Letters on Literature | Page 3

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This etext was prepared from the 1892 Longmans, Green and Co.
edition by David Price, email [email protected]

Letters on Literature

Contents:
Introductory: Of Modern English Poetry Of Modern English Poetry
Fielding Longfellow A Friend of Keats On Virgil Aucassin and
Nicolette Plotinus (A.D. 200-262) Lucretius To a Young American
Book-Hunter Rochefoucauld Of Vers de Societe On Vers de Societe
Richardson Gerard de Nerval On Books About Red Men Appendix I
Appendix II

DEDICATION

Dear Mr. Way,

After so many letters to people who never existed, may I venture a
short one, to a person very real to me, though I have never seen him,
and only know him by his many kindnesses? Perhaps you will add
another to these by accepting the Dedication of a little work, of a sort
experimental in English, and in prose, though Horace--in Latin and in
verse--was successful with it long ago?
Very sincerely yours,
A. LANG.
To W. J. Way, Esq. Topeka, Kansas.

PREFACE

These Letters were originally published in the Independent of New
York. The idea of writing them occurred to the author after he had
produced "Letters to Dead Authors." That kind of Epistle was open to
the objection that nobody would write so frankly to a correspondent
about his own work, and yet it seemed that the form of Letters might be
attempted again. The Lettres e Emilie sur la Mythologie are a
well-known model, but Emilie was not an imaginary correspondent.
The persons addressed here, on the other hand, are all people of
fancy--the name of Lady Violet Lebas is an invention of Mr.
Thackeray's: gifted Hopkins is the minor poet in Dr. Oliver Wendell
Holmes's "Guardian Angel." The author's object has been to discuss a
few literary topics with more freedom and personal bias than might be
permitted in a graver kind of essay. The Letter on Samuel Richardson
is by a lady more frequently the author's critic than his collaborator.

INTRODUCTORY: OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY

To Mr. Arthur Wincott, Topeka, Kansas.
Dear Wincott,--You write to me, from your "bright home in the setting
sun," with the flattering information that you have read my poor
"Letters to Dead Authors." You are kind enough to say that you wish I
would write some "Letters to Living Authors;" but that, I fear, is out of
the question,--for me.
A thoughtful critic in the Spectator has already remarked that the great
men of the past would not care for my shadowy epistles--if they could

read them. Possibly not; but, like Prior, "I may write till they can
spell"--an exercise of which ghosts are probably as incapable as was
Matt's little Mistress of Quality. But Living Authors are very different
people, and it would be perilous, as well as impertinent, to direct one's
comments on them literally, in the French phrase, "to their address."
Yet there is no reason why a critic should not adopt the epistolary form.
Our old English essays, the papers in the Tatler and Spectator, were
originally nothing but letters. The vehicle permits a touch of personal
taste, perhaps of personal prejudice. So I shall write my "Letters on
Literature," of the present and of the past, English, American, ancient,
or modern, to you, in your distant Kansas, or to such other
correspondents as are kind enough to read these notes.
Poetry has always the precedence in these discussions. Poor Poetry!
She is an ancient maiden of good family, and is led out first at banquets,
though many would prefer to sit next some livelier and younger Muse,
the lady of fiction, or even the chattering soubrette of journalism.
Seniores priores: Poetry, if no longer very popular, is a dame of the
worthiest lineage, and can boast a long train of gallant admirers, dead
and gone. She