/ p.1 /


    Hollingbury Copse,
         Brighton,
                4 February, 1881

SIR,
    During the course of a long life, the greater portion of which has been devoted to the study of Shakespeare and Shakespearean literature, I have fortunately till now been enabled to avoid even the semblance of acrimonious discussion. The annexed correspondence disturbs the immunity hitherto enjoyed, but there is the consolation of knowing that the exception is not induced by any action of my own. In venturing to submit that correspondence to your notice, let me hope that your influence will be given towards the discouragement of the singular kind of language which has originated the present controversy, and which is obviously calculated to bring disgrace and ridicule on Shakespearean criticism.
    The useful results of that criticism are, as a rule, so limited and so slowly evolved out of long and tedious discussions, the public at large, who care only for the immortal text, have but a hazy idea of its importance; and there is, therefore, the greater necessity for restoring a healthy tone to those discussions, if studies to which many others beside myself are deeply attached are not to fall altogether in public estimation.

        I am, Sir,
    Your obedient Servant,
         J. O. HALLIWELL-PHILLIPS



/ p.3 /



----------------


     Hollingbury Copse, Brighton,
             26 January, 1881.
SIR,
    A few weeks ago there appeared in the Preface to a Facsimile of the Second Edition of Hamlet some coarse and impertinent language in reference to a work of mine on that tragedy. In that Preface I am described as a "leading member of the firm of Pigs"brook and Co."; some of my observations are denounced as "porcine vagaries," and others as being promulgated "on the prongs of a dung-fork." Not being versed in the phraseology of Billingsgate, I am at a loss to understand the application of these words, but anyhow you will acknowledge that they cannot belong to the language accepted by gentlemen in literary or any other controversy.
    This language, not appearing in the work of an obscure individual, but in a preface conspicuously announced on the title-page as written by the "Founder and Director of the New Shakspere "Society,"-- and the indefensible nature of that language of studied insult precluding communication with its writer -- I considered myself entitled to ask the Committee of that Society, in a note of the 14th inst., if such offensive vulgarities had even their tacit sanction. The Committee, in their reply, dated the 22nd inst., inform me that they "do not consider the matter referred to as falling within their jurisdiction, the quartos in question not being published by the Society."
    In other words, the Committee are of opinion that their officer is at liberty, in any work not absolutely issued by the New Shakspere Society, to publicly announce himself as the Director of that society, / p.4 / and under the credit of that title to print what he likes without involving the Committee in the responsibility of his repulsive discourtesies. This convenient isolation puts one in mind of an anecdote, current in Shakespeare's time, of the only person in a church who was not moved to tears by a pathetic sermon, and who excused his want of sympathy by the observation that he belonged to another parish.
    The position assumed by the Committee cannot, however, be sustained. If it could be, a commanding officer might use his own official title to give weight to scurrilous attacks on a member of his regiment, and escape remonstrance merely because he happened to be off duty at the time of their publication.
    The Committee being thus indifferent to the ungentlemanly manner in which I have been treated, the obvious course would have been to have appealed to a general meeting of the Soceity, but here a difficulty arises, there being no provisions under which such a meeting can be summoned,--no constitution, no laws, no regulations, and no power whatever vested in any of the members,--there being, in fact, no Society at all. What is called the New Shakspere Society is really a mere book-club, supported by annual subscriptions, and conducted by an irreversible self-elected Committee. The members of this Committee, however, are obviously even more responsible for the character of observations published in the name of their Director than if they derived their functions by a recognized election from the votes of the subscribers.
    Under these circumstances, the entire power being vested in yourself, as President, and in the Committee, you will, I feel sure, excuse my asking if you will not insist upon the Director's withdrawal of the above-quoted disreputable language used by him in a work published in his acknowledged position as your Director. The offence is greatly aggravated by its being entirely unprovoked. Neither in my essay on Hamlet before mentioned, nor in any of my Shakespearean publications, now extending over a period of forty years, is there an unkind word respecting your Director or any one else.
            I am, Sir,
        Your obedient servant,
            J.O. HALLIWELL-PHILLIPPS.
    To Robert Browning, Esq.,
        President of the New Shakspere Society.


