ROBERT WILLIAMS BUCHANAN (1841 - 1901)

‘Imperial Cockneydom’ - the omissions

“Here followed in the original article a description of Mr. Lang’s lecturing visit to Scotland, in which, by following certain newspaper reports and comments, I appear to have exaggerated or mistaken Mr. Lang’s utterances. I therefore suppress the passage.”

The original version of ‘Imperial Cockneydom’ was published in The Universal Review of May, 1889 and included several passages omitted in the reprint in The Coming Terror. I have placed the original article below in its entirety, but the passage about Andrew Lang is included here, along with some items from the Press:

The most daring of all the attempts to proselytise, however, has recently taken place in our own country, in that ‘land of cakes’ which lies north of the Tweed; and though it has ended disastrously, it is worth recording. Having discovered by diligent researches in Cockaigne, and by divers personal experiments, that ‘there is no God,’ or in other words that the modern idea of God is simply a result of evolution from the anthropoid ape’s fear of thunder, Mr. Andrew Lang the other day hastened back to Scotland breathless with his discovery. The people were called together; through the land of Knox and of the Covenanters ran the news—‘Our Andrew has come back frae London wi’ fearsome information—they’ve found oot down yonder that there’s nae God!’ It was an awful moment. Conceive the consternation and amazement of a God-fearing nation, informed on the highest authority (for Mr. Lang could quote the scientific Prophets) that all its great work of human freedom had been done under a delusion, under the absurd idea that there was pending over human destiny an all-powerful Lord of Hosts. Yet Mr. Lang stepped lightly on to a platform in the very heart of Scotland, was introduced by a peer of the Scottish realm, and proclaimed not only the horrible heresy, but his own accession to it! Curiously enough, his Scottish audience, instead of being angry with him, heard him out quite patiently. If Mr. Lang didn’t believe in God, they reflected, it really did not much matter. Mr. Lang didn’t believe in many other things, for Mr. Lang had become—‘a Cockney.’ ‘It’s jest this, neighbours,’ said a local critic, taking a pinch of snuff: ‘our Andrew, when all is said and done, is only imitating poor Davie Hume, who became a Cockney lang syne. We’ll jest leave Davie and Andrew and the other Cockneys to do without a God—fushionless folk like yon dinna maybe need Him—but we’ll keep Ours till we receive mair reliable information.’ And so, amid a chorus of chuckles and guffaws, the apostle Andrew returned to Cockaigne.

Andrew Lang objected to the passage in a letter to The St. James’s Gazette, of 16th May, 1889:

MR. ROBERT BUCHANAN ON NATURAL RELIGION.

BY MR. ANDREW LANG.

IN the new number of the Universal Review, Mr. Robert Buchanan alludes to a criticism of mine, on a criticism of his, which you published some weeks ago. Mr Buchanan writes the following remarkable passage, which perhaps is worth reprinting verbatim:—

     The most daring of all the attempts to proselytise, however, has recently taken place in our own country, in that “land of cakes” which lies north of the Tweed; and though it has ended disastrously, it is worth recording. Having discovered by diligent researches in Cockaigne, and by divers personal experiments, that “there is no God,” or in other words that the modern idea of God is simply a result of evolution from the anthropoid ape’s fear of thunder, Mr. Andrew Lang the other day hastened back to Scotland breathless with his discovery. The people were called together; through the land of Knox and of the Covenanters ran the news—“Our Andrew has come back frae London with fearsome information—they’ve found oot down yonder that there’s nae God!” It was an awful moment. Conceive the consternation and amazement of a God-fearing nation, informed on the highest authority (for Mr. Lang could quote the scientific Prophets) that all its great work of human freedom had been done under a delusion, under the absurd idea that there was pending over human destiny an all-powerful Lord of Hosts. Yet Mr. Lang stepped lightly on to a platform in the very heart of Scotland, was introduced by a peer of the Scottish realm, and proclaimed not only the horrible heresy, but his own accession to it! Curiously enough, his Scottish audience, instead of being angry with him, heard him out quite patiently. If Mr. Lang didn’t believe in God, they reflected, it really did not much matter.

These remarks of Mr Buchanan’s fill me, as his French grammar fills me, and as his views of Totems fill me, with respectful amazement. I lectured this spring, in Scotland, on several platforms and in several towns. I delivered the Gifford lectures at my own University—St Andrews: I lectured on “Book Collecting” at Edinburgh: and I lectured on “Religion and Progress” at Dundee. Nowhere, to the best of my knowledge and memory, was I introduced to any audience by “a peer of the Scotch realm.” Nowhere, certainly, did I proclaim the discovery “that there is no God.” It is distasteful to any man to speak of his belief in such a trivial connection as this: I shall merely remark that Mr. Buchanan does me injustice. I am not what he supposes. He adds that I have discovered that “the modern idea of God is a result of evolution from the anthropoid ape’s fear of thunder.” I cannot remember anything in my lectures which could even distantly suggest this quaint absurdity. Man may have been evolved from an ape; I know and care nothing about it, and certainly am not convinced of it. The whole gist of my lectures was to show that the Origin of Religion is unknown, is “a mystery;” that no evolutionary explanation of it is authoritative and final. Is it likely, then, that I proclaimed this crude uneducated drivel about apes and thunder! I don’t even know how apes behave in thunder. I know not whether it frightens or affects them in any way.
     Nowadays it does a man no harm to be called an atheist; and he may even get over being introduced to an audience by a Scotch peer, and being reported to deduce religion from the anxieties of a monkey in the ravages of an electric tempest. But Mr. Buchanan has been misled in some way, by the lack of intelligence or of memory in some reporter. It is of no consequence to me, and I will confess to the peer if he can be proved against me. To the other charges I cannot confess.

___

The next day’s issue of the St. James’s Gazette (17th May) contained the following comment in its review of the current issue of The Universal Review:

“... Mr. Andrew Lang has already said something about Mr. Robert Buchanan’s latest outburst. In the course of a long and, of course, rather clever article, Mr. Buchanan touches upon a good many subjects, including the Failure of Marriage, the Possibility of Chivalry, the differentiæ in New Magdalens, and the Bank Holiday Young Man again; but he returns at the end to what he started from at the beginning, the subject which always interests him, his great and unappreciated Self.”

___

Andrew Lang’s letter was reprinted in the Aberdeen Evening Express of 18th May, 1889 under the heading:

“A LITERARY QUARREL.
HOW SCOTCHMEN LOVE EACH OTHER.
ANDREW LANG AND ROBERT BUCHANAN.”

___

I also came across a later dispute between Lang and Buchanan which is referred to in this item, again from the Aberdeen Evening Express of 21st December, 1891:

     THERE are some exceedingly smart men who think there is no room for difference of opinion on questions of literary and artistic criticism. Mr Robert Buchanan, notwithstanding all his experience of the world, is one of these. Recently he indulged in vigorous condemnation of Mr Andrew Lang, because that gentleman had eulogised Sir Walter Scott at the expense of Lord Byron. Mr Lang has now replied, and he contends, on the authority of Aristotle, that in artistic matters there is no standard but the man of exquisite taste. This position is perfectly sound, but it does not advance the matter much. Mr Robert Buchanan is doubtless of opinion that he is the one man of exquisite taste now living in the United Kingdom; and it will not be surprising to learn that Mr Lang is personally impressed with the view that he might justly claim the same monopoly. Men of common sense will, however, frankly admit that it is possible to differ as to the respective claims of Scott and Byron without being put out of Court as competent literary critics. There is no necessity for uniformity of opinion. The great point is that each critic should be able to give an intelligible reason for the faith that is in him. Mr Robert Buchanan is at perfect liberty to put Byron above Scott in the literary hierarchy; but he writes himself down narrow-minded and illiberal when he seeks to censure Mr Lang for holding a different opinion.

