Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Lang, Andrew
LANG, ANDREW (1844–1912), scholar, folk-lorist, poet, and man of letters, was born at Selkirk 31 March 1844, the eldest son of John Lang, sheriff-clerk of Selkirkshire, whose father Andrew Lang, also sheriff-clerk, had been a friend of Sir Walter Scott. His mother, Jane Plenderleath Sellar, was the daughter of Patrick Sellar [q.v.], factor to the first Duke of Sutherland, and a sister of William Young Sellar [q.v.], professor of Latin in Edinburgh University. During his childhood he spent a year at Clifton, to which he refers in the autobiographical chapter of his Adventures among Books (1905). He was educated at Selkirk grammar school and the Edinburgh Academy (where he ‘loathed Greek’, but was converted by Homer), and in 1861 matriculated at the university of St. Andrews. His three years' residence there laid the foundations of a lifelong attachment to St. Andrews, which in his later years became his second home. In 1864 he removed for a session to the university of Glasgow in order to qualify as a candidate for the Snell exhibition, and with this he proceeded in 1865 to Balliol College, Oxford. In 1868, having taken a first class both in moderations and in literae humaniores, he was elected to an open fellowship at Merton College.
A career of academic distinction now lay before him. But although he occasionally resided (a carved door-top and oak mantelpiece still testify to his interest in his college rooms), he was by temperament unsuited to collegiate routine, and his literary talents pointed clearly elsewhere. In 1873 the doctors passed sentence on his lungs, and he went abroad for a time; but the trouble was averted. In 1875 he married Miss Leonora Blanche Alleyne, the youngest daughter of Mr. C. T. Alleyne, of Clifton and Barbados. He vacated his Merton fellowship, and settled down in London to a life of journalism and letters.
For journalism, which he practised with unremitting diligence for nearly forty years, Lang was unusually well qualified, combining with a lively scholarship and wit a remarkable range of miscellaneous and immediately applicable knowledge, a facility in writing which astonished even Fleet Street, and a complete indifference to time or place or interruptions. ‘He would turn into the pavilion during the intervals of a cricket match’, says a friend, ‘and begin, finish, or write some middle page of an article, on the corner of a table or the top of a locker, quite as comfortably as he would in his own study.’ His essays and articles found their public at once, and kept it grateful to the end. His sparkling verses proclaimed a new and happy talent. His characteristic studies, also, were already taking shape. By 1875 he was making his name as a folk-lorist, he was hard at work on Homer, and had been selected by Spencer Baynes to write for the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1875–1889). The articles in that work on Apparitions, Ballads, The Casket Letters, Crystal-gazing, Fairy, Family, Edmund Gurney, Hauntings, La Cloche, Molière, Mythology, Name, Poltergeist, Prometheus, Psychical Research, Scotland, Second Sight, Tale, and Totemism are all from his pen.
Lang's first book was of verse, his Ballads and Lyrics of Old France (1872). It was followed in 1880 by xxii Ballades in Blue China, which became xxxii the next year. These two books helped to inaugurate a revival, which Théodore de Banville had already established in France and with which Swinburne had toyed, of the old French modes of ballade, triolet, and rondeau. It was a notable contribution to English prosodical resources. His Helen of Troy (1882) was more ambitious. It is a narrative poem in six books, in stanzas—a beautiful exercise, but in rather still life, for ‘who can write at length of Helen?’ This was Lang's one deliberate bid for the laurel, and it brought him more compliments than praise. He accepted the sentence perhaps too hastily; spoke of ‘the unpermitted bay’; and though he continued to write and publish poetry, as one to whom verse-making was a function of being, never again attempted a poem that might not be written at a sitting. Rhymes à la Mode (1884), Grass of Parnassus (1888), Ban and Arrière Ban (1894), and the rest, are rallies of fugitive verse, as his Letters to Dead Authors (1886), his Books and Bookmen (1886), and their numerous successors are rallies of fugitive prose. They are all journalism, but they are the willing journalism of a man of genius. In the lighter play of the essay as in some of the daintier forms of verse, in the short causerie falling just between literature and gossip, Lang had no rival. The prose pieces which he valued most were collected in his lifetime; a collected edition of his poetical works was published posthumously in 1923; the latter contains many waifs from the files of periodicals, and leaves many uncollected. Lang's prose was always relished, but he wrote so much of it that his verse has been underrated. He was in the habit of belittling his poetical achievement, and was too readily believed. On his favourite places and heroes, on St. Andrews and the Ettrick country, on Gordon, Burnaby, and the world of ancient Greece, he has written poems not easily forgotten. His Ballade of his Choice of a Sepulchre and some of his sonnets are among the best of their kind; his poems in Scots stand high in a now impoverished tradition; and he boasted with justice that no man of his day could better fake a ballad. He might have been a much more considerable poet had he made the necessary sacrifice, and been a poet only; but this he could not do.