/ p.5 /


            19, Warwick Crescent, W.,
                            Jan. 27, '81.
DEAR SIR,
    I am sorry indeed to receive your letter of yesterday's date, and doubly sorry that there should have been occasion for your writing it. I never saw the Preface in question, and altogether fail to understand the meaning or relevancy of the language you quote from it. My position with respect to the Society is purely honorary, as I stipulated before accepting it, nor have I been able hitherto to attend any one of its meetings; and should I ever do so, my first impulse will be to invoke the spirit of "gentle Shakespeare" that no wrong be done in his name to a member of the brotherhood of students combining to do him suit and service. Pray believe me,
        Dear Sir,
            Yours very respectfully,
                    ROBERT BROWNING
    J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps, Esq.



-----------------


            Hollingbury Copse, Brighton,
                        31st January, 1881.
DEAR SIR,
    The receipt of your note of the 27th instant has occasioned me not a little embarrassment. As you are conspicuously advertised as President of the New Shakspere Society in a prospectus now being extensively circulated by the Soceity, it never occurred to me that the dignity was merely nominal. The public can know nothing of this, and hence your eminent name is made use of to give weight to an influence to which the Society is not entitled. The duties attached to the office of Vice-President being, no doubt, equally impalpable, the Members nowhere, and the Committee attenuated, the governing body of the Society resolves itself into what is nearly, if not quite, a case of "dearly beloved Roger and I."
    Every person of good feeling will sympathise in your wish that the gentle spirit of Shakespeare should prevail in the New Shakspere Society; but, unless gentleness be permitted to degenerate into submission to any kind of indignity, the generic invocation you suggest will hardly be appropriate to a case where the offence proceeds from an individual source. There has been no provoca- / p.6 / tion from my side; and although this fact may appear to outsiders to be singularly incompatible with the nature of the onslaught to which I have been subjected, the latter will be regarded by others as the outcome, in an exaggerated form, of the indecorous slang which for some years past has thrown ridicule on Shakespearean criticism. In plain-speaking lies the only chance of suppressing what has become an intolerable bore to quiet-loving students. In one of the publications of the Soceity there is something far more objectiona ble even than slang, in the advocacy of extreme political opinions and the admission of scandalously jocular references to the Bible, while in another place there is the scandal of the plays of our national dramatist being allotted out into the unfit-nature group, the tempter-yielding group, the lust-group, the cursing-group, the under-burden-falling group, the false-love group,--all this miserable nonsense appearing under the directorship of the new Shakspere Society.
    It is this official connexion with these inconvenient eccentricities that is the gist of the mischief. I should never have dreamt of taking serious notice of anything the Director might choose to say respecting myself, so long as it was uttered strictly in his individual capacity. There is no harm in anyone forming a book-club, calling it a Society, making himself the Director, and coaxing Prince Leopold and other distinguished personages to support his position by joining the most wonderful list of Vice-Presidents ever seen outside the announcement of a cottage-garden flower-show. This is a matter that chiefly affects the individuals whose names are thus grotesquely paraded, and, so far, it is no manner of consequence whether the Director makes the Society or the Society makes the Director, the same effect being produced from either cause. But when the public are blinded to the real nature of the Society, and dazzled by the apparently elective and sympathetic influence conferred on the Director, then there arises a very serious objection when that influence is used for the dissemination of personal antipathies.
    As to the offensive language of which I have specially complained, it cannot be palliated by any extent of friendly advocation. It is a resuscitation of the coarseness of Swift without his humour. Only fancy the editor of one newspaper accusing the editor of another of writing his leaders with the prongs of a dung-fork inked in a pigsbrook! Fortunately no such journal can be discovered, at least in this country, or if one did appear that indulged in such ribaldry, we should have to engage a detective to search the low pot-houses for a copy. One would have thought that the Committee, instead of / p.7 / moving a technical objection, would have been anxious to have repudiated even an indirect association with the use of the reeking imagery derived from mixens and pigstyes. Perhaps, however, my appeal was heard solely by the "I," unassisted even by the counsels of "dearly-beloved Roger."
    I had hoped to have been spared the necessity of publishing this correspondence by the decisive action of either yourself or the Committee in a case so detrimental to the best interests of all concerned in the pursuit of Shakespearean studies. You will, however, see that under the circumstances I have in self-defence no other alternative.
            I am, Dear Sir,
                Yours very respectfully,
             J. O. HALLIWELL-PHILLIPPS.
    To Robert Browning, Esq.,
        President of the New Shakspere Society.