Back to The Coming Terror: ‘Imperial Cockneydom’.

_____

This is the original version of ‘Imperial Cockneydom’ which was partly a rejoinder to George Moore’s article in Truth (4 April, 1889) ‘Is Buchanan Still Possible?’, which was a response to Buchanan’s article, ‘The Modern Young Man As Critic’ (Universal Review, March, 1889) and his letter to The Daily Telegraph, ‘Is Chivalry Still Possible?’. George Moore then replied to ‘Imperial Cockneydom’ with ‘No! Buchanan Is Not Still Possible!’ in Truth (6 June, 1889).

The Universal Review (May, 1889 - pp.71-91)

Imperial Cockneydom

A REJOINDER TO CRITICS ¹

FOR an article by the writer who still lives, I am glad to find, to subscribe himself ‘A. K. H. B.,’ ‘On certain Terms of Opprobrium’ would be a felicitous title. Perhaps the most notorious manufacturer of such terms was Carlyle, following close in the wake of Goethe; but the late Mr. Arnold ran him very hard, inventing many catch-words and nicknames which have passed in the current vocabulary of journalism. For example, every one who did not agree with Mr. Arnold, or who called a spade a spade, was a ‘Philistine,’ and every one who emulated him in the suppression of vitality possessed ‘sweetness and light.’ ‘Anthropomorphism’ is another epithet, much in vogue with those writers who dislike the idea of a Personal God; it was invented for us, I fancy, by Professor Tyndall. Well, an epithet, be it opprobrious or complimentary, is to be valued in proportion to its aptness and suitably. Of course, such terms are coarse and trivial enough; and need abundant qualification. Most living writers have at one time and another, when uttering some disagreeable truth, been called ‘Philistines.’ Some of them, too, have been called ‘provincial’—a term which has its antithesis in the other magnificent term ‘Cockney,’ invented by Professor Wilson, but applied with singular infelicity to the school of Keats and Leigh Hunt. In the present article I purpose to appropriate this term, and for the first time, I believe, to apply it

—    ¹ See ‘The Modern Young Man as critic,’ UNIVERSAL REVIEW, March 15. —

⁷² properly. For as I have suggested, a term or a nickname, to possess any force and durability, must be felicitous. When Mr. Edmund Yates called me a ‘scrofulous Scotch poet,’ the words were savage enough, but they somehow missed the mark, for my sanitary or literary troubles have never affected my blood or my epidermis, and I can lay no claim to the honour of Scottish nationality, having been born in Staffordshire. But when Mr. Andrew Lang, in view of certain expressions in a recent article, calls me ‘provincial,’ the epithet has meaning. I am very provincial, as I purpose to show, while showing, at the same time, that Mr. Andrew Lang, though Scottish by birth, is a Cockney of Cockneys. For to be a Cockney, it is not after all necessary to be born within the sound of Bow Bells; the word implies, not a nationality, but a temperament, an environment, and a habit of mind. Charles Lamb was a Cockney in the best and finest sense of the word; Hazlitt and Gifford were Cockneys in its worst and earthiest sense. The true Cockney, like the true Parisian, regards his own City as the Centre of the Universe; his own outlook as the one outlook on life and literature; his own taste as the only taste to appreciate what is pleasant and what is beautiful; his own little pool of thought and feeling as the one Ocean where a man-tadpole can comfortably push about. There has never been a great, there have been shrewd and sagacious and delightful Cockneys: the type rises as high as Dr. Johnson, and sinks as low as ‘Mr. Gigadibs.’ The true ‘provincial,’ on the other hand, is considerably sceptical as to the centralisation of all thought and feeling, all brilliance and all activity, in any particular City, although, if he sinks very low, he may rather incline to the opinion that the centralisation should take place in Birmingham, or Glasgow, or Stoke Poges, or Kilmarnock! He has no particular bias towards any form of life or literature. For the narrowness of personal taste, he substitutes the breadth of ideal principles, and is guided by those principles. He moves about this merry England, about the waters of the world, with a full consciousness of his own insignificance, yet with no disposition to take minnows and tadpoles for leviathans or even bottle-nosed whales. He, in a word, is free. Shakespeare and Milton, Wordsworth and Byron, were glorified provincials. In the great periods of literature the men of light and leading have been provincials always. In the little periods, e.g. those of the Georges and Queen Anne, the victorious writers have generally been Cockney to the marrow. But Richardson was a true Provincial, and so, thank heaven, was Harry Fielding.

     Are we getting near to a definition? If not, we may get quite close ⁷³ to it as we go on, and furnish contemporary illustrations. It is, by the way, a very certain sign of provincialism to say severe things of any contemporary, more particularly if he is a Cockney. The Cockney way, the way of ‘sweetness and light,’ is to take one’s stand apart, to say nothing personal, but to depreciate by complacent innuendo, and at any rate, if fighting has to be done, to do it in kid gloves. Then, says the Cockney, if you must attack, instead of taking your cakes and ale comfortably, for heaven’s sake attack only Things in General, Things which are helpless and incapable of self-defence; it is very bad taste indeed to do as Byron and Shelley did, and ‘name’ your Southeys and Castlereaghs. This, however, with a reservation. If it is merely a ‘provincial’ you have to deal with, call him what names you like. Call him, as they called Coleridge, a genius manqué. Call him, as they called Wordsworth, a ‘driveller,’ a ‘Lakist.’ Call him, as they called Christopher North, ‘that damn’d Scotchman!’ The whole vocabulary is at your service. Call him, if at a loss for an adjective, a ‘scrofulous’ Scotch, or Irish, or Manx, poet. And then, should the poor provincial retaliate, you are still free to hold up your hands and exclaim, ‘How provincial! how ill-bred! how barbarous!’ Your strong point is that the world in general still confounds the Cockney with the Londoner, and when the Cockney utters his fiat, is ready to accept it as representative of the great Centre of Opinion. ¹ You are localised for the time being, you build your little nest, in the Temple of all the Sciences and all the Arts, London; and so, if you are noisy enough, the sound you make may seem, not the caw of the jackdaw, but the voice of the Oracle.

