The Valet's Tragedy And Other Studies E-Book

Andrew Lang

• Herausgeber: Jazzybee Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Of these twelve studies three are purely literary, two dealing with the ballads of Lord Bateman and of the Queen's Marie, and the third being an essay on the Bacon-Shakespeare imbroglio. This last is a delightful bit of acute, lucid, and witty criticism ; and if the Baconians were but blessed with a shred of humor, Mr. Lang would certainly bring them to reason. Of the remaining essays those which deal with the ghosts of Fisher and Lord Lyttelton possess no historical interest. The "Mystery of James de la Cloche" is of a different character, since James was a supposititious son of Charles II., and since the evidence in support of his paternity establishes the further and much more important fact that Charles was anxious to declare himself a Roman Catholic as early as September, 1665. This book is annotated with a rare extensive biographical sketch of the author, Andrew Lang, written by Sir Edmund Gosse, CB, a contemporary poet and writer.

Leseprobe

The Valet's Tragedy And Other Studies

Andrew Lang

Contents:

Preface

I. The Valet's Tragedy

1. The Legend Of The Man In The Iron Mask

2. The Valet's History

Ii. The Valet's Master

Iii. The Mystery Of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey

Charles Ii. And Godfrey's Death.

Prance And The White House Club.

The Jesuit Murderers.

Iv. The False Jeanne D'arc.

V. Junius And Lord Lyttelton's Ghost

Vi. The Mystery Of Amy Robsart

1. Historical Confusions As To Events Before Amy's Death

2. Amy's Death And What Followed

Vii. The Voices Of Jeanne D'arc

Viii. The Mystery Of James De La Cloche

Ix. The Truth About 'Fisher's Ghost'

X. The Mystery Of Lord Bateman

Xi. The Queen's Marie

Xii. The Shakespeare-Bacon Imbroglio

The Valet's Tragedy And Other Studies, A. Lang

Jazzybee Verlag Jürgen Beck

86450 Altenmünster, Loschberg 9

Germany

ISBN: 9783849611255

www.jazzybee-verlag.de

www.facebook.com/jazzybeeverlag

[email protected]

ANDREW LANG (1844-1912)

Biographical Sketch from "Portraits And Sketches" by Edmund Gosse

INVITED to note down some of my recollections of Andrew Lang, I find myself suspended between the sudden blow of his death and the slow development of memory, now extending in unbroken friendship over thirty-five years. The magnitude and multitude of Lang's performances, public and private, during that considerable length of time almost paralyse expression; it is difficult to know where to begin or where to stop. Just as his written works are so extremely numerous as to make a pathway through them a formidable task in bibliography, no one book standing out predominant, so his character, intellectual and moral, was full -of so many apparent inconsistencies, so many pitfalls for rash assertion, so many queer caprices of impulse, that in a whole volume of analysis, which would be tedious, one could scarcely do justice to them all. I will venture to put down, almost at haphazard, what I remember that seems to me to have been overlooked, or inexactly stated, by those who wrote, often very sympathetically, at the moment of his death, always premising that I speak rather of a Lang of from 1877 to 1890, when I saw him very frequently, than of a Lang whom younger people met chiefly in Scotland.

When he died, all the newspapers were loud in proclaiming his "versatility." But I am not sure that he was not the very opposite of versatile. I take "versatile" to mean changeable, fickle, constantly ready to alter direction with the weather-cock. The great instance of versatility in literature is Ruskin, who adopted diametrically different views of the same subject at different times of his life, and defended them with equal ardour. To be versatile seems to be unsteady, variable. But Lang was through his long career singularly unaltered; he never changed his point of view; what he liked and admired as a youth he liked and admired as an elderly man. It is true that his interests and knowledge were vividly drawn along a surprisingly large number of channels, but while there was abundance there does not seem to me to have been versatility. If a huge body of water boils up from a crater, it may pour down a dozen paths, but these will always be the same; unless there is an earthquake, new cascades will not form nor old rivulets run dry. In some authors earthquakes do take place as in Tolstoy, for instance, and in S. T. Coleridge but nothing of this kind was ever manifest in Lang, who was extraordinarily multiform, yet in his varieties strictly consistent from Oxford to the grave. As this is not generally perceived, I will take the liberty of expanding my view of his intellectual development.

To a superficial observer in late life the genius of Andrew Lang had the characteristics which we are in the habit of identifying with precocity. Yet he had not been, as a writer, precocious in his youth. One slender volume of verses represents all that he published in book-form before his thirty-fifth year. No doubt we shall learn in good time what he was doing before he flashed upon the world of journalism in all his panoply of graces, in 1876, at the close of his Merton fellowship. He was then, at all events, the finest finished product of his age, with the bright armour of Oxford burnished on his body to such a brilliance that humdrum eyes could hardly bear the radiance of it. Of the terms behind, of the fifteen years then dividing him from St. Andrews, we know as yet but little; they were years of insatiable acquirement, incessant reading, and talking, and observing gay preparation for a life to be devoted, as no other life in our time has been, to the stimulation of other people's observation and talk and reading. There was no cloistered virtue about the bright and petulant Merton don. He was already flouting and jesting, laughing with Ariosto in the sunshine, performing with a snap of his fingers tasks which might break the back of a pedant, and concealing under an affectation of carelessness a literary ambition which knew no definite bounds.