THE SHAVING OF SHAGPAT

THE SHAVING OF SHAGPAT. An Arabian Entertainment.  By George Meredith.  Chapman and Hall. 1856.

It is nearly forty years since I first heard of The Shaving of Shagpat.  I was newly come, in all my callow ardour, into the covenant of Art and Letters, and I was moving about, still bewildered, in a new world.  In this new world, one afternoon, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, standing in front of his easel, remarked to all present whom it should concern, that The Shaving of Shagpat was a book which Shakespeare might have been glad to write.  I now understand that in the warm Rossetti-language this did not mean that there was anything specially reminiscent of the Bard of Avon in this book, but simply that it was a monstrous fine production, and worthy of all attention.  But at the time I expected, from such a title, something in the way of a belated Midsummer Night’s Dream or Love’s Labour’s Lost.  I was fully persuaded that it must be a comedy, and as the book even then was rare, and as I was long pursuing the loan of it, I got this dramatic notion upon my mind, and to this day do still clumsily connect it with the idea of Shakespeare.  But in truth The Shaving of Shagpat has no other analogy with those plays, which Bacon would have written if he had been so plaguily occupied, than that it is excellent in quality and of the finest literary flavour.

The ordinary small collection of rarities has no room for three-volume novels, those signs-manual of our British dulness and crafty disdain for literature.  One or two of these simulacra, these sham-semblances of books, I possess, because honoured friends have given them to me; even so, I would value the gift more in the decency of a single volume.  The dear little duodecimos of the last century, of course, are welcome in a library.  That was a happy day, when by the discovery of a Ferdinand Count Fathom, I completed my set of Smollett in the original fifteen volumes.  But after the first generation of novelists, the sham system began to creep in.  With Fanny Burney, novels grow too bulky, and it is a question whether even Scott or Jane Austen should be possessed in the original form.  Of the moderns, only Thackeray is bibliographically desirable.  Hence even of Mr. George Meredith’s fiction I make no effort to possess first editions; yet The Shaving of Shagpat is an exception.  I toiled long to secure it, and, now that I hold it, may its modest vermilion cover shine always like a lamp upon my shelves!  It is not fiction to a bibliophile; it is worthy of all the honour done to verse.