     Let us understand, clearly, however, what we mean by Cockneydom. It by no means follows, as I have suggested, that a Londoner is necessarily a Cockney. Your true Londoner, like your true American, is cosmopolitan; he is fortunately very numerous, and may still be found writing books, painting pictures, editing newspapers. In many cases, indeed, he is merely a transplanted provincial; in journalism especially, the strength, the vigour, and intellectual capacity is constantly supplied from the provinces; and because journalists are for the most part not

—    ¹ On the other side of the Channel, it is still the highest possible compliment to call a man or an author ‘a true Parisian of the  Parisians.’ Admiration even went so far as to apply the compliment to Balzac and (mirabile dictu!) Victor Hugo. But though Hugo himself said that Paris was France, and France was the centre of the Universe, every line he wrote under inspiration rebuked the absurdity. We are learning just now what to be a ‘true Parisian’ means in literature; it means simply to be a boulevardier. A similar lesson is being taught us, here in England, as to the true meaning of the word ‘Cockney,’ though Cockneydom, of course, works by stealth towards imperialisation, instead of vaunting it grandiloquently. —

⁷⁴ Cockneys, but liberal men of the world, much of our criticism is broad, generous, and fair. Cockneydom is to Cosmopolitanism what the Gironde was to Jacobinism. Its philosophy is epicurean, its humour is persiflage, its poetry is vers de société, and its wisdom is the wisdom of the clubs. Within its own little sphere it is triumphant, because it suits well the temperament of men thoughtless by disposition and busy in occupation. It has its libraries, its theatres, its journals. It exchanges for a provincial worship of Truth and Beauty, a lightsome admiration for the Pretty, the Elegant, the Comme il faut. It quite objects to take life seriously. It regards Thought itself as an almost disturbing influence. It occupies itself with the manners of accomplished men and the nuances of well-dressed women. A glorified Cockney is a sort of literary or artistic ‘buck’ of the period, exhibiting himself in the salon or the theatre, showing to ordinary people the pink of manners, and accepting with easy complacence life as it really is—in London clubs. He has seen the sea at Scarborough and Margate, and he has seen the mountains from the door of an hotel in Switzerland. As the degenerate Roman copied the elegancies of moribund Greece, the Cockney frequently apes the affectations of honeycombed France. He usually has the light literature of Paris at his fingers’ ends.

     And what has this glorified Being to tell us? About manners, much; about those questions which determine the thoughts and feelings of aspiring men, nothing. His inclinations are lightsome and practical, and his injunction upon us is that, since Life and Religion and Philosophy are all a muddle, it is best to exist comfortably, to ask no more of Providence than a good dinner, a cheerful friend, a pleasant, well-printed book, a picture or two, a newspaper, and a charming woman to flirt with upon occasion. His motto is laissez aller. Pessimist and epicurean in one, he regards all conduct that is not ill-bred with equal sympathy; with a ‘one thing is as good as another’ sort of criticism, forbearing in appearance if fundamentally heartless. Great deeds and great thoughts have no real interest for him, but he has a cultivated appreciation of them on the æsthetic side.‘For heaven’s sake,’ he says to us, ‘be calm! Things may be very bad indeed, society may be rotten to the core, London may be a warren of the poor and wretched, but all this is really not worth troubling about; it will so soon be over! To excite yourself over the loss of a Religion is like crying childishly over the breaking of a toy. To protest against public nuisances is to make yourself a nuisance.The most disinterested Man that ever lived, the Man who your teachers tell you was Divine, has been a puritanical 75 Bore for nearly two thousand years, and his preaching and prosing has all come to—nothing! You can’t make the world better. You can’t keep the monkey-blood out of humanity. You can always find a piano, or a flower, or a set of verses, or a bit of scandal, or a pretty woman; all of which make life gladsome. And when it is all over, when the lute is unstrung and the golden bowl is broken, you can at least go comfortably to sleep!’

     I am obliged, in this connection, to proclaim my belief that the man who, more than anyone who ever lived, wrote most about the metropolis, was not a Cockney. The greatest of all humourists, Charles Dickens, whom the true Cockney is so fond of quoting and yet underrating, was awfully and hopelessly provincial, and was frequently reproached for the fact by the Saturday Review. An idealist and a dreamer, he found in this Great City, not Cockneydom, but Fairyland, and he was never tired of wondering at its piteous oddity and delightful quiddity. Now a Cockney sees nothing of all this, though it is all so near to him. Wordsworth had to come up from Cumberland, at the very time when every clique and coterie voted him an utter failure, and when every Cockney literary man professed total ignorance of and contempt for his works, before the world could realize the beauty and solemnity of the Dawn seen from Westminster Bridge—

Dear Lord, the very houses seem asleep,
And all that Mighty Heart is lying still!

That Mighty Heart! which sends no pulsation whatever through the veins of the contingent poetaster. Why, it required even a poor Glasgow poet, whom the Cockneys first welcomed and then stoned and killed, to produce even the fine lines—describing London as:

The terrible City, whose neglect is Death,
Whose smile is Fame!

     That Mighty Heart! The Terrible City! How felicitous, and yet how provincial! No Cockney has ever yet expressed in literature the mystery and the awfulness of this London in the shallows of which he sports. A fine old Cockney once attempted it, and was told by his friends that he was a great poet; and indeed if all Cockneys were like that honest, purblind, pertinacious, prosaist, Samuel Johnson, how we should adore the breed! But in those days a Cockney had not discovered that ‘there is no God,’ and that life means comfortableness and prettiness. ⁷⁶ He had only begun by discovering that the world is Fleet Street, and that it is merry to hear the chimes at midnight. The rest has followed in the usual way of Evolution.

     The great Cockney organ of opinion was once the Quarterly Review. Many years ago the standard of revolt was raised in Edinburgh by the Whigs, and the Edinburgh Review was started; but a very short time sufficed to show that this was, after all, a Cockney organ too. Gifford and Jeffrey were both arrant Cockneys. They cackled endless praises to Byron because he was a lord, but there was not a stainless reputation, not one flower of original genius, they did not pollute and try to kill. In their dotage, the good old Quarterlies, once the watchmen of our literature, survive still, but amid universal neglect or derision, as things far too slow for the times. Poor old Dogberry and Verges! Lanthorn and clapper in hand they pop out of their pigeon-boxes, and months after the henroost is robbed and the house burned down, utter their wheezy cries of ‘Fox’ or ‘Fire.’ And they are still Cockney to the marrow; still cheerfully unconscious that the world is moving, still ready to aim their paralytic blows at ‘Deformed’ and other malefactors.Only yesterday, Dogberry told us that Mr. John Morley was the inheritor of the character and temperament of—Rousseau! The good old man had somehow muddled Rousseau with ‘Deformed,’ and was quite unconscious that he was comparing an inspired Deist, the one writer who kept the soul of men aflame when Rationalism had almost blown it out, with a belated Hume whose mind had been nurtured on the gospel of the Hall of Science, who prints God with a small ‘g,’ and who had descended from the azure of the Savoyard Vicar’s prayer into the atmosphere of the platform. Only the other day, the same asthmatic authority told us that Lord Tennyson was ‘no poet.’