[F. J. FURNIVALL's RESPONSE]

[In pen written top right-hand corner:]
British Museum Library
from F. J. Furnivall
10 Feb. 1881

The "Co." of Pigsbrook & Co.

---------

                  3. ST GEORGE'S SQUARE,
                        LONDON, N.W.,
                              February 8, 1881.

            MY DEAR----
Many thanks to you for sending me the printed letter about this Pigsbrook & Co. business that the junior partner of the firm had posted you. You suggest that the proper place for the letter is the waste-paper basket, and so it is; but, before putting it there, I feel bound to answer a gross mis-statement in it, repeated more than once.
      This mis-statement is, that my criticism of Mr. J.O. Halliwell-Phillipps--whom, for shortness sake, I call Hell.-P., was "not induced by any action of his own," was "entirely unprovoked" by him, that "there has been no provocation on his side."
      Now, he knows as well as I do, that this is not the case; and this is why he knows it.
      You are aware that the "person" whom I call Pigsbrook, from the meaning of his name--Ang.-Sax. swin, a swine or pig; burne, a bourne or brook--printed in a newspaper and a review, some articles insulting grossly the New Shakspere Society, its writers and myself. This person being one of damaged character, I resolved to adopt O'Connell's plan with him, and find a phrase equivalent to the famous "isosceles triangle" to silence him with. In this I happily succeeded, after refuting every one of his mistakes about Shakspere. Mr. Hell.-P. had a hearty laugh over my "Pigsbrook," when the name first struck me, and I told him of it.
      I then heard that the Pigsbrook's grossly insolvent articles / p.2 / against us were to be reprinted in a volume, with some new matter, and that Mr. Hell.-P. had gladly consented to let the Reprints, &c., be dedicated to him. The latter fact I could hardly believe, as I had had talks over these insults with Mr. Hell.-P., and told him my opinion of the "drunken clown,"* their author.

---------------------------
    * This epithet having been applied by that author to me, a thirty years' teetotaller, in the pages of The Athenæum, I felt, and still feel, justified in using it of him, to whom it was, in literal truth, once applicable, as everyone knows.
---------------------------

      So I at once wrote to Mr. Hell.-P., saying with what astonishment I had heard that he, affecting then to be my friend, had agreed to let these insolent Reprints, &c. be dedicated to him. I pointed out to him that, as the character of the Pigsbrook articles was known to him, and all of the Shakspere set, his acceptance of the dedication of them would be a deliberate adoption by him of the insults in the articles; and I told him that if his name appeared before the book, it would stop all relations between him and me; I would cut him dead; and that if he thus adopted and offered insults to my friends and me, he would find it a game which two could play at. He answered, admitting his acceptance of the dedication, but shirkt the point I had put to him, saying only that he had never heard of anyone making a dedicatee responsible for the opinions in the book dedicated to him. In return, I asked him not to put forward such a subterfuge as this, because the character of Pigsbrook's insulting articles was quite well known to him; and his acceptance of their dedication was therefore an adoption of them and their insults, and I should so take it.**

