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experiment in vain, and when she repeats a former product there is good cause for its repetition.

IT is possible to view the whole history of policy, of letters, and of society as a cycle of recurring human types. Pericles repeats himself in In the early years of last Cæsar, Aristides in Cato: century the critical journals Frederick the Great has a pre- were filled with attacks upon cursor in Henri IV. and a the Cockney school of letters. successor in Cavour: Tennyson The epithet was not without is the Virgil of a different its appositeness, but the moveEmpire, and Bacon a northern ment was wrongly treated as Cicero. Among the lesser sporadic and unrelated, "withas among the greater types out pride of ancestry or hope of there is this law of recurrence, posterity." It is dangerous to and few movements are with- damn wholesale what always out their reasonably exact has been and must continue precedents. Hence the critic to be, for such sweeping is bound to be chary in con- criticism is apt to confuse the demning any human tempera- issues. Keats, for instance, ment or creed that has a was labelled a "Cockney," and recognisable ancestry. The Keats was as little of a Cockney mere fact of its recurrence as Peter the Hermit. The must win a certain respect. writers felt and disliked the That the world goes on repro- faults of a school, and atducing a type argues a justifi- tributed these faults to their cation for it deep in the reason possessors' birth or residence of things. Nature does not in London—a bold but un

VOL. CLXXXVI.-NO. MCXXV.

A

historical theory.
fortune was that while their
instinct was so acute, their
diagnosis should have been a
little perverse. Cockneyism in
thought and style is as old as
Athens, nay, probably as old
as Thebes and Nineveh. You
will find it in the Greek an-
thologists and in Aristophanes.
Horace and Cicero have a share
of it. It is in the policy and
art of the medieval cities, and
it has flourished umbrageous-
ly in the literary coteries of
France. Ces bons, ces naïfs
Allemands, were Cockneys to
Renan, who himself had much
of the same quality. The
school is so old, so numerous,
and at its best so valuable, that
it is unwise to dismiss it with a
sneer. To-day we find it as
vigorous in our midst as when
Lockhart and Gifford first
issued their thunderbolts. It
has no necessary connection
with London birth, or even
with urban birth, though a
city is its happiest environ-
ment; for it is not so much a
mode of life as a point of view.
It might be worth our while
to make a few inquiries into its
strength and weaknesses.

The mis- must be leisure for the elegancies, and the rock whence man was hewn must be decently draped with leaves and flowers. Cockneyism is a civilisation which has become self-conscious. It has looked all the doors which lead from barbarism and lost the keys. It is never sprinkled, in Emerson's phrase, with spray from antediluvian seas: it would be horribly scared if it were. It hugs all the visible proofs of progress, and is satisfied that it is wisdom's last-begotten and best-loved child. A love for the cosy, the domestic, and the homely always marks it, for it sets a positive value upon the externals of that civilisation which it adores. The true Cockney is often subtle, for he has excellent brains, but it is a petty subtlety, concerned with the nuances of fancy and emotion. He has his discipline, but he is apt to bow to convention rather than to laws. The Bohemian parades his trifling liberties, and obeys furiously a rule of conduct which differs from that of the bourgeoisie, but is no less artificial. The honest cit, who goes to church on Sundays and becomes an alderman, finds it simpler to follow the practice of the majority. Both are conventional, and both are good Cockneys. Mrs Grundy is a Cockney goddess, but so is the Lady of the Camellias. Most literary coteries are Cookney at heart. Most writers who have the quality of "intimacy" and love to exploit their emotions are sworn of the school. Stevenson was far

Definition is always hazardous, more especially when we are dealing, not with a formulated creed, but with a vague attitude of mind. We may safely begin, however, with the axiom that Cookneyism is urban in origin. It is the fine flower of city life, where men live close together in complete security security and moderate comfort. Before it can be engendered person and property must be safe. There

enough from Cockneydom on one side, but on another, and that the most popular, he was all that the best Cockney could wish, and the great world of Cockneyism has taken him to its heart. The school is apt to lack breeding in the old true sense of the word. Living a snug social life it considers that a man's all belongs to society, and it does not understand the higher standards of reticence and dignity. Because the modes under which it lives are essentially bourgeois, it is perplexed and rather annoyed by the ways of what it calls the aristocracy. Men who lack its fireside civilisation seem to it inhuman and maleficent. From the sterner realities of life—war, suffering, terror, and death—it has a natural shrinking, unless it can give them the varnish of literary sentiment. It stands uneasy in the presence of a serious passion. It is always human, in short, but not always masculine.