Lang valued himself most as an anthropologist. He was forty when his first book on folk-lore appeared, Custom and Myth (1884), but it embodied papers written and printed much earlier. He had been brought up as a boy among ballads and folk-tales, and the reading of Dasent's Popular Tales from the Norse and similar collections had made him a comparative mythologist while still a youth. He observed, like others, that many of these tales existed, in analogous forms, among widely distant races; he also observed that while they differed little in their incidents they differed entirely in their names. He concluded that the key to these analogies could not be language, and that the philological explanations, then fashionable, must be wrong. He announced this discovery in the Fortnightly Review, May 1873, in an article, Mythology and Fairy-tales, which has been described as ‘the first full refutation of Max Müller's mythological system, and the first full statement of the anthropological method applied to the comparative study of myths’ [Quarterly Review, April 1913, p. 311]. Custom and Myth was followed in 1887 by Myth, Ritual, and Religion. This deals chiefly with totemism, the importance of which in early human society Lang tended in his later works to minimize. He came to believe that the seeds might be found in primitive races of another source of rules, of ‘a faith in a Creator and Judge of men’. This view was first systematically stated in The Making of Religion (1898), and so firmly held that the second edition of Myth, Ritual, and Religion (1899) was drastically handled in order to square with it. Lang's monotheistic heresy, as it was called, involved him in much controversy and some temporary disrepute; the biblical quotations and Hebraic parallels by which it was supported gained him, at the same time, the unwelcome applause of orthodox believers in the legends of Genesis. The misunderstanding was increased by his unprofessional attitude towards miracles. He had always been interested in abnormal psychology: he was one of the founders of the Psychical Research Society, and its president in 1911. He now appealed to its evidence to account for those miraculous phenomena from which religion in all ages has derived support, and which he refused to regard as necessarily fraudulent. ‘A little more of that’, said a French confrère, ‘and M. Lang may be ranked among the Church Fathers!’ It is acknowledged that Lang did a service, even at the expense of admitting ‘degradation’, by recalling attention to some higher elements in savage beliefs which the doctrine of evolutionary progress had led inquirers to neglect. It seems probable, nevertheless, that Lang's earlier work in anthropology was also his best, and that his greatest performance was his first, when he proved that folk-lore is not the debris of a higher or literary mythology, but the foundation on which that mythology rests. ‘He who demonstrated that’, wrote M. Salomon Reinach, ‘and made it a key to the darkest recesses of classical mythology, has conferred a benefit on the world of learning, and was a genius.’
Lang was a Greek scholar, devoted to Homer. S. H. Butcher and Lang's prose translation of the Odyssey (1879), preceded by Lang's best sonnet, was one of the famous and even formative books of its time. The translation of the Iliad, which followed (1883), by Lang, Walter Leaf, and Ernest Myers, was less good, but still notable. He published, also, translations of Theocritus (1880) and of the Homeric Hymns (1899), the first perhaps his best translation, the second remarkable for the excellent essays which accompanied it. He was one of the principal champions of the personality of Homer and of the unity of his poems (even writing a sonnet on Homeric Unity), and to the Homeric question he contributed three books: Homer and the Epic (1893), Homer and his Age (1906), and, best of the three, The World of Homer (1910). He did excellent service, in a light-armed, raiding way, by exposing the more childish methods of the orthodox separatists, and the rather comical inadequacy of some of their tests. There were more self-contradictions, he pointed out, in Pendennis than in the Iliad. His wit and high spirits, his knowledge of anthropology, and his wide range of literary illustration made him an invaluable ally; and if the unitarian minority to which he belonged is now in the ascendant, he must share the credit.
Lang was a considerable historian. He had dabbled, as a young man, in the mysteries of Scottish history, yet his first historical work, a history of St. Andrews (1893), was a confessed piece of bookmaking, and he was nearly fifty when it appeared. It gave much offence, for Lang was frank about the Reformation, and careless errors in the book were triumphantly exposed. The experience was salutary, and an accident of friendship tempted him to profit by it. R. L. Stevenson had asked ‘dear Andrew’ for something about the Jacobites, and Lang, in the course of searching, was caught up by a historical mystery—Who was the Jacobite spy referred to by Scott in the introduction to Redgauntlet? He sent what he had found to Samoa, and on Stevenson's death in 1894 the papers were returned to him. His curiosity revived, and the result was Pickle the Spy (1897). The spy, he decided, was Alastair Ruadh Macdonell [q.v.], ‘Young Glengarry’, and now from another quarter his Scottish critics assailed him. The Companions of Pickle (1898), which put the matter beyond doubt, was his reply. He was by this time well entered in the hardy game of Scottish historiography. In 1900 appeared his Prince Charles Edward, his best historical composition. He had been a Jacobite from boyhood, yet he had no illusions about the prince, preferring indeed the quieter Old Pretender, whom he did much to rehabilitate. He was now labouring at a more doubtful and ambitious project. ‘“A History of Scotland”, said the publisher of Dr. Robertson's work in the last century, “is no very attractive title”.’ So Lang quotes. His own History of Scotland from the Roman Occupation to the Suppression of the last Jacobite Rising (1900–1907) occupied him ten years, and its intended two volumes became four. It had an odd reception. His waiting critics were disappointed by its accuracy, and his admirers by its attention to detail and the business of history. History to Lang meant finding things out, and when he began an inquiry he could not be stopped. This occasioned disproportions, of which he was aware: ‘I wonder anybody can read my four volumes’, he wrote, ‘but the chapter on Montrose in vol. iii is pretty decent.’ It is one of many fine passages, but the principal merit of the work is that, in one of the most partisan fields of human history, he, a partisan, is never content with legend, and is never unfair. His studies for the History overflowed into detective monographs, such as The Mystery of Mary Stuart (1901) and James VI and the Gowrie Conspiracy (1902), or into biography, as in John Knox and the Reformation (1905) and the Life of Sir George Mackenzie (1909). This last had been interrupted by an enterprise in all respects characteristic of its author. In the spring of 1908 Anatole France issued his Vie de Jeanne d'Arc. Within six months Lang had answered M. France's cynicism, from the evidence, in his Maid of France (1908), vindicating the Maid from insult.