---------------------------
    ** I put a political parallel to him, to this effect--I am not sure of the names now:--Suppose, three years ago, Mr. T.P. O'Connor had written some rasping, insolent articles against Lord Beaconsfield, his cabinet, and the Tory party; suppose he had then reprinted these articles with some fresh ones, more or less neutral, and got Lord Derby to accept the dedication of them. Suppose Lord Beaconsfield had heard beforehand of the coming publication and its contents, and had twice very distinctly warned / p.3 / Lord Derby that he would consider the coming out of the book with Lord Derby as its dedicatee an insult to himself (Lord B.) personally and his whole party, in consequence of its sanctioning and adopting Mr. O'Connor's insults. Suppose the book had then appeared with its dedication to Lord Derby, would not men have rightly held Lord Beaconsfield justified in treating this as an insult by Lord Derby to himself and his party? I now add, Suppose Lord Beaconsfield had then written half-a-dozen sharp lines resenting Lord Derby's insult, and Lord Derby had thereupon appealed, as a most injured innocent, to the Tory cabinet he had insulted, to censure Lord Beaconsfield, and had solemnly declared three times that he had never given Lord B. the slightest provocation, would not men have rightly treated this declaration as an impudent flasehood or evasion? (I beg Lord Derby's pardon for using his name, even hypothetically, in a case impossible to him as a man of honour.)
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[/ p.2 / ] "Let there be no mistake between us, for the second / p.3 / time I said; if your name appears before the volume containing those Reprints, I cut you, and you'll get my 'tit' for your 'tat.'"*

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    * The effect of my letters is stated, not the exact words.
---------------------------

The volume appeared with a dedication to Mr. Hell.-P.; I cut him, and threw the three last letters he sent me as feelers into my basket unanswered. When opportunity offered**

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    ** In my Forewords to Grigg's Facsimile of the Second Quarto of Hamlet, 1604, to be had at Elm House, Hanover Street, Peckham, S.E., for 6s. Every one should buy it.
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I gave him the tit for his tat, as I said I would, in two or three sneers at some fresh stupidites he had put forward. This is a simple narration of the facts. And yet in the face of my two letters of warning to him, and my cutting him in consequence, Mr. Hell.-P. has now the assurance to assert three times over, that my well-deserved sneers at the "miserable nonsense" (as he says) which he wrote, was "entirely unprovoked by him."
      How much more straightforward it would have been in him to have plainly stated the facts, and said, that in his opinion I ought not to have construed his action re the Pigsbrook insults as I did. And how much more manly it would have been in him to stand up and fight his own battle, than to go whining to our President, like a little sneak at school, "Please, Sir, Furnivall's been rappin' my knuckles. I never done nothin' to him. You punish him."

