Originally published in Belgravia (John Maxwell) vol.2 #7 (May 1867).
There are a hundred things which "they manage better in France" than we do here at home. A truth we are complacently fond of admitting—as though it were a matter on which to plume ourselves—and perpetually appealing to Mr. Sterne's very words; though that reverend gentleman's remarks applied merely to the French douane, and the expression used was, "They order this matter better in France." But there is one other matter which that lively writer would have confessed, and confessed heartily, was ordered in France with as much superiority; and just as their custom-house officers treated the thin, odd-looking clergyman in black, so do the French people and their government treat their brilliant and refined guild of writers—or "literary men," as the phrase goes. Fancy an Englishman having the humiliation to explain a transaction that occurred only yesterday to a sensible and inquiring Frenchman; fancy his amused air and look of enjoyment as it is explained to him. It must be explained to him that in our country we do indeed take care of poets; but their claim must rest on their being rhymers of the lowest degree conceivable. What is all this tapage about "ce poète Yung"? What sort of a Henriade has he written? he will ask. And when it has to be explained that the lucky recipient of mille francs par an has poured forth effusions separated by a very faint line from the street-ballad, certainly wanting the rude vigour of such performances, and at best hardly aiming so high as the unpaid celebrity of the "poet's corner" of a country paper; with what a comic shrug will this news be received! But then our great poets, according to this proportion, what a splendid recognition must be in store for them! If Young and doggrel are thus handsomely acknowledged, what magnificent treatment is in store for genuine poetry—for Tennyson and Browning—names perhaps only faintly present to the most cultivated Frenchman, who may add perhaps instead, "Vol' Go'smidt et Biron's." And then, fairly driven into a corner, and to save ourselves from a ludicrous and humiliating position, we must explain that the whole is indeed a fiction; that we do allow the State directly to recognise literature or its service, but that to secure even this wretched alms literature must disguise itself, put on political rags, daub itself over with one of the two party colours, and then its application may be considered. We may appeal to any sensible person, if this is not the only logical, yet humiliating, extrication from the slough in which the nation's bounty to its poet Young has involved us. Or has it its origin in some lingering of the old Grub-street associations, as though writers were the mean hungry fellows they used to be, and we are rather ashamed of this class of our children?
They do indeed order this matter far better in France. There is a sumptuousness in the nation's dealings with its writers, painters, and musicians worthy of an imperial nation. Curiously enough, at the moment when England is rewarding her poet Young, France has voted a grant of the magnificent sum of 16,000l. sterling to an embarrassed poet, and a poet certainly not of the first class. "The government," says this munificent proposal, "has thought the moment has arrived to confer on M. de Lamartine a manifestation of national gratitude. It desires to intervene during his lifetime, to give him a striking testimony for his former services, a noble and precious assistance in his present difficulties, and a guarantee for his security and tranquillity in future." . . . . "The legislative body will not hesitate to think with the government that it is worthy of France to honour the celebrity of M. de Lamartine by an act of high munificence." Wonderful words! and yet more wonderful government! Phrases indeed hardly to be realised by us in any shape; and, above all, in the shape of a right honourable Secretary of State coming down to the House, and proposing that his right honourable friend should include in the estimates a grant to that amount for the embarrassed Dr. Goldsmith, the admirable Mr. Fielding, who was worn down with dropsy, and bad hardly funds enough to take him out to Lisbon. This was long ago; but to think of the Right Honourable Spencer Walpole or of Sir George Grey, baronet, standing up to propose any grant or honour to any historian, poet, or novelist, would be improbable, if not ludicrous in the highest degree.
It is true there is some dissatisfaction in France at this proposal, and some doubts also as to whether it will be endorsed by the country. But the ground of this disapproval is not what might be expected—objection to the amount or to the principle. The distressed poet has been helped again and again, has been always sending round "the hat," and has been overwhelmed with charity.
