, and this is the story of ‘Poetry and Cabbages.’

But who are ‘of the race of Israfel’?  Not the prosemen, certainly, as any Western critic may see who will refer to Kircher’s idle nonsense about the ‘Alphabet of the Angels’ in his ‘Ædipus Egyptiacus.’  Are they, then, the poets?  This is indeed a solemn query.  ‘If,’ says Feridun, ‘the mottoes that adorn the bowers of Heaven have been correctly read by certain Persian poets, who shall be nameless, what are those other mottoes glowing above the caves of hell in that fiery alphabet used by the fiends?’

One kind of poet only is, it seems, of the race of Israfel—the parable-poet—the poet to whom truth comes, not in any way as reasoned conclusions, not even as golden gnomes, but comes symbolized in concrete shapes of vital beauty; the poet in whose work the poetic form is so part and parcel of the ethical lesson which vitalizes it that this ethical lesson seems not to give birth to the music and the colour of the poem, but to be itself born of the sweet marriage of these, and to be as inseparable from them as the ‘morning breath’ of the Sabæan rose is inalienable from the innermost petals—‘the subtle odour of the rose’s heart,’ which no mere chemistry of man, but only the morning breeze, can steal.”

“There is not, in the whole of modern history, a more suggestive subject than that of the persistent attempts of every Western literature to versify the Psalms in its own idiom, and the uniform failure of these attempts.  At the time that Sternhold was ‘bringing’ the Psalms into ‘fine Englysh meter’ for Henry the Eighth and Edward the Sixth, continental rhymers were busy at the same kind of work for their own monarchs—notably Clement Marot for Francis the First.  And it has been going on ever since, without a single protest of any importance having been entered against it.  This is astonishing, for the Bible, even from the point of view of the literary critic, is a sacred book.  Perhaps the time for entering such a protest is come, and a literary journal may be its proper medium.

In Psalmody, then, Scottish taste and French are both bad, from the English point of view; but then the English, having Hopkins in various incarnations, are fastidious.

When Lord Macaulay’s tiresome New Zealander has done contemplating the ruins of London Bridge, and turned in to the deserted British Museum to study us through our books—what volume can he take as the representative one—what book, above all others, can the ghostly librarian select to give him the truest, the profoundest insight into the character of the strange people who had made such a great figure in the earth?  We, for our part, should not hesitate to give him the English Book of Common Prayer, with the authorized version of the Psalms at the end, as representing the British mind in its most exalted and its most abject phases.  That in the same volume can be found side by side the beauty and pathos of the English Litany, the grandeur of the English version of the Psalms and the effusions of Brady and Tate—masters of the art of sinking compared with whom Rous is an inspired bard—would be adequate evidence that the Church using it must be a British Church—that British, most British, must be the public tolerating it.

‘By thine agony and bloody Sweat; by thy Cross and Passion; by thy Precious Death and Burial; by thy glorious Resurrection and Ascension; and by the coming of the Holy Ghost, God Lord, deliver us.’

When we, our wearied limbs to rest,
   Sat down by proud Euphrates’ stream,
We wept, with doleful thoughts opprest,
   And Zion was our mournful theme.

Among all the peoples of the earth there is but one that could have thus degraded the words: ‘By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion.’  For, to achieve such platitude there is necessary an element which can only be called the ‘Hopkins element,’ an element which is quite an insular birthright of ours, a characteristic which came over with the ‘White Horse,’—that ‘dull and greasy coarseness of taste’ which distinguishes the British mind from all others; that ‘ächtbrittische Beschränktheit,’ which Heine speaks of in his tender way.  The Scottish version is rough, but Brady and Tate’s inanities are worse than Rous’s roughness.

The Great Style is far more easily recognized than defined.  To define any kind of style, indeed, we must turn to real life.  When we say of an individual in real life that he or she has style, we mean that the individual gives us an impression of unconscious power or unconscious grace, as distinguished from that conscious power or conscious grace which we call manner.  The difference is fundamental.  It is the same in literature; style is unconscious power or grace—manner is conscious power or grace.  But the Great Style, both in literature and in life, is unconscious power and unconscious grace in one.

Of Teutonic graceless unconsciousness, the Anglo-Saxons have by far the largest endowment.  They wanted another element, in short, not the Hellenic element; for there never was a greater mistake than that of supposing that Hellenism can be engrafted on Teutonism and live; as Landor and Mr. Matthew Arnold—two of the finest and most delicate minds of modern times—can testify.

Then, as to the form of literature adopted in the translation, what must that be?  Evidently it must be some kind of form which can do all the high work that is generally left to metrical language, and yet must be free from any soupçon of that ‘artifice,’ in the ‘abandonment’ of which, says an Arabian historian, ‘true art alone lies.’  For, this is most noteworthy, that of literature as an art, the Semites show but small conception, even in Job.  It was too sacred for that—drama and epic in the Aryan sense were alike unknown.