     For Cockneydom to speak in the name of London, then, is a preposterous impertinence. The chirp of the sparrows which nest in the ear of a stone Colossus is not likely to be mistaken for the voice of the giant. Fortunately for free thought, for literature, for art, for science, London remains cosmopolitan. The great journals, with few exceptions, are broad and eclectic. The best writers for the press are men of the world, many-sided, many-minded, free from the prejudices of clique or class. The most popular actor of the day, Mr. Irving, is so sublimely ‘provincial’ as to believe, in the very teeth of the Cockneydom which never ceases to decry him, in the ideal side of the drama. The most widely read dramatic critic of London is one who never tires of ⁷⁷ reiterating his belief in the great verities of morality and religion; and his contemporaries, with notorious exceptions, are sagacious, generous men, with similar ideals. Only very low down in the intellectual scale is heard the clamour of the cliques, the voice of eager Cockneydom. It is represented among critical journals by the dreary journal owned and often inspired by Sir Charles Dilke, by the moribund Saturday Review, and by numberless petty newspapers written for Cockney ‘sports.’ Cockney men about town, and Cockney prize-fighters. These publications would do little or no harm if they were not often accepted outside London as organs of metropolitan opinion. Every cultivated man, in and out of London, knows what to think of Truth and the other Cockney journals of society; they make no pretence to either talent or intelligence, and they are discredited by their own back-kitchen functions. But in the case of a newspaper like the Athenæum, which covers a supreme flippancy with a veneer of pseudo-sagacity and solidity, people are not so instructed. It is still accepted by simple people in the country as a critical organ. It is still read behind the country booksellers’ counter, while the Saturday Review is being studied by the sexton of the parish. And Cockneydom, as represented in its journals, is both noisy and pertinacious. By the ‘Dignity’ of the Great City barks the ‘Impudence’ of the dilettante, calling up recollections of Landseer’s famous picture.

     If this article were political I might proceed to point out the Cockney statesman and the Cockney publicist. My readers, however, know them well, and so I need not particularise, save to say that they have more than once imperilled the honour and threatened the ruin of their country. A thoroughly provincial politician, however, may be quoted in the form of the late Mr. Bright, who was abused throughout his whole career for his anti-Cockney proclivities, who never feared to speak his mind, and who was guided from first to last by solid principles. It may be remarked here, in this connection, that on great public questions involving the progress of humanity and the rights of minorities, Cockneydom is nearly always on the wrong side, and generally the last to be converted. It was a great Cockney organ, the Times, which steadily upheld the South almost to the bitter end, when all sane men saw the inevitable issue of the conflict between Nationality and barbaric Revolt in the United States of America. In Cockneydom alone, the god St. Jingo has found idolaters. Mere provincials have passed him by with contempt or indifference, and turned from the clash of cymbals and the battle-cry of eunuchs to the teachings of wisdom and the humanitarian sentiment of virile men.

     ⁷⁸ Yet Cockneydom, not content with metropolitan or even national triumphs, hungers to become imperial, to possess, like Great Britain, an empire on which the sun never sets. For example, so far as current literature is concerned, its missionaries have completely converted, while its central powers have complacently annexed, the distant city of Boston. Mr. Henry James has become a Cockney. So has Mr. Howells, while avowing his contempt for Dickens. Through the cult of Cockneydom, spreading through mysterious channels of journalism, people yonder are beginning to think dubiously about those good old Puritan fathers, Whittier, Emerson, and Longfellow, and to welcome with complacence the dii minores of the Savile Club! In New York, and as far away as Chicago, Cockneydom spreads its propaganda; so effectually, indeed, that young men have given no ear to the ‘barbaric yawp’ of Whitman, know not even the name of Hermann Melville, ¹ and have found little fascination in the Idylls of Dudley Warner or Charles Warren Stoddard. Of course, I know Americans too well to believe that the Gospel according to Cockneydom, expressed in easy essayism and patter-versification, will ever do for them. It fills certain of their magazines, but to these, in reality, they pay no serious attention. Omnivorous readers, they devour everything; free cosmopolitans, they accept in a friendly way even Cockney missionaries; but as the future masters of the world, they are certain never to be annexed en masse. Nearer home, at Paris, imperial Cockneydom is likely to be more successful. Very busy there has been the good apostle, James, and we find the Cockneys of Paris dedicating books to him and writing articles about Cockneydom in the Revue des Deux Mondes. My acquaintance with the missionary reports of the new religion is not intimate enough to enable me to say whether any Cockneys have been converted in Tasmania or New South Wales; but I met a Parsee the other day who confided to me his belief that all religions except Epicureanism were equally nonsensical, and that the greatest of English poets was Mr. Austin Dobson. The most daring of all the attempts to proselytise, however, has recently taken place in our own country, in that ‘land of cakes’ which lies north of the Tweed; and though it has ended disastrously, it is worth recording. Having discovered by diligent researches in Cockaigne, and by divers personal experiments, that ‘there is no God,’ or in other words that the modern

—    * When I went to America my very first inquiry was concerning the author of ‘Typee,’ ‘Omoo,’ and ‘The White Whale.’ There was some slight evidence that he was ‘alive,’ and I heard from Mr. E. C. Stedman, who seemed much astonished at my interest in the subject, that Melville was dwelling ‘somewhere in New York,’ having resolved, on account of the public neglect of his works, never to write another line. Conceive this Titan silenced, and the bookstalls flooded with the illustrated magazines. —

⁷⁹ idea of God is simply a result of evolution from the anthropoid ape’s fear of thunder, Mr. Andrew Lang the other day hastened back to Scotland breathless with his discovery. The people were called together; through the land of Knox and of the Covenanters ran the news—‘Our Andrew has come back frae London wi’ fearsome information—they’ve found oot down yonder that there’s nae God!’ It was an awful moment. Conceive the consternation and amazement of a God-fearing nation, informed on the highest authority (for Mr. Lang could quote the scientific Prophets) that all its great work of human freedom had been done under a delusion, under the absurd idea that there was pending over human destiny an all-powerful Lord of Hosts. Yet Mr. Lang stepped lightly on to a platform in the very heart of Scotland, was introduced by a peer of the Scottish realm, and proclaimed not only the horrible heresy, but his own accession to it! Curiously enough, his Scottish audience, instead of being angry with him, heard him out quite patiently. If Mr. Lang didn’t believe in God, they reflected, it really did not much matter. Mr. Lang didn’t believe in many other  things, for Mr. Lang had become—‘a Cockney.’ ‘It’s jest this, neighbours,’ said a local critic, taking a pinch of snuff: ‘our Andrew, when all is said and done, is only imitating poor Davie Hume, who became a Cockney lang syne. We’ll jest leave Davie and Andrew and the other Cockneys to do without a God—fushionless folk like yon dinna maybe need Him—but we’ll keep Ours till we receive mair reliable information.’ And so, amid a chorus of chuckles and guffaws, the apostle Andrew returned to Cockaigne.