The principle indeed they were not likely to ignore. French men of letters have always enjoyed a sort of nobility, which is only natural, as they live among a lively, a witty, and a highly cultivated community. We see their breasts glittering with orders—not with the cheap "chevaliership" of the Legion of Honour, but with its higher and more substantial grades, which are as high and rare in France as a Commandership of the Bath is with us. Some are "barons;" some enjoy great pensions. We see them in the brilliant halls of the Tuileries, not making part of an indiscriminate herd, asked en masse, but welcomed with the "select few," and received with exceeding honour. Does M. Ponsard bring out one of his highly polished plays, the lords and ladies of the Court, and the head of the Court itself, fill the theatre; the author is welcomed in the imperial box, and loaded with compliments—earnest of something more substantial to follow. Think of the Duke of Bayswater, and Lord Foppington, and all "the fashionables," crowding to the Olympic for the first night of Doctor Goldsmith's new play; or—more far-fetched still—of the Court, after the triumphant welcome of yesterday's melodrama, sending for its author to the royal box, to receive compliments, and despatching the order of the Bath to him next morning. The men whom the Paris "roughs" of 1848 thought of for their business were Lamartine and Arago—a poet and an astronomer. Guizot was a prime minister. In every other country the principle of such recognition prevails. America sends her literary children to Europe as ministers and consuls; and at a grand military banquet at St. Petersburg, held to commemorate the gallant defence of Sebastopol, the president distributed copies of a popular military novel among the military guests, by whom it was received with rapture.
About a century ago there was a certain recognition of literary services; and literary men were "jobbed" into 400l. a year, 300l. a year, and similar sums. But to earn this, some political scavangery was expected from them. Dr. Johnson was so recognised; but they hoped to buy his vigorous pen. And it is a melancholy illustration of the strange tone which English governments have always held towards writers, that when he was very ill, and a small grant and an increase to his pension was pressed for with great interest to help him out to Italy, it was refused. Had he been a hack writer, and helped the wretched ministries of his day, there would have been no difficulty. The same principle would seem to have come down to our own days. There is no country so lavish and magnificent in its rewards for services; but, alas, it does seem as though these services must be of the "shopkeeping" order, and conduce to the wealth and profits of what was so disrespectfully called "the nation of shopkeepers."
Men who have saved territory, or, better still, have added territory by the sword, are handsomely considered. Does an Indian general rout Sikhs, dethrone rajahs, and annex their kingdom—coronets and handsome pensions come showering on him as a matter of course. Yet it would be hard to grudge the skilful soldier his honours. But there is a worse prostitution of rewards in the less dazzling fields of political service and commercial employment. The peerage is certainly the most brilliant honour the country can bestow—through its sovereign—on its sons who have served it faithfully. However substantial other rewards may be, they do not approach this gorgeous shape of testimonial, which in England almost sets an aureole over the head of the fortunate recipient, and brings reverence, connection, and is even a glorified substitute for wealth. Yet let a man enter the prosy ground of politics, and take the spade as a diligent under-secretary or secretary, taking care to keep close to the Whig or Tory chief gardener, and after a decent service he very often retires ennobled.
A long list could be made out of obscure secretaries for India, of plodding official "hodmen," respectable in their homely talents and decent drudgery, Whiglings or Torylings, Right Honourable Taper Tadpoles or Harding Hanapers from the India Board or Duchy of Lancaster, who have been thus splendidly ennobled. So with the cheaper tribute of a baronetcy. Is a man successful at his railways or his warehouses; has he been a Lord Mayor of London; has he got the contract for an exhibition or a railway, and been successful to his own exceeding profit,—and he is called to the front, and sent away with the Red Hand upon his banner. Who shall blame this selection in a great commercial country? Nay, when the great Ocean Telegraph is laid, the fortunate chairmen of the companies—shrewd men of business, who were dreaming only of business and forty per cent in the matter—find themselves, perhaps to their surprise, honoured and "baroneted" handsomely. So with science, geology, what not; so with medicine and doctors, departments which bring profit or comfort to the coffers of the country. Does it not look, with this lavish showering of honours, as though this was the instinct in the great public mind, and that only those who contribute to the substantial wealth or comfort of the State are to be glorified?