So runs the definition of the Cockney by his defects-let us hasten to add, a very bad kind of definition indeed. If we harp too much on these defects we shall be guilty of a stupid blunder. A limitation is no vice unless it is forgotten, and the Cockney in his own sphere is a very useful and worthy citizen. There is no more nauseous cant in these days than the cheap mysticism which is always fluttering in the clouds-the desire of the moth for the limelight-and the perverse sublimity which must be grandiloquent about pedestrian matters. To these the

Cockney is a salutary correc. tive, for at his weakest he is a sane and friendly fellow. If he talks too much about himself and his likings and his back-garden, it is better than if he babbled about preposterous immensities. He is our defence against that stupendous bore, the Superman, who seems to have captured the fancy of the intellectually half-baked. One of the pleasantest forms of belles-lettres, the personal essay, would cease to be if the Cockney spirit were utterly exorcised. By all means let the word stand for merits as well as for defects. In the best sense 'Cranford' is Cockney, and Miss Austen and Miss Edgeworth have a trace of the accent. All painters in genre have been of the school. Lamb is too great a man for us to label carelessly, but it might be said, in Bagehot's phrase, that a Cockney could be carved out of him. As for Leigh Hunt, he is the very deacon of the craft. He sat by his fire in a frowsy dressinggown and carpet-slippers, exuding the purest doctrine of Cockaigne. He is a good instance, for he shows us very clearly how straitly the temperament is bounded. Sport, adventure, manly excitement, he dismissed with a sneer; far better and more noble, he said, to bring smiles to the faces of a party of cultivated women. His merits are beyond question, his deftness of fancy, his humour, his instinet for poetry; and yet we defy the most resolute admirer of Cockneyism to read

largely in Leigh Hunt without a slight feeling of nausea. The ordinary person, who is not a Cockney any more than he is a Superman, cannot view the whole of life from a parlourwindow. Besides, he does not like to feel doubts as to the sex of his author.

The Cockney, to put the matter fairly, has the faults of all people with a limited outlook, and the faults are patent when his ambition begins to exceed his discretion. He fails lamentably when he transgresses his own proper sphere. It is offensive to find the Derby described in the manner of Isaiah, but it is no less offensive to have Man's Chief End treated in the style of the week-end causeur. Because within his limits he is so admirable, his friends must protest when they see him cutting a sorry figure where he has no business to be. Our parlour - gossip is not the man to harangue a mob in a revolution, to preach a new doctrine of infinity, to meddle with high policies, or to tell the secrets of the wilderness. If he tries such things he will fail, and, respecting his courage, we must take leave to regret his temerity. Nay, more. He who in his own place is admirable, may be vulgar in the wrong environment, and vulgarise by his intrusion what in itself is rare and excellent.

A few months ago we celebrated the anniversary of the birth of Edward FitzGerald. FitzGerald was a great man of letters, of a type which is fast vanishing. To a warm

It passes

humanity he added a scholarship as ripe and fastidious as Landor's. Essentially he was an aristocrat in taste, in culture, and in habits: and as such it was given to him to render in perfect verse the spirit of that sad old aristocrat who preached the philosophy of the Vine. Now the Cockney is democratic: a chirruping optimist: a lover of conventions, plain or coloured: the prophet of domesticity and solid fare and not of a mistress and a loaf in the desert. He is probably a far better fellow than Omar, but different eternally different. the wit of man to guess why he should have discovered both Omar and FitzGerald and insisted on acting as their showman. The scholar and aristocrat has nothing in common with the blades who dine in his honour with roses in their buttonholes. The result is that FitzGerald's version of the 'Rubaiyat' is in grievous danger of being put to the use of album verse. It is given such incongruous associations that its strange aroma, its rare dignity, are destroyed. It is quoted as the wisdom of Mr Martin Tupper was once quoted, as a compendium of homely sentiments; and it is toasted by obstreperous diners with an awful familiarity and a complete misapprehension.

There is a case where the Cockney, straying from his sphere, blunders in criticism and perhaps in taste. But in order to make the limitations plain let us take an instance from creative work of a high

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