     My article on the Modern Young Man as Critic has at least done something. It has drawn this same Mr. Andrew Lang from the obscurity of his club and the anonymous sanctities of his daily and weekly journals. With well-bred bitterness, with volcanic calm, he chides me (in the St. James’s Gazette) for ‘discourtesy,’ for (in House of Commons fashion) ‘naming’ particular offenders. He knows—no man knows better—that the covert sneer, the lifted shoulder, the smug innuendo, the depreciating smile, are far more à la mode than plain speaking and rushing into print. The former, however, has never been my method of warfare; I leave it to the cheery pessimists, and the prophets of modern materialism. I call a spade a spade with the Philistines, and a Cockney a Cockney with the provincials. For Mr. Andrew Lang personally I have no little respect. He is a gentleman and a scholar, and at certain moments, when he forgets his newspaper and his club, a poet. I have still ringing in my ears certain lines of his ⁸⁰ about the ‘Iliad’ and the ‘Odyssey’—lines full of the swing of the early periods of literature. Yet I am going to arraign him on the very score of his natural abilities and literary gifts. ‘Sir,’ I say to him, after the manner of a certain famous justice of the peace, ‘you are clever, well-educated, able-bodied, intellectual, instead of which you go about disguised as a Cockney.’ I blame him not, as others have blamed him, for now and then showing the courage of his opinions. I am with him even when he vindicates the ‘imagination’ of Mr. Rider Haggard, and holds that one gleam of creative power atones for a host of small technical imperfections. Never, in my wildest moments, should I condemn him for his occasional courage. My charge against him, if proven, would rather convict him of constitutional literary cowardice, of chronic anxiety to keep out of brawls and take things ‘easy,’ of urbane freedom from anything like real enthusiasm—in a word, of a desire, at the hazard of all disingenuous suppressions, to ‘get comfortably along.’ Even now, I apologise with all my heart for disturbing him in his pet studies of linguistic ‘origins’ and the manners of primeval Man. But he is a journalist as well as a scholar, a clubman as well as a student, and in a moment of distraction he has put on his ‘war-paint’ and fingered his tomahawk. ‘Is this a free fight?’ asked the pugnacious American. Quite free; and it is indeed a pleasure to find that Mr. Andrew Lang, not content with indulging in cynical ‘asides’ in the Daily News and elsewhere, has stepped out, armed at all points, to join the fray.

     But before I join issue with Mr. Lang on these matters, let me refer to one or two points of his criticism of my article. I may pass on one side his suggestion that the same charge as mine was brought against the young men of the last generation; that is a suggestion easily met by a reference to the literature of the eighteen-sixties. His first serious assumption is that I ought not to have ‘mentioned individuals,’ or have ‘called them names.’ My reply to that has been given; my charge was specific, not general. Mr. Lang goes on to say that about several of the gentlemen I denounce one ‘may easily be silent,’ as ‘it is not given to every one to keep up with current literature.’ Very characteristic this, as we shall find later on, of an author who, more than most of us, watches every swirl and current of the literary tide. Of course Mr. Lang knows these gentlemen as well as I do, but they do not belong to his ‘set,’ and he has no particular call to defend them. He then goes on to say that M. Bourget, though he may be a ridiculus mus, can ‘interest us, in spite of everything’; and he adds, lightly, that ‘M. Bourget has “done a murder very well indeed, with pleasing circumstances of good ⁸¹ taste.”’ Here again is characteristic levity in dealing with a serious accusation. Mr. Lang then defends Mr. James, and vows that he has written at least four admirable novels. I do not think that I denied Mr. James’s cleverness; I said indeed that he was very clever. My charge was that he was superfined to the point of indetermination, that he became feeble from supreme good taste and overweening catholicity. My critic, then, with growing irritation, refers to Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, a valuable reference, as we shall see. I called Mr. Stevenson ‘a hard-bound genius in posse;’ by which I meant that he was a genius who had never expressed himself in creative work, although Mr. Lang and his friends have attached noisy importance to every one of his promising flights in literature. Mr. Lang refers me triumphantly to ‘Kidnapped’ and ‘Treasure Island,’ two excellent books for boys, and (as a proof that this cannot be the period when ‘all young men never have dreamed a dream or been children’ ¹ ) to ‘A Child’s Garden of Verse.’ I am loath to say one word in deprecation of the praise Mr. Stevenson has received from his contemporaries; personally, he deserves it all for modest gentleness and persistent work; and the exaggeration of his performances would matter little if every such exaggeration did not mean the neglect of young writers at least equally deserving. The late Mr. Jefferies, who was a genius in esse, had to die miserably before the fact of his genius was discovered; and for every word of praise he gained, Mr. Stevenson received a thousand. Mr. Lang, in his reckless light-heartedness, has actually talked of the author of ‘Treasure Island’ in the same day with Walter Scott, but he has refrained from informing the reader of such trifling matters as the bodily theft of the young writer’s leading character, the one striking character in the book, viz., the blind man, out of the pages of ‘Barnaby Rudge.’ For the rest, ‘Treasure  Island,’ excellent as it is, is a story of ‘reminiscences’ of better stories; at its best, it is worthy (though that, indeed, is no little honour) of Mr. R. M. Ballantyne; but work so trivial can never justify the serious language used concerning it by nepotic criticism. The ‘Child’s Garland of Verse‘ is another matter; as poor and made-up a matter, from any child’s point of view as one can well conceive; and yet it has been treated as the work of a poet. The late James Thomson, who died miserable and neglected only a little while ago in the casual ward of a London hospital, and who wrote poetry which will live, would never have died, perhaps, so miserably, if he had received one modicum of the encouragement vouchsafed to Mr. Stevenson. Mr. Lang goes on to say that the value of my criticism may be estimated by my casual references to writers of another age, and of more settled reputation. I call

—    ¹ Of course I said nothing of the kind.—

⁸² Théophile Gautier ‘insufferable’—Théophile, ‘the joy of youth.’ Heaven help the youth of whom this extraordinary stylist, who treats the flesh like a pork butcher, and makes love like a cony of the burrows, is to be the joy! Since Mr. Lang has faith in the ‘golden book of spirit and sense, the Holy Writ of Beauty,’ I leave him to his religion; it is worthy of one who informs us elsewhere that God was born when the first anthropoid ape heard it ‘thunder,’ and so began to ‘wonder,’ and so on. Again, I have said that Zola is a dullard au fond; and so I hold him to be in spite of all his genius (which I was among the very first to praise), and so I hold every man to be who believes, au fond, that baseness and bestiality predominate in human life and character. I called this pessimism ‘dulness,’ and sought no harsher term. Lastly, I have styled Ibsen a ‘totem-god,’ and said that the late Mr. Arnold, in the definition of poetry as a ‘criticism of life,’ committed poetical suicide. Mr. Lang, learned in theology and anthropology, laughs at the idea of ‘a human totem-god;’ well, if he turns to L’Homme qui Rit, he will read at any rate of certain mutilated children, who were afterwards worshipped and exhibited for their very deformity. A criticism of Mr. Arnold as a poet would be out of place here. What I said of him dead, I said long ago of him living. He was a poet when he wrote ‘Thyrsis ‘ and ‘The Strayed Reveller.’ He was no longer a poet when he perpetrated his verses in unrhymed Heinesque; when he compared the receding tide at Dover to the receding Sea of Faith, and could find nothing better to say of a sublime Humourist than that ‘the World smiled, and the smile was Heine.’ This may be criticism of life, but it is neither poetry nor even decent imagery. Au reste, Mr. Arnold forgot that Poetry, so far from being a dilettante’s opinion or ‘criticism’ of life, is the very Spirit of Life itself.

