The Dominion SATURDAY, JUNE 17, 1911. LITERARY RIVALRIES.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1166, 17 June 1911, Page 4

The Dominion SATURDAY, JUNE 17, 1911. LITERARY RIVALRIES.

Political rivalries, their criminations and recriminations, with which we are all so familiar, may with advantage bo laid aside while the cleverer, far more entertaining, attacks and counter-attacks of some famous literary men are recalled. What authors have said about other authors provides a most alluring, strangely illuminating study. But brief observation is necessary to realise that many of our brightest literary luminaries dwelt not always in empyrean regions; that, on the contrary, they were distinctly of the world, and inherited a goodly share of the weaknesses and imperfections of commonplace humanity. Not a few great writers— Voltaire, Pope, Carlyle,. for example—seem to have suffered from an ailment very like chronic bad temper which caused them, with or without provocation, to hurl hard and ungenerous things at the heads of their literary contemporaries. Then, the smaller men, actuated often by jealousy, sometimes by contempt, heroically attempted the belittlcment of the illustrious ones, winning, some_ of them, immediate and dire enstigation, but through their punishment, probably immor-

tality. Indeed, tho names of scores of puny authors survive to-day for the reason that they led temerarious attacks upon men of eminence, who, at' times, retaliated' in poetry or in prose imperishable as the mountains. Dean Swift, not overpunctilious himself, had no approval to bestow upon this mode of conferring fame upon the undeserving. "If the men of wit and genius," he wrote, "would resolve to complain in their works of critics and detractors, the next age would not know that they over had any." Dryden, when Shadwell and others attacked him, was fully alive to the fact that by lashing them in verse ho was securing for them a little niche in the Temple of Panic. By his muse, ho wrote, those' scribblers would live "in spite of their own doggerel rhymes.'' The name of Hobert Greene is known to-day, not as tho outcome of personal merit, but because ho attacked Shakespeare. In his Groat's Worth of Wit, it will bc_ remembered,' he churlishly dismissed Shakespeare as "an upstart crow," "with his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide." After Dryden's period, probably the most hated and the strongest hater among literary men was Pope. Pope, "that portentous cub," affirms old-time Bentley; "that imp of genius," declares modern Herbert Paul. Pope possessed a remarkable faculty for quarrelling with his friends and fellow-authors. The vivacious Lady Mary AA'ortley Montague, long his 'admiring correspondent and warm associate, was afterwards, along with her husband, savagely dealt with in his bitter and ferocious Satires. Addison, thoughtful and gentle though he Was, aroused his furious wrath by preferring Tickell's translation of Homer to Pope's edition. In a letter to Graggs, Pope, we read, "poured abuse and contempt on Addison." His vindictive "epistle to Dr. Arbutiinott," when written, had the lines:

Who but must laugh if such a man tliero bo? Who would not weep if Addison were he? This couplet was, later, changed, Atticus appearing instead of Addison, as in modern editions. Pope's friends became gradually fewer, says .one biographer, as his enemies rapidly increased in number. The violent assaults of the' latter stirred the spirit of the vain little man to its very depths. But he was a match for them all. In his Treatise on the Bathos, ho mercilessly scourged in vigorous prose tho poetasters of tho . day. Then came the Dunciad, the most brilliant of all satirical poems. Its principal idea it a realm of dullness ■ inhabited by literary nonentities. ] Upwards of one hundred poets and other writers are mentioned. Of tho Dunciad it has been said: "Never before had such scathing and stinging satire been levelled against unlucky _ scribblers, and there has been nothing like it since." The army of obscure authors held up to scorn in the Dunciad became more noisy and truculent. One, Amurose Philips, whose Pastorals had been immensely ridiculed, ostentatiously hung up a formidable rod in Button's, publicly announcing that, when Pope next visited the tavern, accounts would be finally settled between them. "This threat," ungenerously explains a contemporary chronicler, "wis o. pretty safe one, seeing that Pope never by any chance went there."

Gaiuuck's biting couplet. on Goldsmith brings us clown to the days of Boswei.l and of Johnson. Gah'iuck and others ungraciously joined in the making of mock epitaphs on "dear old Goldie," and Gaiuuck's production led to the composing of the poem Retaliation, which has been described as the last flash of Goldsmith's genius Coming down to relatively recent _ times Cahlyle stands out conspicuous, wild, and denunciatory. Few of his literary contemporaries escaped him, llaise,

according to Sir M. K. Giunt Duff, was stigmatised in language which will scarcely bear reproduction. llusKi.v to him was "a bottle of lint soda water," likewise "a puir creature": Hkrrert Spencer was "an immeasurable ass." But Caki.yle himself was subjected to severe enough criticism. Galton let the fact be known tint ho considered Carlvle "the greatest bore that any house could tolerate." Someone clubbed him "that atrabilious sage of Chelsea," and Herrert Spencer dissects him in fine scientific style in his Autobiof/raphy. "He is a queer creature," Spencer writes. "It is so useless to reason with him

that I do not want to sec much of him. ... I found I must cither listen to his absurd dogmas in silence, which it was not in my nature to do, or'get into fierce argument, which ended in our glaring at one another." Tennyson, according to Sin Leslie Stephen, was "childlike in his little vanities": Matthew Arnold, Stephen thought, "had a touch of the intellectual coxcomb." George Meredith had no high concents regarding the same Arnold. Matthew, he informed Edward Clodd, was "a dandy Isaiah, a poet without passion, whose verse written in a surplice is for freshmen and for gentle maidens who will bo wooed to the

arms of these future rectors." This, the rivalry division of literary biography, from the few instances of verbal and written outbreaks given, will be seen to possess extraordinary attraction and interest. The subject demands a volume to itself. The mutual jealousies of authors and the assaults upon them by minor writers have given a vast body of literature to the world, literature, in the highest degree, acute, piquant, and powerful.