Letters to Dead Authors

by Andrew Lang
Contents:

Preface
To W. M. Thackeray

To Charles Dickens
To Pierre de Ronsard

To Herodotus
Epistle to Mr. Alexander Pope

To Lucian of Samosata
To Maitre Francoys Rabelais

To Jane Austen
To Master Isaak Walton

To M. Chapelain
To Sir John Maundeville, Kt.

To Alexandre Dumas
To Theocritus

To Edgar Allan Poe
To Sir Walter Scott, Bart.

To Eusebius of Caesarea
To Percy Bysshe Shelley

To Monsieur de Moliere
To Robert Burns

To Lord Byron
To Omar Khayyam

To Q. Horatius Flaccus
PREFACE

Sixteen of these Letters, which were written at the suggestion of
the Editor of the "St. James's Gazette," appeared in that journal,

from which they are now reprinted, by the Editor's kind permission.
They have been somewhat emended, and a few additions have been made.

The Letters to Horace, Byron, Isaak Walton, Chapelain, Ronsard, and
Theocritus have not been published before.

The gem on the title-page, now engraved for the first time, is a red
cornelian in the British Museum, probably Graeco-Roman, and treated

in an archaistic style. It represents Hermes Psychagogos, with a
Soul, and has some likeness to the Baptism of Our Lord, as usually

shown in art. Perhaps it may be post-Christian. The gem was
selected by Mr. A. S. Murray.

It is, perhaps, superfluous to add that some of the Letters are
written rather to suit the Correspondent than to express the

writer's own taste or opinions. The Epistle to Lord Byron,
especially, is "writ in a manner which is my aversion."

LETTER--To W. M. Thackeray
Sir,--There are many things that stand in the way of the critic when

he has a mind to praise the living. He may dread the charge of
writing rather to vex a rival than to exalt the subject of his

applause. He shuns the appearance of seeking the favour of the
famous, and would not willingly be regarded as one of the many

parasites who now advertise each movement and action of contemporary
genius. "Such and such men of letters are passing their summer

holidays in the Val d'Aosta," or the Mountains of the Moon, or the
Suliman Range, as it may happen. So reports our literary "Court

Circular," and all our Precieuses read the tidings with enthusiasm.
Lastly, if the critic be quite new to the world of letters, he may

superfluously fear to vex a poet or a novelist by the abundance of
his eulogy. No such doubts perplex us when, with all our hearts, we

would commend the departed; for they have passed almost beyond the
reach even of envy; and to those pale cheeks of theirs no

commendation can bring the red.
You, above all others, were and remain without a rival in your many-

sided excellence, and praise of you strikes at none of those who
have survived your day. The increase of time only mellows your

renown, and each year that passes and brings you no successor does
but sharpen the keenness of our sense of loss. In what other

novelist, since Scott was worn down by the burden of a forlorn
endeavour, and died for honour's sake, has the world found so many

of the fairest gifts combined? If we may not call you a poet (for
the first of English writers of light verse did not seek that

crown), who that was less than a poet ever saw life with a glance so
keen as yours, so steady, and so sane? Your pathos was never cheap,

your laughter never forced; your sigh was never the pulpit trick of
the preacher. Your funny people--your Costigans and Fokers--were

not mere characters of trick and catch-word, were not empty comic
masks. Behind each the human heart was beating; and ever and again

we were allowed to see the features of the man.
Thus fiction in your hands was not simply a profession, like

another, but a constantreflection of the whole surface of life: a
repeated echo of its laughter and its complaint. Others have

written, and not written badly, with the stolid professional
regularity of the clerk at his desk; you, like the Scholar Gipsy,

might have said that "it needs heaven-sent moments for this skill."
There are, it will not surprise you, some honourable women and a few

men who call you a cynic; who speak of "the withered world of
Thackerayan satire;" who think your eyes were ever turned to the

sordid aspects of life--to the mother-in-law who threatens to "take
away her silver bread-basket;" to the intriguer, the sneak, the

termagant; to the Beckys, and Barnes Newcomes, and Mrs. Mackenzies
of this world. The quarrel of these sentimentalists is really with

life, not with you; they might as wisely blame Monsieur Buffon
because there are snakes in his Natural History. Had you not

impaled certain noxious human insects, you would have better pleased
Mr. Ruskin; had you confined yourself to such performances, you

would have been more dear to the Neo-Balzacian school in fiction.
You are accused of never having drawn a good woman who was not a

doll, but the ladies that bring this charge seldom remind us either
of Lady Castlewood or of Theo or Hetty Lambert. The best women can

pardon you Becky Sharp and Blanche Amory; they find it harder to
forgive you Emmy Sedley and Helen Pendennis. Yet what man does not

know in his heart that the best women--God bless them--lean, in
their characters, either to the sweet passiveness of Emmy or to the

sensitive and jealousaffections of Helen? 'Tis Heaven, not you,
that made them so; and they are easily pardoned, both for being a

very little lower than the angels and for their gentle ambition to
be painted, as by Guido or Guercino, with wings and harps and

haloes. So ladies have occasionally seen their own faces in the
glass of fancy, and, thus inspired, have drawn Romola and Consuelo.

Yet when these fair idealists, Mdme. Sand and George Eliot, designed
Rosamund Vincy and Horace, was there not a spice of malice in the

portraits which we miss in your least favourable studies?
That the creator of Colonel Newcome and of Henry Esmond was a

snarling cynic; that he who designed Rachel Esmond could not draw a
good woman: these are the chief charges (all indifferent now to

you, who were once so sensitive) that your admirers have to contend
against. A French critic, M. Taine, also protests that you do

preach too much. Did any author but yourself so frequently break
the thread (seldom a strong thread) of his plot to converse with his

reader and moralise his tale, we also might be offended. But who
that loves Montaigne and Pascal, who that likes the wise trifling of

the one and can bear with the melancholy of the other, but prefers
your preaching to another's playing!

Your thoughts come in, like the intervention of the Greek Chorus, as
an ornament and source of fresh delight. Like the songs of the

Chorus, they bid us pause a moment over the wider laws and actions
of human fate and human life, and we turn from your persons to

yourself, and again from yourself to your persons, as from the odes
of Sophocles or Aristophanes to the action of their characters on

the stage. Nor, to my taste, does the mere music and melancholy
dignity of your style in these passages of meditation fall far below

the highest efforts of poetry. I remember that scene where Clive,
at Barnes Newcome's Lecture on the Poetry of the Affections, sees

Ethel who is lost to him. "And the past and its dear histories, and
youth and its hopes and passions, and tones and looks for ever