Literature alone is unhonoured by a people that indignantly repudiates being called a "nation of shopkeepers," and holds itself out as an intellectual and reading nation. The poets, who furnish whole hours of waking dreams and feasts of the most gorgeous and heavenly scenery, more exquisite than even its first pantomime to a child—enchanters whose works drift the labouring and the weary into Paradise—they are passed by. But the political upper-clerk, who has patiently uncoiled red tape with due tact for many years, and for whom a hundred thousand brothers could be found, as patient and as laborious—his head is measured for the glittering coronet, or his Christian name is drawn from obscurity by a decorative "Sir." Novelists—those other enchanters (that is, when of the first rank)—who thinks of them? True there is the starved pension-list, the alms of forty pounds and a hundred pounds, but which we are now told, on good official authority, is no perquisite of the literary ranks, and which indeed, so far as it stretches, is fairly expended in relieving needy widows and failing men, who have been humble navvies and paviours in the very lowliest walk of letters. Nor indeed can it be said that the ranks of the fiction writers, in the main, deserve such recognition, any more than the ranks of the Harding Hanapers or Taper Tadpoles. These titles—baronetcies or peerages—are the common counters, the pieces-of-eight in which these debts are paid; and so far we fall in with the vulgar notion that being made a lord or baronet is just verging on the beatific vision. This is the accepted shape of bauble with which men are supposed to be made happy; and therefore we claim it and would accept it also.
As the lawyers, doctors, contractors, soldiers, geologists, chairmen, &c. are thus popularly made happy, so the men of letters might be dealt with in the same way. They have done as much service in their generation to their country and countrymen as any secretary or contractor. Surely this diffusion of grand thoughts, of poems largely read and got by heart, of fine story and generous humanity, at least makes government cheaper and easier. Tennyson, Anthony Froude, Thomas Carlyle, and Robert Browning, are surely more valuable than some of the poor flashy cheap Jacks who go about in their political carts, and sell their wares—poor wares enough too—with such profit. There seems small prospect of this neglect being amended; and looking down the long and splendid line of English writers, we see the stray scraps of title flung to a Scott or a Macaulay—a bounty apologised for on the ground of some political desert. But what can be expected where, in a country now literally being overrun with brass and marble figures, the grand, the immortal Shakespeare, whom we rave of, whom we would fight for, the "Divine Williams" whom the French depreciate, whose works we buy and illustrate, but do not read quite so diligently as might be supposed, is at this moment without a decent monument?
But there is one name—a household name not only in England but on the Continent,—a name which will be known in the great house as well as in the humbler cottage when the cheap reputation of our day shall have passed away for ever. It is indeed a disgrace to our generation that it should not have thought of Charles Dickens, to whom it owes so much. Even the "first gentleman" of Europe, who did do some surprisingly gentlemanly things, after all, had the grace to acknowledge and dignify the surpassing services of Walter Scott. Yet our splendid and perfect Britannia, in her lavish distribution of premiums, money, &c. to all her good children, has forgotten the child of whom she has most reason to be proud.
But the tribe of secretarylings, mayors, chairmen, merchants, &c. have all done service, and public service, to the State. And the State, it will be said, cannot take official cognisance of those moral services, which, like virtue, are to be their own reward. But I will venture to say, that for actual positive service, for work done, for money saved to the State, which is a grand point, the country is indebted to her writers. Myriads of the Harding Hanapers and Taper Tadpoles, hard at work for generations in their little political circles, and Home Secretaries bringing in bills that fail to realise any social improvement, have done nothing to compare to Mr. Dickens's labours. He has been the great prophet of the union of classes—the link between rich and poor, never weary of showing to the former what virtues and endurance and what charity is found under rags and in hovels; and to the latter, that the rich are not monsters and tyrants. Who will say that this is not a public service, and that it has not done more than the costly machinery of boards and secretaries and commissions? And yet the fact remains behind: the Right Honourable W. Putt, an ex-secretary, becomes Lord Skelper, in acknowledgment of his services, whatever they are; and the noble English writer is still plain Charles Dickens.