/ p. 4 /

      Just fancy you or me, or any fellow who's ever pulled in a racing-eight, going to the President of the Antiquaries, and saying, "Here's Mr. Hell.-P., F.S.A.., been sneering at me! Please stop him." Wouldn't it be a joke?
      It would also have been more honest if Mr. Hell.-P. had said that my Hamlet Forewords contained the following passage on his criticism, so-called, and the following tribute to his searchwork, which I admire heartily:--
      "Men who dub our school the 'sign-post' one, who write inane and feeble allegories to show that labourers at Shakspere should remain mere labourers, and never strive to become gardeners, much less scientific botanists (Mem. on Hamlet, p.75), must not be surprised if we call their school the 'woodenhead' one, and treat it with the contempt it deserves when it steps outside the province which it has wisely declared that it is alone fit for. And I say this, while yielding to no one in respect and gratitude for the admirably careful work of the leading members of the Labourer or Woodenhead school in their own province."
      As to the wording of my sneers, you'll see that I've founded it only on Mr. Hell.-P.'s acts. He turned himself into the Pigsbrook's 'Co,' and I just treated him as such. The firm's vagaries (that Hamlet's soliloquies on his own character were not to be trusted), thus of course became 'porcine' ones. In his Hamlet Memoranda, -- see last quotation -- Mr. Hell.-P. wrote a weak and washy allegory to show how superior he and his fellow amateur labourers were, as tenders of Shakspere's trees, to us who strive to be not only gardeners but scientific botanists. And when I saw the worthy Labourer, dung-fork in hand, holding up the one word sallied (for solid I. ii. 129), accidentally coinciding in Qo.1 and Qo.2, as settling the question whether Qo.1 was a first sketch or not, I could not help smiling, and making a note of it (p. ix. of my Forewords, two lines; the Pigsbrook note in p. iii. is four lines). So, though Mr. Hell.-P., "not being versed in the phraseology of Billingsgate" -- in which I con- / p.5 / sider him the greatest proficient I ever met -- is "at a loss to understand the application of these words," you will easily see that he supplied me with them.
      As to the sneers which Mr. Hell.-P.'s mortified vanity leads him to make against our Society, my Leopold Shakspere Introduction, and myself, you know as well as I, that for some four years or more -- as long as he was praised -- Mr. Hell.-P. was a member of our Society, and hadn't a word to say against its constitution, &c.; but he gets his knuckles rapt for insolence, and then all is changed, everything is wrong. As to myself, it used to be, "You're a devilish clever fellow;" "There are some devilish fresh and original views in that Introduction of yours. I've brought four copies of it," &c. Now it's "miserable nonsense," &c. Well, I don't care which it is: either way'll suit me. The one opinion is doubtless worth as much as the other in mr. Hell.-P.'s mouth. But Mr. Hell.-P. wants things all one way. In the Facsimile Series, under my superintendence, in which the editors of the Quartos are chosen by me, the Midsummer Night's Dream vols., that came out with my Hamlet, Qo.2, are dedicated to Mr. Hell.-P. by their editor, with "sincere esteem and affection," and in one of them his "ripe scholarship" is actually spoken of, a perfectly genuine expression, though, in my opinion, you might as well attribute "ripe scholarship" to a turnip-top. But Mr. Hell.-P. can't set the affection and the scholarship -- ripe, too -- against the "Co." and his own labourer's tool, the dung-fork; he wants all sugar and cream. That, however, is not healthy food for any man. Mr. Lowell's review of him in My Study Windows (1s. 6d.), and what I have told him and shown him of his need of wider views, while giving him full praise for his faithful labourer's work, are far more wholesome for him than the injudicious flattery which has made a fool's paradise for him to live in. Especially I wish that he'd attend to his English Grammar. I've pointed out to him before, his habit of swallowing that's. He promised not to do it again, and yet here in this precious fresh letter of his, is the / p.6 / old fault once more -- no printer's blunder. I correct it in capitals:-- "The useful results of that criticism are, as a rule, so limited, and so slowly evolved out of long and tedious discussion, [THAT] the public at large, who care only for the immortal text, have but a hazy idea of its importance.
      I hope you'll agree that I've treated Mr. Hell.-P.'s jobation*

---------------------------
    * He seems to have taken six months over it. My Hamlet was out on July 26, 1880. His letter is dated 26th January, 1881. It isn't much of a thing for the time, is it?
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good-humouredly -- one can't get angry with a man who swallows that's-- and that you'll hold (1.) that he didn't state his case fairly; (2.) that he only got what he was warned he would get; and (3.) that he well deserved it.
      What he ought to do now, is clear: dissolve partnership with Pigsbrook, apologise to us all round, send the Society a cheque for £250 to pay for a Reprint, buy an English Grammar, and then I'll let him off turning teetotaller.
                  Very truly yours,
                        F. J. FURNIVALL

      P.S.-- You will see that I have said nothing of Mr. Hell.-P.'s action as regards the Committee; but as I see it, this it is. After two warnings not to do an act which I, being Chairman of the Committee, tell him will be an insult to our Society, and each of us, he deliberately does the act. I retaliate, in a book for which I am solely responsible. He then comes coolly to the men whom he has insulted, and, using fresh insulting expressions to me, their Chairman, asks them to blame me. Had I been free to act for them, I should of course have torn Mr. Hell.-P.'s letter into four pieces, and sent 'em back to him with the inscription "Mr. Phillipps's insolent epistle is returned to him." But the Committee treated him with great forbearance, and he, unfortunately, has not been able to appreciate it.