There are few forms of writing which Lang had not attempted. The last book he saw through the press was a History of English Literature (1912). For years he supplied the nurseries and schoolrooms of England with Fairy Books only less attractive than his budgets of True Stories:
Books Yellow, Red, and Green, and Blue
All true, or just as good as true.
He tried the novel, but without much effect, although his first, The Mark of Cain (1886), and his last, The Disentanglers (1902), are books of note, and such as no one else could have written. As a biographer he was more successful: his Life, Letters and Diaries of Sir Stafford Northcote, first Earl of Iddesleigh (1890) is a valuable contribution to Victorian parliamentary history, and his Life and Letters of J. G. Lockhart (1896) is one of the best biographies of the century. Lockhart—‘the Scorpion of the loyal heart’—was a subject to his mind, and he took pleasure in righting a proud and fastidious character which in many respects resembled his own. He was also provoked by the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy to write a defence of Shakespearian authorship, which was published after his death, Shakespeare, Bacon, and the Great Unknown (1912).
The word commonly applied to Lang was versatile, and there was nothing he less liked to hear. He wrote too much, but the loyalty and tenacity of his mind are as striking as its variety. His characteristic tastes were formed early. His Jacobitism and ballad lore, his interest in folk-tales and his idolization of Homer, that devotion to the memory of Sir Walter Scott which may almost be regarded as the key to his life, all date, like his instructed passion for cricket, golf, and the ‘ringing reel’, from his boyhood or early youth. If he kept them all going, the reason is that he never grew old. He was not an affable person, and it was his pleasure to conceal his astonishing powers of work under the air of a dilettante. But no man ever helped more lame dogs over stiles. He had what is rarer than an instinct for friendship, something higher and drier, an instinct for fraternity. He was, before all things, a brother of the craft. Indeed, in his generation, he was the ambassador of all the sporting crafts at the court of letters, and the protector of all loyalties fallen upon misfortune. Though he had many admirers among his countrymen, Scotland never heartily relished Lang: he could not be serious, it was said, and he cut too near the bone. Yet he was the greatest bookman of his age, and after Stevenson, the last great man of letters of the old Scottish tradition. On two subjects only he refrained from expressing himself: on personal religion and on party politics. No man had more questions to ask of the next world, but he kept them to himself. His chance of politics was gone with Culloden.
Of the many honours that came his way Lang valued most, perhaps, his St. Andrews (1885) and Oxford (1904) doctorates, his appointment as the first Gifford lecturer at St. Andrews (1888), and the freedom of his native town of Selkirk, conferred upon him in 1889. Merton College elected him an honorary fellow in 1890. He was more than once urged, by Sir Francis Doyle and Matthew Arnold among others, to stand for the professorship of poetry at Oxford, but always refused. He died of angina pectoris after a few hours' illness at Banchory, Aberdeenshire, on 20 July 1912, and is buried in the cathedral precincts at St. Andrews. He had no children. His portrait was painted in 1887 by Sir W. B. Richmond, and is reproduced in volume i of his Collected Poems (1923). A memorial by Percy Portsmouth in Selkirk free library contains a profile portrait in relief. He was averse from any biography of himself or from publication of his letters, and there will be no authorized Life.
Specimens of a Bibliography of Lang's works (1889), a Catalogue of a ‘Lang’ Library (1898), and a collection of verses addressed to Lang by his contemporaries, called A New Friendship's Garland (1899), were privately printed at Dundee by C. M. Falconer. There is also in the Dundee reference library a manuscript collection, in one volume, of all the poems written by Lang and uncollected by him, between the years 1863 and 1904, transcribed by C. M. Falconer and revised by Lang.
[The Times Literary Supplement, 6 September 1912 [G. S. G.]; notice by G. Saintsbury in Oxford Magazine, 17 October 1912; commemorative address by W. P. Ker, 28 November 1912, in Proceedings of the Academic Committee of the Royal Society of Literature, 1913; R. S. Rait, G. Murray, S. Reinach, and J. H. Millar in commemorative article, Quarterly Review, April 1913; G. Saintsbury in Quarterly Review, October 1923; private information.]