     We shall get into deep waters if we discuss, in detail, the correctness or incorrectness of my opinions on literature. They have one poor merit—they are at least my own. If Mr. Lang wishes to understand them (and no man is better able if he will try), he will learn that from my point of view literary accomplishments are nothing, and literary fame is less than nothing, when they do not imply that spiritual insight which I believe to be the one prerogative and proof of genius. I am not at all what Mr. Lang calls me, a virtuous person.I am  not at all what he implies me to be, a person who makes it a condition than any one to be worthy of admiration must agree with a certain view of life and ethics. I find the spiritual insight I demand in Herbert Spencer as well as Dr. Martineau, in Walt Whitman as well as Lord Tennyson, ⁸³ in Professor Huxley as well as Faraday, in Byron as well as the late Mr. Longfellow, in Burns as well as in Keble, in Mr. Bradlaugh as well as Mr. Gladstone. I do not find this insight in any thinker who has a retrograde, or a contemptuous, or a dilettante, view of human nature. I sit at the feet of no bogus reputation, however magnificent; worship no idols, however bedizened by criticism; follow no particular religion, and assume no particular morality.

     Let me touch now in this connection on another question directly connected with the subject of the present article. There is no charge which so seriously affects the character of a contemporary, whether he be politician, poet, artist, or general man of letters, as that of Nepotism. Often, when proven, it has caused the fall of a great statesman; and I see no reason why it should not wreck the reputation of a small critic, or small body of critics. In literature it is a cruel crime, since it means the exaltation of mediocrity, and the perversion of the rising generation. Nepotism is the poison of which such men as Keats and Coleridge, as Richard Jefferies and James Thomson, miserably died. Read the life of Coleridge. Read the words which were written by the cliques of that great and good man up till a few months before his death, and note en passant that Blackwood’s Magazine, which labelled him at the height of his living achievement as a dotard and a driveller, honoured him on his decease a few months afterwards as the greatest of English writers. Nepotism, of course, does not kill strong men. Wordsworth, we know, survived its endless persecution. But the weak, too gentle man, the struggling writer, the genius out of tune with the times, perishes by it daily. What comfort is it to him who starves for bread, who hungers for a little praise, who saddens for a kindly word, to be told that neglect and insult are the historic credentials of originality, and that he who does not humour and pander to the Cockney cliques must be persecuted by them? So long as little men band together, Cockneydom and Nepotism will always flourish. To be outside their barriers is to be a ‘provincial.’ To be within them, at the present moment, is to be a ‘Cockney.’ We have to ask ourselves, therefore, if Cockneydom is to prevail in Literature, while it fails so miserably, as it has failed on every great occasion, in Politics, while it gains only a precarious and a doubtful victory in Art and even Science?

     It is the weak, the unknown, who suffer most by Cockneydom. If only for their sakes, it is worth inquiring how far literature is now suffering from the old disease.

⁸⁴     There appeared some little time ago in a leading monthly review an article which caused the initiated infinite amusement; so naïve, so outspoken, so fresh and yet florid, was its impudence, so specious was its pleading on behalf of the gospel of mutual admiration, that more than one reader exclaimed, ‘Nepotism is at last to be vindicated as a literary religion.’ The writer was one among a group of lighthearted and feather-brained gentlemen who had come to the conclusion that literature is not literature but high jinks, who had adopted the moral philosophy of Mr. Puff and the worldly wisdom of Mr. Dangle, and who were resolved to exchange, for the freedom of pure letters, the merry freemasonry of a social club. Working out in practice a well-known theory of the great Balzac, that a dozen bold and unscrupulous writers might easily conquer criticism and occupy all its bastions, by religiously banding together and working for each other in and out of season, these gay fellows had for at least a dozen years been working hard for a common apotheosis; and the result had almost justified the great Frenchman’s theory. True, there had been moments of peril and hesitation; heartburnings and backslidings caused by the occasional obtrusion of individual vanity and selfishness; but on the whole the spiriting had been done so cunningly and so cleverly, the anonymous system of criticism had been utilised so judiciously, that the reading public—or at least the Cockney portion of it—had been converted to the belief that England was labouring under an absolute plethora of original genius—nay, even America had been invaded and Boston itself had paraded in its newspapers and magazines the likenesses of the new gods of literature. Great little poets, great little novelists, great little essayists, great little critics and journalists, swarmed on the walls of our modern Babylon; helping each other up, praising each other’s prowess, singing each other’s songs, sharing with each other the hot ginger of ambition, and chuckling to one another over their adventurous feats of warfare. Well, it was magnificent, but it was not war at all. It was the mere skirmishing of Nepotism. It needed only one piece of sound artillery to put all the skirmishers to rout, and strangely enough, the Prophet of the new religion provided that same artillery, and by bungling turned it upon his own friends, when he recklessly opened fire from the masked battery of ‘Our Noble Selves.’ ¹

     If I were to tell in full detail the story of my own persecutions on account of a single expression of opinion the world would open its eyes . My offence was criticising a body of writers whom I believed to be

—    ¹ See the Fortnightly Review. —

[Additional Note: ‘Our Noble Selves’ by Grant Allen (The Fortnightly Review, February, 1887, pp.211-224.)]

⁸⁵ extravagantly praised, but whom I should never have attacked on literary grounds alone, if I had not, rightly or wrongly, fancied them to be offenders against the higher ideals of their generation. This article, published in the Contemporary Review, met with a mixed reception. All the puritan world (with which I had little sympathy) approved it, many artistic notabilities sympathised with it, but a noisy Cockney clique, commanding the bastions of nearly all the critical journals, resented it—and swore to avenge it. Now, it contained not one syllable which had not been expressed viva voce by men of accepted eminence, by Carlyle, by Emerson, and by others equally famous who are still living and whom I need not name. It was a hasty article, a frivolous article; in some respects, as I acknowledged afterwards, an unfair and uninstructed article; but no portion was half as violent and hasty as the normal criticisms on contemporaries of some of the writers satirised. I had, however, committed the one unpardonable sin—attacked the gods of Nepotism. Thenceforth all Nepotism was armed against me. I do not exaggerate when I say that my very life, my very means of subsistence, was threatened, and had I not been a strong man I should have been crushed and destroyed. Nearly every critical journal persistently attacked or ignored me, until the matter became so serious that it became inexpedient to publish any work under my own name. Tongue cannot tell, words cannot convey, the extent of this persecution. My very life and private character were not spared. I wrote certain novels; it was because I had ‘failed’ in literature. I wrote for the stage; it was because I had ‘failed’ in fiction. Not even Carlyle, when he was ‘cut’ by Mill because he was ‘reported’ to have made a certain little joke, suffered more torture. I, who had all my life been the friend and helper of my fellows, was described as a bitter, an envious, and a hateful person—a Tartuffian Scotchman. ¹ Yet, curiously enough, I survived. My books, my failures, were being read in every English speaking country. While the small gods of Nepotism were still avowing that I had done nothing, I had written inter alia ‘Balder the Beautiful,’ ‘The Shadow of the Sword,’ ‘God and the Man,’ ‘White Rose and Red,’ ‘St. Abe,’ and ‘The City of Dream,’—works on which I am quite content to take my stand when I am brought face to face with the shadowy Rhadamanthus, the Arch-Destroyer of Cockneys, Posterity.

