Familiar Studies of Men Books | Page 4

has time to
represent his subject. The side selected will either be the one most

striking to himself, or the one most obscured by controversy; and in
both cases that will be the one most liable to strained and sophisticated
reading. In a biography, this and that is displayed; the hero is seen at
home, playing the flute; the different tendencies of his work come, one
after another, into notice; and thus something like a true, general
impression of the subject may at last be struck. But in the short study,
the writer, having seized his "point of view," must keep his eye steadily
to that. He seeks, perhaps, rather to differentiate than truly to
characterise. The proportions of the sitter must be sacrificed to the
proportions of the portrait; the lights are heightened, the shadows
overcharged; the chosen expression, continually forced, may
degenerate at length into a grimace; and we have at best something of a
caricature, at worst a calumny. Hence, if they be readable at all, and
hang together by their own ends, the peculiar convincing force of these
brief representations. They take so little a while to read, and yet in that
little while the subject is so repeatedly introduced in the same light and
with the same expression, that, by sheer force of repetition, that view is
imposed upon the reader. The two English masters of the style,
Macaulay and Carlyle, largely exemplify its dangers. Carlyle, indeed,
had so much more depth and knowledge of the heart, his portraits of
mankind are felt and rendered with so much more poetic
comprehension, and he, like his favourite Ram Dass, had a fire in his
belly so much more hotly burning than the patent reading lamp by
which Macaulay studied, that it seems at first sight hardly fair to
bracket them together. But the "point of view" was imposed by Carlyle
on the men he judged of in his writings with an austerity not only cruel
but almost stupid. They are too often broken outright on the
Procrustean bed; they are probably always disfigured. The rhetorical
artifice of Macaulay is easily spied; it will take longer to appreciate the
moral bias of Carlyle. So with all writers who insist on forcing some
significance from all that comes before them; and the writer of short
studies is bound, by the necessity of the case, to write entirely in that
spirit. What he cannot vivify he should omit.
Had it been possible to rewrite some of these papers, I hope I should
have had the courage to attempt it. But it is not possible. Short studies
are, or should be, things woven like a carpet, from which it is
impossible to detach a strand. What is perverted has its place there for

ever, as a part of the technical means by which what is right has been
presented. It is only possible to write another study, and then, with a
new "point of view," would follow new perversions and perhaps a fresh
caricature. Hence, it will be, at least, honest to offer a few grains of salt
to be taken with the text; and as some words of apology, addition,
correction, or amplification fall to be said on almost every study in the
volume, it will be most simple to run them over in their order. But this
must not be taken as a propitiatory offering to the gods of shipwreck; I
trust my cargo unreservedly to the chances of the sea; and do not, by
criticising myself, seek to disarm the wrath of other and less partial
critics.
HUGO'S ROMANCES. - This is an instance of the "point of view."
The five romances studied with a different purpose might have given
different results, even with a critic so warmly interested in their favour.
The great contemporary master of wordmanship, and indeed of all
literary arts and technicalities, had not unnaturally dazzled a beginner.
But it is best to dwell on merits, for it is these that are most often
overlooked.
BURNS. - I have left the introductory sentences on Principal Shairp,
partly to explain my own paper, which was merely supplemental to his
amiable but imperfect book, partly because that book appears to me
truly misleading both as to the character and the genius of Burns. This
seems ungracious, but Mr. Shairp has himself to blame; so good a
Wordsworthian was out of character upon that stage.
This half apology apart, nothing more falls to be said except upon a
remark called forth by my study in the columns of a literary Review.
The exact terms in which that sheet disposed of Burns I cannot now
recall; but they were to this effect - that Burns was a bad man, the
impure vehicle of fine verses; and that this was