IN

CLUB.

BY GEORGE MILNER.

[An address at the Manchester Literary Club Closing Conversazione,
March 30th, 1885.]

N accordance with recent custom, I have to ask your attention to an address which will be very brief, and which is only intended as an introduction to the proceedings of this closing conversazione of our session 1884-5. That session may be described as one of varied character and of ample interest. Hardly any province of thought has been left unrepresented. Art and music; literature in all its forms critical, historical, poetical; even science, though supposed to be a little outside our proper boundary, has not been entirely neglected. We have not allowed ourselves to overlook those subjects of local interest which have an undoubted claim upon us; nor, on the other hand, have these been permitted to divert our attention from that wider region of letters in which all Englishmen, whether so-called provincials or not, have common rights and equal privileges.

It is only necessary to allude in more special terms to one class of subject. I do this because it is comparatively THE MANCHESTER QUARTERLY. No. XVI.-OCTOBER, 1885.

novel among us, and is especially worthy of further cultivation. I refer to the subject of foreign literature, which has been ably represented by Mr. Hindle's paper on Amiel (a writer who has hitherto been little known to Englishmen) and by Mr. Gannon's translation from Brinckmann.

It may not be out of place to add a few words on what seem to me to be the proper functions of a literary club in Manchester. Undoubtedly our first object is to stimulate a real love of literature for its own sake, and a willingness to undertake literary work among our own members. That being done, we may hope to influence those who are outside. Nothing astonishes one more in what is called society-I mean the class of people who have money, and who are supposed to have educationthan the blank ignorance of nearly all that is best and most familiar in our literature; or than, what is still more irritating, the shallow pretence of knowledge which finds expression in feeble and totally unmeaning chatter about half-a-dozen well-known names. That caricature in Punch a few weeks ago, which represented a male and female booby of the upper classes expressing astonishment at discovering from a playbill that As You Like It "was written, then, by Shakspere" was not at all exaggerated. A short time ago, a person in the garb of a gentleman asked a Manchester bookseller for Shakspere's Christmas Carol. On being shown a book of that name by Charles Dickens, he said, with great simplicity, "He thought that couldn't be it, but he would go and ask." To induce a little wider study of literature would not, therefore, be entirely a work of supererogation.

Two other objects which should be kept before us, and to which I think we might give more systematic attention, are the preservation of good, contemporary local work, and the rescue from oblivion of forgotten or ill-remembered authors

of merit by the republication of their books. The issue of the Manchester Quarterly, which is now in its fourth year, is undoubtedly helping forward the first of these objects, and I should like to ask for greater interest and encouragement with regard to that journal. Nothing can be more in harmony with the professed aims and principles of a literary club, or more honourable to Manchester, on the literary side, than the successful maintenance of a magazine of this kind, the more so as all previous similar efforts have resulted in failure. In illustration of the second point, I will only mention, as one among many instances, that we have had living amongst us probably for twenty years a really fine poet and thinker, Mr. Henry Septimus Sutton, whose works, published more than thirty years ago, are almost totally unknown in Manchester, and are among the rarest treasures of the book-hunter; and yet Mr. Sutton is a man whom Emerson valued very highly, and whom he thought not unworthy of a special pilgrimage on the occasion of his second visit to England.

Another subject to which greater attention might be given is that connected with the special interests of authors and journalists, and I am glad to say that some of our legal members have promised for next session papers on copyright and kindred topics.

I will only add that notwithstanding the seriousness of these suggestions, I am still of opinion that our work here should continue to be, what it always has been, recreative in its character. I should put good fellowship and the promotion of kindly feeling among those interested in literature, not second, but first. The best intellectual workers are not, as is often supposed, so vain and irritable as to be incapable of generous friendship. A literary club, at any rate, should be a harbour of refuge, a place where piques and paltry animosities should find no foothold. As

our own Lancashire poet has put it, "There is always fight

ing enough to be done out of doors." a week, to find rest and geniality.

Here we come, once
And this leads me

to say that, although the debating society idea is good enough in its place, it should be banished entirely from a literary club. Men of intelligence always enjoy the healthy shock of contending opinions, but this is not the same as that carping criticism which is intended neither to controvert nor to change opinion, but rather to wound by inferring intellectual inferiority. Ben Jonson, who knew what a literary club should be, laid down the right rule—“ Argumentationis totius strepitus abesto"

Let argument bear no unmusical sound,

Nor jars interpose sacred friendship to grieve;

or, to quote again, within the precincts of this Club, we should have the spirit of that golden age—

Which without hardness will be sage

And gay without frivolity.