     My point here is, that nine writers out of ten would have been silenced by the clamour of the cliques of Nepotism. That I was not

—    ¹ I cannot, as I have pointed out, even claim that national distinction, though I am, I am proud to say, Scotch on the paternal side. —

⁸⁶ silenced, was due to three facts—that I had always had a very low opinion of merely ‘literary’ persons, that I was a man of the world, in the habit of rubbing shoulders with all classes of people, and that, on the whole, I attached very little value to popular opinion. ‘Woe to you when the world speaks well of you,’ was a dictum echoed in my heart very constantly. I knew that to be frank, and fearless, and free, was not the way to ‘get on’ with worldlings. Above all, I never posed before my own looking-glass as a martyr, felt no self-pity, but when I received a blow took it as one I had doubtless earned. Writing for the stage was for me, I may say in this connection, a sort of moral salvation; with its Bohemianism, its rough and ready manliness, its necessity for practical good humour and friendliness, it saved me from becoming a literary ‘prig’; it made me familiar with a world which, with all its faults, is lighthearted, gladsome, and not too conceitedly ‘intellectual.’ One loves actors, when one knows them well, for their simplicity and innocence of character. The social sympathy which follows them may be (to quote one of my young men) ‘Mummer-worship,’ but it is the wise and unerring sympathy of generous human nature, which knows that for earnestness, for catholicity, and above all, for personal ‘charm,’ the heirs of Betterton and Garrick compare favourably with the followers of any profession under the sun. Perhaps, if he had not been bred a ‘mummer,’ Shakespeare would never have learned his way so easily to the intellects and the souls of men.

     It is wise, no doubt, to ‘humour one’s reputation’—a fragment of Cockney gospel which the late George Lewes was ever fond of quoting. The more varied a man’s gifts and sympathies, the more difficult is his road upward. But let any young writer, conscious of his power yet fearful of his contemporaries, only survey the history of literature, and take comfort . It is never—well, ‘hardly ever’—the man whom Cockneydom praises that rises in the end to genuine eminence, to the sad sunless aureole of Fame. Cockney Nepotism is a little chamber, hot, ill-ventilated, full of noisy chatter; but outside, is the busy storm of Life, and far above, the silence of the patient heavens. Inside, John Dennis, Hazlitt, Gifford, and Mr. Andrew Lang; outside, in the open air, Shakespeare and Milton, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Schiller and Heine, Balzac and Victor Hugo, and, whether greater or smaller, thousands more.

     Let me now turn aside from the personal question to one broader and more cosmopolitan. My article on ‘The Young Man as Critic’ ⁸⁷ elicited, among many other comments, one in the editorial columns of the Daily Telegraph, in which the writer, while expressing sympathy with my views in general, objected that I was somewhat unjust to the higher work of my contemporaries. I therefore wrote and published a letter, under the title ‘Is Chivalry Still Possible?’ pointing out that the issue involved affected the whole fabric of modern society, and more particularly the moral and social status of the two sexes. The Cockney pessimist, I contended, had poisoned the wells of life and literature to such an extent that Chivalry, by which I implied the old-fashioned faith in female purity and goodness, was, like other religions, fast passing away. The discussion raged for some little time, but of the many letters which appeared on the subject, scarcely one dealt logically, or even instructedly, with my main contention. As usual, also, the subject had to be expurgated of all objectionable matter; for I had touched on what is known as the Great Social Evil, asserting that its existence was the shame of Civilisation. The remedy I suggested was a higher standard of purity on the part of men, a remedy which every Cockney regarded with supreme derision..At this point I had to join issue with Mrs. Lynn Linton, a lady who is intellectually an honour to her sex, but who has unfortunately sided with those who are sceptical as to the powers of womanhood. Mrs. Linton dubbed me roundly a ‘sentimentalist,’ and scouted the idea that women were to be ‘coddled’ and persuaded that they were superior beings. But my fair antagonist, like the rest, entirely lost sight of the premises on which my argument had started, viz. that the true cause of feminine deterioration was masculine corruption, and that the real cause of masculine corruption was the omnipresent want of faith in spiritual, or in other words religious, ideals. I contended, moreover, and I again contend, that a man has no right to set up for a woman any personal standard of thought or conduct by which he is unable or unwilling to measure himself. If women are to be pure, I said, let men be pure too. I did not mean by purity the negation of human passion. All I held was that men who are notoriously impure themselves have no right to persecute the individuals who minister to their impurity; that the man whose life is (as Goethe said of his walk) a series of falls, has no right to despise the woman whom he drags down with him. And yet, as everyone is aware, all the onus mali falls on the weaker sex, falls more especially on her whom I designated, after a divine ideal, the Magdalen. With curious want of logic, Mrs. Lynn Linton identified my Magdalen with the depraved, drunken, besotted creature of the streets and the gin-shops, battered by misery out of all ⁸⁸ human likeness; whereas the true Magdalen is the woman who, in spite of all physical degradation, brings her penitence, the spikenard and myrrh of her spiritual purification, to the feet of a Redeemer. The modern pessimist contends that this Magdalen is an impossibility: that the true original is even as himself, evil because evil is of the very essence of her nature; and Mrs. Lynn Linton, a pure woman, a good woman, and a woman (I am sure) who is generous and loving to a fault, sides herself, I am grieved to say, with the modern pessimist.

     Chivalry, as I understand it, is (1) the belief that the moral temperament of women is superior to that of men; and (2) that men should regulate their social conduct by the laws feminine insight has ratified. ¹ Of course, this belief goes right in the face of modern Pessimism, not to say modern Science. A grim young pessimist confided to me only the other day his belief that there were no really ‘good’ women except ‘fools’—i.e. unintellectual persons; and this belief is very common. Science fortifies it by asserting that woman has a smaller brain, a narrower understanding, than man; that in her case the sexual evolution dwarfs and narrows the mental evolution at every stage. And Mrs. Linton, herself a woman whose intellectual gifts it would be difficult to parallel among men, a woman who is careful to tell us that she has fulfilled all feminine functions and duties, scoffs at the equality of the sexes with the very accomplishment which refutes her theory! Surely, some less disqualified person, not a woman of genius, should tell us that a woman unsexes herself when she measures herself against man, and demands from him equal rights and equal privileges! My own experience is that intellectual culture, so far from making women hard and rectangular, almost invariably deepens their insight and makes them more spiritual. If it occasionally renders them ‘masculine,’ it only does in the inverse ratio what it does to some men, by rendering them, in the bad sense, feminine. Intellectual culture, whether in man or woman, is the poorest and meanest of all accomplishments when it is not coincident with spiritual development. What is called culture is often only another word for narrow-mindedness, for dilettantism. If a human being does not become better and wiser through what he or she knows, the knowledge is practically worthless. Supernatural cleverness did not create in Goethe the enthusiasm of humanity, but it created it in Schiller and Richter, who were infinitely less ‘clever,’ infinitely less ‘knowing.’

—    ¹ I am delighted to note that Mr. Pinero, in his recent play, ‘The Profligate,’ upholds this view, but unfortunately he conciliates the Cockneys by his catastrophe, and makes the pure woman, as usual, give her profligate a clean bill of domestic health. Reverse the positions, and how criticism would protest! Yet I cannot understand for the life of me how any average man can dare to pronounce judgment on any woman, however fallen. —

⁸⁹     Chivalry, however, is, as I have discovered, quite provincial. Imperial Cockneydom will have none of it. The Cockney, with Mr. Podsnap and the editor of Truth, puts all moral difficulties behind him; the discussion of the wrongs of women is ‘unsavoury’; the great journal which opened its columns to that discussion was ‘pandering to a morbid appetite, in order to increase its circulation.’ Conceive the anomaly! The person whose life is spent on the back kitchen stairs, who lives by scandal, whose mission it is to circulate dirty and lying reports concerning his superiors, declines to hear one word of a crying evil because the mere mention of it may ‘bring a blush to the cheek of a young person!’ But he is not too modest to open his columns to the Bank Holiday Young Man, with his banal ‘Confessions,’ in order that the Bank Holiday Young Man may assault the writer who has proclaimed that the Well of Truth is composed of foul printer’s ink, and that its presiding goddess is an unclean creature, composed of cynicism and scnadal, dirt and Death. Elsewhere, in less discredited quarters, there is the same prurient tendency to ‘hush up’ those agitations which imperil the moral status of men. If you vindicate Marion de Lorme, you asperse directly or indirectly the character of the Cardinal, with a possible innuendo concerning the King himself! The Cockney sentiment, a sentiment existing wherever Cockneydom prevails, appears to be, that open discussion is inexpedient, and that, if left alone, the world (with Mr. Lang) can ‘jog comfortably along.’

     The immaculate editor of Truth, his arm thrown lovingly over the shoulders of the impeccable Mr. Moore, asks me how I reconcile my manifesto concerning Chivalry with a certain novel called ‘Foxglove Manor’? The story in question is a study in the morbid anatomy of a sensuous religieux, a clergyman of the Church of England; and the subject, possibly an ill-chosen one, merely illustrates the moral degradation of an intellectual and emotional man who clings to the superficial dogmas, while forgetting the inner verities, of his religion. Opposed to him, and triumphing over him, is a Man of Science, who is faithful to his own far inferior ideals; and my thesis is that it is nobler to be true to a narrow creed than false to a higher. The book, I presume, is deemed immoral because it portrays an immoral character, and contains some strongly-coloured illustrative episodes; it is certainly not a book written for Miss Podsnap; and for that very reason—in other words because it is impeachable from a certain point of view—its place is alien in literature. A writer, nevertheless, is not to be judged by the ethical quality of any one work of art, but by the ethical quality of his works ⁹⁰ in general. If I were asked to point to any single work of mine which represents me fairly, I should certainly not point to ‘Foxglove Manor.’ But when either the editor of Truth or the author of ‘The Mummer’s Wife’ can point to a single piece of their writing to which is attached any ethical or literary quality whatever, I shall be content to do with them (as they reproach me for doing with others) and ‘change my opinion.’ I would even go as far as Byron accused Southey of wishing to do, and not only turn my coat but ‘change my skin,’ if I felt that I had been unjust, or unfair, or intolerant, to any individual. I have placed on record my respect for the fine qualities of Mr. Labouchere as a politician, as a philanthropist; that respect does not alter, though it qualifies, my scorn for him as a journalist and a scandalmonger. I have pronounced strongly enough on the illiterate atrocities of Mr. Labouchere’s young friend, but that would never prevent me from expressing my sympathy with him if he should ever exhibit any signs of moral or literary reformation. If he chooses to retort, when I proclaim my opinion of him, that my opinion is worth nothing, because no one reads me and no one likes me—by which he means that Cockneydom scoffs at me and Nepotism loathes me—he is quite within his right in so doing. The man we correct is justified in correcting us. It is merely unfortunate, in this case, that the young man should have sought the assistance of a professional cynic, whose literary accomplishments are exactly on a level with his own, and who (outside politics) is justly esteemed, as his young friend yearns to be esteemed, a public nuisance.

     So again, as on the former occasion, in descending to the lowest depth of my investigation, I am confronted with my ingenuous young friend Mr. Moore. It is a far cry from Mr. Lang, as it was a far cry from Mr. Henry James, to this dolefulest and dismalest of young men, but once again he has to be recognised as the truest, most typical Cockney of them all. Since my first article was written he has published a new edition of his ‘Confessions,’ and has added certain matter which the Pall Mall Gazette describes as his ‘Apocalypse.’ He has at the same time, as I have noted already, published an article on his critic, whom he describes as an arrant failure ‘all round,’ and a person whom ‘we,’ the ‘successors of Swinburne and Rossetti’—i.e. Mr. Moore et hoc genus omne!—reject with unutterable contempt. It is rather too bad at the same time to quote the rejected and despised critic in newspaper advertisements; no, not to quote, but to garble him, turning such phrases as ‘his (Mr. Moore’s) ignorance, his vanity, is colossal,’ into ‘his ⁹¹ variety is colossal.’ ¹ I think under this provocation I am justified in printing my young friend’s new matter, ‘not exactly as it stands in the pages corrected by the printer’s reader , but as I fancy it must have appeared in the manuscript. In this form, at least, it is far more trenchant, far more characteristic of the thinker whose mind has been nourished on such books as ‘The Rise and Fall of Rationalism.’ Here it is, then—the new Apocalypse of Cockneydom, in ‘English as she is spoke by the Bank Holiday Young Man’:—

     No, Emma! No marrying! Marriage is antagonistic to my ideal!
     We bank holiday chaps are the saviours of souls. Other crimes are finite: sensuality alone is infinite. We hang a cove for killing another cove; but a little reflection should make even a dull chap like Buchanan understand that the crime of bringing a cove into this beastly world exceeds by a millionfold the crime of putting a cove out of it. (Them’s the ‘Fruits of Philosophy,’ in a nutshell!)
     Why, men are as thick to-day as flies in a sweetshop; in fifty years there will be less to eat, and millions more to eat it. I laugh, I rub my hands! I shall be dead before that time comes. I laugh at the religious chaps who say that God provides for them as He brings into the world. That there French Revolution won’t be in it with the revolution that’s coming. Men will hang like pears on every lamp-post; in every quarter of London there’ll be an electric guillotine to chop off rich folk’s heads like hogs in Chicago. Haha! Him that promised Universal Peace shall go out in a cattychasm of blood. The neck of mankind shall be opened, and blood shall cover the face of the earth . . . . So let’s take the boat to Rosherville, and go and spend a happy day! ²

     After this, the Deluge! Even a heterodox Buchanan can take comfort at being counted a miserable failure, in the same breath with Christianity and Religion and Decency in general. Cockneydom may reject the utterance, but with all its stupendous brutality, it is the final utterance to which Cockneydom is bound to come. It is the reductio ad absurdum, but still a reductio. So let it be. Christianity has failed. Decency has failed. Marriage is ‘antagonistic’; and ‘high jinks’ is the motto of the new creed. The Bible and all free literature is to be superseded by the ‘Fruits of Philosophy.’ Chaos approaches, viâ the Corinthian and the Supper Clubs. The world is to be deluged with blood, but until that moment we keep Bank Holiday. In view of ail the omens, Imperial Cockneydom prevails!

                                                                                                                                 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

—    ¹ ‘Colossal variety’ is, nevertheless, very good, and very characteristic of the puzzleheaded young man.
         ² Vide Confessions of a Young Man, new edition. —

_____

Back to The Coming Terror - ‘Imperial Cockneydom’